Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

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WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED? POEMS OF NATURE, LOVE, AND AGING, Victoria Doerper. Penchant Press International, Bellingham, WA, 2019, 94 pages, paper, $15.95.

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Hedgerows

I’m convinced that heaven
Lurks in old hedgerows,
Not like a predator, but
More like a mystery
Laced through thickets
Tangled with song.
In those byzantine temples
Of leafy, shaggy, profligate
Bud, flower, and berried
Commonplace delight,
Visited by visions of roses
Wafting the incense of attar
Into the sacred air,
Where angels shelter
The hungry, the trod-upon,
The sky-travelers seeking rest,
No questions asked,
No proof of worthiness,
No papers required
For an offer of ground
In an unsullied place
Filled with the potent
Possibility of grace.

—Victoria Doerper

That “possibility of grace” is, I think, what Chodron is talking about, too.

What If We All Bloomed? is dedicated to John Doerper, the poet’s husband, who also did the lovely drawings illustrating the cover and throughout the book.

The website for Penchant International didn’t work, but I found Doerper’s book for sale at Sidekick Press, and it is also available at Village Books ($1 shipping). Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times is widely available.

Jed Myers, LEARNING TO HOLD

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LEARNING TO HOLD, Jed Myers. Wandering Aengus Press, Eastsound, WA, 100 pages, paper, $18.60, https://wanderingaenguspress.com.

I have a soft spot for any book published by Wandering Aengus Press—their publications include the anthology, For Love of Orcas, a gorgeous tribute book published in 2019. Jed Myers’s Learning to Hold won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award, and is another beautifully written, and beautifully wrought book.

This was one of my August Sealey-Challenge books. I read it on Amtrak, Portland to Seattle, on August 26. (I know because I used a print-out of my ticket as a bookmark). So, I read it on a journey, and the book is a journey, placing a personal and familial history of war and trauma and healing into a larger context. Yes, the world is a bloody mess, but this book tells us, with the tenderness of a father reassuring a child: “Don’t let go now.”

When I opened Learning to Hold this morning, this poem leapt out at me. It’s a wonderful antidote for election anxiety.

A Prayer

A cormorant crosses a harbor low,
wings’ pulse keeping an air pillow
on the bird’s shadow, that black
belly a steady few inches aloft.

I know a soft blaze glows
in that dark fuselage. Fine fire courses
a delicate wire web to maintain
the arcane mechanics of constant

lift. A nameless attunement
in that sleek breast resets the ratio
heartbeat to wingbeat, pump’s clap
matching the instant’s requirement.

The fire’s quiet, discrete. We spread
our flame out in whatever gods’ name.
Our heat breaches containment.
We spark the wind with bright sticks.

I watch from an edge of the land
we’ve lit. I see the cormorant
reach a buoy and stand, wings held
wide to the air, a trusting, a prayer.

—Jed Myers

Jed Myers is the editor of Bracken, and a major player in the (marvelous) Seattle music and poetry open-mic, Easy Speak. Learning to Hold is his third full-length book of poems. You can learn more about Myers at his book page at Wandering Aengus  or at his personal website. You can find my blog review of his first book, Watching the Perseids, here.

 

Paulann Petersen’s MY KINDRED

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MY KINDRED, Paulann Petersen. Salmon Poetry Press, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, 2023, 108 pages, paper, $14.95, salmonpoetry.com.

I read My Kindred in August. I was sprawled on the guest bed in my friend’s daughter’s house in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Everyone else was napping (baby, grandma, mama). I was basking in the light of Paulann Petersen’s poems claiming kinship with bees, plums, big-leaf maples, totems. Oh, and family.

I’m indebted to Petersen for such epigraphs as these:

—Surely our parents give birth to us twice, the second time when they die. —Anaïs Nin

and this:

—One pound of honey contains the essence of two million flowers. 

The poems, too, are packed with honey, and surprise. A sister, “so full of yourself / when you’re rain” (“Her Sister Tells Water What’s What”). A poem titled, “Had the Matriarch Been Born a Bat.” A poem titled, “Where Is the Saint If Not in the Slightest of Things.” Everything is related: a poem titled, “Whitman, Me, Hermes.” Petersen (like the bat with its umbrella-spine fingers) encompasses worlds. “Mythic, voluptuous” worlds, in the words of Kathleen Flenniken.

Here’s one poem to give you a sample:

Kinship

A few of our world’s people still speak
a tongue so old its closest analog
is birdsong. And a bird carved
some thirty thousand years ago
may well be our first work of art.

Why mimic the palaver of a thrush?
From wood or stone, why shape
a tern’s body, its wings pressed
tight against its sides? Or remember
the dream-moments our beating arms
took hold in air, lifting us away
from earth trod smooth by our feet?

We each possess a bird-soul.
On the highest branch of every family tree,
a winged spirit preens in the sun,
gleaming with iridescence—
that sheen of our common blood.

—Paulann Petersen

Petersen has an impressive biography, including being the Oregon poet laureate. I am indebted to Olympia Poetry Network’s Last Tuesday’s with Sandy for introducing me to her work. (And you, too, can check out OPN.)

To read more about Paulann Petersen, visit her website, or Poetry Foundation.

 

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), GOD IN HER RUFFLED DRESS

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GOD IN HER RUFFLED DRESS, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein). What Books Press, 363 South Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga, CA 90290, 2023, 110 pages, $17.00, paper, https://www.whatbookspress.com.

Just a little shout-out this afternoon for singer / poet Lisa B, whose book, God in Her Ruffled Dress, I reviewed for Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature for Women. (You can find the review on-line, here.)

It’s a romp of a book, much worth reading and recommending. Lisa B, also a singer and songwriter, plays with sound, and weaves together color and image in ways that continually surprise and please me.

Here’s one poem wedding past with future, history with fantasy, Emily both at her writing desk, sewing together the fascicles of her poems, and working as a computer programmer. Surprise, surprise!

EMILY DICKINSON AT WORK

she pulls
the thread
through the linen
on the embroidery frame
and at her writing table
through the white packet
of paper poems
the next morning tapping
the keyboard
piecing together
the html
<br> <br/>
marking and closing
the breaks
a figure in a white dress
silent under
fluorescent lights
at her place at the long table
beside the other programmers
listening to the enclosing
emptiness a white
pillow invisibly
holding the lines of code
on her screen
where she glimpses
her own
reflected smile
“I can make the zigzag stitches
Straight—when I am strong—
Till then—dreaming I am sewing”
the shape of God walking
through it like bird’s feet
tracks in the snow
“I’ll begin to Sew
When the Birds begin to whistle—”
a song hummed
under her breath
a bare small wind
she painstakingly places
the letters and brackets
she for whom
“Success in Circuit lies”
here and now are not
where everything
that ticked has stopped
no part of her shaven
instead tick by tick
her mind the mind
forming the frame

—Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) 

You can find Lisa B at her website, www.lisabmusic.com.  She is working on a second audio version of the book, in “spoken word” format. Follow this link to find vendor links to both the paperback and the audiobooks:

https://lisabmusic.com/#god-in-her-ruffled-dress-new-poetry-book-audiobook