BAY AREA POETS SEASONAL REVIEW
More Spring 2009 Reviews
WHERE IT LEADS
By Andrena Zawinski (OAKLAND)
Taking the Road Where It Leads by Andrena Zawinski (Poets Corner Press, Stockton, CA: 2008) 28 pages, 20 poems, $12; ISBN 0979859441, email: poetscornerpress@yahoo.com (209) 951-7014, poetscorner.press.
Taking the Road Where It Leads contains 20 poems, many of which have been previously published. This road is red-knuckled, driven by an intense, forward-motion, often raw and uncontrollable. Andrena Zawinski is on a quest, but it’s not linear: it crosses the country, goes overseas and comes back, and encounters the past and relationships wherever they pop up.
The poems that moved me most were those employing greater musical formality: repetition, consonance and assonance to create a rhythmic structure, or an actual formal “container” to take Zawinski’s marvelous kinesis to a higher level by focusing her theme. Kind of like containing atomic energy.
Travel, love, place, and the author’s relationsip to each are the main story-lines. Zawinski has an exceptional eye for revealing details that explode beyond their initial use:
The pickers, backbent and dozens abreast, rise before the sun
past the blonde grasses, behind the concertina wire
running between Soledad and Salinas, move in squats,
toss artichokes from sun-pocked fields into pickup beds,
calloused fingers pricked by the thorny thistles.
They pour seeds into rivulets of dry earth
that will burst into lettuce, chard, the great bouquets
of broccoli and cabbage along El Camino Real’s humpback hills
Keen observation and empathy shine through in her Steinbeck-esque description (indeed the poet invokes Steinbeck in a later stanza) as the poet imagines the aching backs of the workers and the final release that awaits them at the end of labor’s hard day.
“The Poet Driving” recreates the experience of an audience in the presence of a skillful wordsmith, conveying the magical transport that can come when listeners share that magical “lift off” by the end of the read poem (if the reader has real skill):
And our silences
grow ravenous for this.
We choke down whole landscapes,
drink in cloud bursts, throb
with the starlit sky. We lean into the words
like a slow dance pinned to ourselves
like a corsage, like a lover, like a poem,
like the language
of applause.
Several love poems balance the poems intent on lists given in long breathless lines, and are a welcomed countervailing wind. I found “While I Am away” and “We Have Traveled Here” to be good, grounding poems in contrast to the stream-of-consciousness rush of “I Am Reminded When Thinking” and “Ghosts in the Garden” which feature whole stanzas often composed of one or two long sentences. Is it the act of addressing an other, a lover or spouse, that allows the author to attend to the communication aspect of language, rather than spinning ruminations? The other poems that held my attention were also characterized by greater formality: “I Have Seen Terezin” is a pantoum of devastation:
Now we study this, house fronts tattooed in SS brass plaques,
the Camp’s mass grave’s numbered markers bedding down in roses,
feather quilts airing our sins across the opened window ledges,
gallows wreathed in candles, slips of prayers tucked under stones,
the Camp’s mass graves numbered markers bedding down in roses
for ones hung at the Gate of Death. I walked tunnels from the cells
to gallows wreathed in candles, slipped prayers beneath stones,
jumping at my own shadow darting by me, at how horror twists it . . .
The last poem, “Woman Waking Seaside” has a delicate lilt, a satisfying fresh taste to close the book:
The shroud of coastal fog rolls over
a woman lifting herself up
from deep pockets of sleep, from night’s
low note still whispering in on the lip
of the wind, on a slow drum of rain.
THE NUMBER BEFORE INFINITY
Zack Rogow (OAKLAND)
The Number Before Infinity by Zack Rogow (Scarlet Tanager, Oakland, CA: 2008) 82 pages, 49 poems, $16. Scarlet Tanager Books, P.O. Box 20906, Oakland, CA 94620, www.scarlettanager.com.
The Number Before Infinity casts a seemingly swift parabolic arc from when a married man becomes overwhelmed by emotion and sexual energy for a new lover--to a shaky middle where he finds himself divorcing his wife and being rejected by his own child, couch-surfing, and moving to his own place--to an endpoint where an old life is replaced with a new one, an old wife, with a new lover.
It is not a theme I am predisposed to like; honestly, I have judgments about affairs and “romantic love,” especially when it takes over in older adults as compared to hormonally-driven adolescents, yet, Zack Rogow’s poetry, his obsessive love and quandaries about it, his seeming helplessness and sobriety in having to make decisions, won me over in the end. This is what I love about poetry: it can take a reader’s fixations and confront them with new interpretations, chucking you out of your comfort zone and into life in all its messy and nuanced complexity.
Rogow’s love poems are delicious. The poems with underlying questions about what path the lover should take are moving. The poems touching on a child’s responses and a father’s feelings, are insightful and honest. There’s a lot to be said for this rich study: Rogow is courageous in setting the narrative in motion, particularly in light of the opportunity for critics to dismiss it as “confessional“ poetry, a label so often applied to the work of women writers.
This is Rogow’s sixth book of poems. He is also a translator of French literature, including works by Andre Bréton, George Sand, and Colette. The French influence is present in the passion just as there is a shade drawn from Neruda‘s palette, the Chilean poet’s earthtones used to describe a the human body and human love:
You’ve become my map, my geography:
the Black Forest of your hair,
your alpine lake eyes,
fathom after fathom,
your mouth as red as turned Carolina earth . . .
*
And your legs taper
like a continent headed south,
one ending in Tierra del Fuego--
the Land of Fire--
and the other
in the Cape of Good Hope.
(from “A Map of You”)
Secret love is always exciting, but as a reader eaves-dropping, or even as one who listens to a friend recount the details of an affair, many poems made me squirm. This titillation is a roller coaster: we fear for our lives yet know somehow there is a track underneath us. It’s heady, exciting, and I want to cover my eyes, especially when the moments of the affair come close to the routines of daily life as they do in "Carpool":
Only an arm’s length away from you
in the back seat
I can’t reach out
can’t even toss glances with you
but when when I stare at the woods
on Mount Tamalpais
I’m thinking of
pushing my hands
up into your closely planted hair
The passion gets tempered by consequences, and that is where Rogow’s honesty is freshest. Shopping for shoes with his young daughter, there are levels of emotional experience:
I urge my daughter
toward the less expensive pair
but she won’t let go
of the shiny ones.
And how can I refuse
when each morning my marriage sinks
a canto deeper into hell
and I’ll soon be the strands of rain
braiding my daughter’s window?
(from “Before-the-Divorce Rainboots”)
And, farther down the road of a life-changing cycle:
For a whole year after the separation
my daughter wouldn’t let me brush her long brown hair/
wouldn’t let me stand behind her
and coax the tangles down
Ouch! Rogow’s is a brave book, a true-confession that rises way above grocery store scandal sheets in its imperative toward deep connection, meaningful touch, the electricity that two people can find together in stolen moments. And, then there is the denouement as the narrator reflects on the bumps of life and love:
There are some years I’d love to toss behindand even decades barbed with twists and ache,
so many scenes I’d just as soon rewind
if I could only roll another take--
I should have seen the storm that time carried
before I shingled my roof with half-lies,
should never in a million have married
until I sprouted my own set of eyes.
(from "A Sonnet--Against Regret")
There is humanity here and introspection that rises from the smoke of disrupted domesticity. And, isn’t it interesting that the poems where the narrator seems to set the arc back on its steadier path, are ones that move to greater formality?
We all make choices, many of us taking the path of least resistance: instead of succumbing to passionate love, we all too often cave in to what is comfortable and secure, as much of a cop-out as the more out-of-bound choices some make. Rogow’s book takes us in a direction not easy to follow, particularly if you have been in the role of the first wife (and, in this book, her story does not enter although we have read it many places elsewhere; Elizabeth Edward’s, where are you?). In the end-run, we each have to carpe whatever diem is our particular fate, and recognize:
you and I were not meant to be Buddhas or saints
or tourists of the flesh
but to touch each other’s fires
for so long as we can clasp one another
till the last strength
is lifted from our limbs
(from “Under a Black Lace Sky”)
-Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser
MAKING TIME
By A D Winans
(SAN FRANCISCO)
Making Time by A D Winans (erbacce-press, Liverpool, United Kingdom: 2008) 40 pages, 32 poems, $8. http://www.erbacce-press.com, with design and cover photo by Alan Corkish and back cover photo by Gerald Nicosia.
A D Winans moves swiftly between sardonic and droll, the beat and the impassioned voices. He is a master of the clean one-liner, not needing punctuation to interfere with statements that shock by their candor and grace. Few writers can excuse themselves from respecting the rules of English writing, needing those little glyphs of punctuation and capitalization to guide us, but Winans wins his right to a more stripped-down, somewhat prosaic poetry because of the clarity he creates in his choice of words. Here‘s “Letting Go,” short but emotionally punchy and imagistically complex:
The last desperate thread of love
A shoe print in the mud
Next to the public phone booth
Her talking to her new beau
Not noticing the love beads
I bought her in Mendocino
Left behind in the circle
Of my footprint
Like a tribal elder offering
A small piece of his heart
Love and lost opportunities for love, sex and missed chances are frequently themes in this book, along with the foibles of others who grab for attention such as poseur poets, music and musicians who give more than they take, friendship, aging, and the vagaries of American culture are recurrent subjects in possession of Winans’ imagination. “Poem for Allen Ginsberg” updates “Howl” with idiosyncratic parallelisms:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by greed/
Naked under their fashion designer clothes/
Driving themselves through congested city streets/
Looking for non-existent parking spaces/
Aging hormone driven biological clock mothers offering/
In public their purple veined near perfect breasts/
To baby sucking zombies/
Who stock market driven sipped Starbuck’s coffee/
While chatting aimlessly on their cell phones . . .
Yes, but tell me how you really feel? Winans’ grasps the contradictions in our compulsive do-it-all-till-you-drop and never-reflect-or-apologize dominant culture. But just when you start feeling a bit overwhelmed by negativity, he turns to humor:
Holy is the sock
Holy is Swiss cheese
Holy is the ATM machine
Holy is Cable Television
Holy is the condom
Holy is the U.N.
Holy is pop culture
Holy is Bank of America
Ka-ching
Ka-ching
Ka-ching . . .
As with Zawinski, Winans also describes a poetry reading, but focuses on the performing poet’s perspective rather than the response of the audience, as his narrator/poet/self requires a mother’s-little-helper to venture to the podium, then takes full command:
For thirty minutes
They sit quietly
Like birds in a nest
Their eyes devouring the silence
Before the poem
The first poem cuts into them
Like a machete
Winans is a poet tackling the aging process head on, and he doesn’t find much about it that is pretty (aging‘s not for sissies). Yet, his characters are more than the sum of their parts, as in “The Old Italians of Aquatic Park“:
Have the smell of garlic and pasta imbedded/
in their skin, Italy beating in their heart/
The old men of Aquatic Park are dying off/
With grace and dignity and a love for the old ways/
There is something sad about being Americanized/
There is something sad about growing old/
The bocce ball rolls slowly along the grass/
Coming to rest like a hearse parked at an open grave
In fact, the young do not escape life any better in the view of Winan’s somewhat jaundiced eye, as in “Un Titled” where an old man/young man point/ counterpoint structure elucidates:
Old man hobbling on cane
Young man feeling no pain
Old man singing the blues
Young man in spanking white shoes
Old man with no teeth
Young man balling under the sheets
Old man in Palm Beach
Young man out of reach
Old man with young dreams
Young man unraveling at the seams
Threaded in and around poems of upstart poets and aging Beats, are poems where life’s meaning is found in music, companionship, the richness of memory, and the anticipation of poems yet to be written. As Winans’ sums up in “Rainy Day Thoughts”:
Every cloud does not have a silver lining
A dead man casts no shadow
The man who has the last laugh
Is the first to be laughed at
Sticks and stones will break fragile bones
Names numb and kill the brain
Here today gone tomorrow
One part joy
One part sorrow
--Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser
