The Human Line, Ellen Bass (poetry)

A flyer announcing the 28th annual reading In Celebration of the Muse in Santa Cruz, CA, prompted me to read Ellen Bass' latest poetry collection. One of 20 women writers featured at the Muse reading this year, Bass will be joined by some of Santa Cruz’ finest, including Angie Boissevain, Joan Zimmerman, Lisa Allen Ortiz, and Julia Alter-Canvin, among others. It promises to be a great evening celebrating great writing.

As Bass’ title suggests, the poems in this collection revolve around human concerns: the birth of a child, the death of a parent, relief over the homecoming of a lost dog, compassion for a woman who has run over the poet's cat, dancing with her love to Louis Jordan. Running through these poems is a deep awareness — and celebration — of the ordinary joys and suffering that make life so extraordinary.

A personal favorite is "Asking Directions in Paris," which captures perfectly the experience of trying — and mostly failing — to communicate in another's language.

Ou est le boulevard Saint Michel?
You pronounce the question carefully...
you feel a flicker of accomplishment.

But the triumph is short-lived when the helpful native speaker does not provide a textbook answer, instead replying with:

...something wholly unintelligible,
some version of: On the corner,
he is a shop of jewels in a fountain
when the hotel arrives on short feet.

I laughed out loud at this. Bass nailed the way language is acquired (or not) in a jumble of words heard and misheard. And then she turned it, from being a simple observation of personal failing, to something far bigger:

you think this must be how it is
with destiny: God explaining
and explaining what you must do,
and all you can make out is a few
unconnected phrases, a word or two, a wave
in what you pray is the right direction.

This is Bass' gift: at their best, her poems invite us in through the door of specific experience, and then show us how — as she writes in the title poem — we are all lashed to the human line.

Voices, Lucille Clifton (poetry)

I first discovered Clifton’s poetry more than 20 years ago and treasured her work, reading every collection. But I had overlooked her two most recent books. After her death earlier this month, I decided to correct that.

Voices is Clifton’s final book. Throughout her life, she often gave voice to those who could not speak. Here, she continues to do so, albeit offering up some surprising choices. I don't recall her writing animal monologues before this. I was intrigued to read the prayers of dog, horse and raccoon, and I thought she captured perfectly the simmering anger voiced by Cream of Wheat of food product fame. Other voices include those of family and friends no longer living.

It is a gift, to throw their voices to us. The one that soared above the others and touched me most deeply, however, was Clifton’s own in the poem, "sorrows." In lines that recalled "the message from The Ones" in Mercy, she begins by comparing sorrows to angels:

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful . . .

Then she evokes an amazing image of them clicking/their bony fingers, before ending on a whisper:

. . . enough . . . not me again

but who can distinguish
one human voice

amid such choruses
of desire

It is an extraordinary poem that can be read in its entirety on the Poetry Foundation website.

Since Lucille Clifton’s death, much has been written about her. Elizabeth Alexander has a particularly touching tribute in the New Yorker.

If you have not read her work — or have not read it in awhile — I encourage you to do so. She will be missed, but her resilient and enduring voice can still be heard through her books, most of which are available through BOA Editors Ltd, her long-time publisher.

Mercy, Lucille Clifton (poetry)

In the poem, "here rests," after returning to care for their dying father, Clifton's sister Josephine turns to her:

when you poem this
and you will...
remember the Book of Job.

And though there was a suggestion of humor in that sisterly aside, there is a Job-like quality, an anguish, throughout Mercy, Clifton's 12th collection of poetry.

Lucille Clifton died on Feb. 13, after many health challenges. Published half a dozen years ago, Mercy reflects some of her struggles and works to transcend them.

Early in the collection, a poem begins:

surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red

Then, of course, there is that inevitable "but." Anyone who has read Clifton's work knows that despite their accessibility and seeming simplicity of language, her poems are never that easy, as she acknowledges in this searing query at the end:

. . . why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?

In workshops, emerging poets are often warned against the use of certain words — words such as "soul" and "angel." Few poets have the voice, the moral authority, to pull them off. But Clifton did.

In the last long sequence titled "the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s)" she speaks of angels as a matter of fact, then provides this warning: They come disguised in the daily, and they:

will keep coming

unless you insist on wings

Clifton was an insightful and incisive poet, with many awards and honors to her credit. But I will most remember her for her generous spirit. I had the good fortune of spending time with her in the mid-90s when she did a number of readings in rural Minnesota, as part of a poetry residency. It was a bitterly cold winter, but everywhere she drew crowds — students, young families with small children, and writers of every stripe from the well-established to just-emerging. And she warmed us all with her poems and her presence.

Piece Work, Barbara Presnell (poetry)

Early in Piece Work, "Charlie, First Shift Foreman" explains how he is following his father's lead — a farmer who always had "good hands" with his cows:

I do my daddy's work here in the plant,
for it's me makes sure this cloth
has a good hand...
Put that on your skin
every morning in a t-shirt and you'll know
why what I do means something in this world...

And in "Tanisha Talks About Knitting," she knows the risks of the deafening machines, but she is good at her job and proud:

I can't hardly leave this spot to pee —
thread or something might pop loose...

...Twelve machines is all anybody gets
no matter how good they is. I'm on ten.
...you got to get better and faster to earn
your machines...

And so Tanisha coaches Manuel, the immigrant worker with the baby daughter who has a hole in her heart. Then before anyone can believe it, the factory is closed, the work outsourced to Port Au Prince.

Reading these poems is like listening to my aunt or my grandmother tell me the way it was, giving me snippets of history. The 2007 winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize celebrates work from an insider’s view through the voices of the cutters, spinners, bar tackers, quality control and supers in a textile mill in the Carolinas.

I care what happens to Charlie and Tanisha and Manuel, to Velma in packaging and Charlene in quality control, to Carl the HR guy and Mr. S.B., the owner who knew all their names and their children's names. It's rare to read a book of poetry about work, but these are hard-earned experiences, and through Barbara Presnell, each voice rings clear and true.

Lip Prints, Alexis Rotella (poetry/tanka)

In the shortest
and longest
month of the year,
the chocolate I crave
is the dark bitter kind.

There are few better ways to mark Valentine's Day than with bittersweet tanka such as this and others found in Lip Prints, which contains almost three decades of Alexis Rotella's five-line poems.

Rotella is a master of the short form, whether it is haiku, senryu, or tanka, and I have admired her writing since I first discovered it in The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor Van Den Heuvel.

When reading a collection that represents a body of work, I like to put together the poet's lexicon, words that recur in various forms and that seem to carry a special charge for that writer.

Rotella's tanka are replete with stars — galaxies of stars, dandelion stars, frost stars; light — whether it is starlight, moonlight, or the light of fireflies; lace — lace curtains, Queen Anne's lace, ice blossoms and lace crystals; and the color white — white cat, chrysanthemums, gauze dress and Milky Way as well as the aforementioned dandelions, lace, frost and stars. It is a resonant lexicon, reflecting a broad imaginative and emotional range.

For example, this tanka moved me deeply:

Our white cat
gone seven years
and still
her light
in every room.

Just as Rotella describes a lover leaving a "trail of quick kisses," these tanka capture moments of experience and offer them as little gifts to the reader.

This is a collection I will return to and re-read. Unfortunately, tanka can be difficult to find in bookstores or online distributors. But the MET Press, the Modern English Tanka Press, is a great resource, offering Lip Prints as well as Rotella's surprising Elvis in Black Leather (gotta love those titles!) along with collections of many other tanka poets.

Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa, Karin Muller (nonfiction)

Focus. Harmony. Wa. I wasn't even sure exactly what wa was, but I wanted some.

A decade of Judo practice, service in the Peace Corps, an engagement followed by disengagement, and a dream job as a filmmaker with National Geographic — none of this gave Karin Muller a ready answer to a birthday taunt from her brother: Still looking for the meaning of life?

Anyone who has fallen in love with the Japan of perfectly raked rock gardens and Zen-like equanimity will understand Muller's quest. But since almost everyone has written about it, I resisted reading yet another memoir. Until my Japanese tutor's husband, a man who has experienced his own share of 'lost in translation' moments, assured me it was worth it.

Japanland — despite its often hilarious moments — proved to be a painful read. Dissonant, focused on the wrong things, Muller’s search for harmony often revealed a shocking lack of awareness and consideration of others that was all too reflective of my own clumsy efforts over the years. But Muller gained entree into corners of contemporary and ancient Japan rarely experienced by non-Japanese (or for that matter, by many Japanese).

Over the course of a year, she learned firsthand about sword-making and sumo, the life of a 60-year-old geisha and Kobo Daishi's pilgrimage to 88 temples in search of enlightenment, just to name a few examples.

At the end of her journey she finds herself at a local Judo club with a handful of students half her age and a sensei many years her senior. There she is thrown. And thrown. And thrown again.

Japanland is about being thrown and getting up: a funny, painful, honest foray into what it is like to lose — and find — yourself in another culture.

Sleeping with Houdini, Nin Andrews (poetry)

Who could resist a book titled, Sleeping with Houdini? Or an opening poem that introduces us to a girl who concludes: It is only by lying that she can stay alive. Or "Dear Confessional Poet," with its proclamation: I hate what you do. You and your entire school.

As might be expected, the magical Houdini appears and disappears throughout the collection, along with others whose escapes Andrews documents with a quirky mix of irreverence and longing. Many of the poems are magical in the way Grimm's fairy tales are – dark and provocative. But they can also be smartly funny. "Male Logic" – with its self-help tape, Reason Your Way to Bliss – is a laugh-out-loud riff on the failure to communicate.

Throughout, Nin Andrews shows herself to be a Houdini of the prose poem: masterful, confident, always pushing the limits of what this reader will entertain.

"Sleeping for Kafka" exemplifies this. After positing the idea that prayers can heal, it takes us on a magic carpet ride during which prayers can be purchased by calling an 800 number, Kafka's insomnia is slaked by his lover's sleep, angels traverse a ladder of Jacob's thoughts, and Nietzsche speculates on whether people really think. And then it concludes with this amazing assertion:

...Many people are dreamt and prayed. They are like seashells inhabited by hermit crabs.

Most of us have no clue whose dreams we are.

Sometimes dark, always daring, Andrews' collection of prose poems with its sudden turns and swerves, swivels and leaps, never fails to engage. The Monserrat Review listed Sleeping with Houdini among its Best Books of Poetry in 2007, and I understand why. This is a poet worth seeking out.