Scott Wiggerman has achieved a noteworthy reputation as a widely-published poet, editor, and poetry workshop facilitator. Presence, his long-awaited second book-length collection of poems, certainly solidifies his standing as a contemporary poet of seriousness and distinction.

Wiggerman intelligently divides his collection into five sections: Water, Air, Earth, Fire, and Spirit, the Elemental Correspondences historically utilized to represent the forces of nature. Whether he writes in free verse or within the rigors of complex poetic forms, he does so with equal excellence and assured artistry. His sonnets and villanelles are especially brilliant and memorable, rivaling those of the best of his nationally-recognized contemporaries.

There are four major thematic threads which run throughout and seamlessly unify the tapestry of the collection: 1) the gay male’s courageous triumph against the evils of bigotry and discrimination; 2) the inadequacies and shortsightedness of religious orthodoxy; 3) the power and transcendent capabilities of love, both sensual and spiritual; and 4) the indefatigability of a fierce human spirit which celebrates the now and embraces the beautiful mystery at the core of ephemeral human existence. Each theme is subtly and convincingly revealed through Wiggerman’s uncanny mix of humor, refreshing candor, high intelligence, and hard-earned wisdom.

Presence is an ambitious, significant, and memorable collection of poetry. I give it my highest recommendation.

reviewed by Larry D. Thomas, Alpine, Texas

Scott Wiggerman. Presence. San Antonio: Pecan Grove Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-931247-95-5.

1

a thousand years and this
mirror pond takes emptiness
in, empty mountain no one
there in an ocean of dry
where anyone
can see all
save one
anywhere

garden changes
every time a leaf falls
every time light falls there

still
waterflow
comforts all
who do not know

human voices echo
sorrow passing
passing joy

2

uncontained, this world city is
a museum all surface, no
symbol

3

no speech is
ordinary

4

everything is
different

5

trying to be
strong as a rock
the odd stone out

6

then she
would write

the things
that have fallen

it’s the rain

7

people come to the walls
stop. the sound of water flowing

8

it’s with our walls we get past the wall

9

strangers in this museum,
never stray from ordinary things

no speech is
ordinary

we both look for clear lines

10

and there you are, missing
the children in that
house of clear
lines

I passed
this morning
walking — still

no idea how
to spend a fickle winter.

we can only die to be alive

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Leung Ping-Kwan. Amblings. Translated by Kit Kelen, Song Zijiang, Debby Sou Vai Keng, and Iris Fan Xing. Association of Stories in Macao, 2010. ISBN 978-99965-42-20-6.

1

no small thing, this
pointing

the way
where story
thinks itself at war

with vision

2

where there is no vision
the people perish

intriguing, this
telling

stories for the dead

3

not how you play
the game, the game

itself. no point
piling points up

in this dark place

4

playing weiqi
thinking pinball

missing prayer bells
that may just be the point,

no verb contained

5

but not for lack of walls
not for lack of icons

hanging on them

6

every icon
a crack, a crack
in everything. that’s how

the light gets in –
bathed in blood, the way
the creator is

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Alan Berecka. Remembering the Body. Mongrel Empire Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-983-3052-0-0.

1

what is not here is always
here. there is no there
there. it is hard

to plant one green thing.

out there is
America,

seeing in circles.

the city is where I am. we
is that by which I am.
mountains always

wait for nothing.

2

somebody’s grandmother
thought a white horse
is not a horse.

the whiteness of the whale
passes. the whale
remains.

3

my daughter’s eyes
roll at the sound
of Iowa.

she knows
suffering a day there
will suffice for a life in poetry.

around here, we pronounce that Ohio.

4

a just word is
worth a thousand pictures.

nothing always
rights itself,
like a book,

like a river
that eats levees

the way you say modernity
ate its scholars, like
the memory
of water.

5

tadpoles are a city
at your feet.

trains pass.
the poem is nothing.

6

water never leaves the sky.
every real boy lies
in some bloody city.

dry is forgetting how to love
for so long every prophet turns
and runs. every gourd vine withers

while god counts cattle,
waiting for nothing.

7

a poem could be a failure
of stem cells, a failure
we will never

correct. never
finished, it is
abandoned.

8

we are
now, beginnings

everywhere. crows see
the light, get happy.

spirit breathes
on the face
of every body

of water. pray
for rain.

sun, you know,
doesn’t rise at all.

it stands still
while the world
turns, dripping
waves of joy

we take for light.

9

take, read,
this is my body.

10

light catches everything,
contains nothing, a blessing.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Benjamin Myers. Elegy for Trains. Cheyenne, OK: Village Books Press. ISBN 978-0-9818680-6-6.

1
he came, not
from nowhere, saying
revolution now
revolution –
now

turn turn turn
and, turning, walk
the walk as though you
mean it

2
writing to a circle
of his friends, Paul
said of another

we’re fucked
if he did not rise

his editors cleaned this up
so there would be no danger
of someone taking offense

if we read it when
there were children
in church. suffer

the little children who
know if there is no
danger, there is no

possibility. Saul,
Saul, can’t you see
we’re fucked whether he

did or did not?
every one of us is
falling. but if one falling

rises, all
rise. all rise.
turn turn turn
and, turning, walk
the walk because you mean it.

3
every single one of us is
still rising from a single
cell learning to walk
on water — but all
fall, and we crawl
before (learning
to walk) we rise

again again again
and again.

4
not one
word.

if Anna’s cruel age
taught us nothing
else, it taught us

what is bad is being
sure we know
what we

have
is final

i can’t say
if cats name
names, but i know
they know a name when
they hear it — and i can say
most of what i know was
named before i came
to know it. still,

i know a named when
a fitting name is spoken

5
in this silver blue
lake, serene,
i think blue mountains
the silver of the mirror lake

6
Ernesto, a cosmos
filled with white
holes making Lebensraum

chills me. nothing
matters more
than emptiness

when it comes to light.

7
i think the bison
on the wall
stood

for bison on the wall
and children playing know
that is good. that is very good.

8
why not a bus
with a sign that says
Delphos and means what it says,

or an insect nothing
but a salamander
snack

that leaves
nothing but a wall
right where it belongs?

9
a bus is as good a way as
any to see years ago
pink girl, in blue

in Alabama or Virginia
on a ladder plucking apples
the sister, blue too, painting white
on the facade gazing at time passing

the white painting still fresh
the brush dripping
the hand on the apple

the gaze. on the bus
or off, the state forgotten
Malcolm knew, not
the facade

10
entre el cristianismo y revolución no hay contradicción
turn turn turn, and turning walk the walk
because you mean it

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Ernesto Cardenal. The Origin of Species and Other Poems. Translated by John Lyons. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-89672-689-5.

1

Decay so everyday natural it’s not necessary
to stop and catch your breath, just hold on
to the only matchstick pole not broken
in this hurricane while the camera
rolls. Stand pat, keep talking,
keep the show on the air.

Matter of fact autopsy of the sacrament
of marriage in a voice so Tennessee
soft it covers every sharp corner
the way kudzu does till
all the world is green

and you’d swear there’s nothing there
that could cut you, all smiles bland and
expected as the courtesy of name tags.

2

You see the haint at the front door when
you open it, standing there plain as day

an orphan, and you take her in
because you can’t even leave

the cold that will drown you
homeless. And you know

you have to keep the door
ajar for the spirit

that will make you sway
like dancing, but it is no sin,

the way the gray contempt for sky
you call a storm edged perfect day
looks like hope, but it is no virtue.

3

take a hard look at what you thought
love and you won’t doubt
the world is flat

no matter what they say about that oblate
spheroid shit. The edges are there all right
shrouded in time like some parasite
vine so dense no light escapes,
and it will cut you.

Call all this miscellaneous
for a laugh in a voice sweet as
candied violets full of purring hope,
but you know there’s a touch of winter
behind it, and it’s bound and determined
to come, come hell or high water.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Melissa Morphew. Bluster. Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9831362-1-7.

This little book begins before it begins, with a poem printed to appear as something scrawled on plain brown paper, on de-iced Indiana asphalt: “nothing moves / save me / at 80 mph…” On the Interstate in Indiana praying for salvation at 80 mph “driving into sunrise / with ten thousand days in tow” — a stunning image of the specific elsewhere in which this poet reads Jack “Loud but not so clear anymore.”

“I’m drowning in this new century, Jack,” DeGenova writes. “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go, we’re all gonna fuckin’ explode!” Not the atom bomb or the creeping suburbanization of 1950s Cold War America, but “plastic and Wi-Fi nights of virtual conversation — programmed thinking, programmed wars, programmed music, programmed religion… Miles is in the sky… cell phone rings, and no one is there…”

Program or be programmed, as they say…

Yes, Kerouac has a way with sad, and so does DeGenova, “a small word for a poet,” but every poet knows small is beautiful in particular — and that there is no place that is not.

Writing to Jack from all over the place, DeGenova makes his way home, to “the sad eternal core,” which is, no doubt, “old as coal” — not older than love, but its “sad distillate,” made flesh, I’d say, in los abuelos de san juan, the viejos gathering in a plaza by the bay, the dance that “holds the song in its pace.”

DeGenova places the image of being “homesick all my life” in Napoli, but it is with him (as it was with Jack) everywhere he writes. Having spent much of my life on Route 66, that particular gotta go gotta go gotta go struck a chord — blowing yourself into words, becoming “the asphalt of sad Rt. 66,” sets me to thinking how hot asphalt on that old road broken by the rhythm of stop signs and local intersections differs from the de-iced asphalt of the Interstate.

There is so much fuel here for contemplating what it is while on all that road going, going, I think, even when we’re there for the pasticcio. There is a touch of sadness in the image of home at the end, love older than coal that is the product of life decayed (on its way to being diamond):

…Sometimes it’s just time
to go home. Go Jack, to your cats
where Mamere irons your shirts and makes

your highballs. I think it’s time –
my grass at home needs cutting, the deck
needs cleaning. I have to go now

put this box of sad souvenirs away in my closet
behind the beat old gym shoes and
silk ties fallen from their plastic hangers.

I miss her warm thigh against my hip.
There is pasticcio baking in the oven.
Roses are blooming over my arbor.

In the end, as much Candide as Kerouac. I catch my breath with the thunderstorm singing “her wicked, sexy song.” And I want to say to the poet who has made this beautiful sad book, this performance, yes, yes, sometimes it’s just time — and we can all be sure if this is where we want to die we will. We will. There is no other place for it.

Now, play it again.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Albert DeGenova. Postcards to Jack. Chicago: Naked Mannekin Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-61584-279-7.

Donna Pucciani, Wheaton, Illinois

Paul Friedrich, a goldfinch instant: Concord to India Haikus. virtual artists collective, 2010. ISBN 978-0-98198-989-1

In my favorite poem of the collection, “Eight Journal Sketches — Taking Leah Home,” Jackson displays his considerable skill as a poet. Here he brings his nearly adult daughter to his own childhood home to visit his aged parents. In this poem the passing of time, the interplay of the generations, are handled deftly. In part five of the poem, the image of his ancient father smiling at the tombstone of his grandfather for a picture taken by Jackson’s daughter foretells the poem’s powerful ending.  In the poem’s final part, “Leaving Again,” Jackson paints an eloquent scene.  “Our eyes meeting in a last look / spark unspoken a recognition / that this may well be the last time / we will all see each other alive. / We look away, moving swiftly to fumble with luggage / & locks & doors to check the tears. / It’s still dark & raining hard as we pull away.” For its look into the psychology of the estranged but caring father, for the artful craft of a fine poet, Child Support is well worth the read.

Alan Berecka, Corpus Christi, Texas

Robb Jackson, Child Support. Corpus Christi, 2010. ISBN 978-1-45373-209-0.

The title poem (13-14) is a taste of what is possible here: “make of your voice a shaft of flame / shifting into cloud and back again // a rift in a wave, a crack in a wheel, / a road in the midst of the sea; / make of your voice a staff turned snake / turned brass turned tambourine.”

And with “High Lonesome” (16-17), the reader is transported to “Tennessee November: nothing slumbers: / in the barn, bluebottles’ ice-whittled shells / hue the tops of feed and water buckets, // inlay corn shucks and tobacco flakes / instead of the lashes of Appaloosa or Paint, / Everything which could be salvaged // has gone to rot…”

The series of poems that sing weapons in part two (29-46) begins with two virtuoso performances of sonnets (“The Arrow” and “The Bow”) and contains some of the most chilling imagery, as in “The Trebuchet” (34-35): “I teach land-bound things to fly, / turn mountains into missiles. / I loft more than hunks of rock. / With thought and craft, all may be / transformed to weaponry…” The last two lines of the poem — “like you, I’m an ingenious engine, / the union of force and intellect.” — rivet attention not only on weaponry but also on what it means to be human, also brought to mind with jarring clarity in “The Rope” (45-46), which ends with “Twine wasn’t made for this. I should be baling hay. // I’d rather pull a bucket from a well, / haul a rowboat to a dock, give an acrobat a path // across the air. That’s a kinder life for a piece of string. / I’d like to rig a mast up, and hear the sailors sing. // Take me from this limb, or if you keep me here, / tie me to an old tire, and let the children swing.”

There are moments in the last section when pure delight in sound threatens to overwhelm — but that is in keeping with the pentecostal imagery. Carried away, it will taste just right to some, even if it is too much for others. No one will call it bland, and most, I think, will find themselves singing along.

Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Melissa Range. Horse and Rider. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-89672-702-1.