Book Reviews

OPA BOOK REVIEWS: GUIDELINES AND POLICIES: 
We welcome both members and non-members to send us reviews, but the books themselves need to be published by an OPA member… more information about submitting a book review  | Books Needing Review  |  List of Book Reviews


BOOK REVIEWS

  • This Swarm of Light reviewed

    January 22, 2021

    Reviewed by Paul Telles

    This Swarm of Light by Suzanne Sigafoos
    I-Beam Books (2020), 65 pp $16
    ISBN #: 978-1-938928-10-9
    Available at: https://shop.spybeambooks.com/product/this-swarm-of-light

    In her first full-length collection, Portland poet Suzanne Sigafoos delivers on her book’s title with an enchanting swarm of poems that moves fluidly through a garden of themes that include mortality and the joys to be found in nature and art. Published in 2020, This Swarm of Light consists of 43 poems sorted into three sections that offer illuminating perspectives on each theme while introducing new topics and concepts of their own. The result is a loosely autobiographical meditation, focused more on emotions and insights than personal history.

    Although This Swarm of Light does not follow a strict narrative arc, the thematic center of the collection comes in the middle section, titled “Bloodlines,” that chronicles the unique story of Sigafoos’s recovery from spinal surgery while she cared for her mother who was dying of cancer. These touching poems show the women growing progressively closer as Sigafoos regains her strength and her mother nears her end. “Uncharted Terrain” finds them living together under one roof, shared.

    One of her daughters, I’m strong again, and able.
    Mother, lighter, smaller, has no strength,
    her bad days longer by a mile, no — by a tundra.

    The two women grow closer through their suffering. Although she says plain talk is not our custom, Sigafoos shares her deep-set fear that she will die alone. After the mother reassures her, they bond over an atlas and their shared lack of sleep.

    I offer her valerian. If sleep’s a thing that can’t be found,
    I hold the atlas open to the pages she prefers:
    maps of oceans, maps of plains.

    The mother’s final moments are portrayed in “Break,” an elegant poem reminiscent of Frank O’Hara. However, they are foreshadowed in the book’s first section, “Light Swarms,” a series of 14 poems that connect human suffering and loss with nature and its consolations. “March – April – May” presents the mother’s death as a one of several painful events Sigafoos experienced in springtime.

    The Ides were easy – April was the cruelest,
    two years in a row. My mother died. I wasn’t there
    my sister called me with the news. April, next —

    a suicide, a friend, who inked my name on
    his exit note. Police were on the phone to me at 3 a.m.
    Night fractured. Furious, I flew from room to room.

    By the poem’s end, Sigafoos finds solace in nature’s cycles and seasons. I am eager now, for spring’s relentless orbits –, she says in the penultimate stanza. She concludes:

    Daphne, tulips, Stars of Persia, tulips, tulips –
    then dicentra, Bleeding Hearts, in May. Any day gets better
    if you look through branches at the sky.

    The book’s final section, “Landscapes, Seascapes, Soundscapes,” celebrates the arts. Many of the section’s 15 poems are ekphrastic, while others focus on the spiritual and emotional experience of art-making. “Art Class, 1957,” for instance, depicts a woman’s immersion in the process of filling page after page with new / versions of “Moonlight on Water.” As her engagement with this work deepens, she finds release from the burdens of selfhood. Even with color, the speaker says:

    nothing is lost – ocean, night, immensity, depth,

    her wish to walk that wide, bright path,
    her wish to disappear.

    The ekphrastic poems go beyond mere description to enact the joy and exaltation that can come from encounters with great art. “Still Life, or A Surface, Teeming” begins with an impassioned, but straightforward, description of Jean Brusselmans’ “Still Life with a Fan”:

    What pleasure to look at still life paintings – pear and apple
    beauties, fallen petals, a dewdrop bright on variegated rind,
    open, offering melon flesh and seeds.

    As the poem describes the painting’s many elements, including a checkerboard, a black-and-white photograph, and a conch shell, the speaker gradually reveals a broader vision of the arts. After quoting poet Robert Penn Warren’s observation that a poem is a hazardous attempt at self-understanding, the speaker concludes by observing that all genuine art requires risk. There you are, painter. There you are, poet. Two of you joined / in your hazardous longings.

    Even though these poems do not directly address issues of mortality, their proximity to the poems describing the death of Sigafoos’s mother gives them a special poignancy, as if they represent a return to life after a harrowing journey through an emotional underworld. This feeling is underscored by the final poem, “Departure,” a quiet, 12-line piece about a couple parting as one boards a train. The poem reaches its climax as the speaker reflects on her own death in a way that recalls Sigafoos’s earlier fear that she would die alone.

    I want death to be like this:
    one on a platform, one on the train,
    both closer to a foretold, lonely beauty.

    Written in accomplished but unobtrusive free verse, This Swarm of Light often reads like a thoughtful and super-literate journal, touching on a wide range of emotions and experiences that include a reminiscence about a childhood mentor, a visit to a Christo installation, and auditioning for roles in New York theater. The poems cast light upon each other and the world, swarming to form a mature and expressive collection that is greater than the sum of its parts.

    Reviewer Bio:

    Paul Telles’s poems have appeared in Verseweavers, Pif Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Book of Matches and other print and online publications. He is a winner of multiple Oregon Poetry Association prizes, including an Honorable Mention in Fall 2020. He is a two-time finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest.

  • What She Was Wearing by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, reviewed by Paul Telles

    October 4, 2020

    Reviewed by Paul Telles

    What She Was Wearing by Shawn Aveningo Sanders
    The Poetry Box (November 5, 2019), 48 pp, $12
    ISBN #: 978-1-948461-32-0
    Available at: https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/what-she-was-wearing

    In What She Was Wearing, Portland poet Shawn Aveningo Sanders bravely reveals her experience as a rape victim. In a series of 29 muscular poems, Sanders recounts the horrific experience of being raped during a fraternity party in the 1980s. As well as offering a heart-rending description of the rape itself, the collection delves into the trauma’s influence on the rest of Sanders’ life, exploring its ramifications for her identity as a mother, a wife, and a woman.


    The 2019 chapbook uses its title as a refrain, repeatedly deploying the phrase to reveal, ridicule, and lament the hypocritical assumption that women’s clothing attracts and justifies rape. The book’s third poem, “What She Was Wearing,” introduces the theme by describing Sanders’ innocence as she readied herself for the party. Excited and eager to fit in, Sanders assembled an outfit that included a pink sheet twisted into a toga / over a one-piece swimsuit, / pink chiffon bow in my hair /… and a big smile.


    By the end of the poem, Sanders’ innocence is ruined and her outfit is soiled with blood and depravity:


    And then I woke up to a strap
    falling off one shoulder,
    the other strap cut
    revealing my breast,
    a drop of blood
    where the knife
    nicked my flesh, the crotch
    of my swimsuit sliced in half…

    This is what I wore running home.

    Frank and uncompromising, the rest of the poems provide intimate insight into feelings of helplessness, alienation, and fear. Some poems explore Sanders’ inability to talk to others about her experience and her reluctance to go to authorities. Others show how the rape can be recalled to consciousness by random events such as hearing that a football player on TV has the same name as her rapist. “How to Survive Suicide” laughs at itself while staring into the abyss:


    Wash the pills down
    with a Yoohoo.
    No need to count calories now.

    In one of the book’s most touching poems, “Prepping My Kids of College,” Sanders deftly portrays her conflicted emotions when she felt obliged to let my secret out, / tell my story. / For ignorance is dangerous, / not bliss. She chose not to teach her daughters how to avoid rape that day.


    I didn’t buy them a whistle.
    Instead, I taught my son
    the horrid ugliness of the crime
    against a woman, a girl, a mother, a sister.

    The children react sympathetically, bowing their heads like wilting roses, hugging and crying with their mother until she feels her shame morph into courage. Sadly, though, the poem ends with a troubling response from the children’s father: … he asked me if I told them / what I was wearing.


    In the end, Sanders finds some peace and healing, but it still feels tentative and unsure. In “There Will Be Days,” she accepts that she can still be reminded of the rape by fragrances, songs, or even the accidental scrape of fingernail / against a crisp, white-linen tablecloth. Still, she takes solace in everyday life—the weddings, anniversaries, graduations—and in the special moments that come unbidden, such as the wonder in your son’s eyes / meeting his twin baby sisters.


    Unornamented and unvarnished, What She Was Wearing skillfully blends art and testimony. Reading the poems, I felt angry, tearful, and sometimes overwhelmed by sadness. In the end, though, I rejoiced in one of my favorite poetic pleasures: the ability to briefly experience another person’s suffering as if it were my own. All I really have to say is, “Thank you.”

    Paul Telles is a poet and Yoga teacher who lives in Beaverton, Oregon. His poems have appeared in BoomerLitMag, Children, Churches and Daddies, and Currents, a journal published by the Body-Mind Centering Association. He is a winner of multiple Oregon Poetry Association prizes, including an Honorable Mention in the Traditional Verse category in Fall 2019. He is a two-time finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest.

  • The Barbie Diaries by Dale Champlin, reviewed by Paul Telles

    July 3, 2020

    The Barbie Diaries by Dale Champlin

    Just a Lark Books (November 17, 2019), 65 pp $14

    ISBN #: 978-1708450267

    Available at: [email protected]

    Is it possible to say anything new about Barbie? Since her introduction in 1959, the PVC fashionista has been reviled and revered, loved and loathed. Her literary footprint includes adoring preteen blogs, scathing doctoral theses, and an authorized biography from Random House.

    Still, I’d be willing to bet that Oregon poet Dale Champlin is almost alone in considering Barbie a fit hero for epic poetry. In her 2019 book, The Barbie Diaries, Champlin presents a sequence of 57 poems that portray the inner life of a Barbie doll who is both typical of her kind and a compelling individual. Aware she’s both sentient and plastic, this Barbie wrestles with several troubled relationships including her unequal marriage to a Ken doll, the doomed love of her girl owner, and the sadistic depredations of the girl’s brother. The result is a free-verse dramedy that is thought-provoking, literate, and awake to the absurdities on display in American Pop Culture.

    The Barbie Diaries cleverly invokes the epic tradition with a three-part narrative that begins by portraying Barbie in the context of her suburban milieu. In the second part, Barbie undergoes her hero’s ordeal when she spends a year submerged in a backyard swimming pool. Rescued by a pool cleaner, she returns home in the third part, wiser and more self-assured, but not entirely relieved of her issues.

    The book begins with an ironic take on the epic argument in a short poem titled “Writing Weird” that introduces Barbie’s inner turmoil and ambivalence about her hopeless marriage. Since you’ve left I’ve been writing weird, Barbie says before describing her unique existential predicament:

    Alone in lostness, with my new Barbie body,

    I teeter across the four-lane in my six-inch stilettos,

    without a blink of my swimming-pool blue eyes.

    She recalls the good times in her marriage, including a camping trip to Reno in my bubblegum-pink convertible camper. She waxes nostalgic about how she and Ken squatted in the motel / and swilled dry martinis, then recalls that Ken is now gone. Where are you Ken? I miss your square jaw, she concludes.

    Much of the book’s first section tells us why the marriage is over. In “Terrible Fun,” Barbie recalls a premarital date whenthe couple had sex in Ken’s apartment. I should have guessed by your plastic pompadour / that you’d be into S&M, Barbie comments before describing how Ken tied her hands with a twist tie, then slid a bit between her teeth.

    You rode me like a demon—

    clenched me in a choke hold, snakebit my neck

    and hard-knuckled my thighs.

    Fearing Ken has finished with her, Barbie worries that he will sell her on eBay. The poem concludes with a terrifying image of sexual abuse:

    After you flipped me over,

    you told me my tits

    looked like dead rabbits.

    As her marriage careens toward divorce, Barbie also contends with the family who owns her. In “Possession,” Barbie recalls how she began her life as a little girl’s treasure, only to see this relationship fade as the girl grew up. At first, she remembers, the girl carried her everywhere and even shared chocolate ice cream with her. However, as Barbie begins to fall apart under the wear and tear of daily play, the relationship with the girl becomes less certain. Once again, Barbie finds she is an object in a disposable culture.

    After her mom’s hairdryer

    scorched my hair

    she cut off the burnt ends.

    It was not an improvement.

    I thought I was priceless,

    but I was replaceable.

    Like many Barbies throughout the decades, Champlin’s hero must deal with her girl’s brother, whose boyish hi-jinks are revealed to be cruel and misogynistic. At various points throughout the book, the brother kicks Barbie into a gutter, buries her in the backyard, and hangs her from a silver thread / compelling as spider silk.

    The rest of the book explores and expands on these relationships and themes. In the second section, the year spent in the swimming pool gives Barbie a chance to face her demons. As she feels her polyvinyl chloride off-gassing in the chlorinated water, Barbie reflects on her life and relationships and recognizes some unpleasant realities about her family.

    “The Day All I Could Think of Was Suburbia” begins with a deft lyrical landscape that offers an example of how The Barbie Diaries paints Barbie as a convincing character:

    I remember looking out the picture window

    the sprinkler on the lawn twirled,

    rainbows gleamed in the fine mist,

    robins tugged worms from the damp turf.

    Noting there was a fire hydrant on every corner, Barbie portrays the security of the American middle-class lifestyle before turning toward its darker side:

    My little girl’s mother clutched

    her first drink of the morning

    in her white-knuckled manicured hand.

    Rescued unceremoniously by a pool cleaner, Barbie goes “Home At Last” in the final section. In a mere eight poems, we learn that Barbie, like all epic heroes, has grown and matured because of her ordeal in the pool. In the book’s final poem, “I Feel I Understand Existence,” Barbie considers all of her relationships from a stance of hard-earned self-knowledge. She accepts she is a discarded plaything while also expressing her sense of agency.

    Although I may be no more than a tchotchke

    on a shelf gathering dust that I will never return to—

    my thoughts resurface as artifacts

    lured to the present by something

    I don’t quite understand.

    Still, she ends by hoping the girl will once again turn her way.

    When will she remember where she’s

    concealed me? What box, what chest,

    what burial?

    As The Barbie Diaries tells their peculiar tale, Barbie flirts with religion, falls in love with a frog, and parties in a Motel 6. Still, the book succeeds in connecting Barbie’s anxieties and struggles to larger questions of identity, gender, and sexuality. Even as I laughed at her ridiculous situations, I empathized with her struggle to balance her need for independence with her need for love. Against the odds, Champlin enabled me to relate to Barbie as a real person.

    Paul Telles’s poems have appeared in several print and digital publications, including BoomerLitMag, Verseweavers, and Children, Churches, and Daddies. He is a winner of multiple Oregon Poetry Association prizes, including an Honorable Mention in the Traditional Verse category in Fall 2019.

  • The Leaf, by Nancy Christopherson, reviewed by Paul Telles

    June 1, 2020

    The Leaf by Nancy Christopherson

    Nancy Christopherson (July 13, 2015), 66 pp $8

    ISBN #: 978-0-692-42433-9

    Available at: http://www.nancychristophersonpoetry.com/

    In her 2015 book, The Leaf, Oregon poet Nancy Christopherson showcases uncommon poems about one of the most common human sufferings—the loss of a parent. In poems deployed throughout her self-published collection, Christopherson builds a loose thematic arc that poignantly explores her mother’s loss of independence, her death in an assisted care facility, and its implications for those she left behind.

    This thematic development reaches its climax near the middle of the book with a series of six consecutive poems filled with keenly observed imagery that conveys deep feeling without lapsing into sentiment.

    “Reconciliation on Blue Mountain,” for instance, finds Christopherson reviewing her relationship with her mother as the woman approaches her final days. The poem begins with Christopherson and her son looking for a spot to bury his pet rabbit in the mountains near their home in Eastern Oregon. Noting that her son was angry and bitter, / not about the rabbit, / but about other things, Christopherson gradually picks up on his mood as she drifts into reverie about her mother. At first, she shows fondness for the ailing woman, remembering how her lips tremble sometimes when / she searches my eyes with her gentle / blue eyes for her lost memories. As the poem proceeds, however, Christopherson turns to bleak recollections of betrayal and abandonment:

    … On my thirteenth

    birthday she married Dick, who hawked

    insurance and everything else, took his

    thick leather belt to my brother, then

    took our mother away in his ugly

    Jeep pickup, all the way to Alaska,

    leaving my brother and me behind.

    How could she do that? Go with him.

    Reminding herself that these events occurred a long time ago, Christopherson finds reconciliation by recalling my mother’s pain. / My father’s pain and even Dick’s pain as he lay dying of cancer. She counsels her son that we must learn certain things like patience, / forgiveness, perseverance. After the rabbit is consigned to a grave festooned with wild flowers, the poem ends with imagery that suggests a new basis for Christopherson’s relationship with her dying mother.

    And besides, I love to brush her hair, it’s thick

    and white and soft.

    “When My Mother Died,” arguably the climax of the entire book, begins with a stark observation:

    When My Mother Died

    Her right eyelid didn’t close all the way,

    leaving a shallow band of opaque

    at the bottom

    Christopherson describes how she unsuccessfully tried to close her mother’s eye by using my right fingertips / the way they used to do in the movies. When her mother’s eye refused to stay closed, Christopherson pressed it back open, but the eyelid returned to its half-closed position.

    It would only slide slowly back down,

    leaving that same shallow band

    of opaque at the bottom

    In the end, Christopherson accepts her mother’s eye—and death—as they are:

    not her choice, not mine,

    but some other.

    The last of the six poems, “Putting Things Right,” shows Christopherson’s family growing close after the mother’s death. Dedicated to Christopherson’s brother, Allen, the poem focuses on moments immediately after the funeral when the siblings sit on a lawn watching nieces and nephews play. Reminded how she and Allen played on lawns as children, Christopherson fondly recalls tumbling / head over heels and grass in our hair, / bits of thatch, / laughter. Sadly but inevitably, Christopherson’s thoughts turn back to the childhood trauma described in “Reconciliation.” This time, though, she pays tribute to Allen, who is described as tender and loving despite his suffering.

    You, who were abandoned too soon

    by your mother, who got down anyway

    onto your hands

    and knees to lower mom’s urn into dirt,

    and who so patiently now

    holds urn above dirt while I snap, briefly, the

    necessary shutter.

    The Leaf’s poems about death and dying are interwoven with skillful poems on other themes, such as the relationship between nature and human creativity, travel, and ars poetica. Many of the 38 poems in The Leaf portray moments when the Eastern Oregon landscape intersects meaningfully with Christopherson’s inner life. One of my favorites was “Master Heron,” one of three poems that contemplate the Great Blue Heron. This 13-line poem begins with Christopherson observing a Heron standing tall on the rocky bar / deep in his own contemplation of water / and of fish.

    Calling the bird a monk / in smoky grey feathers, Christopherson admires its patience so much that she takes it as a spiritual master. She aspires to the same patience, watching him carefully with the hope she can become heron. The poet ends by observing the bird’s majestic aloofness: He sometimes allows this.

    Unfortunately, despite the obvious quality of Christopherson’s work, I felt the collection lost some of its energy and focus in the second half. The first half of the book foreshadowed the climactic series with vivid, intimate poems. One of the most striking was “Mending My Mother’s Clothes,” an understated lament in which Christopherson lovingly recalls sewing sessions with her mother while performing simple repairs the woman can no longer do for herself. In the second half, however, poems approach death dramatically, historically, and symbolically. “Mona Lisa” and “Death on the Farm” are third-person poems about women grieving and confronting their own mortality. The final poem, “Blizzard at Ground Zero,” uses a rich description of a snow-filled landscape to warn of an impending white where the imagination falls silent. While each of these poems has its heartfelt virtues, they seemed to emotionally distance the collection from realities it had bravely confronted earlier.

    This minor complaint did not detract from the genuine poetic pleasure I found on every page of The Leaf. Christopherson’s poems are sharply observed and musically composed. They convey a strong sense of place immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Eastern Oregon. And they display genuine human feeling and wisdom in the face of one of our greatest shared sufferings.

    Reviewer bio:

    Paul Telles is a poet and Yoga teacher who lives in Beaverton, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Verseweavers, Children, Churches and Daddies, and Currents, a journal published by the Body-Mind Centering Association. He is a winner of multiple Oregon Poetry Association prizes, including an Honorable Mention in the Traditional Verse category in Fall 2019. He is a two-time finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest.

  • Bee Dance by Cathy Cain, reviewed by Paul Telles

    May 1, 2020

    Bee Dance by Cathy Cain

    The Poetry Box (June 15, 2019), 87 pp, $16

    ISBN #: 978-1948461221

    Available at: https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/bee-dance

    In Bee Dance, Portland poet Cathy Cain brings a fresh take to one of the most venerable themes in modern poetry: the troubled relationship between the natural world and human society.In 51 tightly crafted poems, Cain explores her theme from a full circuit of perspectives, contemplating such issues as the link between poetic creativity and natural genesis, the alienation engendered by digital technology, and the generative power of women.

    From its very first poemHint of Hexagon, Bee Dance leaves no doubt about its primary concern: the lack of harmony between nature and human creations. The poem begins with a speaker reading the news and seeking a safer read / beyond the headlines. She recallsa story she saw earlier about Saturn’s north pole and how it gathers and swirls in a handsome hexagon. Realizing this fearsome harmony also is found on Earth, she focuses on the clean design of the honeycomb, contrasting it with the amorphous perversity of human designs.

    But all is not lost for the human race. Another news story says our own nerve tracts, / may also be loosely packed / as if in a beehive / a hint of hexagon. The poem concludes with a lovely stanza that gives us the book’s title:

    The pleasure of pattern

    a map

    through the rough human expanse

    between perfect flower and honey trance

    I could show you where I’ve been

    do my best bee dance

    Bee Dance never loses focus on this theme. The final poem “La Lune de Mielechoes the first by contrasting the hexagon of bee life with the sway of human curve. In between these points, Cain’s reflections unfold like a flower, with each new poem forming a petal that grows in a fresh direction from the stem. In some poems, humans find awestruck connections with nature; in others, they are at odds with it in ways they don’t understand. Some poems have naturalistic Northwest settings; others are dream-like and mythic. Some are optimistic, others pessimistic.

    All of the poems feature surprising images presented in a lyrical free verse that often adapts traditional forms. Several of my favorites were free-verse sonnets with strong conceits and echoes of traditional rhyme schemes. “Without Defense,”for example, uses a portrait of two young surfers to subtly warn of the dangers in taking nature for granted. The poem begins with a quatrain that features very direct rhymes:

    Their swim suits mimic the surf’s crisp blue sheen,

    bare skin echoes wet sand, dark and rich.

    Two young brothers, maybe twelve and fourteen.

    One waits. One skims. Then they switch in the morning mist.

    The rhyme scheme relaxes in the second and third stanzas, which portray the boys’ bravado as they laugh and wager against cold waves and boiling sea, even when they’re crashing without defense. The final quatrain ends with a concerned question: When will the sure surge roar in / to undo their cool, upright innocence? The poem closes with a couplet true to its Shakespearean heritage:

    For now, engaging the sea with a glinting glide,

    they throw the board, thinking only of the ride.

    As well as critiquing humanity’s engagement with nature, Bee Dance celebrates the joy to be found in intimate relationships with non-human life. For instance, “Planting Spring Bulbs,”a very short poem near the end of the book, uses simple, affecting language to show how the creative power of women expresses the power of the Earth:

    the way this earth mounds up

    sister

    as new life surges

    within you

    I touch your belly

    that rises

    like the sun

    More complex lyrics portray this unity as the fruit of determined searching. “Sitting Cross-Legged in the Forest, I BecomePeziza, an Upturned Cup Mushroom”uses a free-verse variation on terza rima to portray a speaker longing for communion with nature as she meditates. The first of the poem’s seven tercets describes how a gesture used in Buddhist meditation suggests a mushroom awaiting rain:

    My hands form a cup of spores, each an ornamented dream.

    Come now, rain, with your clear and focused drops,

    splash my spores far into this forest gleam.

    After calling on the breeze to touch my smooth curve, the speaker recalls earlier contemplative efforts and declares my secret source of growth / has prospered. As her meditation deepens, her silence bursts and reveries rise together. The poem ends in expectancy:

    I remain ready to greet the rain.

    Listen for the longing of letters, hungry

    to reveal my name.

    Other poems find Cain fleeing digital culture to connect with the natural world through poetry. In “Dream of a List of Names,”the speaker begins by asserting I will live in the forest with the fairies. To fulfill this dream, she must hold in her heart the list of our names… that were caught in our ruthless digital life. Having hacked the machines, she rescues our names and takes up the poet’s work:

    Now among the trees I drip an inky trail

    With my feather quill I rewrite our names by hand

    She ends by wishing all of us back into our dreams, which lead to an Edenic forest:

    damp earth      scented fir

    the forest canopy sways

    bursts with the light of birds

    To Cain’s credit, as I finished Bee Dance, I found myself struggling with mixed emotions. On one hand, I was sad to be reminded so poignantly that a vein mined by poets from Wordsworth to Merwin remains so rich and disastrously relevant. On the other hand, I was glad to be reassured that we can still dance with the bees and love the voices of our poets.

    Reviewer bio:

    Paul Telles is a poet and Yoga teacher who lives in Beaverton, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Verseweavers, Children, Churches and Daddies, and Currents, a journal published by the Body-Mind Centering Association. He is a winner of multiple Oregon Poetry Association prizes, including an Honorable Mention in the Traditional Verse category in Fall 2019. He is a two-time finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to Top