Book Review: "Heart of A Comet" by Pages D. Matam

Pages D. Matam’s new book is a model of becoming the change you want to see, of living as if the revolution is over and a new world needs building -- now!

Much political poetry, and certainly much slam poetry, is structured on the observation-and-complaint model -- witness to injustice. In this age, when we feel as if we should have made more progress for the people and the ecology without which we are doomed, these poems of witness are more needed than we want. These poems turn our gaze out, to a world made accountable: a prejudice hard to escape, a power relation rusted into place, a history none of us can revise. The tensions of these poems are usually between the speaker and the world.

For all that outward gaze, however, the world of spoken word and slam poetry is a real community of mutual encouragement, appreciation of difference -- a culture where we become poetically honest in sometimes indecorous ways. Because safe haven is made for that honesty. The slam is, after all, a game. The poetry is what matters, the heart.

Heart of a Comet is born in slam, where the broken in you is welcome, where you can and must name what is breaking you, make it weak by its naming. The honesty of these poems is scouring-pad-to-skin intense. Even for this context, these poems are permission and challenge to turn the witness a little more inward, and the result is so transparent it almost hurts to read:

When you wake up drenched         in tomorrow’s amnesia,
your pulse still burning                 filled with troubling memories
…

that reminds you that you are still human, that your heart is not a dandelion, so you must stop scattering yourself to pieces …

You’ll feel beaten down by the weight of your own galaxy
The shooting star emptying its clip into the sky on celestial drive-by;
But if we’re going to live on the shoulders of giants,
We will have to stop complaining of our fear of heights.

This poem arrives early in the first section of the book, called “Apology of a Confused Tornado, Part 1,” and it signals much of what is to come: motifs at once cosmic and personal, Matam's wit that interjects traditional and pop cliches into a confession of personal disaster, a sense of form that mixes and mingles elegantly and at will.

These elements mix with lines clearly in the slam form -- “But drinking more Absolute only made me more obsolete” -- that roll onto the more difficult, and arresting, cadence of a “fiendish appetite for earthquakes at the dripping enjambment of a woman.” There are moments in these poems when the onslaughts of linguistic and symbolic bounce are hard to keep up with.

But this brings me to the matter of theme. The poems present us with a man rebuilding his masculinity from one fractured by immigration, linguistic alienation, racism, victimization, and self-punishment to one still mending but radically changed. A man who chooses to father another man’s son, a man who saves himself from his addictions, a man whose god is feminine and for whom women have become whole and human, a man who puts himself up against the imago of corporate hip-hop and burns it to a crisp.

A series of prose allegories cast the poet as Comet, the son as Sol, the woman as Sky, and the larger (unfriendly) culture as the Fog. The tropes are clearly meant to place this personal drama on the cosmic scale, and this conceit is well placed. When it’s your life on the line, the stakes are cosmic, for you, for your little human constellation. The extended metaphor supports the poetic tension of the whole book. We are discrete beings, but we are also completely part of the larger universe, each other. Our being affects all beings.

The allegorical Comet, paradoxically, zooms through the solar system and lives in a city imbued with a fog of wrong ideas and dead or dying hearts. Matam uses this allegory to think through a transformation, the wrenching tear-down-to-studs that we hazily call “personal growth.”

The Fog has a number of problems with black men, with post-colonial black immigrant men to boot, one of the deepest of which is the matter of carnality, of sexuality. On one hand, an Anglocentric culture wants to reduce black men to their bodies, their sexuality or their violence, and then wants to punish them for its own inability to see much else in them. Matam’s honesty addresses this carnality full-on in beautifully rendered metaphors that are impolitely honest about sex, about the gorgeous fall into the Right Here of the body.

But, the Divine Feminine can be an easy ocean in which to drown. This being a complicated masculinity, rather than the consumer-friendly kind, it exposes the abandonment that can hide in the worship of women as source, as mask. Her orgasm can be his false sense of value. These are not things admitted in the larger culture. Poems titled “Lovemaking Is a Flightless Bird in a Burning Pit” are not the kind of poems about sex that men are “supposed” to write.

On the other hand, Matam’s Comet reminds us that a poet bent on seduction, especially for self-deluding purposes, is a dangerous creature. Embedded in the realization story of Comet we are presented with a barrage of compliments few women would dismiss:

The fire in your eyes potty trained the big bang at gunpoint. The wrinkles in your hands taught phoenixes of resurrection. I have a heart full of ashes ready to Holy-Ghost dance anew at your beckoning call … Allow my lips to learn your bow-legged truth, squeezing your parabolas into a symphony of waves … You make me feel like I mean something.                                                                                                                                                                   

These poems render sensuality as spiritual revelation and as addicting escape. We witness a man’s evolution from soul-killing abandon to tentative learning of love, to really, really blowing it, to rebuilding from the atom outward a whole, more engaged self. In charting this exploration, Matam gives us permission to say – out loud -- that we know what That is. We are rebuilding ourselves for the sake of the world we want to live in. Matam's poems are the rebuttal to every thin, easy, profitable lie ever laid over the black male self by an Anglocentric culture jealous of its status.

Matam is not working on the revolution in this book, but on what comes after. He’s got witness, and complaint, and analysis -- he’s a master of his genre -- but more importantly, his poems chronicle a question: If I don’t want to be what they think I am, or don’t want to live my pain as self-destruction; then how shall I love myself in a country that does not love me, and how shall I live my love as a whole life?

This is what I love most in Matam’s poems. Beyond the formal dexterity, the complex echoes and refrains through the book, the bravely (pointedly) incomplete allegories of the prose poems -- I love that this book is a model of becoming the change you want to see, of living as if the revolution is over and a new world needs building -- now! We do need to live as if, and become our selves replete -- or we’ll just make another muddle of it. More poems of evolution, more poems of enjoyment of our new being and living, more witness of what is loving and nourishing and brave.

… poetry is another name for heartbreak

and just like air
  or a home
     or a chorus
         or a memory

it will fill
until there is no more room
to expand

and you must find somewhere new to

inhabit.

Write Bloody publishes many page-stage poets, and page poets, and fiction writers on the condition that they tour hard like an indie rock band to promote their own work. Pages Matam is touring now, so buy his book and help fund the tour!

To purchase a copy of this visionary work, visit Pages’s site here.

Written by Simone Roberts, Split This Rock Poetry and Social Justice Fellow, a feminist activist, and a scholar of post-symbolist / hybrid poetics and feminist phenomenology.

I bite shut my eyes between songs: Review of Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song

Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui

Reviewed by Melissa Tuckey

Sherwin Bitsui is a member of the Dine tribe of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan), who grew up on the Navajo reservation in White Cone, Arizona. Flood Song is his second book of poems. Bitsui writes in English, and also speaks Dine, so that the poems navigate between Dine culture and industrial/ American culture.

In a recent interview, describing how the book moves between these experiences, Bitsui says:

Politically, English is the language of my tribal nation’s oppressor, but we certainly have to use it to come into a new kind of knowing that will help us translate this outer culture into our own and vice versa. Flood Song feels like it’s trying to braid these diverging worldviews together in order to create a middle area that is accessible to both perspectives.

Flood Song is a poem in which images such as “I cover my eyes with electrical wires,/see yellow dawn eclipse Stop signs” co-exist with “grandfather’s accent rippling/ around the stone flung into his thinning mattress,” the grandfather who “Years before, he would have named this season/ by flattening a field where grasshoppers jumped into black smoke.”

Flood Song is both a vision and an utterance, from the first line of the poem, “I bite shut my eyes between songs.” We are drawn by the vividness of image and its strangeness. The speaker has a world to make, one that crosses between cultures. The singer’s “shrill cry.... becomes the wailing that returns to the reservation.” As readers we are participants in this ritual, we follow the singer “across sand dunes/ warm his hand with your breath.”

This sense of braiding or bringing together of disparate worldviews is present at the very level of sentence-making in the book. Entering the poems, we are entering a world. Sentences like “bison horns twist into the sides of trains/ winding through the broth filled eyes of hens/ squawking from the icebox./ shock-coils from the jet engine’s roar/ erupt from memory of splintered eagle bone” render a world where past, present and future are simultaneously present and time is luminous. The natural world here is violently displaced, but continues to exist in the memory of an eagle bone, and as song.

As Americans – especially those of us who are white – we often do not live with our history. We live in the present tense and even that is not fast or new enough. These poems contain history and vision, as well as the shocking pace of the new, even while they bend toward beauty.

At its most surreal, the poem is birthing a new world: “The storm lying outside its fetal shell/folds back its antelope ears.” Bitsui writes, “I wanted to crack open bulldozers and spray their yolk over the hills so that a new/ birth cry would awaken the people who had fallen asleep.”

I especially enjoy the sense that experimentation is not for its own sake, but that there is something pressing within this book to born, to be remembered, to be told.

Our faces coated with history: A Review of Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa

Tocqueville, by Khaled Mattawa

Reviewed by Yvette Neisser Moreno

In his fourth book, Tocqueville, Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa examines the world and human experiences with a wide lens and communicates his perceptions to the reader in a multiplicity of voices and poetic styles. Mattawa has been straddling worlds for a long time, as one of America’s most preeminent translators of contemporary Arabic poetry, and in his own poetry the individual experience is inextricably intertwined with global events, and vice versa. Indeed, Mattawa’s ars poetica is summed up in these lines: “[T]o love one person / you must contemplate loving the whole world” (p. 10).

One such poem in which Mattawa brings multiple worlds together is “PowerPoint I.” Here the poet makes extraordinary leaps and striking comparisons between seemingly unrelated subjects, including a record-setting swimmer, an ordinary person training a puppy, imperialism, American movie culture, with references to World War II, the Vietnam War, and the current U.S. war in Afghanistan, among others. The closing stanza of this 6-page poem remarkably brings all these strands together in a commentary on contemporary society’s place in history:

The dog owner opens a magazine and reads about the swimmer’s accomplishment

which is to have become for a short while the cogwheel driving the second-arm of civilization’s time,

because to say Empire is to say: the Tet offensive and one step for man,

and going out to the movies and making sure the dog does not maul the new sofa,

wherein the blind man’s accomplishment, via an eye bank in Bombay, is another toddle unto revelation,

so many magical powers or advanced technology incorporated within

where the march of progress becomes loops and loops of human matter strung around the cinemaplex,

the human soul as a conglomerate, a spark plug winking within the universe’s internal combustion,

triumphs like motes of pollen from new epochs stinging the Cyclops’s eye,

so much dithering, a catharsis that hurls us screaming unto the street, our faces coated with history. (12-13)

The book’s centerpiece is its ambitious title poem, a 26-page collage of short lyric poems and prose passages, which takes its name from the famous chronicler of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville. The choice to title this poem—and the collection—“Tocqueville” indicates that Mattawa sees the piece as continuing Tocqueville’s project of defining democracy and its impact on the American people and society. Perhaps the aim is to demonstrate the irony of the fact that the United States’ efforts to spread “democracy” across the globe have had sometimes devastating results.

The poem centers on recounting the shocking life stories of several Somali citizens during their country’s tumultuous recent history, as reported by the BBC. Prose fragments of these stories are interspersed with excerpts from works such as Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” and the Qur’an, as well as short poems written in a first-person, beautifully lyric voice:

Sometimes I want to call what I see

through the keyhole “a flower.”

Then I see the clock racing,

the digits tumbling over themselves.

Then I turn to her face

and ask a question of love. (23-24)

Although the notes in the back of the book reveal that the war zone described in “Tocqueville” is (at least primarily) Somalia, the poem itself provides no geographical or contextual reference.

Thus, the stories and images presented in the poem take on a universal quality—the sense that these horrors could occur anywhere. For me, this reading experience was somewhat reminiscent of Split This Rock poet Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic or Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History.

In terms of form, Mattawa—like fellow 2012 Split This Rock featured poet Douglas Kearney—pushes the boundaries of free verse into new territory by interspersing prose and lyric poetry. In particular, the book includes a series of poems called “PowerPoints,” which include charts and placeholders for images along with text. In a commentary on the writing process of his book Amorisco, Mattawa explains his experimental style:

I wanted to write in that pure mode that seems to transcend time and circumstance, and that it many cases acts as a skeleton upon which much of poetry is placed. In the longer poems that range freely among pressing questions and unresolved episodes I work in counter-mode attaching, welding, and knotting as much material (and prose) to a lyric impulse as it could handle. Of course, I love the lyric mode, but I sometimes resist its taciturn wisdom and the purity of its bones. (coppercanyonpress.org)

While I deeply appreciate the way Mattawa’s longer poems challenge the reader to reconsider the relationship between history and current events, and between US society and US foreign policy, I am always drawn to simple, lyric moments. As such, I was quite moved by Mattawa’s poem “Trees,” which ends with the following meditation on how we should define them:

Should I group them by touch or color—

trees of pearly, gray smooth bark,

of leaves like old women’s hands,

trees of round, dark red fruit?

Should I name them to their stories—

tree that hides the stop sign in summer,

tree where I once shot a bird,

tree I planted to cast a shadow on her grave?

Some of Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2011

2011 has been an incredible year for poetry of provocation and witness! We're seeing an explosion of poetry today, poetry that tells the story of what it is to be alive in the United States, in all its variety and beauty and madness and disaster.

We recommend 25 single-author books by some of our favorite poets below -- Split This Rock featured poets, festival attendees, poets who've read in our monthly series in DC, poets new to us. We also suggest five anthologies that break new ground and we look forward to several books forthcoming in 2012.

Poetry books make great holiday gifts, great gifts, great reading any time of the year. Run out to your local independent bookstore to support poets and poetry or order through Teaching for Change's Busboys and Poets Books, or Powell's, a union shop. You'll be changing the world, one book at a time.

And if you love that Split This Rock is bringing you this diverse alternative to the Other Guys' lists, please consider a gift to support poetry by and for the 99%. Just click here to give. We thank you!

Split This Rock

Recommended Poetry Books of 2011

Wisdom Teeth, Derrick Weston Brown (Busboys and Poets Press)

"After reading Derrick Weston Brown's Wisdom Teeth, it's hard to believe this is his first collection of poems. As Busboys and Poet's first Poet-In-Residence, Brown approaches his poetry with an incredible confidence, which often touches on tense topics of history and culture." - Kaitie O'Hare for Split This Rock

L-Vis Lives: Racemusic Poems, Kevin Coval (Haymarket Books)

"A radically candid collection... daring, historically grounded, and socially cathartic poems... Coval's air-clearing honesty about violent and insidious racism and authenticity and creativity is blazing and liberating." - Donna Seaman, Booklist

The Trouble Ball, Martín Espada (W.W. Norton & Co.)

"Poetry would have no meaning in society if it did not also include the work of poets like Martín Espada who look beyond the surface glitter of contemporary culture, who bear witness, and bring us the hard news from this all too real world we live in." -- Sunil Freeman, First Person Plural

Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney (Triquarterly) - Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
"What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems." --Kwame Dawes, author of Hope's Hospice

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Nick Flynn (Graywolf Press)

"By engaging with the contemporary world, and its atrocities, Flynn faces up to some of the most difficult and uncomfortable questions and confusions of our time, and his devotion to the consideration and confrontation of dark truths, compels the reader to do the same." - Louise Helferty for Split This Rock

Bringing the Shovel Down, Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press)

"These poems speak out of a global consciousness as well as an individual wisdom that is bright with pity, terror, and rage, and which asks the reader to realize that she is not alone-that the grief he carries is not just his own." - Jean Valentine

Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions)

"Girmay's poems, sometimes ecstatic, and always incantatory, take as their project the disciplined practice of building connections... Kingdom Animalia maps the world in which we live, classifying us, grouping us, reminding us of what sets us apart, and what ties us together." - Camille Dungy for The Rumpus

Black Blossoms, Rigoberto González (Four Way Press)

"Black Blossoms taps into the waters of Lethe, as a bower uniting desire and mortality, history and the present, in tones alternately rapturous and threnodial. Gonzalez alights on the darkest and most alluring flowers, "the beauty and grief of life," and draws us down into its intoxicating sweetness." -D. A. Powell

Mule & Pear, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (New Issues)

"Griffiths gifts us with deleted scenes, alternate endings, and a VIP pass to wander the sets of some of the greatest literature of our time... But what else should we expect from an artist who sees the world through so many mediums?" -Frank X Walker

The Requited Distance, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Sheep Meadow)

"The myths and ancient images... wander into each other's stories, get possessed by another's myths and challenge the old music with their questions...There is a surreal, unsettled beauty in these re-settings and these ancient dreams invade our own time with their inevitable augury."- Ed Roberson

Elegies for New York Avenue, Melanie Henderson (Main Street Rag)

"Elegies for New York Avenue, the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award Winner, is quite a collection of verse, styles, and emotions. It tackles all of life's complex subjects but it also celebrates the simplicity of life in Washington D.C." - Brian Gilmore for The Big Ideas

Chameleon Couch, Yusef Komunyakaa (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

"Known for musical references and remarkable imagery, the Pulitzer Prize winner mixes worlds freely. Memory is stirred up and ghosts engaged, from Minerva to Monk.... More than a witness, Komunyakaa navigates between poles: between crime and faith, cages and paradise, love and reason." - Jeffrey Cyphers White, The Brooklyn Rail

Last Seen, Jacqueline Jones LaMon (University of Wisconsin Press)

"At the heart of Jacqueline Jones LaMon's collection is a haunting series of poems born of the silence tragedy and loss wedges into our lives. With restraint and through a variety of characters, LaMon gives voice to those whose voices have been lost to us, who've left behind only questions and vivid empty spaces." - Natasha Tretheway, author of Native Guard

Transfer, Naomi Shihab Nye (BOA Editions)

"Naomi Shihab Nye has more than honored her father by these poems. In their personal and tender qualities, she honors all of us who know loss. Anyone who knows grief, especially the loss of a parent or of a homeland, can find a fatherly love, a homeland, in these poems." - Joseph Ross

Meanwhile, Kathleen O'Toole (WordTech Communications)

"Kathleen O'Toole's Meanwhile dwells as much on what is not present as what is. The book plays with time, transience, land and place, and works these themes into a powerful statement about justice and love." - Katherine Howell for Split This Rock

Spit Back a Boy, Iain Halley Pollock (University of Georgia Press)

"Beyond the bracing intelligence in these poems, beyond the surges of joy and trouble, beyond the poet's awe in this split second, he plunges with imagination into the timeless work of loving witness, resonant with high style and the blues." - Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry

Inside the Money Machine, Minnie Bruce Pratt (Carolina Wren Press)

"Deeply informed by politics and an analysis of the socioeconomic system in the United States today-and it's flaws-Pratt doesn't deliver a polemic...but rather a carefully observed and deeply transformative vision of people doing work in the United States and around the world today." - Julie R. Enszer, Lambda Literary

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Adrienne Rich (W.W Norton & Company)

"Rich is one of the greatest American poets of the past half century...attested to both by the extraordinary power of her poems and by the laurels she's racked up....The events of our blood-dimmed decade have afforded Rich a subject for some of her strongest material." - Sara Marcus, San Francisco Chronicle

Animal Magnetism, Kim Roberts (Pearl Editions)

"Animal Magnetism takes the reader on an unexpected and fascinating tour - a tour of the human body via an exploration of unusual museums and peculiar collections of medical memorabilia... Roberts' verse is lean and lyrical... a formalism [that] is easy and non-intrusive and frames the poems in a sheath of historicity, as if we were observing them like specimens behind an antique glass display." Mike Maggio, Rattle

Though I Haven't Been to Baghdad, Margaret Rozga (Benu Press)

"The poems in Though I Haven't Been to Baghdad throb with the anxiety of those left behind: mother, lover, friend. They are finely tuned to the fractures in daily life when a child is at war, when a child is wounded in war - how language itself stutters through fear and grief... Rozga's striking poems tell us, Look. Here. This is the true cost of war. Here." Sarah Browning, Split This Rock

the new black: poems, Evie Shockley (Wesleyan University Press)

"Shockley's the new black is a dismantling of archetypes: a series of poems where black is at times landscape and at times backdrop, righteous fist in the air or questioning glance...Race is the linchpin but not the quintessence." -Reginald Dwayne Betts for Post No Ills

Mad for Meat, Kevin Simmonds (Salmon Poetry)

"As sharply and carefully honed as his poems are, Kevin Simmonds has managed to preserve a quality of urgency, spontaneity and surprise in his poems through his unquestionable sense of music and, above all, through his willingness to take risks in subject and form." -- Kwame Dawes

Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)

"[Life on Mars] blends pop culture, history, elegy, anecdote, and sociopolitical commentary to illustrate the weirdness of contemporary living. . . . The title poem, which includes everything from 'dark matter' and 'a father.../ who kept his daughter/ Locked in a cell for decades' to Abu Ghraib is proof that life is far stranger and more haunting than fiction." - Publishers Weekly

Tropicalia, Emma Trelles (University of Notre Dame Press)

"Tropicalia gives us instead an ultrasensitive pair of eyes in addition to our own--as acutely attuned to color and texture and passion as a painter's. Trelles writes with a sensibility part emotional and part anthropological, offering a way of seeing first the surfaces and then delving into the poems' subjects with both heart and precision." - Khadijah Queen for Post No Ills

Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, Kevin Young (Knopf)

"Twenty years in the making, Kevin Young's "Ardency,'' a sprawling choral retelling of the 1839 uprising aboard the slave ship Amistad and the aftermath for its captives, rises fearlessly to the challenge of historical poetry, in both the breadth of its scope and the intimacy of its materials. Young transforms archived letters, artifacts, and oral accounts into a carefully composed clamor of voices, stolen through history into some of the year's keenest lines." - Boston Globe

Anthologies

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, Editors: Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Northen (Cinco Puntos Press)

"Highly intuitive and without artifice, the poetry in this compendium shows that the greatest difference may be the greatest triumph. This book's a brain trust of talent in a world of doubt. Sensory memory, self analysis-the constants of the poet-acquire a greater spiritual value than before, teaching all of us to trust our own abilities. It is sumptuous." - Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality, Editor: Kevin Simmonds (Sibling Rivalry Press)

"If prophesy is speaking an idea whose time has come, then Collective Brightness must be prophetic. In a time when the right for all persons to participate in religious freedoms, such as marriage or ordination, is shifting and changing, and when religious groups of all kinds demonstrate their turmoil over sexual identity, the 100 plus poets represented in the anthology write boldly of faith, lack thereof, religion, exclusion therefrom, and spirituality that cannot be taken from them." - Katherine Howell for Split This Rock

Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry, Editor: Julie R. Enszer (A Midsummer Night's Press)

"In the land of milk and honey, there is room for a myriad of voices expressing a spectrum of emotions and witnessing a pantheon of moments - rage and humor, passion and regret, secular necessity and sexual desire, political exhortation and personal reflection. That's how it is in this collection of work by more than 30 poets, every one somehow queer and in some way Jewish." - Richard Labonte, Book Marks

Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Editor: Allison Hedge Coke (University of Arizona Press)

"One of the most essential anthologies of recent years, Sing is rare in scope and insight. The poems found here are a testament to the power of indigeneity and the urgency of our current moment. This book sings the hemisphere into glorious fullness, teaching us the connections between us, and the great schisms between our knowledge and our actions." - Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone

Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo, Editors: Margaret B. Ingraham and Andrea Carter Brown (Wavertree Press)

Editor Margaret B. Ingraham writes, "This anthology is at once a work of literary merit, a celebratory offering, and an historical record of a hallowed place." A celebration of the 40yh anniversary of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Contains over 60 previously published poems by VCCA Fellows, written about or inspired by their VCCA residencies. The poets are from throughout the United States, around the world, and across the decades.

And a few 2012 books we're looking forward to:

• Richard Blanco, Looking for the Gulf Motel (Pitt Poetry Series)
• Carmen Calatayud, Cave Walk (Press 53)
• Martha Collins, White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series)
• Piotr Gwiazda, Messages (Pond Road Press)
• Monica Hand, me and Nina (Alice James Books)
  
• Nathalie Handal, Poet in Andalucía (Pitt)
• Alan King, Drift (Willow Books)
• Alicia Ostriker, The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011 (Pitt Poetry Series)
• Joseph Ross, Meeting Bone Man (Main Street Rag)
• Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)
• Patricia Smith, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press)
• Pamela Uschuk, Wild in the Plaza of Memory (Wings Press)

Holly Bass Reviews Alice Walker

The following review was written by Holly Bass.

Gwendolyn Brooks famously said, “Poetry is life distilled.” Alice Walker’s newest book, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, reveals the evolution of an activist-writer who has distilled her own practice to its purest and simplest form. These are humble poems, composed of sparse lines, often only one or two words in length. But this brevity is not the absence of craft or attention to language. Rather, these poems represent an intentional choice on the part of a mature writer to set aside flourish and embellishment in favor of honesty.  These poems are mantras or prayers with meditative silences humming between their lines.

The work is about getting to a truth, often a very personal truth full of surprising rawness and intimacy. In “I Will Keep Broken Things,” she writes, “I will keep/ your/ wild/ free/ laughter/ though/ it is now/ missing/ its/ reassuring /and/ graceful/ hinge/ ...I will keep/ broken/ things./ I will keep / you: pilgrim / of/ sorrow./ I will keep/ myself.”

These are poems of personal pain and global distress, and love as a form of activism. Walker’s long history of activism is represented not only in the content of the book, but in form as well. Whereas previous recent collections were published by a major house, this newest book was released by an independent publisher, New World Library, that participates in the “Green Press Initiative” powering its offices with solar panels and printing books with 100% recycled paper. The poems themselves reside squarely in the space where the “personal is political.”

The title is a celebration of humanity and an acknowledgment of the fraught times in which we live. In her introduction, she speaks of the need to “dance our sorrows away, or at least integrate them more smoothly into our daily existence.” This theme carries throughout the book, balancing what might be termed an optimistic resignation—yes, our world continues to be marred with oppression and violence, but even if we cannot solve or fix it, we must continue to do the work of dismantling power, no matter how Sisyphean the task.

In the poem “Loving Humans,” written for Aung San Suu Kyi, she writes, “Loving humans/ is tricky/ sometimes/ a slap/ in the face/ is all you get/ for doing it/ just right.”  She continues, “Loving humans/ means/ writing poems & songs/ novels & plays, slogans, chants/ & protest signs...”

Like “Loving Humans,” many of the poems, composed over the course of one year, are written in first person and directed toward specific individuals or entities: activist friends, the grandson she has never met in person, deceased family members whose spirits she continues to carry, even to her decades-old BMW car and beloved animal companions.

At times they recall the spiritual sensibility of Persian poetry. Take, for example, “The Taste of Grudge,” the collection’s longest poem, written in thirteen parts:

I do not

regret

that

I am

imperfect

In each crack

there is

an orchid

growing

…

This we know:

We were

not meant

to suffer

so much

& to learn

nothing.

Ultimately, the book resounds with love-- for women, for the earth, for peacemakers and for humanity. The poems remind us of our own capacity to change ourselves and the world in which we live. To turn our sorrow into “beauty, form and beat.”

Even So by Alice Walker

Love, if it is love, never goes away.

It is embedded in us,

like seams of gold in the Earth,

waiting for light,

waiting to be struck.

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

Alice Walker

New World Library 

$18.00

A free review copy of this book was provided to Split This Rock by the publisher. 

Review of Meanwhile

Review by Katherine Anderson Howell

Kathleen O’Toole’s Meanwhile dwells as much on what is not present as what is. The book plays with time, transience, land and place, and works these themes into a powerful statement about justice and love.

Throughout Meanwhile, spirituality and religion echo – from Lent to Advent, from Bible verses to portable communion, from ku to Pentecost to Buddhist peace flags, spiritual things become not the subject of the poems, but an overtone, serving to keep the reader in mind of a search for enlightenment and peace.

The search is not always successful. In the poem “At Kelly Ingram Park” a photographer shoots pictures of the memorials to the victims of the Sixteenth Street Church bombing. The poem moves through time, from when the speaker’s “grandmother lit candles in the dark fearing/ the riots would spill our way in April of ’68” and even further back to “parents// dress[ing] her as Aunt Jemima for Halloween in’59.” The speaker considers the “un-oiled wheels of law” and the “couple of 80-year old preachers, former klansmen/ in wheelchairs for their life sentences,” contrasts these with the broken lives of the young girls who were murdered. The reader senses the fullness of life – the ice cream truck, a neon sign – and the absurdity that comes with the creeping pace of justice that allows hatred to breath long and cuts off innocence.

The next poem in the book continues this juxtaposition between the full life and the broken life. “Seen, Unseen” begins with a litany of natural images – a heron, a Sierra ridge, and winged insects. The poem then shifts, asking us to:
“Imagine a movement/ among the super rich, rushing to cash in their billions./ A river of balm floods the sub-Sahara, overtakes the pillaging of AIDS.”

Justice here is economic and abstract – it is money becoming a healing agent. Such a thing exists only in the imagination, as O’Toole reminds us in the next lines: “Only first see the mothers/ queuing up at a Bostwana clinic, their sons bending over the cassava plots,/ sisters minding babies who play gamely in the dry stream bed.” We cannot imagine justice that will heal this; we certainly cannot imagine it until we have seen this brokenness ourselves.

Our physical lives hold fascination for O’Toole. “County Antrim Archeology” discusses the transience of the physical, how our bodies will be subsumed into atoms, will become just “a small moist stain on the lip of the whirling god.” Even in life, our bodies are divisible; they break, they become ill, they require healing. O’Toole connects the tools we use for healing with the tools we use for murder in “Themes and Variations: Baltimore Museum Sculpture Garden”:

Nuclear medicine, the technician explained
............is only three steps of mind
.........................- a few acrobatic sparks –
from the science of war..........................I watch
...........the inscrutable screens moving dots
and what may be white
.................................masses of organ or bone
as if my flesh were dissolving…

Our bodies are both knowable and unknown, both victim and assailant.

So too are our homes. “Demolition in a Time of Penitence” shows the transience of shelter, and here again, justice is slow, imagined or absent: “For weeks the demolition experts have been at work -/ picking clean the carcasses of four public housing high-rises.”

O’Toole connects this destruction to all of us – the eyes that watch are ours, the skeletons forced out of closets are ours, and questions are left hanging after the explosion that brings the buildings down.

These themes of injustice, transience, and the search for peace converge in the poem “April is National Poetry Month.” The speaker of the poem is in a taxi, listening to the radio with a driver from Sierra Leone. Together, they feel the absurdity of a world with justice for some but not for all:

He recoils at the lawyer’s voice on the radio
defending the serial arsonist: “My client
only set those fires to relieve stress!” …
…his corner of the world
abandoned by Cold War interests, leaving
the vultures of chaos free reign with home-grown
(Harvard educated) rebels swooping in

The rest of the poem slides away from this reality, returns to nature, where many of O’Toole’s poems return in their search for peace: cherry blossoms, the dogwoods of “dependable” spring in DC. “Poetry” this book claims “is where you find it.” O’Toole has found it in the fight to love the world.

Kathleen O'Toole
Meanwhile
David Robert Books
$18

A free review copy of this book was provided to Split This Rock poetry Festival

Review of The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

The following review was written by Louise Helferty, Split This Rock intern, Summer 2011.

Nick Flynn is the author of two memoirs, The Ticking Is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He is also the author of two previous works of poetry, Blind Huber and Some Ether.

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is his first new poetry collection in nearly a decade.

From the offset of his latest collection, it is abundantly clear that Flynn’s time spent in Turkey interviewing former Abu Ghraib detainees, has unsurprisingly had a deep and lasting effect. As was the case in his most recent memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010), in which he chronicled his post Abu Ghraib work, collecting the testimonies of Iraqi men who were unjustly detained and tortured, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, is predominantly informed by the subject of torture. In around two dozen poems organized into three parts, Flynn considers the plight of soldiers trained never to question authority and the acute betrayal of trust encoded in orders to commit profound and disturbing acts of torment.

The style employed by Flynn in the captain asks for a show of hands, is often rather abstract. Indeed his content is frequently mimicked by his structure as he parallels the confusion inherent in our relationship to war and torment, with that of distortion of syntax and form. This is vividly portrayed in this opening section from his poem “earth”:

last night I wandered, capt’n, the earth
bright and poison, I

staggered, a forced march, yes, then
digging, a grave, made to dig my own

gave someone muttered ‘kiss
my ass’, a body walked into the

earth, I saw my own body, covering itself
with earth, my body becoming

earth

Indeed, “earth” was one of my favorite poems in the collection. With its potent mix of frustration, urgency and naivety, Flynn’s heavy satire and social critique is somewhat underscored by the genuine earnestness of his speaker:

if I understand the memo right, capt’n, we can use
water, but we cannot use earth–that is,
we can simulate drowning, but not
burial–is that right, sir,
capt’n? I’ve read
the memos &; I want to do
what’s right

This almost blur that Flynn creates between torturer and tortured is further exemplified in his "seven testimonies (redacted)," which was for me, without a doubt, the highlight of this collection. The poem is composed of Flynn’s fragmented redact of testimonies given by Abu Ghraib detainees whereby he uses erasure to manipulate the pre existing words and phrases:

broomstick was I was
you are we want-

one better one blanket
for under & one

& fifteen days of food. One man had
a heart, a pill under

As with the above excerpt, Flynn’s technique paints a most disorienting and ominous picture throughout the entire poem. Figures and objects loom, suggestive of violence and suffering, forcing us to use our imagination to puzzle the pieces together. Flynn also, however, includes the original testimonies in the book’s notes section, where we learn, for example, that the above quoted broom is as reprehensible as suspected: “The broomstick was metal. I was hit in the face, back, legs...” For me this is most important as the knowledge garnered from the original transcripts provides a horrifying and potent depth to the poem, making it, and the voices of the detainees impossible to forget.

Flynn has created in The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, a powerful and important book of poetry. By engaging with the contemporary world, and its atrocities, Flynn faces up to some of the most difficult and uncomfortable questions and confusions of our time, and his devotion to the consideration and confrontation of dark truths, compels the reader to do the same.

Nick Flynn
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands
Graywolf Press
$22.00

Graywolf Press provided a free review copy of this book to Split This Rock Poetry Festival.