BOOK NOTES
Toward the Winter Solstice, by Timothy Steele
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. Cloth, $24.95, Paper, $14.95
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Whatever Happened to Baby Tim?
'Twas the night before Solstice and all through the book/not a poem was stirring—their lives, all forsook.
In his newest collection, Timothy Steele takes us to the place where poems go to die. It is a spooky place, floors creaking in 2/4 time to our footsteps, rooms papered over with repetitive patterns, and, down the long corridors of declarative sentence structures, the tintinnabulation of the rhyme, rhyme, rhyme. Whatever lived here once has expired in confinement, perhaps while counting out the number of bricks in the wall:
Each giddy drop induced the trampoline
—From Gym Nights
Reading these poems evokes a kind of nostalgia, a memory of writing poems as a child, getting the meter to work, the rhymes to rhyme, and even working in the occasional “witticism.” They display knowledge of poetry's tradition, of how poems used to be written:
—From Jardin des Tuileries
The boy stood on the burning deck.! Ah, yes, I remember it well. And, of course, the boy cannot simply be weeping, but must needs be “weeping in dismay.” Where would poetry be without its poetic clichés?
There are lines and phrases throughout several of the poems that prove the poet has a facility with language, for example, these lines from “Black Phoebe”:
but, they are cruelly undercut by the line before or after, or both:
and they land with a thud—a cute thud—like entries in a Reader's Digest “Toward More Picturesque Speech.”
When Steele maintains his power of acute observation and exact description, the result is “Herb Garden”; or “Didelphis Virginiana”; or these lines from “Sepulveda Basin Mallards”:
Even though such passages do not seem to contribute to anything larger in the poems, they are at least well-written and enjoyable for their own sake. What he does, he does well. The title poem, however, has no such redeeming passages. And, since it is the title poem, it should be able to bear close scrutiny without coming up empty. It cannot. A series of sophomoric observations about the Christmas season are presented as profundities:
with some “witticisms” sprinkled in:
This poem is unable to bear low-light scrutiny, never mind the spotlight it is bound to receive because of its title. Why was this poem highlighted by using the same title for the book? Did someone—if not the poet, then the editor—think it was representative of Steele's poetic abilities? What is the reader meant to feel? That the poet is competent? Unfortunately, mere competency is the enemy of real poetry and it is as impossible to gain entrance to a core, a life force, in these poems as in their evil twins, the post-avant, spat-up-by-a-spam-filter poems. In both types, the challenge is the same—to read one without finding that your mind has wandered away, and you can hardly wait to follow it.
Drive: The First Quartet, by Lorna Dee Cervantes,
Wings Press. $24.95
Drive, She Said
The cover of Drive: The First Quartet is buzzing with information. First, there is the title along the top: 5 by Lorna Dee Cervantes. Then, to the right of a cover illustration of what appears to be a crowd of colorful screaming heads, is the vertically arranged title DRIVE. Under the illustration we find the title The First Quartet, followed by the explanatory new poems, 1980 –2005. Finally, in the lower left, there is a list of more titles: “How Far's the War?”, BIRD AVE, Play, Letters to David, and Hard Drive. (Unclear if the drive in this title is related to the other drive on the cover, the one vertically arranged.)
As it turns out, Drive: The First Quartet consists of five separate books, thus raising the nagging question: did someone miscount? Furthermore, if this is the first quartet, and it is actually a quintet, does this mean there will be a second, or even a third, quartet (and will they actually be quintets as well)?
The overriding theme of more is better extends beyond the cover. For example, the author's presence is pervasive: not only (predictably) on the front and back book flaps, but also in a two-page “Author's Note”, at the back of the book, immediately followed by another two pages of “About the Author.” There is a photograph of the author on the back flap, another one to accompany a poem about the author, written by the author (“Portrait of the Poet at 33”), another one to introduce the fifth book (the book called “Hard Drive” but also, inexplicably, called “Striking Ash” on a title page where the author's photo appears with yet another title “to be salvaged” in parentheses, and some dates that may or may not be significant: “1980-81” and 1984-89”). Just in case, there is also a blog address which, I confess, I looked at. It's about the author.
While the cover requires several re-readings and multiple interpretations, the poems themselves are not difficult. At all. They are perfectly accessible, in fact, one could say familiar, all five books of them. Here are poems that protest war (the number of potential readers of this book who will be moved or shaken by these poems is probably zero—the number of poetry readers who are not already anti-war being about zero); a book of poems from the “barrio” that while predictable also have some energy and (dare I say it) drive; poems that are writing exercises; poems that use the death of someone else (David Kennedy) to explore the author's apparently worthier, because less privileged, life; and, finally, a book of poems that must be related to the word “drive” but may also have been culled from whatever was leftover on the author's hard drive when she got through with every other possible grouping around a theme. Following is one of the poems from "How Far's the War?" in its entirety ("Coca Cola"):
Although here, as in many of the poems in this section, there are interesting imagistic moments, there is also an editorializing tone that induces the stupor that comes of agreement with the obvious. The poems in this section are more successful as descriptive reportage, without an attempt to create metaphors or symbols:
Though poems like this, with one declarative sentence after another, are interesting for their subject matter, there is still the matter of language, tension, pacing, momentum and variety of line syntax. The addition of adjectives--especially adjectives like "tender" with "baby" and "bloodied" with "mud"---and use of an unstoppable cliche-maker (the phone "rings off the hook") only serve to reinforce the flat affect. In addition, there is often a virulent form of bathos at work:
It is difficult to admit that this poem, as so many others in the book, is simply boring. It has important themes and subject matter. It should be moving. But it doesn't do more than induce a mild, politically correct indignation, if that. Unfortunately, cliches of political sentiment are still cliches and even the most admirable or potentially shocking subject matter can be made dull by using ready-made phrases to describe it. While there are some decent poems and striking lines throughout, the overall effect of this book is one of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink—and who wants to go searching through all the dross for the gems? Wasn't that the editor's job?
This “major literary event” is more of a major marketing event, a study in how to package someone's years of unpublished work into an oversized, overreaching, unpruned and stick-to-the-wall glossy artifact of a book and then sell it in an edition of “100 numbered and signed, specially bound, in a hand-made wooden box.” Would that be pine or mahogany? And does it include a photo of the author on the lid?
Copyright © 2006, Joan Houlihan
To launch me that much higher from its bed;
I feared I'd arc off to the side and land,
Like a defective rocket, on my head.
The boy stood weeping in dismay,
Duffle-coated against the cold,
Watching his sailboat bob away
On a pool vast and granite-bowled.
Compact, black-capped, black-breast puffed to the sun—
…………………………
Perching, she strops her bill against a wire
…………………………..
If she displays an unassuming pride—
Compact, black-capped, black-breast puffed to the sun—
The sentiment perhaps is justified;
…
Perching she strops her bill against a wire
As though she'd barbered in a former life.
Birds call and, called, respond.
And mallards drift serenely
On the fresh inland tide—
Speculum feathers flashing,
Males lifting their heads greenly,
Some, as they're swimming, splashing
Their bills from side to side.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We are all conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.
Black blood of imperialism,
sed de las selvas, distilled, watered
down, mescalado, sweet and
fermented as revenge. Little
volcanos of gas, uprisings
of air, a revolution waiting
to happen.
Acteal. December 22, 1997. Bloodied
mud sucks the plastic sandals of a child,
velas gutter through saged prayers
in the little church blasted through with
twenty-two splintered holes the size
of a baby's tender fists. Melon heads pop
and the hacking drum of a machete
meeting bone counts down the hours
of matanza. Somewhere, a telephone
rings off the hook. The Vicar of Diocese
calls in twenty minute intervals.
—From Coffee
You were born on a patch of dirt
named for a grid of unchartered
desert. Your grandparents fled
The Long March and disappeared
into blood canyons rather than stand
disappeared and bloodied. Your mother
never washed a dish in her life, but pressed
the spines of cut cactus together
which dried into bowls. Your sutures
never healed when you lost them both.
Your father's heart too small. Your
mother's heart, too large. You scraped
the arroyos of roots and hard seeds,
mouthed a language too clumsy for
your tongue and tried to forge
love from the tiny shadows of leaves
in a foreign country -- your own.
—From Tiny Shadows of Leaves