Author: Nathan Leslie

2009, Hamilton Stone Editions

Filed Under: Poetry.

Known mostly for his fiction – six collections of short stories last I counted – I nevertheless became acquainted with Nathan Leslie when we both had poems in Red River Review in 2001 (one of these, “Chip,” is included in Night Sweat).  While his fiction collections often cohere around a theme – motherhood (Madre), cars (Drivers), faith (Believers) – Night Sweat is a selection of poems that span a decade and sometimes seem so different, one from another.  This collection is divided into seven discrete sections, an eclectic mix of theme, form, and focus.  Thus, to get a handle on Leslie’s work and the vision it embodies we need to approach this collection in terms of style.

While he writes the occasional form poem – there are two ghazals in the final section and the book opens with a series of exphrasis poems, based on works of art – Leslie primarily writes free verse poems and keeps the language spare and descriptive.  Whitman-like, he is fond of lists, but rather than cataloguing a stream of examples or representatives, Leslie uses the technique to paint a picture.  “On a boat in the Severn we caught/eels, crabs, bluegills, croakers…” (“A Fishing Poem); “Though I hiked the juniper/trails – spying lizards, coyotes, hares and hawks…[the wrentit] plucking toyon berries,/wasps and caterpillars…” (“Wrentit”);  “My sister and I found/washing machines, tires,/rusted box springs, hordes/of brown bottles, beer cans.” (“The Creek”); “in Indian Lake dotted with wildflowers,/moss, lichen, scrub bushes and beetles…” (“The Lake”); “a dragon stem goblet for mother,/topaz wings, a Sarpaneva sculpture/blown in a burned wooden mold/for Anne, a lavender opaline/bell gilt with a bronze mount for me.” (“Glassware”)  These aren’t lists so much as details freed from the fog of prepositional language, as if Leslie is carving a statue from a block of wood, only the material is the concrete language of nouns, things. …
Continue reading »

Author: Louis Gallo

2010, Createspace

Filed under: Poetry

In a recent interview, Lou Gallo told me that nostalgia is a disease and that he is a “complete, woebegone nostalgician.” He may as well have told me that the sky is blue, for I’d already read two of his new poetry collections.

Halloween and Omens are both so thick with the past that the idea of a year 2010 once again becomes the stuff of futuristic sci-fi. These poems takes the reader into Gallo’s New Orleans childhood of the ’50s, into his wilder ’60s and ’70s, and dip their toes into the ’90s, but rarely do they venture into present day. Which is for the best, because Gallo is a born storyteller, an unabashed sentimentalist who moves forward only by looking back. …
Continue reading »