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Michael Daley, GROUND WORK

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GROUND WORK: POEMS 2020-2025, Michael Daley, Ravenna Press 2025

It’s my pleasure today to share a poem from Michael Daley’s newest book, Ground Work. My full review appears in the current print edition of Rain Taxi, and you can learn more about Michael by visiting his page at Empty Bowl, or Poets & Writers.

I love this poem because I, of late, have been in danger of being buried in the bottom of box of tools. House projects began piling up in December—new gutters turned into a new roof, delayed and expanded by the discovery of rotted roof struts; new flooring because of the damaged carpets revealed a leak in the kitchen, a subfloor that had to be replaced, then the perhaps stupid choice to go for a whole new kitchen; and did I mention the doors, the windows?—suffice to say we are not yet at the end. (Though now when things come up I am learning to say, “That’s a 2027 problem.”)

Rereading Michael’s poems about work, and about failed work, gives me heart.

On the Gift of Yet Another Torn Cardboard Box of the Late Great Master Poet’s Letters

For Fred Manvellor

Maybe fifty years from now, some kid mechanic
desperate to locate a caulking gun or jigsaw blade
inside a greased box labeled “finest bourbons”—
under a cache of stripped screws, bent brads,
cigarette butts, garage soot, crumpled bloodied toilet tissue—
might uncover such a trove of my own unread sketches, unsent letters,
drafts of failed poems, and dreams—if I’m lucky.

—Michael Daley, Ground Work

In my on-line search for sites to share with you I found a bunch of Michael Daley interviews, poems, and recordings. Nina Burokas, in her Raven Chronicles review, calls the poems of Ground Work, “incantatory,” and adds a timely reminder (for me) that all work is prayer.

Michael Daley is truly a northwest treasure and I invite you to take a deeper look.

Susan Landgraf, Crossings

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TRIPLE NO. 17: “Crossings,” Susan Landgraf. Ravenna Press, 2022, pp. 49-82, $12.95, paper, www.ravennapress.com.

Ah, the Triples! This is an amazing series from our local Ravenna Press, and well worth your time. Triple No. 17 offers not only a chapbook by Susan Landgraf, but also Philip Quinn’s “Home Movies (from The Afterlife),” and Suzanne Bottelli’s “American Grubble.”

“Crossings” (with a subtitle: “Past to Present to Future and Between”) includes 22 poems, divided into 3 short sections. There are multiple threads, but a dominant one is wings. From the first poem, “Crowkeeper,” to the last, wings and winged creatures are both literal and symbolic. Birds cut the air with slick wings, painters molt like birds, a newborn gets his wings “stuck // like the moth / in a jar” (“Crossing Over”), an old woman’s head bobs like a pigeon’s, feathers poke out of pockets and men yearn to turn into birds: “he raised his arms again and again / and the sky turned a rainbow / of green, black-tipped, blue and white” (“Birdman”). Even Pegasus makes an appearance.

In “Fear of Birds,” which is ostensibly about carpentry, a bird’s mouth fits along the rafters, “joints flush, compounds smoothed / and feathered,” and in the closing lines the carpenter’s daughter becomes “the sound of birds /their cacophonous scattering.”

Besides wings, we get beetles and silvered fishes, footprints in concrete, sand-scrubbed sheets. Landgraf invites us to notice all of it, color, texture, sound.

But, about those wings. This poem, all one sexy sentence, evokes flight:

Midnight

Loving him was like dancing on a drum,
grapes ripe near to bursting, fields turned
burgundy, scarlet, golden loving him
like dancing on a drum, she said, his fingers
circling her skin, tracing her curves until
her heart was a bird flying out of her body
like dancing on a drum, she said, in a metal-
roofed room with a tuba and bass, Satchmo
on his sax and Vaughn in her summertime
and loving him was dancing out of their skins
and back, a week’s worth of Saturday nights
in a slow opening of loving him in a cave
of firecrackers, stars falling out of the sky,
a full moon, its white, white eye pressed
to the frosted window and loving him
was dancing on a drum, she said, so when
he left, she didn’t know how to walk.

—Susan Landgraf

Only one line, “her heart was a bird flying out of her body,” comes right out and shouts “flying,” but it seems (to me) a precis of the whole poem and the poem’s subject.

I attended Landgraf’s recent reading at Soul Food Café in Redmond, and was able to spend some time talking with her about her poems, and her 2019 writing exercise book, The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press). You can learn more about her at the Triples page (such a wonderful series) at http://ravennapress.com/books/series/triple-series/, and at The Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/susan-landgraf.

Joannie Stangeland

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THE SCENE YOU SEE, Joannie Stangeland. Ravenna Press, PO Box 1166, Edmonds, WA 98020, 2018, 60 pages, $14.95 paper, http://ravennapress.com/.

The Scene You See is Stangeland’s fourth poetry collection. It is luminous. Stangeland draws from the world of painting, capturing color and line (and texture and scent and…) and paying homage to numerous artists. (“Cast an eye for shadows” she writes in “Self-Portrait, if I Were Lebasque.”) But the poems here also pay homage to the gifts of marriage and shared meals and glasses of wine. It made me feel strangely grateful for the ordinary, for the chance to stay at home all afternoon and read. Which I seem to be doing a lot of. (Like you.)

Be sure to check our Stangeland’s blog and her Saturday poetry picks.

Our Bodies Given up for Light

An inch no longer measured by a thumb,
a foot for walking only–
old artifacts abandoned.

Particle and wave, what is the shape
of essential undulations
to which distance now is tethered, and time?

Its lambent body pummels me from the sun,
glistening minutes
shattered on the sand.

What is the shape of love?
Like a turtle pressing
slowly toward the lettuce,

a smooth river stone–or is it the river,
so often standing in for time
rushing over the rocks

like the horse galloping across a field–
or is it riding the horse, the wind in her mane,
in your hair, almost like flying?

Is love a peach, the fuzz a soft burr
in your hand? Or can you not hold love,
the fog that runs through your fingers?

 

Joannie Stangeland’s In Both Hands

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Should you wonder, I can’t italicize words in the post title, which is why the titles of books are not. Furthermore, Joannie Stangeland’s book has “both” italicized, so, In Both Hands.

And this is a book you’ll want to hold onto with both hands — it has flying horses, furious skies, lakes that rise into the air — all in all, a volatile place to lose yourself for an hour or two.

I chose this poem (below) for you to read out loud and savor, because of the final tercet. As the poem begins with “Words tonight fly out as black as crows,” I can guess that the home the poet refers to is language (perhaps more complex than that). But having spent an hour with my mother today, at her care home, attempting to have a conversation with this dearly beloved woman who can no longer carry the thread of a conversation, the poem rings true for me on an even deeper level.  Let me add to that comment, that many of the poems in this book are about mothers and daughters. I have read most of the poems before; and I suspect I will read them many times again. I hadn’t sat and read them all at once, and it was a lovely and resonant choice, particularly today.

Roost

Words tonight fly out as black as crows,
oily and stubborn, ruffled and sharp.
Feathers may litter the floor.

The air holds a fever, a taut pitch,
a howl we hitch to, each unsure
of our turf. Bristling, a hiss—

and it isn’t the kettle or the cat.
But we swallow the rest, stinging
until the barbs wing into the night.

We settle our worries like eggs.
Tomorrow, we draw the same breath
when we see the mountains rising

into morning, as white as clouds.
A crow’s nest is a sloppy mess,
a loose muddle of twigs in a tree.

Love is like that—on a hard day, held
with spit and bits of string—
on a good day, home.

—Joannie Stangeland