Author: stevenschroeder

Ben Myers follows his debut collection of poetry, Elegy for Trains (winner of the Oklahoma Book Award), with the equally engaging Lapse Americana. As in his first collection, small town Oklahoma pulses with fairs, county dumps, summer jobs, holidays, Jesus, tragic commoners and such things Americana. In the hands of Myers, these themes breathe the hope of memory, but the disciplined line control of this poet does not allow memories of yesterday, of everyday, to overrun themselves.

A poet demonstrates control in the ability to avoid saying what need not be said, despite the urge to do so. In Lapse Americana, Myers performs a mature control by his refusal to over-speak a poem. I find his control reassuring and comforting — like collective silence at the end of a grand and moving film. Some examples:

1. But there wasn’t a war then (xvi, line 35)
2. and the men are dancing (20, line 23)
3. When we leave, not only the children
   are looking back
   over shoulders into the shadowed
   tent where Angel
   is lighting his cigarette (22, lines 23-27)
4. There is a sky like sharpened bone
   over the trailer home
   with tinfoil in all the windows (24, lines 1-3)
5. I thought nothing
   in Lincoln County still worked (26, lines 17-18)
6. Outside the wind
   ripped through the ragged
   arms of the cedars,
   their red and shaggy roots
   deep in alien clay (30, lines4-8)
7. Better that than waste
   my last moments batting
   after eloquence like a cat
   after a June-bug (105, lines4-7)

Many times Myers successfully, artistically paints for me what is not there, and in that absence, I find so much speaking over and over again, reminding me, echoes lingering. Let me be clear, Myers is not merely Imagist, in the restricted, historical sense of that poetic movement; nor am I speaking of the mere sensation of “the sound of silence” to which we sometimes refer. I’m talking about technique –- control of a line for artistic effect. The poet’s refusal to tell all, his ability to lead us toward the image or theme merges with his insistence on stopping short. His scenes point without prattle. It is up to the reader to follow. Of course selection of details is perhaps the most challenging task for any writer in any genre. The tension between what is revealed and what is concealed makes art possible; and both under-stating and over-stating can interfere with the purity of dialogue a poet seeks with an audience. More often than not, Myers wonderfully strikes this balance. He leads readers into excursions of common memory. He takes them toward a profound sense of “I remember it; I feel it!”

Myers strikes the proper tones for his subject matter: somber, ironic, elegiac, musing, hopeful. He connects the everyday to Virgil and like Virgil he knows the depths of human potential. This knowledge, reined by his line integrity, invites readers to realize what he has realized. His lines compel us to see ourselves in his reflections offered as a gift, but a gift that requires our mutual attention to fulfill a dialogue. Like all fine and satisfying conversation, the variety of experiences represented by the various participants is enriching, when together, we reflect the life we hold in common.

Reviewed by Ken Hada, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma

Benjamin Myers. Lapse Americana. New York: The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc., 2013. ISBN 978-1-935520-71-9.

Old Bourbon, Cormac McCarthy, Muscular, Falconry, Siberia, Wildness – these terms have all been associated with Gary Worth Moody’s poetry collection Hazards of Grace. Certainly the power of these associations is understandable. His lines resound like stallion hooves pounding against a barn door. His voice tells of freedom longed for and the eventual, tenuous release.

I recently met Gary at a social gathering. I remarked to a few that I liked his work. The reply from all was consistent: “Powerful” was the word they used. But what is this power? It is more than his impressive stature, honest eyes and firm handshake. His power is paradoxically realized within the courageous vision to be vulnerable. By definition, paradoxes demand, even as they form, a tertia media, a higher way that is revealed only when facing the end of surface knowledge. The truth forged between two competing vistas.

I admire (and cringe) the displayed tension between father and son that lingers throughout these pages. Moody’s presentation is a rugged path ascending a crest. The climb is not easily accomplished, but it is more than worth the effort. One wonders about the courage to love, to remember, to hope against despair, against the leather leash that limits the flight of even the most powerful raptor. In this work, the poet willingly lets the wild bird fly. He risks losing. He is no longer in control. The majestic flight may not return, and readers of his lines feel his act of release, finally, as an act of love.

Really the book is a novel in verse, retold with haunting jurisdiction. Technically, the format consists of pronounced visual line-spacing (often more than one image fills a line) that commands attention in five chapters. Magnificently, the book is full of color. His long lines reverberate with dust and sage and fog and coal and water and sun. Some examples of his use of color in no particular order:

“wild violet” (56), “eyes not black, only amber” (53), “seared pink” (27), “yellow bus of children” (26), “volcanic pine” (81), “water reflected blue in red stone” (81), “sheathed in pink” (62), “pale turquoise eyes” (34), “blood orange wash of her hair” (51), “sun struck blue” (80), “red mouth of their daughters” (47), “copper skinned morning” (23), “red chili, calabacitas in butter and brown sugar” (22), “white as a scorched bone” (57), “green cuttings on the road” (47), “lavender scent” (51), “black volcanic salt” (50).

My non-sequential presentation of these phrases of color is intentional, for it suggests the aesthetic rendering of the poet’s use. Reading Hazards of Grace, whether forward, backward or randomly, engulfs the reader in an array of irrevocable color. The book is an art gallery as much as a novel in verse. His color usage is primal, stirred deep in the soul of being. His coloring establishes the geography of the book. Yes, his geographic arrangement is vital, but finally the places blur into a pochade of color – South Texas, Siberia, Appalachia and New Mexico – all seem the same despite the poet’s accurate attention to particular details associated with named places. The landscape collapses into the primal struggle to walk upright among the bones, wrestling, like old Jacob, for blessing – to be free in everlasting sky of his hawk, honest like the core below the poet’s feet.

But this father/son theme keeps pricking. This nagging, unspecified, eternal chance to be new – this is where Moody’s lines arrest me. The fists, the shotgun, the dreams. Who cannot feel: “This night it rains my father’s hands” (23)? I sense (and I applaud) the author’s courage. This work is “for the family of the beautiful-eyed father and ghost of my own” (35). Life is a hazardous journey, this much seems profoundly beautiful in Moody’s lines. But what about the “grace” nominated in the title? Ah, there is the awkward hope of a poet! Such titles betray the glory of implication a truth-teller knows. Of course, a truth-teller is first and always a truth-seeker, and Moody’s quest for organic truth is both frightening and exhilarating. The grace, of course (of course!) is realized in the act of questing. It is the gift (or those gifts) that results from a refusal to be static, institutionalized, paralyzed in memory. To borrow from Freya Mathews and David Bidney in The Ecological Self, the poetry of Gary Moody exhibits what the Scholastics called Conatus: “the impulse for self-preservation or self-maintenance, and also for existential increase, or self-realization.” Bidney continues: “The nature of a thing is not shown by its static perfection of form; and it is not defined by reference to some end which it tends to realize. The nature or essence of a thing is rather expressed by its … power to continue in existence.” The grace in this work moves beyond the static forms of poetry lamenting old memory; rather it is a living quest for Conatus, for self-realization, for self-preservation within the ongoing context of a living, yet hazardous planet. This is the grace realized in Gary Moody’s work. Grace is the breath breathed high above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where, finally, memory floats harmless as a midsummer cloud.

reviewed by Ken Hada, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma

Gary Worth Moody. Hazards of Grace. Santa Fe: Red Mountain Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9799865-7-4.

There is a moment early on in Hardy Jones’ new novel Every Bitter Thing where the hero, a twelve-year old boy name Wesley, accepts a gift from another boy, Rubin, who he very much wants to befriend. The gift is a drawing of a swastika, but it might as well be a switchblade for the danger the two project upon it.

He held it up. The swastika sat square in the middle, about to leap off the sheet. “Take it with you. Just don’t let your dad see it. Mine hates that I can draw a swastika. He flips out and starts cursing in Spanish.” Not only was this a gift, but contraband.

This exchange between friends will be replayed in way more serious terms as the novel moves into its third act, but what we see early is the illustration of an interesting idea: to what degree can a secret be empowering? Like most twelve-year olds, Wesley doesn’t have his own money or transportation; he doesn’t control the spaces he lives in(he has to keep his bedroom door open 24/7); he can’t prepare his own food and, most importantly, his very thoughts and desires seem to be policed by his ubiquitous father. It is in this context that the exchange of the swastika drawing between Wesley and Rubin is both a gesture and a contract of tremendous power. A lesser novel might stand pat here, create a world in which Wesley and Rubin’s friendship empowers them to levels previously unrealized, but Jones refuses such sentimentality. Instead, the novel turns this friendship inside out: where fraternal trust once offered symmetry, now it is the crooked thing; where sexual naivete was guarded, now it is preyed upon; and where once the boys held the secret of a swastika drawing—in reality not dangerous at all—now they come to share the secret of something else, utterly taboo, and completely and realistically dangerous.

Set in Florida, in 1981, Every Bitter Thing is told by Wesley Royal, an overweight adolescent being raised by an overbearing, racist father, and an exhausted, patient mother. In the novel they simply go by “Dad” and “Mom”, and herein we see early the nearly sentence-by-sentence difficulty of trying to write from the point of view of a twelve-year old. The trick with such a narrator, it seems to me, is to find a voice that avoids affecting preciousness on the one hand, while still maintaining a sense of wonder on the other. Such books as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Padgett Powell’s masterpiece Edisto strike that balance in the voices of their young storytellers, where as perhaps a book like Tony Early’s Jim the Boy crosses that line of believability. Either way, what is striking and original about Jones’ narrator is the way in which he seems so different than so many contemporary adolescent narrators—he is neither precocious nor sarcastic. Instead he lives mostly in silence.

The story line of the novel essentially follows Wesley’s journey to become a man as his father imagines what becoming a man means. In his typical overbearing nature, Wesley’s father, after watching a Bruce Lee film, decides to enroll Wesley in a tae kwon do class. There he meets other kids, also trying to become men, and most importantly, it is there that he meets the enigmatic Rubin Lopez, a black belt, and several years his senior. Their friendship and Wesley’s advancement from white to yellow belt, all under the relentless gaze of his father, take up the bulk of the action of the book.

For a novel set in Florida, Every Bitter Thing is remarkably without the trappings, the furniture—if you will—of typical Floridian literature: there are no beaches to speak of, just as there are no alligators, swamps, or boats. Any aesthetic that might lend itself to some cheap Jimmy Buffet world, where relaxation is religion, where space and time are limitless, simply doesn’t exist here. Instead, it is replaced by the exact opposite: the limitations in Wesley’s world are limitless, and domestic spaces are constantly described in terms of their claustrophobia.

Our dining room table was a long dark brown rectangle with extensions at each end. We never used the extensions, because that would make the table twelve feet and it was already six and took up most of the room. A narrow path ran from the kitchen past the head of the table, where Dad always sat, to the back hallway that split in two. To the left was Mom and Dad’s room, straight ahead was the bathroom, and to the right was my room: a small square box the same size as Mom and Dad’s room.

What is important to notice here is that this is just one of many of Jones’ use of interior description. Added up, these descriptions lend themselves thematically and build toward the novel’s climactic moment—a moment of utter fear and helplessness that I cannot describe here—which will occur in a terrifyingly tight space. A space that Wesley, to be fair, has feared for a hundred pages.

To call Jones’ novel a coming-of-age story is to discredit the amount of confusion Wesley contains by the book’s end. However, there is a modicum of understanding between boy and father that rounds the story and offers, if not a conclusion, a place to exit. Jones allows us to walk away. Listen: For a novel this intense, you’ll be grateful for the fresh air.

reviewed by George McCormick, Cameron University, Lawton, Oklahoma

Hardy Jones. Every Bitter Thing. Black Lawrence Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9825204-1-3.

I met Larry before I met him. The first time was at the famous Marfa Book Company in Marfa, Texas, on my way, also for the first time, to Big Bend National Park. I wanted some poetry about West Texas to read while in the heart of the West Texas wilds. His book, Where Skulls Speak Wind (Texas Review Press 2004), encapsulated the very vista I surveyed from the side of the mountain at the head of the Lost Mine Trail. I had found my West Texas poet, and I was not disappointed.

But although that was my first introduction to Larry, he is not limited to that subject matter. After inviting him to read at Blinn College and meeting him in person over a year later, I became more familiar with his works. Collections such as The Woodlanders (Pecan Grove Press 2002), set in the deep swamps of East Texas, and The Fraternity of Oblivion (Timberline Press 2008), featuring outlaw bikers, reflect the complexity of his subject matter. Still, like the scorching heat of West Texas days or the relentless bone-chilling cold of the desert night, he is always fascinated with the extremes of our dualities regardless of the backdrop – the good and the evil that reside in us all, the atrocities that can happen between the closest of kin or absolute strangers in turns, and the saint and the sinner in all of us. The dark corners are laid bare or dimly illuminated with his pen, at times a searchlight and sometimes a candle. Either way, he knows what details to focus on and how to implicate us in what he reveals.

I would not call Larry a West Texas poet, but he is. And I would not call him just a Southern writer, but he would do James Dickey, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor proud. I would not call Larry’s work simple, but it is starkly complicated in its clean lines and sparse descriptions. In addition to these labels, I guess I would call Larry a humanist above all because even the most despicable acts are almost understandable from the perspective he grants us. Just as he loathes and loves himself, he knows we are deserving of both. There is love in the violence and there is respect in the fear of his characters just as there is a soul coupled with the mind, no matter how deranged or lucid that mind may be.

In Uncle Ernest, as in many of his other works, you will want to turn away. You will see how love can twist and deform the very ones it cloisters. In some of his other collections, Larry has shown us how open, dry spaces can lay bare secrets or be the perfect place to forget the past. Larry reminds us that the deep dark woods nurture secrets so dark the mind can barely conceive of them, even the minds of those who commit the atrocities. Too much distance from society twists and hones the taboo into normal, but even out there, there are still limits of what is acceptable; there is an inherent moral compass. Sometimes, those minds bend to envelope the deeds they’ve created, but sometimes they break. Larry reminds us that madness is the only option for some in order to cope.

In a blue expanse of desert sky, the blue moon shadow of an owl’s wing sliding across a clearing, or jars of sparrows’ hearts on a window sill, Larry shows us the delicious pleasure and beautiful pain of the weight of memory, real and imagined. I am comforted to know that Larry is there to remind us of the things we’re sorry we’ve forgotten and the things we wish we could.
 
Reviewed by Courtney O’Banion, San Jacinto College Central, Pasadena, Texas

Larry D. Thomas. Uncle Ernest. Virtual Artists Collective, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9440485-1-1.

Leaving Tulsa displays a new and poignant voice in American poetry. This debut collection by Jennifer Elise Foerster is published by the University of Arizona Press as part of their Sun Tracks: American Indian Literary Series. Praised by luminaries such as Joy Harjo, Foerster’s work certainly echoes a Native American epistemology, but her journey depicted in these lines transcends an individual story connected to (and painfully dis-connected from) a tribal context. Beyond the presentation of an individual member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, the lines in this collection agitate for the most essential, nagging, universal human desire – freedom.

I am struck by the poet’s skillful, lyrical use of language which at once images a visceral landscape even as it renders it innocuous. The speaking voice of the collection exhibits a triumph of language as she wrestles with the leaving, (the expulsion?), the venturing west from Tulsa (a landmark to suggest home, or what is known). Landscape is not celebrated but negotiated. The colors of the journey west are pronounced, not for their ability to console or even inform, but for their obstinate reminders as parameters defining the speaker’s uncertain quest. There is much aesthetic negation in her presentation. An anti-pastoral feeling permeates, stark as much as colorful. Consider some of her phrases:

“This is not God’s/ country. Our story: scrolled on leaves,/buried under cedars” (58),
“on this windswept/ledge of land – no footprints” (69), “a sea” she “has no name for”
“at land’s end,/ no witnesses./Not even the trees/sketched on the horizon”(63),
“I no longer know the difference/between water and air/or which I should breath” (61),
“Imaginary friends” depicted as “snow/dispersing into wind,/their little heads rolling/ across the yellow plains” (31), “gutted armadillos” (48), “billowing from splintered mud” (70).

At times the images seem to be accelerating: horses stampeding (53), a “fugue of black/ horses drowning in the surf (56), “Black horses broken loose/over a trampled dawn” (55).

At times the images are distant or diminished: “dissipating campfires” (54), “icy stars”(60), “splintered stars”(62) “echoes from the planes … plucked stars”(69), “I step and shatter the field” (40), “a framing of absence” (46).

At times the language is wonderfully blue: “[I] can only speak about blue things –/the woman in the blue shirt, the blue/October sky, blue silk on the woman’s/laundry line/flapping against a blue breath,/ the bluishness of a body/when it is left behind, the blue/memory of a desert” (51).

Magdalena is a recurring allusion, the title of four of the poems, as well as a referent in other poems. The allusion is mythical for what we know of her, but more poignantly, for what we think we might know of her. This mystery fits neatly with the wounded traveler in this collection.

The language throughout is aggressive; it is beautiful. Like one standing at the precipice overlooking a violent waterfall, Foerster’s phrasing keeps the reader at a respectful distance. We are witness to the poet’s personal epic, and though we are drawn into her journey by the alluring beauty of her phrasing, we are never quite comfortable. Readers of this volume find consolation in the poet’s array of language, for what is revealed – content and contexts – is limited, suggested more than clarified. But the striking use of language intrigues me to consider what may be concealed, though I certainly don’t need to know more to embrace this journey, this dance of survival. One exception to everything I have said so far may be found in the poet’s use of a blanket or quilt imagery. This image is one of the few comforting images in the collection.

In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr claims the personal lyrical poem functions to “translate our crisis into language” and thereby “arrays the ordering powers our shaping imagination has brought to bear on these disorderings” (4). Indeed, Foerster’s aptitude with language seems to have an ordering power, but Leaving Tulsa is more than personal lyric. The voice of the one who has “to live/ with these scars now” (46) is mingled within the collective voice, a corporate, as well as individual memory. Orr borrows Sara Hutchinson’s term “Overculture” to explain the tension evident within the collective and the personal voice: “the two worlds the self must negotiate are the world of personal memories and emotions and the surrounding social/political/economic world (i.e., the Overculture)” (213). Foerster’s speaker embodies the pain (note frequent reference to scars and ashes) bound up within the journey, a recoiling, an effort to negotiate the personal and the collective within the greater Overculture.

Reviewed by Ken Hada
Ada, Oklahoma

Jennifer Elise Foerster. Leaving Tulsa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8165-2236-1