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.

 

Sheila Sondik’s LIGHTING UP THE DUFF

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LIGHTING UP THE DUFF, Sheila Sondik. The Poetry Box, Portland, OR, 2024, 48 pages, paper, $14.00, https://thepoetrybox.com.

I love this chapbook by Bellingham poet and printmaker Sheila Sondik. I read it before publication and wrote one of the cover blurbs. I read it again during the Sealey Challenge in August. And again, today. New delights and discoveries each time.

“Duff” is the fungi and decomposing leaves and other detritus that sifts to the forest floor, that stuff you scuff through when you walk on wooded trails. The other term you need to understand in order to make your way through these poems is “Golden Shovel,” a poetic form invented by Terrence Hayes in which the last word of each line is taken from a single line of poetry by another poet. Lighting Up the Duff perfectly and playfully marries these two ideas, while paying tribute to Sondik’s influences: Linda Pastan, Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy.

Well, playfully, but there are more serious threads running through here as well: Covid, aging, and Sondik’s care for the natural world and its endangered beauty. Using a line borrowed from Bob Kaufman’s “Response,” she creates this poem:

Blow, Wind, Blow!
            —after Bob Kaufman

Firs and red cedars are dancing
in the fierce November winds.
Under the comforter, will
we find the courage to sing
bold anthems of praise for
the buffeting? I embrace you.
We two become one ancient
breathing trunk. Call on the gods
to share our awe. Requests will
receive no response. Don’t pray
to idle distraction. Advocate for
the beast the howling wakes in you.

Sheila Sondik

—Sheila Sondik

I was especially fond of the Pastan and Kumin influenced poems. And who can’t help but be delighted by a poem beginning “I will write my biography in recipes”? (“The Joy of Cooking”). A line from Pastan, “Electrons move around their nucleus like moths circling a light or earth the sun,” inspires Sondik’s “Mutual Attractions,” which includes this passage: “We hip-hop like / dolls … or like moths / flittering frantically bumping into screens…”

I encourage you to take a look at Sondik’s book at The Poetry Box (it’s a beautifully made book, with cover art by Sondik), or get your own copy and see how gorgeous it is for yourself. You can find more images at her website, https://sheilasondik.com/.

Plus, if you’re looking for a poetry prompt, the Golden Shovel is a great one.

Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

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TRAVERSE, Kevin Craft. Lynx House Press, Spokane, WA, 2024, 130 pages, $25, lynxhousepress.com.

I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).

I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do. These lines, for instance, opening “A Few Pre-Existing Conditions”:

We drank too much.
Stayed up late watching late night turn to laughter
as the elephants disappeared.

Oh, yes. Or this:

Elevator Pitch

First the doors won’t close, then they won’t pry
open, between them the tall tale self-replacing.
We talk it through—a night train rattling high-rise windows—
beginning of the middle, middle of the end,
though sometimes whole chapters fall from the sky
like pieces of a space station. Once I wanted
to be an astronaut. The sky is a laboratory
into which we pour our excess lives.
Some appear in dreams like the family reunion,
the gull-circled landfill, that day I turned the blue car
into oncoming traffic. Our grandmothers went to town
in a horse-drawn buggy. A single cell becomes a city
is one way to muscle through this backstory
hanging over breakfast like a shroud.

—Kevin Craft

Kevin is the featured reader at Everett Poetry Night on Monday, October 7, 5-8 p.m. As I recall, the reading begins at 6:00, but you want to come early—to grab some dinner and find a seat, and to sign up for the open mike. I plan to attend. Go to https://duanekirbyjensen.wixsite.com/everett-poetry-night/features-poets-2024 to learn more

To learn more about Kevin, visit Lynx House Press, or this page: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kevin-craft. Or buy the book!