BAY AREA POETS SEASONAL REVIEW
Spring 2009 Reviews
Dark Card
By Rebecca Foust (Ross)
Dark Card by Rebecca Foust (Texas Review Press, Huntsville, Texas: 2008) 36 pages, 27 poems, $12.95. www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2008/foust.thm
Dark Card is a poetic chronicle of one of the most difficult life challenges a mother could have: raising a son with Asperger’s Syndrome. This poetry collection has the finest organic unity I have ever encountered. Certainly each poem has its own focus and resolution, but Dark Card is really a poetic novel tightly woven through. As in any novel, the development of the main characters is crucial. Here both mother, from the alarm of an almost impossible delivery, and the son, from that inauspicious entrance into the world, experience lives that slowly develop understanding. For both the growth curve is astounding.
“Dark Card” sketches the situation: a creative mother facing the challenge of defending her special son to a Dullard’s Universe and her son delighting in the patterns of the Actual Universe.
…bare branches of trees, matrices in jar stacks,
Shang Dynasty history in tick of school clock,…
how he sees the moonlit vole
on the freeway’s blurred berm.
Early poems in the collection deal with the difficult birth process and babyhood, “The reed frail wail when you breathed,” in “Firstborn” and in “No Longer Medusa” “You freeze my heart to stone when I measure your foot with my thumb.”
“Perfect Target” calmly lists the cruelty of “normal” children. The poem concludes:
How he braided in three strands the lanyard
of his middle school years;
the hours and hours spent pacing
the playground alone,
the play dates and parties
he was never invited to, the chairs
pulled away
just before he sat down.
The mother somehow begins to learn and accept the situation in “Eighteen” which begins:
Maybe I don’t have to whisk
the ice smooth ahead of your
curling stone, explain
How you don’t always mean
what you say, nor say what
you mean; tell why you don’t cry
even though you feel pain,
explain your indifference….
In “Refrigerator Mom” a “so-called psychologist” conveniently blames the mother and her “helicopter-mothering” for the problem.
“Show Your Work” is a comparison masterpiece presenting the reality in the son’s mind and the reality of a limited understanding world.
The son’s mind was one with the universal mathematical process so why should he show his work to the teacher or the class. At last he was forced to comply, but later admitted the work on paper was not his own, but, “what he imaged the rest of us needed to do to see the answer.” Here is the complex final stanza where the mother presents what she thinks is going on in her son’s mind:
(-) small-talking
(-) planning
(-) reviewing your day
(-) worrying about the thousand details
that do not concern this problem
+ look inward
+ get up from your chair
+ walk through the dark house
+ climb each step to the back deck door
+ feel the latch
+ slide the bolt
+ walk into the clarity
and stillness
of the dark night air where
= it is possible, finally to look up and stare
at pi in an infinity of moon.
You’re just experienced the overwhelming desire of a mother to understand the mind of her unusual child. That transformation into words is a breathtaking achievement.
In the next three poems the mother and the lucky reader begin to understand the richness and depth of the son’s special world. “Underneath” observes his blank face and his feeling for the pond of living in his spirit beneath the surface. “Asperger Ecstasy” offers flashes of the details that delight his mind. “Like Dostoyevsky’s” tells us “My boy loves who he is,….” and the mother comes to terms “…I’m learning to let him alone and to see that his pacing and humming are how he keeps time in a world made of chaos,….”
Three poems of sublime and hard won understanding complete this amazingly perceptive book. “Homage to Teachers” lauds the teachers who were big enough and open enough to see the son’s spirit and potential. “Empathy” is a tribute poem to Dr. Temple Grandin, autistic veterinarian, who used her special world view to understand the inappropriate and unnecessary stockyard killing procedure: thanks to Dr. Grandin the cattle now end life instantly without the terrifying minutes before. Indeed, “…cruelty to animals diminishes the human.”
Last poem in the book is “The Peripheral Becomes Crucial” where the poet attempts a very ticklish metaphor and pulls it off. The Bancroft Library crocodile-mummy shrouds have proven to be a treasure trove of ancient writing thought lost forever. The reader is shown the son’s conflicted life slowly unrolling to reveal the treasures. The poem wraps with this astute perception:
We watch as the linen-strip, tight-wrap coil
of that Gordian-knot neck-throttled curse,
that gene-encrypted, linked-chain curse,
that DES-taken-by-his-grandmother curse,
that fumble-fingered-fool-doctor-shaped curse,
unravels with his years, unwinds, unfolds,
lets loop out in vast uncoiling spirals
whole archives of text,
found worlds.
-Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra
Word Dancing: poems, prose and art
By Jeanne Powell
(San Francisco)
Word Dancing: poems, prose and art by Jeanne Powell (Beatitude Press, Berkeley, California: 2008) 138 pages, 52 poems, 7 prose selections, 21 collages, $20.00. www.jeanne-powell.com
Word Dancing is a rich and opulent anthology. The collages are a welcome, sophisticated edition: diverse elements justaposed in a fresh and sagacious way urge the viewer to imagine and to heal. Collages give another glimpse into the poet’s mind which is always a treat. This review will discuss only New Poems, but the reader will also find a solid selection of poetry from February Voices – 1994, Cadences 1996, and Tangerine Dance – 1999.
I’ll begin with my favorite poem, “Looking Homeward,” a gentle title for a power driven reflection. Here is the third and fourth stanza:
If I were queen again
I would declare it a cardinal sin
requiring banishment from this earthly plane
to compromise the childhood of any living thing.
When I am queen again
it will be as it was, as the Mother decreed 7,000 years ago
the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the fox with the hen
when I am queen again, all will be well forever.
In so many ways any poet has the power of the “queen” if the poet chooses to exercise that power. Alas, few do.
“Without a Map” tells us we can’t go back to the past, but none the less we must.
Sometimes you undertake long journeys
without a map, without a calendar,
without even a clock
because you know it’s time.
Family dynamics are often a terrifying mystery but “You’re hoping for a chance to replay the tape….”
And the trunk, wonderful and magical,
brimming with memories and treasures,
surrounded by leather bound Scriptures
and other cautionary tales
remains locked and in waiting
until you remove the carpet and insert the key
and bring possibility alive again.
Word Dancing is filled with superb tribute poems. “Swing Dance,” a poem the poet often reads with warm emotion, recalls the mother: both at her grave service and in her exciting World War II young life. “Pocahontas” epitaphs the extraordinary life of that princess caught between two civilizations. “Passing through Her Bedroom” is a heart wrenching observation of a homeless girl. The first and last stanza do a poignant balancing focus.
Hiking boots her only pillow
she sleeps on the harsh sidewalk
near my front steps.
Am I the only one who shuts down
the cell phone and walks softly
when passing through her bedroom?
There are two delightful “Watch it, Baby. You’ve gone too far!” poems. “Five Minute Warning” finds the lady empowered when she sets fire to her errant gentleman friend’s fancy wardrobe in his new Pontiac truck with “an eight-inch handpainted fireplace match from Pottery Barn.” “Lazy Susan” isn’t so lazy after she sees her man take off with another dame. That poem concludes:
I’ll have a kitchen blade
in my hand when you come back
for more cash, the way you do
And then we’ll talk
it’s time
The “New Poem” section finishes with two essential statements of civilized behavior. “Stop the Loss” of war, especially the female soldiers, is an ardent plea: so essential to the fabric of human decency, yet mostly ignored. This is the resolution of one anecdote in the poem:
Stateside called Germany and MASH in Iraq,
see how she’s doing, she made it, come see,
one day she remembered who she was,
remembered the man who never left her side,
by the date of the wedding, she was walking with a cane,
she kept both legs, and her skull was intact,
a hard-fought, hard-won bittersweet ending.
The final poem, “About that Woman,” chronicles a woman’s proud and enduring walk through history.
…works construction, waits on tables, lives on scraps,
builds a nation with her blood and sweat, survives rape,
nurtures children through it all,
forgives her captors, survives the death of hope,
century after century for 5,000 years
-Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra
Symmetrical Reflections
Nancy Keane
(San Francisco)
Symmetrical Reflections by Nancy Keane (3300 Press, San Francisco: 2009) 29 pages, 19 poems, $5.00. keanes33@yahoo.com
Here is a testament to the human spirit written with intense urgency, breathtaking understanding, and a magnificent heart! Strange but true, I still open every collection of poetry I encounter for the first time with the greatest expectations: Symmetrical Reflections soars above my greatest expectation.
Poems in this golden chapbook flow subtly through four major landscapes of our lives: Healing, Pride in the Human Community, the Vitality of Art, and, last but not least, Love. That about covers it.
Titles of the first five poems speaks painful volumes: “Awaiting Surgery,” “ Looking Backward Moving Forward,” “San Francisco General,” “Chemo Collage,” and “After Chemo.” But the poems stand as resilient banners. About the quality life in San Francisco and the comfort of a writer’s group “ Looking Backward Moving Forward” offers these two valiant stanzas:
Larry has been gone for awhile, both of us/
In midst of medical mazes we stubbornly/
determine not to become miseries.
Though not going gently into that sweet night,/
taking time to enjoy the drama, acknowledging/
that experiences do strengthen.
“San Francisco General” has a subtitle “Dianthus Barbatis” and here is that poem in all its understated power:
Should I send pink carnations,
forged from rugged iron,
rolled in palette pastel dust,
dipped in pots of crimson hues.
Sort curves of flowers lying among/
masculine, intricate, cylindrical designs,/
squared, boxed, resting one upon the
other.
Should I write that art is oxygen
allowing us to breathe.
Practice, zeal, quest to perfect our skills,
the chosen paths.
Or, should I just say be well,
and if it be a matter of will,
the battle has been won.
“Unfinished Canvas” sketches my own greatest joy resultant from living in San Francisco: pride in the dazzling mix of people from all over the world. Opposite the poem is one of Nancy’s six vibrant paint/collages presented in this chapbook: we see handprints against bright colored squares. As archeology continues to discover, the very first human artistic efforts were human handprints pressed in dynamic patterns on stone boulders.
“May the Road Rise Up to Meet You” presents the workers of the Human Community with pride, hope, and unflinching honesty. The stanza I’m about to quote manages to hit almost every emotion and every level of understanding:
Skeletal remains of men who labored/
away their lives. Pride in eyes now/
hallow sockets for nesting roaches./
The Vitality of Art is a subject often tossed about. Two poems in this chapbook manage to nail it. “Birth to Now” sketches an artist’s life realized:
Artist brush
abstractly rushing over canvas
to capture this moment.
“Portrait at Dawn” traces a symbol of the human/all creation connection that is both a symbol and a reality. This poem is both and more.
Tiny snail tracks,
translucent on ashen footpath,
pattern circles, crosses itself
like an intricate Celtic design,
appears to have no beginning,
no end.
Primary lines for portrait at dawn.
The last seven poems in Symmetrical Reflections give Love a thorough lookover. “After Intimacy,” “Requiem Postlude,” and “She sleeps the First Sound Sleep” stand as a ravishing triptych of a woman’s journey through the land of affection. All three poems are too noble to quote so I won’t, but I urge all earnest poetry readers to acquire and relish this potent little collection.“Love Imprints” gently wraps this book: rejoicing in the Now and looking to the Future. Here is the first and the last stanza:
Image painted on wall of heart,
rugged jaw line, mischievous grin./
Inhaled his aroma, laughter, touch. . .
her life once more right side out
memories accessible at will, leading to
new adventures.
Nancy Keane reflects on life and discovers her own passionate and intrepid reflection to create truly Symmetrical Reflections.
-Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra
