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BOOK REVIEWS

  • Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems by Pepper Trail, reviewed by Alan Contreras

    November 20, 2017

    Painted Thrush Press, 2015, 65 pages, $12

    ISBN 978-1508484356

    Available via Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Cascade-Siskiyou-Poems-Pepper-Trail/dp/150848435X

    The Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon and northern California are what writers of stories of the west, both historic and fictional, call “rough country.” It is in fact about as rough as anyone might ask for in the lower 48 states, particularly in the steep tangled chasms of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness at the western end of the complex. The whole region has in recent years become a land in transition as its history of winter snows is now matched by summer fires of brutal proportions.

     

    This is the home range, if you will, of Pepper Trail, a forensic biologist and one of the nation’s experts on the identification of feathers. It is this country of a thousand borders, this land of stony pockets, hard-faced shrubbery, and random defensive trees, that he inhabits with such poems as “The Border,” which ends with the stanza:

     

          In this world of solid things

          Of wood and stone, rough ground

          And green enduring leaves

          My fingers reach, reach past the real

          Forever seek the border

          Crossed, again and again

          But never found.

     

    Like every poem in this highly local collection, “The Border” is linked to a specific site, Soda Mountain. The entire collection was written on-site and there is a definite sense of immediate experience and hands-on knowledge in most of them.

     

    The great poet of human experience J. D. McClatchy once wrote that the natural world is an “uncongenial” source for poetic inspiration. Setting aside the fact that nature is, as Gary Snyder put it, home, not a foreign place, I can’t help but doubt whether congeniality makes for the best poetic experience. This collection stands for the primacy of what is rooted in the ground, as does the work of Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, Loren Eiseley, and others.

     

    Some poets assemble poems with some structural similarity in order to create the theme of a collection. Trail has instead gathered poems with a commonality of place, so we go from a set of seasonal haiku to longer ruminations on winter survival, human passage, the movements of deer. The genuineness of the poet’s connection to place is obvious in “Haiku – Winter,” which perfectly describes the way kinglets move through the forest:

     

          A drift of kinglets

          Passes, leaves behind only

          Sound of falling snow.

     

    This is knowledge gained from the forest, not read in a book somewhere. There are few birds in the montane forest in winter – there are few human observers, either. There is also in this collection a profound sense of the seasons, necessary for the haiku and densely informative in other poems as well, such as “The Berry Woods”:

     

          How secret and alive, the berry-woods

          All song stilled, the boasting season done

          Nothing to be heard but murmurs and calls

          Bursts of flutter, birds lost within the leaves

          Swallowing the pin-cherries, bright as rubies

          The Oregon grapes, hard and full of spice

          The manzanitas, their little apples sweet

          Today, the world balances dark and light

          The agitations of spring long past

          Summer’s full schedule forgotten

          This autumn work is simply gathering

          Feasting, growing fat beneath the feathers

          Preparing to fly before the cold

          Before winter opens its empty hands.

     

    Let’s unpack this characteristic Trail poem and see what’s in it. First, it is profoundly regional in the sense that the presence of Oregon grape and manzanita in the same place breathes of the collision-space of the moister climate of the coastal northwest with the more sere shrub-forests of California. Then it is about as seasonal as a poem can be, clearly written on or near the autumnal equinox (set forth where it should be, halfway through the poem). We digest (pardon the expression) an evocatively restated outline of recent seasons.

     

    Then the poem, which has to this point been an amiable, detail-rich meander on a ridgeline filled with fruit-nibbling birds, ends with the oxygen-sucking hammer fall of what winter really means in the high country: death. This bold tonal shift in the last line changes the meaning of every previous word: all this cheerful chewing is not a casual avian picnic. It is a desperate bid for continued life by way of energy-hungry migration.

     

    There is some variation in craft and weight among these poems, but the best among them are very good indeed. A review should not reveal all the goodies, of course, as readers should read the real thing, but I’ll mention “False Hellebore,” “To a Young Lizard,” and “Late Riders” as among the most fully realized and thoroughly carved of the collection.

     

    The lizard poem is a reptilian cognate of “The Berry Woods,” but more tightly focused and directive throughout, as though Trail is urging the lizard to get into a safe hole pretty quickly. False hellebore and “real” hellebore get a mutual apology and a taxonomic dusting-off in what is perhaps the best poem in the collection. “Late Riders” is one of the last poems in the book and is, in truth, the natural closer for the collection because the sun descends and the human observers, having seen all the day permits, feel their way home in darkness. Yet, the concluding poem, “Juniper Years,” makes its own claim, concluding:

     

          Time enough to accomplish our own perfection

          To grow, to express in the shape of our lives

          The beauty of our afflictions

          The worth of all the time there is.

     

    I am told that Pepper Trail was named the official poet laureate of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in 2013. And why not?

     

     

    Reviewer’s Bio

     

    Alan Contreras is author of the poetry collections Night Crossing and Firewand. His collection In the Time of the Queen will appear in 2018. He is co-editor of Birds of Oregon (OSU Press 2003), author of Afield: Forty Years of Birding The American West (OSU Press 2009), Northwest Birds in Winter (OSU Press 1997), State Authorization of Colleges and Universities and other titles. He is editing a collection of essays about Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and will soon begin work on a history of Oregon ornithology. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and lives in Eugene.

  • Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key by Kelly Terwilliger, reviewed by Anita Sullivan

    October 23, 2017

    Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key by Kelly Terwilliger

    Airlie Press, Portland, OR
    ISBN-13 978-0989579964
    2017, 79 pp., $16.00

    Reviewed by Anita Sullivan

    When you pick up a copy of this remarkable book, stop! Look at the cover – really look at it. Across the bottom rests a narrow strip of seashore in vivid blues, whites and browns. Above that, sky takes up the rest of the space. The ratio of sky to seashore is 5 to 1, which may resonate slightly in your vision as a very satisfying relationship. Yet the placidity of this image is interrupted near the top of the page by an odd little island with some old-fashioned people on it who seem to have no idea their small piece of ground has been detached from its own world and inserted into another one. Two distinct realities inhabiting a single place. Already, you might feel the center of your forehead humming with anticipation.

    Then you read the title words: Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key. And the humming grows louder. If you squint a little and move the words around in your mind, you may recognize them as similar to an Anglo-Saxon kenning – an ancient word puzzle where certain words can be mixed and matched in ways that allow them to strike sparks off one another and reveal hidden meanings. For example:

    king     dragon
    hall      cave

    1. The king is a hall-dragon.
    2. The dragon is a cave-king.
    3. The hall is the king’s cave.
    4. The cave is the dragon’s hall.

    Such simple word-sets formed the underlying structure of Anglo-Saxon riddles. Although the four words in Terwilliger’s title don’t fall neatly into this particular pattern, I feel them making a close quadrille with one another: A riddle can be a key, a fish-hook can be a thorn; a riddle can hook you, a key can pierce your heart. Thorn and Fish Hook stand between Riddle and its Key.

    Throughout the book, true to the cover’s promise, these and other words shape-shift into one another in ways that are always surprising, but always completely appropriate to the underlying pattern the original magic formula has ordained.

    The opening section, “Air” is also about water, about breathing and folding, taking in and letting out, jumping into. Entire poems breathe in as one thing, breathe out as another as when one sound shifts in a word/and summons another.

    In “Handkerchief” the poet remembers a father, who sneezed and carried/this crumpled peony in his pocket.

    Folding her father’s handkerchiefs, warm from the dryer, clinging together/like pages of a fragile book, she goes back to the flower image as she folds

                                      soft square
    halving and halving. What if I’d just kept going?
    Blossoms unblooming, reversing
    to a single point
    with everything inside them.

    In “Night Song” she feels her way into the longing of the owl’s call:

    Not sorrow, but the overflow
    of wanting to live, to break open
    all those feathers into night …

    The second section, “Body,” intensifies the theme of falling apart and coming back together to live again (which recalls the ancient enactment of death by dismemberment and burial as a rite of spiritual renewal).

    The first poem begins big – imagining how a whale might die at sea:

    turning softly within
    to something like cream, until
    the skin splits, the rest
    falls away.

    The poet then brings the whale body onto shore.

    What then, strange coat. . . .
    A hill of skin
    enough to hide a house.

    But the poem does not end there: a man rides down the beach on a horse; a group of people stand around the carcass, waiting for him. Where is the whale? Here on the sand, yes, but at the same time forever out at sea:

                 bones still falling.
    I’m sure of it. Slipped from the skin
    they descend through the sea’s green rooms …

    Later in the section, in “Gift Horse,” the horse itself is now dead on the beach, like an old sail blown in.

    The poet, looking at the horse, feels herself changing into an animal: I begin to wear fur. I feel hairs on my skin,/between my teeth, in every breath.

    Half animal now, she reaches into the horse’s mouth, and behind the tongue/ that isn’t there, something jiggles./Riddle, fish hook, thorn, key –

    Two more observations about this amazingly coherent and luminous book:

    First, at the core of all the poems, whether there are people in them or not, is a steadfast and palpable love. The poet’s father is sometimes directly present, as are her two sons, and once they have been introduced, you realize they are, in some sense, inhabiting every poem. “Beyond Swans” begins

    My friend once ate a swan,
    the only thing she was ashamed to admit
    she’d gladly do again.

    And the poem, after immersing itself fully into the magnificence of this bird as cloud god, with its intimacy of weight, slips easily into a memory of the poet being tenderly carried as a sleeping child, up from the beach at night by her father,

    He climbed up and over the rocks,
                and my body felt loose and safe.

    After which, turning back to the swan, she says

    This is how I’d carry her
    the one-who-ate-a-swan, who probably
    never will again, whose burdens now
    have changed their shapes, as burdens do.

    Second, in my own reading of poetry, I especially look out for how much distance a poet is able to maintain between what she is trying to say, and what she actually ends up saying. If this distance is too close, the poem may feel “controlled,” and tend to be merely descriptive or informational. If the distance is too wide, the poem risks veering off into blind alleys of personal symbols or getting trapped in a kind of feedback loop of seductive images or sounds that have detached themselves from actual experience. In Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key, I believe Kelly Terwilliger has managed – partly due perhaps to her long experience as a professional storyteller – to maintain a perfect distance, thus allowing The Mystery to be doing its essential work to keep the poems honest, beautiful, and strange.

     

    Reviewer’s Bio:

    Anita Sullivan is a poet and essayist who has been part of Oregon’s literary community for 35 years. Information about her work can be found at www.anitasullivan.org

     

  • No Acute Distress by Jennifer Richter, reviewed by Tiah Lindner Raphael

    July 26, 2017

    No Acute Distress by Jennifer Richter

    Southern Illinois University Press
    ISBN-13 #978-0809334827
    2016, 67 pp, $15.95
    Author website: www.jenniferrichterpoet.com

    Reviewed by Tiah Lindner Raphael

    From Disease to Ease: Transforming Pain into Resilience

    Jennifer Richter’s second full-length collection, No Acute Distress, was published in 2016 by Southern Illinois University Press as part of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Editor’s Selection. Following her first collection, Threshold, which won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Open Competition, No Acute Distress centers around family, un/health, chronic disease, and the way in which these forces shape identity. The collection follows a single speaker in an arc of transformation, looking for the universal through the lens of intensely personal – and physical – experiences.

    Structurally, the book is divided into sections  – “Family History,” “Admission,” “Examination,” “Complications,” “Release” – mirroring the inpatient intake and treatment process. Medical terminology is explored in all its surrealism from the title itself to PICC lines, from visual pain scales to a list that highlights the bizarre naming of pharmaceuticals:

                    I’ve tried Depakote, Sinequan,
    Zomig, Xanax, Toradol: fuck you. Fuck
    your side effects, your scripts fanned out then dealt
    to me for years. And Midrin, Flexeril,
    Vicodin, Axert, Celebrex, Frova
    that hooked me – what the fuck?
                            – “Eighteen Seconds”

    Throughout the collection, the body is alternately cataloged with clinical efficiency or given the extreme tenderness of an intimate or caregiver, treating language-lovers to a subtle lexicon that includes femurs, veins, spines, and the wild labor of birth. In the long poem “Eighteen Seconds,” Richter writes, My body’s dragging like a plastic sack /of batteries: they’re dead or not, can’t tell.

    Indeed, the body plays such a central role in No Acute Distress because Richter uses it as both a vehicle for action and agency and as a limiting force: Lately I feel my body’s felt docked, as in: all aboard (“I’m Used to Feeling Like I’m Moving Even When I’m Still”). The plurality of strength and weakness, vulnerability and ferocity, is particularly noticeable in Richter’s poems about children. For example in “My Daughter Brings Home Bones,” she writes about the bright future of a young daughter on the cusp:

                                   In this next decade, she’ll go: head off like
    today, take into her arms all she’s curious about. Her line of bones
    makes an arrow; sun lights them like a sign.

    In contrast, in “My Boy, My Body: When I Type I Always Mix Them Up,” Richter describes a sick child and the pain of parental guilt.

                                                                 The surgeon finally
    emerges with photos: the shadowed terrain inside my son like a
    moonscape if the moon were smooth. He slides a pen from his
    pocket. I fidget like I’m starved. With the tip he traces exactly
    where my body, when I made Luke’s, made it wrong.

    The further one gets into No Acute Distress, the more one notes the role of pain, in both its physical and emotional manifestations. In these poems, Richter asks difficult questions about the nature of pain, how it shapes the individual and whether or not that pain brings people closer in shared experience or pushes them toward isolation. In “My Own Blood,” the speaker discusses her mother’s ill health, Our pain’s the same, behind one eye. She knows /some studies trace mine back to her.       

    As she explores the experience of disease, one’s own and that of others, Richter creates a collection permeated with a specific sense of unease, even in times of relative wellness: I’m fine if you mean satisfactory (“Eighteen Seconds”). However, by the final section of the collection, “Release,” the tone of the poems changes towards one of transformation. In the poem “Imagine,” the speaker mourns what has been lost in her journey:

                                                                                  Our
    Children’s mouths sigh open in the dark. They’re not surprised:
    The healer touched me, and it worked. They’ve seen magicians –
    Beneath the sheet that’s pulled away, something’s always gone.                                                            

    However, in the next poem, “Synesthesia: The Way I See It,” the speaker shows herself to be in a place of more peaceful acceptance: I’m better now;/Still trying to make sense of everything. By the final poem, “No Joke,” Richter’s speaker reflects on her transformation and pauses in a state of gratitude: Even the quality of the light is new. I’ve come so far.     

    Readers, too, will find themselves grateful for the experience of sitting with Richter’s rich poems. Illness is a universal experience and, shaped by Richter’s deft hand, one that gives readers a way into the most complex questions about body, being, and selfhood.

     

    Reviewer’s Bio:

    Tiah Lindner Raphael is an obsessive gardener and writer living in Portland, Oregon. A frequent volunteer with the journal VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices and visions, her poems have most recently appeared in Cloudbank, Pretty Owl Poetry and Spoon River Poetry Review.

     

  • Everything is Shining By Jan David Madsen, reviewed by Emily Pittman Newberry

    April 25, 2017

    Everything is Shining By Jan David Madsen

    Lulu, 2016, 66 pages, $15
    ISBN 978-1329812314
    Available at https://www.lulu.com/
    Author website: https://zestymumbles.com/

    Reviewed by Emily Pittman Newberry

    When Carolyn Martin sent out a call for poets to write reviews of books, I scanned the list of books on the OPA website and was drawn to Everything is Shining just by the sound of the title. As I read it through the first two times, I loved many of the poems.

    The book opens with some intriguing pieces. “Dust To Dust” is a nicely done meditation on the concept of no thing. No thing is the belief in a deeper reality that is neither what we think of as nothing nor made up of stuff. It is more real than the material world around us. The poem begins, Ask when I first knew that everything/was shining, all at once, like the sun … and ends, That it is the dust in which I Am/ dancing forever. This line – with the capitalized I Am – leaves us with the mystery of whom is being referred to: the speaker or pure Beingness, the nonmaterial world out of which we are all made.

    In “Ever Again,” we are treated to a prose poem that is interspersed with a more traditionally formatted, three-stanza poem. In the prose sections the speaker is present with his internal state. The poetry weaves in the felt and seen world around him. The single word Silence at the end invited me to be present with internal and external physical experiences in a way that transcends the boundary we normally perceive as solid.

    In addition, this poem repeats words from an earlier poem, “That Day,” which describes a similar experience, but one that is not exactly the same. The words of a saint, “Ever Again” says, retrieved and read many, many times. In “That Day” the saint’s words appear as a pantomime: the stream seems to mummer the words of the saint. In “Ever Again” these same words peek through worn-thin papers to speak of this dissolving leap into reality from the depth of silence beneath. I found this intermixing and repetition to be almost a conversation between the two poems. It drew me in and motivated me to re-read both.

    Other poems use sweet language to engage the reader. In “Mist,” the speaker says, Let me evaporate/ like the dew on the leaves, and “Moment In A Meadow” opens with Bright sun dappling green-dance in the trees.

    Given how much I liked many of the poems, others left me wishing they had been reworked. For example, “A Real Poser” begins with a very dark blind and the very bright lamp. Then in the third and fourth stanzas the speaker throws out a series of questions: What is it?/Where is this place?/Is it day or night? and What’s going on?/Is it some kind of trick?/An illusion? He then answers, Yes, yes it is! And, of course, Everyone is in on it! Here we are spoon fed the questions and the answers are handed to us on a silver platter.

    The poem “Draw” does the same thing. It begins with two stanzas in which the speaker asks to be literally drawn on paper, ending with the poetic, The surface upon which I am drawn is still upon a blank and empty page. Then the poem ends with a line of questions in which the speaker again tells us the answers we are to reach rather than showing them poetically.

    I hope this author keeps writing and that we will see more from him with poems like “Dust To Dust,” “Ever Again,” “Mist,” and “Moment In A Meadow.”

     

    Reviewer’s Bio:

    Emily Pittman Newberry is a performance poet living in Portland, Oregon. Her writing explores the challenges of living as spiritual beings in a human world.  OneSpirit Press published her first full book of poetry, Butterfly A Rose, and a chapbook, Nature Speaking, Naturally, now used in art therapy classes for elders. She wrote poetry for the artist’s book Water by Shu-Ju Wang. Her work has appeared in journals such as VoiceCatcher, The Tishman Review, and Kind Of A Hurricane Press. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. Her website is www.butterflyarose.com

     

     

  • Here From Somewhere Else by Judith Arcana, reviewed by Tricia Knoll

    March 22, 2017

    Here From Somewhere Else by Judith Arcana
    Left Fork Press, 2015, 26 pages, $10
    ISBN 978-0692589526
    Available at https://leftfork.org/books/

    Reviewed by Tricia Knoll

    Judith Arcana’s chapbook Here From Somewhere Else was a perfect choice for the Turtle Island Quarterly’s 2015 Editor’s Prize. The press focuses on deepening connections to the natural world. The eighteen poems in the collection take the reader from observations of nature in cityscapes (primarily Chicago and other Great Lake Towns where Arcana lived for more than 25 years) to the forests, trees, and birds of the Pacific Northwest.

    Arcana begins the collection exploring how an urban mind can open up to the natural world. One route is the imagination. A short poem, “Dreaming the Indian Ocean,” describes a childhood dream of flying in her bed to where whales swim in green deep water. She uses close observation to describe the appearance of nature in the urban landscape – the sky darkens over garages, birds speak to each other in graveyards, the rhythm of a train races through Queen Ann’s lace and milkweed, and the mica sparkles in sidewalks – what the poet compares to stars falling from the urban sky. Middle-aged women on sidewalks and lawns watch crows on picnic tables and fountains. Her poem “City River” asks, Does the river know it once was wild? and questions what people watching a river may have lost with the taming of an urban waterway.

    The narrative arc of the collection is movement. Arcana now lives in Portland. The poems move away from Chicago lakefront cityscapes into places familiar to people of the Pacific Northwest. As a transition, the poet is sitting in the woods in “Soon.” Her cell phone rings, a reminder of the world she recently moved away from. The news concerning her father’s health is not good.

    This poem continues a motif of lyric observations of how light plays on natural surfaces. Sprinkled throughout the poems are compounds words like fireclouds, waterhearts, goldsilver, and riverlight. Light flashes through graceful branches and falls on the rushing river not as diamonds and gold but as diamonds and gold wish they could reflect light. Arcana asks, Can I be in love with the light on the water? The answer is yes.

    That vision carries forward how the poems progress. In “Metamorphoses” Arcana plays with all the possibilities her connections might mean. Can the narrator be an old woman in a cottage deep in the woods? Or an ivory owl swooping at squirrels? The dark bird watching children march to the school bus? In “Wild River Sister,” the identification between the poet and a wild river includes both light and the churning river which feels like the poet’s mind.

    These poems are long on wonder. “The Man Who Loves Trees feels the heart of a tree like his own pumping dark liquid to limbs. The affinity with trees in “This Side of the River” concludes with a question:

    Do you understand the language of trees? Most of us can’t
    ask them these questions; we can only raise our eyes, worship
    their solemnity, their reach, their rough skin made of rain.

    Oregonians can celebrate that Arcana chose to come here from somewhere else. She hosts a monthly poetry show on KBOO community radio in Oregon and online. She writes poems, stories, essays and books, some of which are available through the Multnomah County Library.

    Beside the small press award for this book, her fiction collection reflecting the history of reproductive rights Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture was the 2014 winning prose chapbook from Minerva Rising Press. Arcana is a “Jane,” a member of Chicago’s pre-Roe underground abortion service and a long-time supporter of reproductive justice.

    Website: http://www.juditharcana.com

     

    Reviewer bio:

    Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her collections include Ocean’s Laughter (Aldrich Press) and Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press). In Summer 2017, The Poetry Box, a Portland-based press, will release Broadfork Farm.

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