Luther Allen

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THE VIEW FROM LUMMI ISLAND: A JOURNAL OF EXCURSION INTO PLACE, Luther Allen. Other Mind Press, Bellingham, WA, 2010, 163 pages, $15 paper,  https://othermindpress.wordpress.com/.

Bellingham is one of my favorite places in the world — filled with people like Luther Allen and J. I. Kleinberg who I consider to be members of my true tribe. It has been great fun getting to see this full-body immersion that Allen has accomplished here, in writing about a place — Lummi Island — day after day, his biologist’s / geographer’s eye converting everything into lyric detail.

In setting a goal to read this book in one day, I defied the author’s advice:

“My hope is that the reader will have the time and inclination to read this book over the span of an entire year. Many of the poems are seasonal. Pace is important.”

All I can do — heady with the rush of this experiment — is to now put this book beside my writing chair and promise to make my way through it again, as intended.

Images of islands and water and orcas and “bruised ragged light” abound here. I’ve gone against the grain (again) and chosen to share a poem that begins inside. (But do notice the “flocks” of squirming, flitting words.)

March 22

neat tiers of books
huge flocks of words
captured and corralled
in such a way
that you begin to think
nature
is understandable.

but step out the door.
words do not flit through the air
words do not squirt through the ground
things and non-things slither and pulse
neither directed nor truly described
by our most perfect sentences.
the best we can do: just touch, wonder

and keep writing

 

Francine E. Walls

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WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO FIND ME, Francine E. Walls. Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324, 2020, 35 pages, $14.99 paper, https://www.finishinglinepress.com/. 

I loved spending time amid these poems. It was a wild ride from northwest gardens and beaches, to southwest deserts, to Africa and Wales–full of heartache and hope and, as one poem concludes, “a quiet tinkering of fire.”

The Pleiades

Pearl, oyster, agate–desert hues–fade.
Camped in the creased arroyo,
I lie on the hood of the truck.
Stars emerge horizon to horizon,

the Pleiades a glow of light above Orion’s belt,
a meteor flashing out in death,
a satellite tumbling from its orbit, winking out a life.
When you can’t go on with someone, what then? 

He left his cooler, tent, butane stove in the camp,
left this place gouged out by floods
where cacti jump toward movement,
granite traps quartz crystals.

Only the crackle of the fire
until the shriek of a hunting hawk.

By the apricot moon,
tiny desert trumpets bloom
where saber-tooth tigers once pounced on prey,
moths flutter straight into the fire.

Joanna Thomas

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RABBIT: AN ERASURE POEM, Joanna Thomas. Dogtown Press, Ellensburg, WA, 2018, 22 pages, $5, paper.

I met Joanna Thomas two years ago at Litfuse. She does this really arty, fun stuff with erasure poems and visuals and — because I generally don’t do those sorts of poem — I almost skipped her workshop.

I am SO GLAD I went. More than the keynotes or anyone else I encountered that year, Thomas’s work burned a hole through my imagination all the way down to my bootsoles. She is a wonder. If you can’t get your hands on any of her limited edition books (exquisite little gems you’ll want to keep and give to friends), then you should invite her to give a workshop for you. (Adults and our delights aside, I think these would inspire some pretty wicked home school lessons.) To read more, visit Thomas’s very visual blog:  https://www.joannathomas.xyz/.

Because the poems don’t run down the left hand margin, my blog space will just make a botch of it; hence, the photograph. In short, Thomas has erased  Webster’s Elementary Dictionary: A Dictionary for Boys & Girls (New York: American Book Company, 1941), and she shares the image from the dictionary, then duplicates the poem (and its peculiar layout) on the facing page.

 

John Haines

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AT THE END OF THIS SUMMER, POEMS 1948-1954, John Haines. Copper Canyon Press, PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368, 1997, 80 pages, $14 paper, https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/.

A friend gave me this book a number of years ago, and though I have occasionally read around in it, I had never read it straight through, as a book, until today.

I know John Haines better by his late poems, set in Alaska where he lived for many years. The poems in At the End of This Summer are from early in his career, what he describes in the preface as an “apprenticeship” (ix). In the preface, he also explains why he chose to share them here: “It would not be too much to say that at some point in that early period I had simply caught fire with the written word, a passion that held me in spite of every obstacle and momentary distraction.” A worthy goal for any beginning poet, to catch fire with the written word. 

Song

As if my love were like the bending year:
Bleak marvel I look upon with tenderness,
There is no outcast singing, she rides high
In a maze of cloudy passion, a tower of seeming,
Drunk with the snowless winds
That cry for that white veiling. Oh, more than present,
Long ago we felt the parched leaves fall —
Be gathered with them, you mindless snore of death.
Desire is mine; it is like that hopeful turning
When the earth sleeps beneath a blanket of sorry
Dead and does not move, appears unwatchful,
And yet, fair girl, she dreams.