Author: Alicia Suskin Ostriker

2013, University of Pittsburgh Press

Filed Under: Poetry

To be a Jew means different things to different people, perhaps especially to different Jews.  Is it the religion?  The history?  The ethnicity?  If the religion, what about it?  The belief system?  The holiday calendar?  In her Preface to The Book of Life, Alicia Ostriker asks these questions a little differently:  “What is it to be a Jewish poet?  What is it to be a Jewish woman poet?”  Jewishness, she tells us, “has grown on me like a taste for herring, like a needle in a sweatshop relentlessly stitching,” evoking Jewish cultural images.  Which is to say that it’s been a process of discovery for her, and continues to be.  These poems, culled from a third of a century of writing, track that process.  Her parents and grandparents were Marxists, for whom religion was opium.  The essence of Judaism for them was social activism.  We see those concerns in Ostriker’s verse but we also find a mystical, visionary, even prophetic thread as well.

The Book of Life is divided into six parts, which roughly cover the various aspects of her Jewishness, her Jewish anxieties and interests.  The first part consists of more personal poems, growing up Jewish in America and specifically the lower east side of Manhattan, poems about parents, grandparents, grandchildren.  An elegy for Allen Ginsberg.  These poems are very “haimish”  — homey, folksy, if not really nostalgic; they contain a certain angst. …
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Author: Kelly Cherry

2013, Louisiana State University Press

Filed Under: Poetry 

Dedicated “For my students, then and now,” Kelly Cherry’s new collection, the 2013 L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award winner, The Life and Death of Poetry, is indeed in the lofty tradition of Ars Poetica, The Art of Poetry, or The Nature of Poetry, instructions and reflections from a master of the art.  Cherry writes with authority, and her deep philosophical involvement in the subject saturates the pages.  The reader feels from her tone that her audience of students (all of us) is squarely in mind.

This elegant collection consists of three parts, the first, “Learning the Language,” a sequence of meditations on poetry, the language, the rhythm, the speech, the voice, the sounds that precede the speech and the thought that comes before the voice. Without being didactic Cherry conveys her thoughts on the origins of poetry in human consciousness and how it ennobles human existence.  Indeed, she begins at the very beginning.  Take the second poem of the collection, a sonnet entitled “A Sunday in Scotland.”

I found a path that led me through the wood,

past fallen stone – a Roman wall in ruin –

and some felled trees, to where two horses stood

at pasture, and the nearest, a graceful roan,

drew close, and backed away again, and then

came partway back, and then decided to get on

with his own life in that field next to a fen.

I found a stump nearby – something to sit on

while catching my breath. Just to my right, a field

of poppies, post-impressionistically

spattered.  The sky was gray. The church bells pealed,

and I was thinking how it would be, to be

on earth as a horse or dog or cat or bird

or tree or flower, self-consciousness deferred.

I love that “poppies post-impressionistically spattered,” but the point is that poetry is human, a self-conscious creation.  The rest of “Creation,” or “Nature” is simply “the thing itself.” A sequence of poems involving animals in a field follows, with wonderful imagery that places them in speech and writing (from “Field Notes”: A shrew “with a tail as long as a tirade”; from “Seen but Not Heard”: “and trapped things pray/sotto voce.”  From “A Blue Jay in the Snow”: “A blue jay in the snow/is a text/that cannot be read/out of the context…”). And this entire poem: …
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Author:  Denise Duhamel

2013, University of Pittsburgh Press

Filed Under: Poetry

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Denise Duhamel’s new collection, Blowout, is like a three-act play that begins en medias res with the collapse of her marriage.  Part II (Act II) takes us back to the beginning of the story – the “story” being the history of her love life, romantic interests.  The final section brings us back to the present and finds her with a new love.  Is it a happy ending?  Well, provisionally, at least.  It’s not Odysseus reuniting with Penelope and slaying the suitors, but there’s a suitor, and she is in love (again).  But of course, as Duhamel herself knows, nothing’s ever guaranteed.

The collection begins with the deliciously suggestive title, “How It Will End,” a funny poem about the husband and wife sitting on a bench on the boardwalk watching a lifeguard and his girlfriend having a lovers’ quarrel in the distance.  Each takes sides and argues for his/her person.  In the end, the lifeguard and the girl seemingly make up, but Duhamel has opened the door to the “irreconcilable differences” that blow her own marriage apart.  (“…I say, ‘I don’t know why you can’t just admit/he’s a jerk,’ and my husband says, ‘I don’t know why you can’t admit/she’s a killjoy’….”) Sure enough, in the very next poem, “Duper’s Delight,” the shit hits the fan, as they say:

I can’t tell you

exactly when the glowing projectile disappeared,

but I can tell you when my husband did,

exactly six days later, on September 10^th.

The next several poems are like a gossip-monger’s delight as we watch Duhamel fall apart, try to maintain her fragile ego, react to her husband’s erratic behavior, etc.  Through it all Duhamel displays a sort of heroic sense of humor (at least in the poems, which are probably a good deal self-therapy).  The book’s title comes from a line in the 150-line poem from this first section, “Takeout 2008,” in which she recounts her truly shitty year, from her father’s death, to a flooded apartment that ruins her papers, to the financial collapse we all suffered through, “and did I mention my husband left me?” …
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Author: Aaron Smith

2012, University of Pittsburgh Press

Filed Under: Poetry.

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Simply put, Aaron Smith’s collection, Appetite, is all about being gay.  It’s full of frustration, anger, exuberance and humor, all of it grounded in his gayness.  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as a twenty-year old Seinfeld gag puts it, but it’s the truest entry into a review of this collection. …
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Author: Louis Daniel Brodsky

Time Being Books, 2011

Filed Under: Poetry

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Having recently lost my mother at the age of 93, I was drawn to L.D. Brodsky’s collection about his parents’ deaths, Saul and Charlotte, with a keen interest and all-consuming curiosity.  For the record, his father, Saul Brodsky, died at the age of 93 in 2002, and his mother, Charlotte, at 96 in 2011.  As the title suggests, these poems can be read as a love story, or, as the subtitle suggests, Poems Commemorating a Father and Mother, as the nostalgic recollections of the couple’s offspring.  In fact, they are both, but mainly, to me, this collection is an anguished, detailed chronicling of the dwindling capabilities of two elderly people to whom the poet is devoted.

Divided into two sections (“Heavenward” and “Homeward”), Saul and Charlotte records the gradual demise of first the father and then the mother.  Poem after poem begins with a line that places the verses in a point in time.  From “Heavenward,” the section that deals with Saul, the poems begin this way:  “Mandate” – “This dark December morning…”; “Brilliance” – “Since last Monday morning…”; “Cocoon” – “Seven days ago we put our father in the hospital…”; “Peaceful Passing” – “Fifteen minutes or so before two, this morning/Our beloved father’s spirit/Slipped silently into serenity’s sweet sleep…”; “Where to Begin” – “Where to Begin?/Today at about three in the afternoon,/We buried our father…”; “Christmas Eve Yahrzeit” – “Dad, you left us a year ago yesterday….”  Brodsky’s verse is usually so mellifluous and enjoyable in the mouth, whereas most of these poems begin with that blunt, prosaic fact, the day, the time, before his lyrical bent kicks in. …
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Author: Joey Nicoletti

2012, WordTech Communications/Turning Point

Filed Under: Poetry

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Steeped in the memory of a past that keeps slipping through its fingers, Joey Nicoletti’s Cannoli Gangster takes us on a wild ride across America, from Queens and Long Island, New York, to the Midwest and Southwest, and ends up back at “My Sister’s Wedding Reception,” among characters Nicoletti both loves and holds at arm’s length, as he comes to terms with his own personal odyssey.  His is a constant process of evaluation and re-evaluation best summed up in a stanza from the poem, “Knapsack Moon”:

And now I’m like a dishwasher,

foaming with scratched forks and knives.

Tomorrow morning they will be sorted and put away,

and at night they will stab and stain their way back

into my blue, gap-toothed mouth.

Those forks and knives – those memories – keep jabbing and poking Nicoletti’s consciousness throughout the volume. …
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Author: James Valvis

2011, Aortic Books

Filed Under: Poetry

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James Valvis is a prolific poet.  You see his work everywhere.  He is about as ubiquitous in the small press as Lyn Lifshin or Robert Cooperman.  Coming across one of his poems in a journal or online is like an opportunity to get a shot of wisdom, a perspective on life that is both useful and entertaining.   As the title of this collection of poems suggests, How to Say Goodbye is a manual for dealing with heartbreak and life’s other curveballs.  Not that there are ever any clear directions, but Valvis’ recipe calls for a heaping helping of dignity and a good sense of humor.  The essential guideline may be found in the poem, “Live Fire Exercise” about a guy in army boot camp:  The part that wins keeps his head down, keeps crawling.

Take the title poem.  A man receives a call from his wife’s former lover, asking where she is.  She’s with another man now, but the husband at least tries to be a friend while disentangling himself from her life.  The narrator has a sense of ironic distance that gives us the clue to how to behave.  He keeps his head down, keeps crawling.  In poem after poem we find characters who blindly stumble into trouble and have nobody to blame for their predicament but themselves, and the paradox is that they are the innocent; they are often the victims, often merely collateral damage. …
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