Review: Divining the Prime Meridian

Poems by Carol Smallwood

WordTech Communications

The book itself is very well designed, boasting a lovely old map on its cover and, as exacting as the Prime Meridian, the contents are laid out flawlessly. But what of divination? The subject matter within the book ranges from a fastidious mind at McDonalds to a sentimental poet akin to the great Emily Dickenson, to a cancer survivor, and more. In this collection, Carol’s free verse and formal poems are equally skillful. She neither relies on form nor shies away from it, instead using whatever means she divines most appropriate. The poems are immediate and clear, if occasionally abstract. Throughout the book, there are moments when Carol reveals that beneath the surface of a caring, astute individual, there is a person who has overcome more than one trauma.

The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door

Poems by Ken Meisel

FutureCycle Press

Somewhere in my memory is a poet I knew who would complain of “thou poems”: unsuccessful poems about love harking back to Shakepeare’s sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day….” I, too, am suspicious of love poems because most of the time they lack the intensity that they supposedly intend to express. How are love poems that don’t even try to say something new supposed to demonstrate passion? Or devotion?

By contrast, Ken Meisel’s collection successfully takes on the challenge of the thou poem. While the poems here do not all fall into the ode mode, they do as rule center on the otherness of love: what it’s like for one person to love or lust another in many iterations, from teenage boys leering through windows at literally unattainable girls in “The Girls at the Vista Maria Home for Truants,” to a nun (sort of) teaching sex ed (“Love was joining./Death was letting go./ Life was the math of it.”), to the composer Robert Schumann desolately telling his wife among war ruins “you are not the red rose / anymore,” to the poet’s own connections and disconnections to love/lust interests. For Meisel, “Devotion is the aerobics of love,” i.e., it has to be exercised regularly, and the poem of that title embodies the otherness explored in the whole collection: “A woman is another country and so is a man” and marriage is “yet another Country that two / must walk sure-footed in.”

Even though there are plenty of lovey-dovey stock props (violins, roses, chocolate, and, well, tongues) they are employed in unexpected ways, such as the aforementioned nun caressing a rose during the “math” lesson thus confusing the heck out of the young narrator. In fact, the collection prevents itself from falling into clichés by not always taking itself too seriously. The poem “My Wedding” starts as such:

My wedding was a fish. It roused itself awake

by leaping out of calm water.

It flip-flopped all over the grass

on a steamy August morning in 1988.

The oddly apt metaphor serves to offset more declarative lines such as “A wedding ceremony is a healing” and says that Meisel has conviction enough to look (and love) deeply.

Review: Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

Poems by Jack Ridl

Wayne State University Press

A four section book topping out at a whopping 158 pages, this tome’s poems engage without bombastics. There’s no need for painstaking quadruple readings (though any reader would enjoy re-reading) – these are immediate poems at an even pace. They glide with all the grace of the title bird, a river of words steadily, surely flowing in a wide, long rutted guttural bed. “Guttural” because these are poems of the body, of its hungers and gratifications, residual as muscle memory, as natural as flesh knowledge. And then, surprise – “Interlude: “Hey Skinny, the Circus is in Town!”” “Interlude” being a perfect word for the third section which departs from the personal-made-public prior themes for a stint under the big top. The entire section enjoys a circus-inspired color graphic header and trades Christmas ornaments, weeding, and old dogs for transient lion tamers, roustabouts, and trapeze artists. The book then winds down with a final section (“The Hidden Permutations of Sorrow”) that returns to themes from the first two sections. Despite the section title’s connotations, these are not overwrought downer poems. Ridl fluidly blends love and clarity, rendering poems that transcend distance between poet and reader.

This review originally appeared in our July 2013 newsletter.

Review: Candidates for Sainthood and Other Sinners

Poems by Don Cellini

Mayapple Press

As the title suggests, this is not your typical foray into the realm of church and saints. It opens with a prose poem introducing an unlikely preacher, then jaunts out on a far reaching tour, finding in each place a moment or two so striking, a few well chosen words fill the page. Don’s vivid account of Haitian mothers’ preparation of sun baked dirt cookies, the only thing they have to feed their children is heart wrenching. “Where are the / guardian angels / to prevent this?” he asks, not as an accusation but as a plea. So it seems fitting this book came out in 2013, the same year the papacy changed. This new Pope, Francis, might well admire the work this book wrestles with. The community of it. How it offers finely crafted moments to both English and Spanish speakers, how it champions the poor, the weary, downtrodden, how it offers a few glimmers of love in a largely dark, moonless sky. The book revisits the unlikely preacher in the final poem, explaining how the list of
his good deeds grew long, and then, after his passing, “they began to forget. And finally the did.” While good deeds may be forgotten, the voice here will stay with you like a good friend.