Carmen Germain

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THE OLD REFUSALS, Carmen Germain, Moon Path Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 97141, 2019, 64 pages, $16 paper, http://MoonPathPress.com

In November, 2019, it was my privilege to read on the Foothills Writers Series in Port Angeles with poets Karen Whalley and Carmen Germain. Although I had crossed paths with Germain once or twice, this was my first real introduction to her work, and it has been my pleasure to get to know her better through her poems. Rereading The Old Refusals this morning I had a sense of a long conversation about books she is reading, places she’s traveled to, paintings she’s studied. Also a visual artist, Germain brings a painter’s love of color and line to every poem. (Her sonnet, “A Coupling” — a sample image: “your hand a bloated pomegranate” — made me want to get out my journal and see if I couldn’t condense my week in a Paris apartment into something that adept.)

According to the notes, this poem uses “techniques of collage and cut-ups from random sources” (61). It made me think of a surrealist painting. It blows my mind.

The doomed queen is outwardly stately

clustering her subjects by the shipwreck–
the off-duty singer, the glassblower,
the waiter who comes to clear the plates.

Full of elegant repetitions,
she has the grin of an adman,
but no one believes the crisis is over.

Even experts lack expertise
and anyone listening in the hold
knows the flash drive’s concealed in the cake.

How at the click of a button,
can opener, batteries, and flashlight appear.
Tins of soup and bottled water,

tranquil trickling sounds,
mechanics emerging from the pirate ship
like coins spilling from a purse.

Underneath the sea bed, buildings and rusty spoons.
Evidence of so many busy street corners
so many meals on the fly.

-Carmen Germain

Carey Taylor

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THE LURE OF IMPERMANENCE, Carey Taylor, Cirque Press, 3978 Defiance Street, Anchorage, AK 99504, 2018, 73 pages, $15 paper, https://cirquejournal.com/

This morning I reread Carey Taylor’s debut collection, The Lure of Impermanence. Taylor covers a whole lifetime in this book, winding through childhood and adolescence, then marriage and children (with all those attendant fears), then the task of re-inventing a marriage after the children have grown up and left home.

I heard Taylor read this poem, “Post-Election,” at a Cirque celebration at Tsuga Art Gallery in Bothell in 2018. I love how it takes a political topic, marking it with the title, but then embodies a woman’s anguish in a very different image, something I’ll try my hand at later today.

Post-Election

At first they fed in multitudes, from
the high energy suet cube, hung
in the contorted filbert.

Then came week
upon week
of 20-degree weather.

At the icy shoulder of road,
a chickadee in daytime
torpor.

By the third week,
five feathered corpses
on frosted asphalt.

Who knew so many would not survive
that winter, next to the bay with its
foraging wetlands

or now, how much we need them,
to rise like Lazarus and sing
their sapphire songs.

Carol Levin

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AN UNDERCURRENT OF JITTERS, Carol Levin. Moon Path Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 97141, 2018, 96 pages, $15 paper, http://moonpathpress.com/.

I’ve crossed paths with Carol Levin many times over the years, often at It’s About Time, a reading series that meets on the second Thursday of each month in Ballard, Washington. Levin is also an editor with Crab Creek Review, so I’ve encountered her at Seattle Arts & Lectures, as well. But her accomplishments throughout the Northwest arts scene goes on and on, and we have mutual friends. I thought I knew her rather well. Then she invited me to visit her and her husband, Geo, at home, and it was as if I’d dropped through a trap door into another level of an amazing and rich life.

That’s exactly the experience one has reading Levin’s fifth book of poems, An Undercurrent of Jitters. In her brief introduction she explains how she was “catapulted” by writing one poem — about not knowing “what my mother wore at her wedding…” — into writing a book of poems all about weddings and marriage.

With so many weddings postponed amid the Corona Virus ban on gatherings, these poems seem especially poignant. They also remind me of something I was told, before the onset of my own 35-year marriage:

“The wedding is just a big party–the marriage should be the real celebration.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO SAVE WHEN THE HOUSE IS BURNING DOWN

Save George. Save the way he says bow wow
as he greets his crush of dogs.
Save how he rolls on the floor, three dogs
clambering over him licking his beard.
How he laughs and how all four of them
make those snuggling noises.
Save George when he is excited
and lifts his heels bobbing
off the floor, sometimes
drops of spittle sparkle in the corner
of his lips while he tells stories
and can’t talk fast enough.
His cut hands calloused,
raw from working wood.
Save the way he looks at them and shrugs.
Save George who never looks at dirt,
the worst person to clean house.
You can save him regardless–
as you follow him around to find
what messes he misses–
but watch, he can’t pass
the coffee table without setting
each item in the spot
he insists it must be. Methodically
he moves the Deco birchwood box
an eighth of an inch, straightens
the album, exacting edge to edge.
Don’t forget
to save the way he walks room
to room brushing his teeth.
Even if you find the toothbrush
abandoned on the kitchen counter or top
of the dresser, save it.
He is a hugger.
That is the most important thing to save
when the house is burning down.
Save his hugs and how, when he hugs,
he says–that’s nice
I needed that.

 

 

Sue Sutherland-Hanson

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Because it is National Poetry Month and I have a goal of writing a poem a day, I’m also reading a lot of poetry.

This morning I read Stars and Strangers, poems by Sue Sutherland-Hanson. (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2016, 27 pages, $14.99 paper, www.finishinglinepress.com).

Sutherland-Hanson was a northwest native and taught at Edmonds Community College. Her poems play familiar chords: Pentecostal churches and clamming shovels, Napa Auto Parts and camping fires. But they range into a global territory, too, encompassing struggles that might be drawn from the headlines, or from the stories of her international students.

If you took seriously my prompt yesterday to write a bird poem, Sutherland-Hanson could inspire you with “Of a Feather,” where each stanza describes a different bird, and each reminds us that humans are not our only kin on this planet:

A great blue heron tilts his head,
slow-motion fishes my pond.
I have never done anything
with that much
patience.

Sue Sutherland-Hanson was my age, and she died, too young, in 2018, the same year I lost my mother. Little wonder that this sonnet especially resonates with me:

Keeping Vigil

She sits silent, back bent against her season of dying,
unrelenting, leans against her hardest winter yet,
weakens in the wear of each day, shuffles expectant
’round time’s bend, surprised not to find death yet.

It’s hard to see her wait — hard this letting go, more
letting go. But, were she stronger and we found her
gone, wouldn’t we wail, it’s too soon for dying; she was
so alive? This way we pace life’s fence-line with her,

wonder about our own deaths. Will we weaken
while loved ones worry, perish in smashing cars
or gulp freezing seas replacing air? Will we drop
mid-sentence or crawl wheezing into the beyond?

Even though we watch her stare into the clear expanse,
we’ll gasp, shocked she found the opening and left.