Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

TRAVERSE, Kevin Craft. Lynx House Press, Spokane, WA, 2024, 130 pages, $25, lynxhousepress.com.

I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).

I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do. These lines, for instance, opening “A Few Pre-Existing Conditions”:

We drank too much.
Stayed up late watching late night turn to laughter
as the elephants disappeared.

Oh, yes. Or this:

Elevator Pitch

First the doors won’t close, then they won’t pry
open, between them the tall tale self-replacing.
We talk it through—a night train rattling high-rise windows—
beginning of the middle, middle of the end,
though sometimes whole chapters fall from the sky
like pieces of a space station. Once I wanted
to be an astronaut. The sky is a laboratory
into which we pour our excess lives.
Some appear in dreams like the family reunion,
the gull-circled landfill, that day I turned the blue car
into oncoming traffic. Our grandmothers went to town
in a horse-drawn buggy. A single cell becomes a city
is one way to muscle through this backstory
hanging over breakfast like a shroud.

—Kevin Craft

Kevin is the featured reader at Everett Poetry Night on Monday, October 7, 5-8 p.m. As I recall, the reading begins at 6:00, but you want to come early—to grab some dinner and find a seat, and to sign up for the open mike. I plan to attend. Go to https://duanekirbyjensen.wixsite.com/everett-poetry-night/features-poets-2024 to learn more

To learn more about Kevin, visit Lynx House Press, or this page: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kevin-craft. Or buy the book!

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), GOD IN HER RUFFLED DRESS

GOD IN HER RUFFLED DRESS, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein). What Books Press, 363 South Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga, CA 90290, 2023, 110 pages, $17.00, paper, https://www.whatbookspress.com.

Just a little shout-out this afternoon for singer / poet Lisa B, whose book, God in Her Ruffled Dress, I reviewed for Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature for Women. (You can find the review on-line, here.)

It’s a romp of a book, much worth reading and recommending. Lisa B, also a singer and songwriter, plays with sound, and weaves together color and image in ways that continually surprise and please me.

Here’s one poem wedding past with future, history with fantasy, Emily both at her writing desk, sewing together the fascicles of her poems, and working as a computer programmer. Surprise, surprise!

EMILY DICKINSON AT WORK

she pulls
the thread
through the linen
on the embroidery frame
and at her writing table
through the white packet
of paper poems
the next morning tapping
the keyboard
piecing together
the html
<br> <br/>
marking and closing
the breaks
a figure in a white dress
silent under
fluorescent lights
at her place at the long table
beside the other programmers
listening to the enclosing
emptiness a white
pillow invisibly
holding the lines of code
on her screen
where she glimpses
her own
reflected smile
“I can make the zigzag stitches
Straight—when I am strong—
Till then—dreaming I am sewing”
the shape of God walking
through it like bird’s feet
tracks in the snow
“I’ll begin to Sew
When the Birds begin to whistle—”
a song hummed
under her breath
a bare small wind
she painstakingly places
the letters and brackets
she for whom
“Success in Circuit lies”
here and now are not
where everything
that ticked has stopped
no part of her shaven
instead tick by tick
her mind the mind
forming the frame

—Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) 

You can find Lisa B at her website, www.lisabmusic.com.  She is working on a second audio version of the book, in “spoken word” format. Follow this link to find vendor links to both the paperback and the audiobooks:

image from https://www.pittstate.edu/news/2019/11/poet-carol-frost-to-read-at-pittsburg-state-university.html

HONEYCOMB, poems by Carol Frost

I have made it through the Sealey Challenge, through 32 total books and out the other side of August (34 if you count Ravenna Press’s Triple as 3 chapbooks). I posted a photograph on Instagram of each cover with the day’s number, with the exception of this book. (For day 13, I posted another cover a second time.)

Let us admit that I got a bit lost at times. What book did I read yesterday? What book am I reading today? But, as these things go, each day brought stand-out poems, and — by the end — certain books loomed. Not necessarily that they were better or worse than others, but their impact on me, at the particular time (and mood) I found myself in, created a greater impact.

A literature professor once said to me, and to her class of graduate students. “I know it’s a lot of reading, but when the wave recedes I hope you’ll be able to tell what flecks of foam have stuck to you and left the greatest impression.” That’s how it feels this morning.

So.

Carol Frost’s Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010) was one of those impactful books. The poems in this, her ninth collection, address her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a journey I’ve also undergone. It’s hard not to quote the description on the cover, because it’s true: she writes “with unflinching sincerity and courage.”

Her mother’s memory loss is only one theme. The other, woven throughout every poem, is the decline in the bee population. Flying insects of all kinds are growing endangered, and the loss of our native pollinators is a disaster that really can’t be countenanced or compensated.

As is the loss of one’s mother. The poems are a perfect marriage of spirit and humanity and nature.

In these 34 poems (33 in a row, and then an “afterword”), a mother drinks ‘from the poppy-cup / and drowses in her world of dream” (“(For the ones”). A daughter listens “from her shell of silence…” and the last notes are “a song or wound,” or both. In “(Tyrannus tyrannous)”:

bee after bee disappear[s]

into incandescence::

Only the metaphysic flower

feels the approach: and emptying.

(I’m sorry not to be better informed about what’s going on with the double-spaced lines, parentheses, and double colons — I seem to remember encountering double colons before, but I don’t want to research it just now. I will say that, whatever those marks mean, Frost gets away with them. I was willing to grant these poems every grace.)

Consider this short poem about halfway through the book:

To live without memory is to have each hour

as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window

to paint: amber-honey cold mornings:

humbled by evening: variation and variation

of ambiguous figments — ziggurat beehive

auroras — flicker and go out. All history

may as well be in these brushstrokes:

the hand has not rested nor the paint dried.

— Carol Frost

The book, in short, is itself incandescent, and it is one I will be reading again, and again.

To learn more about the poet, you might start here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-frost.

John Egbert, BEARINGS

BEARINGS, John Egbert. Bellingham, WA, 2024, 102 pages, $15.99, paper.

LANDMARKS, Robert Macfarlane. Penguin, UK, 2016, 448 pages, $18.00, paper, penguin.co.uk.

Landmarks is about language, specifically it is about language that describes land. “It is a field guide to literature I love,” Macfarlane writes, “and it is a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis of landscape that exists in the comprision of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as Britain and Ireland” (p. 1). I love this book, and, likewise, feel immensely lucky to have been gifted a copy of Bearings, poems by Bellingham writer, naturalist, world-traveler, and teacher John Egbert.

I am one of the people thanked in the acknowledgments in Bearings, and I know this book well. Even so, sitting down and reading it all at once, cover-to-cover, wholly engaged me. Egbert is someone who understands the importance of getting one’s bearings in unfamiliar territory, and he helps his readers get their bearings. The  poems are—mostly—set in Bellingham and the southwest United States, but he shares Macfarlane’s dizzy romance with exploration, and with precise words, populating his lines with yellow-breasted meadowlarks, river trout, plant names both Latin and common, a carillon of finches, the great horned owl. All the way through—even when the territory is wholly unfamiliar—the reader is in the hands of a sure-footed guide.

Consider this stanza from a poem set in South America, in Brazil, where I’ve never been:

A yellow-breasted flycatcher
sallies from the bridge,
snags a big black beetle.
Crook-necked egrets,
like white-tied Brazilian buskers,
cruise by on hyacinth islets
ripped loose from the Pantanal.

—from “Barge Fishing”

Reading these lines, I’m immersed in the scene. The words themselves (as Macfarlane insists) are poems.

The urgency of such naming—how it should and must matter more to all of us—is heightened in Macfarlane’s Landmarks. In chapter one, Macfarlane talks about a peat glossary (which he will later discuss at length), and contextualizes his discovery with this paragraph:

The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee…. (p. 3)

Egbert’s poems—which span from his childhood in the 1950s to now—encompass practically every one of these deleted words. The poems are nature poems, fishing poems, and sometimes nonsense poems meant to tickle a grandchild, but in every poem we encounter a poet in love with precise, specific language.

Arroyo Cairns

I walk this arroyo cut down
below stuccoed walls
baring roots of junipers and pines.
I love this slice of nature pie,
sluice of feldspar grays and pinks,
green epidote and white quartz,
a bull snake skin curling through
camel humps of sand,
a Scrub Jay begging me to disappear.

You, the artist arrive
like some ancient Native initiate,
some finger-painting kindergarten kid,
come to stack stones
as if to sanctify reparations for all of us
who have carved or cast this earth.

August’s flood sweeps away
rabbit pellets, pinon hulls,
a towhee’s white tail feather.
Footprints vanish.
Cairns survive.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2015

              —John Egbert

“’The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,’” Macfarlane reminds us, quoting from The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. In Bearings we are reminded that seeing what’s there is worth the effort. The poems were written over many years, but, as Egbert writes in his introduction, “Paying attention is its own trip,” and: “Reading my own work has helped deepen my past and, I hope, be open to more people and to nature’s surprising complexity” (p. vii).

Landmarks has been around for awhile; I found a copy at my local library, and ordered my own copy (to mark up) from Thriftbooks.com.

Bearings is brand new (and also features gorgeous drawings by Laurie Egbert); you can find a copy via Village Books, at this link: https://www.villagebooks.com/book/9798218412616.