ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Book Reviews

April 2006  

Review of Catherine Kasper’s Field Stone (Winnow Press, $14) by Lea Graham

Review of Aaron Belz's Plausible Worlds (Observable Books) by Ray Bianchi

Review of Garin Cycholl's Nightbirds (Moria Books) by Ray Bianchi

Review of Catherine Kasper’s Field Stone (Winnow Press, $14)

By: Lea Graham

            In Catherine Kasper’s first book, Field Stone, the unknown, the unearthed, the disembodied, dissected, fragmented and refracted are brought to the surface.  Kasper queries the beginnings of “things”—artifacts and cities, to name a few, drawing on scientific language to specify and define without losing the elusive nature of what she seeks and explores.  Place, as a focus, has been taken back—as if stone by stone, to the elemental without any simplification or solidification of what is found or understood.  This is a book of poems that reveals a sensuality through the close study of both natural and man-made worlds, even exploring the interstices of these, as in the last lines of the last poem:  “when is indigo a stone / a stone a city?”

            The book’s opening poem, “Unearthing,” uses the museum experience as, itself, a kind of excavation.  What the speaker finds in her perusal of the artifacts is not only the “heavy/ snakes curving in eights” or the “Kohl sticks turn[ed] turquoise with age,” but also the museum as a kind of archaeological site—albeit, a sensual, ephemeral one— with traces of a “woman with musk perfume walk[ing] quickly through the gallery” or the “couple in a far corner whisper[ing].”  The weight of what we might hold in our hand or the name of an ancient, sacred world contrasts the quickening, what is passing in the speaker’s world—the scent of perfume, whispering.  Kasper treats both worlds with the same awe. What we initially think might be only a scholar’s poem—that which encourages us in the thinking of dates and materials and figures, moves into the realm of the quotidian: “something you meant once/ like migraine flashes.”  These moves are such that they surprise us into an understanding that seems peripheral, almost beside the point, and yet, important in what they unearth for us about ourselves, our lives as artifacts.  The last line, “I thought I had lost you” is as much a mystery as the golden fingerstalls that are “indented by the fingers of the hands that removed them.”  What we know about this speaker seems intimate, but what we know is as much through suggestion or fragment, just as the observed artifacts that are “severed,” “indented” and “crushed.”

            The poet, Michael Anania, once wrote, “what we are confused by/ is hardly less relevant/ than what we know.”  Indeed, the exploration in Field Stone never loses the dislocation of the unknown even as it is heavy with names that are known: “crystals of dehydrated Borax,” “genus Lestes,” “brick anchor,” and “merlon.” The language is that of the laboratory, the quarry, the architect, the artists’ studio, and the traveler’s journal, multiply dealing a base of knowledge, names, fragments and mysteries:  “Copernicus, Kepler, Herodotus / what keeps us revolving when we’re ready to jump off?”  The questions throughout the book surprise us in their attention to the earthly and cosmic, and in their intimacy.

The mid-section of the book, “Blueprints of the City” is dazzling in its brevity and suggestion.  The poems are themselves pieces, seeming fragments that are spread out as   if clues to place, speaker and society gathered in observation and tactile experience in a particular place.  The titles of the poems in this section are strange juxtapositions of city places and architectural components with what seems to be excerpts from a journal or “note to self.” 

joinery: never wear new shoes when traveling

smell of tar

its adhesive properties:

if your soles were covered with crushed linnet’s wings a scorpion’s tail anything

but fluorescent chewing gum

The “blueprint” or plan in this section—and in the book as a whole— provides us with the concrete, but like the chewing gum is not something easily manipulated, rather like a question we are deliciously in the middle of answering, an inversion we are thinking on:

disrepair is as much a human product as

a cathedral you cannot see

from the window

building is a product of demolition

to unhinge is also a way to open

the door

The achievement of Catherine Kasper’s Field Stone is that of poise and tension between what is known and unknown.  It attracts as an ellipsis and simultaneously, informs.  These poems strike us as a continuance of American poetry in the way that they pull all kinds of experience into them and question the mysteries that are both inside and outside ourselves:  “where do you expect to be taken-- /where do you want to go?”

Review of Aaron Belz's Plausible Worlds (Observable Books) By Ray Bianchi

" I love the Decentralized subway system.

It goes from California to Laos

In California, there are connected windows.

In Laos you lose those, but they do have apes."

Plausible Worlds by Aaron Belz is a short, fine paper book in which one gets the sense that you are at a wonderful third world market where the smells and fruit are just a little strange until you eat them.  This strangeness begins on the cover, it reminds me of a 1968 Sears catalog sketch, the kind that was selling style and was so tacky that it was ignored.  The poems within are short, bursts of poetic prose or prosaic poetry that give you a sense of something not quite right with the world.  Belz tries to draw us into his world and at times he is successful and at other times he falls short but on the whole this work is well crafted and moves easily from Pushkin to Meryl Streep without batting and eye.

There is a very interesting series of Restaurant Scenes that brings the book to a peak and the lets us down easily and openly. On the whole Belz has mastered what he is doing here. This small book is worth the sit down and its words resonate with depth and interest .

Review of Garin Cycholl's Nightbirds (Moria Books) By Ray Bianchi

Garin Cycholl, like Gilbert Sorrentino is comfortable in Prose, Poetry and Narrative and this is what makes Cycholl's work compelling for poets today.  Poetry in the USA has moved into a series of armed camps, magazines and websites with little dialogue or reflection. We get long stupid narrative poems or word salads and in the end we don't know what to think or to say.

Garin Cycholl's Nightbirds smashes these paradigms and forces those of us who are comfortable with simple categories to think anew.

We begin this work in ancient Greece with Achaean fight songs coupled with Charles Mingus. Just when you thought nothing new could be done with these things we get something new.  Prose poetry that verges on Essay and could be fiction and it is in the ambiguity that we are comfortable.

The most compelling part of this book is the series of poems American Necropolis.  In these prose pieces all the banalities of the world are

broken down, built up and broken down again.  We move into a world of cemeteries, Jefferson Davis, and the Hotel Lautremont and in the end we are forced to ask more of ourselves as readers.  The last poem in the book is a stylized Index, my favorites are

"Chicago, Getting the Fuck out of. 99 ff"

"Saigon, Getting the Fuck out of. 154-56"

Unlike Cycholl's longer works which require seating and listening to inner demons Nightbirds is a short taste of this master poet's art and it is a good introduction to a poet who sits, astriding our poetic landscape creating something new.