Ted Kooser, A Man with a Rake

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A MAN WITH A RAKE, Ted Kooser. Pulley Press (an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing), Seattle / Washington D. C., 2022, 32 pages, $14 paper, https://www.clydehillpublishing.com/pulleypress.

I admit I am phoning it in this morning, but who can resist a chapbook of poems by Ted Kooser? I saw this copy at Edmonds Bookshop, and, even though I already own most of his books, I grabbed it up.

Or, I thought I owned most of his books, until I reread his list of books this morning.

Anyway, I doubt any of my readers are new to Kooser. His Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets ought to already be in your home library. (Even if you’re not a poet.) He is a former United States Poet Laureate, won a Pulitzer Prize for Delights and Shadows, etc. Anytime I’m told, “if you lived back east, you’d be better connected,” I think of Kooser, living in the midwest, writing about farms and farmers and farmhouses, working as an insurance agent for much of his career (!), and still here, still writing.

I loved these lines—from Kooser himself—in his biography at Poetry Foundation:

“I write for other people with the hope that I can help them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short, I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention.”

This poem struck me as appropriate, maybe, for Easter Sunday:

A Fox

for Dan Gerber

I saw a red fox stepping in and out
of the shadows of tall granite stones
in a cemetery’s oldest section, fur
flaring as she entered each patch
of sun, though her feet and the tip
of her tail were too darkened by dew
to be set alight. She was quite small
but in her presence the stones forgot
their names. Above her the canopy
was respectfully opening oak by oak
to light her way, though she offered
no sign that she expected any less.
I couldn’t move for fear she’d stop
and fix me with those eyes that had
already stopped everything there,
the headstones, the plastic flowers,
I, too, now breathless as I watched
her pass along that long, long hall,
a flame reflected in its many doors.

—Ted Kooser

If you need to know more about Kooser, visit his page at Poetry Foundation or https://www.tedkooser.net.

Claudia Castro Luna, Cipota under the Moon

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CIPOTA UNDER THE MOON, Claudia Castro Luna. Tia Chucha Press, PO Box 328, San Fernando, CA 91341, 2022, 118 pages, $19.95 paper, www.tiachucha.org.

I blogged about Claudia Castro Luna’s This City, in 2020, while she was still Washington Poet Laureate. This year I meant to read and write a post about her book, Killing Marías: A Poem for Multiple Voices. Instead I came across her 2022 book, Cipota under the Moon, and I am so astonished by it I hardly know what to say. It is a heart-breaking, multi-lingual full-immersion experience in El Salvador—war, exile, and return. In “This Is Not a Poem,” Castro Luna begins, “Guerra doesn’t go away when the bullets stop, when the grenades go silent, when helicopters’ blades no longer kick up…,” and ends: “I highly don’t recommend it.”

I highly recommend this book.

In the early minutes of her Ted Talk, Castro Luna talks about her family’s journey, and the amazing human ability to heal from trauma.

At the Tia Chucha Press website, I found this description:

In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moonis a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

Here’s an example form the poems before immigration:

Garrison

Two girls slinked alongside barb-wired brick walls on their way to swimming lessons, doing their best to remain collected past the turrets stationed with armed soldiers. Ensconced in their look-outs, the troopers held their metralletas close to their bodies, as if they loved them, but not so much they would not use them ill. After our lesson, we headed home the same way we walked to the pool, guillotining chatter and laughter, scurrying along the garrison’s walls. Only the sound of our flip-flops striking our heels betrayed us. What if today’s soldiers were in a foul mood and pulled their triggers? What if they noticed our bulging bags, our weekly comings and goings, and tagged us as informants? What if, right leg, what if, left leg, we got through it that way—like prayers in a rosary—one bead, one foot in front of the other, one bead, one foot, one bead, one foot all the way home.

—Claudia Castro Luna

And here, a poem during and after:

Cloven Moon

The officer in charge of processing my family’s entrance to the U.S. stated that from that moment on my name was to be Claudia Castro. The passport says her name is Claudia Castro Luna, my mother objected. Here we use one last name, said the officer, and closed the matter with the gavel of his voice. Your moon got taken away from you, said my friend when I recounted the story. But when the officer eclipsed the Luna of my name the sensation was more like having a limb chopped off. For years I walked like that, cloven, until pen in hand, I began to weave into blank pages tamales de elote, scent of yerbabuena, spells of flor de muerto, the riot of a Tuesday market in Ahuachapán, the Nahuatl sageness of my abuela. I did not know then that weaving like this, warp of memory, weft of daring, had the power to sew back the name chopped off at an INS center on a January morning in 1981. All I know is that one day I walked into a Social Security office, took a number, and waited my turn to expand the canon of last names in this country. I pilgrimaged the department of motor vehicles, registrars’ offices, bank-teller windows, and once La Luna hung again in the firmament of my name, its light spilled beneath my skin and filtered back into the open mouths of a million pores.

—Claudia Castro Luna

Most of the poems are prose poem. A few are in El Salvadoran Spanish. Even the poems reaching back to the Eden of early childhood seem tainted, overshadowed by war. On every page, I was struck by the metaphors. “the sulphur reek of his step” (“Shade Grown”); “Violence spread like tincture inside a water glass” (“El Salvador 1980”); in a long poem, “Dios Madre,” these lines, “Cupped in his hands / his ten-year-old daughter / in her school uniform / passed from smiling / to hardened concrete.”

I hope you will further explore Castro Luna’s work on your own. Here is a review: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/reviews/157890/cipota-under-the-moon

And here, a link to a one-hour interview and reading from Cipota under the Moon:https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=5205831112787187.

Carmen Germain, Life Drawing

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LIFE DRAWING, Carmen Germain. MoonPath Press, PO Box 445, Tillamook, OR 97141, 2022, 76 pages, $16 paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

Such a pleasure to spend the morning rereading these poems!

On the back cover, Joseph Powell describes Life Drawing as “poetry that embraces the ordinary and sees art as a way to both praise, and make sense of the world.” “Making the ordinary extraordinary” is how I would put it. Familiar territory, at times: Scotch broom, pickup trucks, a father’s war stories, wasps, “horse on a rope in the fog.” But also Van Gogh, Dante, Gorky. This is quintessential Germain, twining her themes together, making a whole that is both fragmentary and lush.

I keep picking out lines: “Only the poets / twine music line by line, / breath of being alive” (from “The Evil Counsellors, The Despots,” dedicated to the Ukrainian people); “hermit despising false / gold, sound of money clinking hand to hand” (from “Choose Your Own”); “finicky clutch, shifting gears as though conducting a symphony” (from “After Your Heart Attack, I Return to This Poem”); “Cochineal crimson / in July, the indigo of August / bursting into sugar among bees” (from “Thorn on a Riff of Sweet”).

Germain is also a (brilliant) painter (as you can see in the images), and this epigraph opens the book:

“don’t be afraid, and don’t try to make it pretty” –Vincent van Gogh

Germain has swallowed this advice. Life Drawing looks at many subjects, but we also get a sense of her whole life, the range of places she has lived, her obsessions, her loves, sifted and drawn, offered to us.

So, one poem to maybe illustrate:

Butterbur (and Wild Pansy)

on a painting by Morris Graves

Pure luminosity, the butterbur, scarlet off-white frothing,
striking and spirited, each stamen’s pinpoint of light

in a skyrocket of smoke and noise, the way happiness
like a festival takes over, fireworks staving off darkness

in a barrage of pyrotechnics.

In a translucent bottle, purple-blue petals in five directions,
a wild pansy poses next to this ballistic. It’s said violets
grew wherever Orpheus put down his lyre

and I like to think because he honored music so much—

his beautiful song—the viola spread its leaves
to open more to listening.

Three red-orange rosehips

lean forward, alert to the darker tone of these petals,
how men prefer this shade while women, like Persephone,
are drawn to the lighter. Still the butterbur catches me first,

stolid in its bronze vessel. How it thrusts shoulders forward
like someone in charge about to shout orders.

But it’s the wild pansy where I keep returning, how it emerges
from milky glass not shrinking, how two leaves rise like hands

to praise such fragile peace.

—Carmen Germain

If you visit her page at Moon Path Press, you’ll find a brief biography, and a recording of the Covid-safe launch (32 minutes!) of Life Drawing. 

John Freeman’s Wind, Trees

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WIND, TREES, John Freeman. Copper Canyon Press, Post Office Box 271, Port Townsend, Washington 98368, 2022, 79 pages, $17 paper, www.coppercanyongpress.org.

I find I am rather late to the party, in terms of appreciating John Freeman. His bio notes include… well, so much (follow the links to see), and Dave Eggers called him, in a Los Angeles Times review, “one of the preeminent book people of our time.” Freeman’s previous books of poetry are Maps (2017) and The Park (2020). I found traces of him all over the web, and you’ll find a couple more links at the bottom of this post.

But my goal here is to write about Freeman’s exquisite third book of poems, Wind, Trees, and perhaps tempt you to take a look for yourself.

This short poem I include simply because it blew my mind (and I have a thing for pianos). It is in the wind section of the poems, by the way, and it beautifully chimes with the book’s epigraph from Jack Gilbert: “We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves / as it passes through. We are not the wood / any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage / between the two.” This one short poem shows how Freeman has married the book’s two themes together, subtly and not so subtly, everything interconnected:

Piano

Who thought to thread
wire through the belly
of a tree, dress its grin with
ivory? Recline it on
its side like a body. Toes to
touch, see. Brilliant blanc,
gold as honey, black as
night lake, it’s always wet.
We’re all water poured into
form. The mystery
of our making, made in every
thing we make, even
if we have to learn how to play.

—John Freeman

Freeman is stingy with punctuation (not in “Piano,” but elsewhere); despite the paucity of periods and commas, the poems have a clarity to them that sings. Even more so, the images in the poems carry us over any difficulty, as in this opening to “Perigee”: “On nights when the moon / is like a hand on my cheek…” Another strong thread here is the science, or what we might call climate science (which Freeman writes about in his prose books). In “Wind”: “Now we know wind is a gap / in atmospheric pressure / gases flowing from high to low / so leaves turn up their tips / umbrellas bend back and roofs / rip off maybe a small cross breeze / blows sweat off our burning bodies….” I highly recommend his poem “The Trees of City Hall” where science and history entwine.

Maybe I should elaborate about the prose books, which include Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality in America, and Tales of Two Planets, an anthology of new writing about inequality and the climate crisis globally. They tip us off to Freeman’s obsessions.

Here is one more poem, this one diving into etymology of the oud, which (I have now learned) is a lute-like instrument played primarily in Arab countries. Again, music. As he does in many of his poems, Freeman braids his Oud with other themes, and the poem emerges as a love poem.

Singing

In Arabic it means wood, and in its cousin
Syriac, burning wood. Cognate to od, as in
the old Hebrew, stick used to stir wood
in a fire. Some days it burns, on others
it simply is, and on occasion it stirs what’s
there. Today from the bedroom the oud’s sound
wakes me and the body inside my body turns over,
the one that remembers not being yours, merely
a visitor, I’d never heard Wadih el-Safi sing
his mawals, a longing unashamed. I’d find you
in the kitchen cooking your father’s food,
air smoky and fragrant, sharpened by
lament. I’d never imagine how cinder-lined
were your days, how little of what was
remained, I’d grown up in a country of
thin wood, pale sky, dateless palms, but you
welcomed me anyway, and as Wadih el-Safi
belted out his psalms, you did me
the kindness of promising me this wasn’t
practice for what time would bring.

—John Freeman

One delight is how he has worked in “palms” and “psalms” only a few lines apart from one another.

I found a poem at Lit Hub (one of my favorite literary sites): https://lithub.com/without-a-poem-by-john-freeman/, and here is John Freeman reading a poem “Among the Trees” at  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/26/among-the-trees.