There are amazing poets among us. Here are some of my online reviews of books.
Curve by Kate Reavey.
MOM EGG REVIEW ON AUGUST 23, 2023
Review by Mary Ellen Talley
Kate Reavey brings a sense of the circularity of seasons and motherhood in CURVE, her first full length poetry collection. The five sections of free verse encompass an arc of personal experiences: motherhood, parenting, family life, cancer, and losing parents. Metaphorical and actual curves suggest a lyrical ebb and flow within an ocean of language and the natural world.
Desire for pregnancy begins the book. The first poem, “My mother’s nipples,” sets out with a heartfelt wish, “I ask for stretch marks / silver as the hairs across / my mother’s brow.”
Children arrive and beautiful poems of parenting and family life weave through the book. “The Waning,” is addressed to the poet’s first baby, “Come, child. Remind me that this moment will pass / and because I can’t hold it, I’ll hold you.”
Subtle differences between the mother’s and the husband’s approaches to life and parenting are conveyed in stanzas about Reavey’s children. In the poem, “My children proceed,” Reavey, the mother, is attentive to daughter Maeve reporting “zero dreams” which means no “nightmares, for now.” Consider how parents see a dead flicker on their deck, “a collection of spotted feathers / almost suggesting a bed.” The father “won’t bury / the bird” because he plans “to tie flies / from the scattering of feathers.” He sees:
a reflection of water, a fish rising
to catch sewn feathers believing
they are nourishment,
life, the precise light each of us
so wants to own.
Kate Reavey and her family live close to wilderness on the Olympic peninsula in northwest Washington. The natural world and constructs of language are currents that run through this collection. Both are exemplified in “Maple leaf” where Reavey speaks of veins present in both leaf and hand. She points out “so many o’s” as mourners at her father’s “midafternoon wake” say to her, “I am sorry for your loss.” As in other poems about humans, Reavey adds depth with natural world imagery. For example, she ends this poem observing that if her “father were here” he would look to the sky where “the heron and red-tailed and falcon leave a trail / only discerned by the wind.”
This poet skillfully takes the minutiae of life and moves it toward rendering profound messages. In “March 20, 2020,” the poet is listening to national news in the car on a “chilly overcast” day in the Pacific Northwest when she turns and sees “a path of cherry trees, blossoming / along each side of this paved road.” She indicates that the weight of the world’s worries have temporarily stopped weighing her down. Reavey is reminded of another moment of reprieve on a prior visit when she was with her daughter, as petals “drifted down,” a magical reminder of “snowfall.” The poet forgets the severity of the world and “the word border disappears.” This border reference reveals that the news reportage had been of walls and immigration, weighty topics that can burden the spirit.
The poem, “After a Line by Chief Dan George,” was written “for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018 regarding the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Reavey makes a basic but profound statement, “this body is your home.” The lines offer support and guidance from a woman and mother.
Reavey brings an underlay of grief to this collection. Poems about the deaths of her mother and father become part of the arc of this book, just as death is part of life. Three poems in section IV are titled “Grief,” “Grief II,” and “Grief III.” The poems show how the heartbreak of losing a mother can change over time just as fruit is transformed when preparing and giving blackberry jam.
Other poems consider our time in the universe as we go about our lives on this planet. In the poem, “Neowise,” the poet and her husband “lay wool blankets down // on the stubble of grasses, allow darkness to fold into night.” They lie under the sky “hoping to catch a / glimpse of Neowise, the comet everyone keeps / mentioning.” This sighting would have been in 2020. The next reappearance will be in 6,800 years. The addition of this poem gives CURVE a wider lens of time.
Like others of Reavey’s poems, “The word evening” honors language and lineage via vignettes about her own family. The father and small son are inside a warm well-lit home laughing as a tower of blocks falls down. The speaker is walking outside telling a story to her daughter who used to be afraid of the evening dark. There are trees, sunset, constellations, and a story of the sighting of limpets, crabs, and tiny mollusks at a low tide. As the pull of the round moon impacts the tides, the curve of Kate Reavey’s poetry offers a warm and satisfying celebration of the verities of life.
A review of Masquerade by Carolyne Wright
Reviewed by Mary Ellen Talley
Masquerade, A Memoir in Poetry
by Carolyne Wright
Lost Horse Press
Oct 21, Paperback, 92 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1736432334
Mardi Gras and Masquerade! Time for recollection and reflection as Carolyne Wright’s latest book weaves a veritable semantic parade of poems. They encompass the elusive years of the 1980s when Wright was a young writer from the Northwest navigating a mixed-race relationship in the South. Her poems incorporate carnival culture and the New Orleans jazz scene as well as the financially strapped family lives of the locals there.
In this memoir, Wright removes her metaphorical mask to reveal her past through narrative and lyric poems that are often witty and erotic, yet always compelling and compassionate.
The writing in Masquerade is erudite, with frequent literary allusions that enrich the poems. From the moment young Wright meets the handsome neighbor to her writing studio, the pheromones are on high alert. In “At First Sight,” she writes of “Kismet’s / metabolic blow-dart” but signals premonition with the final question, “Cupid’s curse / or Caliban’s cri-de-coeur?”
Wright is adept at mixing ancient history and mythology with everyday references and local lore. For example, “IV. Round: What Love Is” begins with “I am never Aphrodite’s fool” in commenting on “all our belongings stacked / in this shotgun house’s makeshift rooms.” Then in the title poem, “Masquerade” Wright describes the Mardi Gras parade’s “Momus Rex” riding by on his palomino. How apt a subsequent line, “Honey, we’re known / by our disguises.”
With a geographic nod in the first section of the collection to the beach dunes of Cape Cod and and depictions of the apartment wall she shares with the man for whom she is tempted to cast caution to the wind, “The Putting-Off Dance” discloses Wright’s conflicted inner dialogue. Should she begin a relationship or not? The poem ends:
Traceries
of North Atlantic sand between my quilted
comforter and pillows, I scribble
predictions in the dark while the town
sleeps, inventing one last reason
it wouldn’t work, my body up against
the wall, braced for giving in.
Running through this collection are poems that reveal a young woman juggling logic and emotion when responding to confrontations regarding her being taken advantage of romantically and financially. In “Get Out of This House,” the couple argue:
you snarl, your features a carved
mahogany mask. “Not until
you give me back my part of it,”
I say. What in the moment’s tension
nails my wits to this answer?
How much was that down payment?
Such a paltry sum today – in those days
half my savings. Your righteous rage
deflates, you sit down heavily on
the arm of the blue floral sofa from Sears
Wright delivers mesmerizing lines that both delight and project a sad reflective beauty. Along with clever literary inclusion and word play, she demonstrates her impressive command of poetic forms such as rounds, triolets, canzones, pantoums, syllabics, sestinas, and ghazals as well as free verse. The third couplet of “Ghazal: Other Than Yours,” for example, flows forth with “Night descends its spiral staircase, unfolds its sable / patterns on the bed, no skin satin other than yours.”
The young Wright can’t escape judgment on a visit home to Seattle. Her
mother announces in the poem, “White,” that “‘You need someone just like him / but white.’” Wright describes how “The gavel/bangs / in her syllables. I swallow my shock / beyond her knowing.”
In the same poem, Wright displays her skills at making poems resonate rhythmically and sonically. She refers to her own evasive answers to her mother with alliteration, calling herself “Deception’s / dutiful daughter.” Casting lines with assonance, she writes “of “picking wisdom’s / wishbone with myself” as well as of her “mother’s equivocal oracle.”
The young woman in these poems becomes aware of racial, housing, and social discriminatory practices toward the Black community in general and toward Black men specifically. These realizations complicate her personal decision-making.
Wright pairs personal interactions amid temporal cultural events, such as in “The Gondola: New Orleans World’s Fair.” Though the couple may not be able to take in some of the pricy entertainment, Wright notes that:
We turn to watch the fireworks display
on the river’s theme-pavilion walls.
Pyro-technicians light their nitro-
glycerin flowers, each spent flash
floats downwind in an ash-petal haze
like souls released from judgment.
The gondola stops, a string of pleasure craft
stunned by a fire fight, travelers
agreeing to any terms of surrender.
We put our stainless flatware down.
She encounters negative responses toward her interracial relationship. “The Divide: New Orleans” tells of being treated well initially by a clerk in a gift shop, “Hey honey! the lady behind the counter / chirps How’s every little thang?” But then the clerk notices the Black boyfriend accompanying her, “Get up out that chair, / miss, less you mean to buy it.”
Delivering her signature witty-literary-lyricism, Wright exclaims in “Family Matters” that “I’m shy as wood smoke // with your family.” In “Epithalamion in Blue,” she reflects in bemused puzzlement, “Who did we think we were? / Ebony Adam and ivory Eve.” She addresses how she stands out in New Orleans in “Note from the Stop-Gap Motor Inn” when she says, “I’ve walked the streets / wearing my Silent Majority look, // my Welcome to America complexion.” The poems convey the young speaker’s combination of astute observer, youthful good intentions, and some naivety.
Only with the distance of years could Carolyne Wright create such a variegated memoir in poetry about this sensual, exhilarating, and conflicted period of her life. In the poem “Another Country,” she notes, “You rail against the middle class / as if I weren’t.” Time plays out its healing cliché as Wright expresses compassion toward her former lover and her younger self:
This Crescent City winter, I am foe
of your foe, flesh
of your flesh, questioning
easy truths I’ve lived by. I don’t know
the score, the difficult history
of our differences. I think all losses
can be recompensed, all heartaches
we deny each other across
the years claimed for ourselves.
As with many love affairs, this one has a melancholy ending, leaving Wright to explore the story and parse out her reflections after the couple’s final breakup. The final poem in this splendid book, “The Devil and the Angel” ends:
I am the Angel
(published on Compulsive Reader)
of No Losses, one wing in debt
divided, connected by the sun’s
infernal touchstone. Welcome
to my world. The demons are intrigued
by our hard choices
The Madrona Project, Volume II, Number 1 (Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia)
Edited by Holly J. Hughes
Empty Bowl Press | 2021 | 146 pages
The Madrona Project (Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia) is the second of a planned series of seven anthologies from Empty Bowl Press. The name honors the madrona tree that is held sacred by many Pacific Northwest tribes. This second anthology presents 64 women writers and artists who reflect on what it has been like to live and work in the Cascadia bioregion.
Planted throughout with vigorous seeds of poetry, essays, and visual art, this book is particularly relevant during unprecedented times of Covid-19, political polarization, social upheaval, and fearsome challenges to our ecosystem. Each contributor recognizes the Indigenous roots of the region where they reside. Nine of them bring their own Indigenous perspectives to these pages.
From the cover’s fanciful painting, “Valley of Love in Birdland,” by Linda Okazaki, the large format paperback opens to subtle divisions as pages traverse like a river with six tributaries alternating poetry and essay sections. Each section begins with unique images and/or text. Drawings by Susan Leopold Freeman enhance several pages as plants rise as if in a riparian zone. The poems and essays pay homage to geography, animals, and early human residents of Cascadia.
Because of today’s strife, these women writers also offer poems and essays that respond to racial violence, wildfire devastation, Covid-19 pandemic anxieties, Indigenous issues, and climate concerns. Essays inform and elucidate, such as one by Kristen Millares Young describing “[n]ot just geologic but cultural” fracturing. She writes, “Reader of the present, take note: the reader of the future will study our society for clues about what and whom we protected. They will see whether we preserved and shared our abundance.”
The initial poems celebrate nature and geography. Marybeth Holleman’s prose poem, “Wet,” delights with similes: “This rain is like seeds that disperse by attaching to a passing animal’s fur, so easily do I gather rain to my body.” Her adjacent piece, “Bear,” tells how the “acrid stench of decay fills the air as persistently as a cloud of mosquitoes on caribou.” The speaker is outside hanging clothes and spots two bears fishing the stream beside her cabin. There is apprehension and respectful coexistence.
Environmental, historical, and personal grief is a thread that runs through the anthology. Meredith Parker’s poem, “To Bear Witness,” speaks of the grief from watching a bird dying on the beach:
Here at this moment to bear witness,
to acknowledge the life that was, the immensity of his travels,
the sweetness of flight, wings tirelessly pumping,
ache of hunger right before a small fish is swallowed,
sating, fulfilling, free, and then it is time.
Besides grief, there is nostalgic remembrance of hardscrabble beginnings. In “The First Ten Acres,” a persona poem by Jana Harris, a daughter recounts her mother’s pioneer life, how her parents had kept borrowed wheat seed warm as they slept “inside the oxcart” in Oregon Country and later “dropped / each seed into a black well of earth.” Such narrative impact weaves a spell throughout this collection.
The four essays in section two focus on place, nature, exclusion, and righting history. Jill McCabe Johnson writes in “Seasonal Round” that colonial settlers had little comprehension that their “savage wilderness” was neither “unmanaged” nor “unoccupied.” She points out that even as U.S. history needs revising, “Colonial exploitation is not exclusive to the Pacific Northwest or even the Americas.”
In “Keeping the Story Alive,” a synopsis and story map about her grandmother who “was born into Laxgibuu (wolf) clan,” Sandra Jane Polzin reiterates a message that resonates throughout The Madrona Project—that stories reveal ancestry, giving us “a place to unfold memories.” Via repetition and reinterpretation through generations, such stories from the past ground us, nourish community, and help us grapple with present day challenges.
The pandemic encompasses searing sociopolitical issues excavated in section three. Sharon Hashimoto’s poem “Washington Covid Death Toll Passes 2,700: November 2020” uses the metaphor of a mobius strip and recalls how crows and humans mourn:
We shout as we witness a meteor-shape
plummeting toward us, the caws and swaths
of wings vertiginous. The sight alarms
me—a pattern as erratic as the spread
of a disease. But I know the starlings
are not invasive, not strange to themselves.
The flock wheels together—every bird shifts
Essays in the fourth section braid the natural world and Covid-19 times. Iris Graville, the first writer-in-residence for the Washington State Ferries, warns in “Not Just a Drill” that by “ignoring alarms sounded about coal, fracking, endangered owls and orcas and coral reefs, overdevelopment, and overpopulation, we’ve failed to ensure that our children (and grandchildren) won’t need lifejackets,” a metaphorical reference to necessities on a passenger ferry. This echoes warnings from K’Ehleyr McNulty in an earlier poem, “Unprecedented,” chastising us for not learning from the pandemic of a century ago and for straying apart from one another.
With realistic and optimistic poetry, section five includes a braided essay that weaves in poetry. Sara Marie Ortiz writes in “River” of her work in Native communities. “Every story is a birth story,” with narratives about the “cyclic nature of all things.” She admits that “I am struggling—as most are—to keep working, keep hoping.” She writes of sadness “rising up and the silt of it flowing and dropping back down as the river / needs. / It was a river, this poem.”
The adjacent poem by Jenifer Browne Lawrence, “Landscape with No Net Loss,” begins with “This is the river’s fingertip, pink bulb-end of a wild onion,” which exemplifies the anthology’s frequent semantic echoes between and among pieces.
One of many lyrical and thought-provoking poems, “Tulips and Garlic,” by Barbara Drake, reiterates a theme of seeds of hope: “Imagine a spring without tulips and garlic. Can you? / In the dark days of autumn, we must not neglect planting bulbs.” Perhaps obvious but a necessary metaphorical message.
Essays in the concluding section remind readers what we have learned about the importance of place as we have sheltered within our regions during the pandemic. Carolyn Servid’s title asks, “You Say This is Your Land. Where Are Your Stories?” She honors the rich oral tradition of Tlingit stories, reiterating that story and the human imagination are tools to help us see our way “through this moment in history—through the crises of climate change, politics, economy, social justice, and pandemic.” In her essay “To Love a Place,” Claudia Castro Luna writes that “Terrain and language dwell inside us.”
The last essay, by Kathryn P. Humes, “The Well-Being of the World,” asks, “How do we partner with plants, animals, and one another to bring back balance?” It is fitting that the final piece heralds a better future: “Imagine working together, spreading seeds,” Humes writes.
Editor Holly J. Hughes has gathered passionate, gifted writing and artwork within the covers of The Madrona Project. Her introduction describes 2020 as part of a “hinge moment” in history, calling for an informed and lyrical response to living in the tumult of recent years. This anthology is a timely plea for change, for recovery, for resilience, and for sustainability. It is a compendium of hope. (Published on Terrain.org)
Mary Ellen Talley 