Luther Allen

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THE VIEW FROM LUMMI ISLAND: A JOURNAL OF EXCURSION INTO PLACE, Luther Allen. Other Mind Press, Bellingham, WA, 2010, 163 pages, $15 paper,  https://othermindpress.wordpress.com/.

Bellingham is one of my favorite places in the world — filled with people like Luther Allen and J. I. Kleinberg who I consider to be members of my true tribe. It has been great fun getting to see this full-body immersion that Allen has accomplished here, in writing about a place — Lummi Island — day after day, his biologist’s / geographer’s eye converting everything into lyric detail.

In setting a goal to read this book in one day, I defied the author’s advice:

“My hope is that the reader will have the time and inclination to read this book over the span of an entire year. Many of the poems are seasonal. Pace is important.”

All I can do — heady with the rush of this experiment — is to now put this book beside my writing chair and promise to make my way through it again, as intended.

Images of islands and water and orcas and “bruised ragged light” abound here. I’ve gone against the grain (again) and chosen to share a poem that begins inside. (But do notice the “flocks” of squirming, flitting words.)

March 22

neat tiers of books
huge flocks of words
captured and corralled
in such a way
that you begin to think
nature
is understandable.

but step out the door.
words do not flit through the air
words do not squirt through the ground
things and non-things slither and pulse
neither directed nor truly described
by our most perfect sentences.
the best we can do: just touch, wonder

and keep writing

 

Francine E. Walls

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WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO FIND ME, Francine E. Walls. Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324, 2020, 35 pages, $14.99 paper, https://www.finishinglinepress.com/. 

I loved spending time amid these poems. It was a wild ride from northwest gardens and beaches, to southwest deserts, to Africa and Wales–full of heartache and hope and, as one poem concludes, “a quiet tinkering of fire.”

The Pleiades

Pearl, oyster, agate–desert hues–fade.
Camped in the creased arroyo,
I lie on the hood of the truck.
Stars emerge horizon to horizon,

the Pleiades a glow of light above Orion’s belt,
a meteor flashing out in death,
a satellite tumbling from its orbit, winking out a life.
When you can’t go on with someone, what then? 

He left his cooler, tent, butane stove in the camp,
left this place gouged out by floods
where cacti jump toward movement,
granite traps quartz crystals.

Only the crackle of the fire
until the shriek of a hunting hawk.

By the apricot moon,
tiny desert trumpets bloom
where saber-tooth tigers once pounced on prey,
moths flutter straight into the fire.

Kathleen Kirk

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ABCS OF WOMEN’S WORK, Kathleen Kirk. Red Bird Chapbooks, 1055 Agate St., Saint Paul, MN 55117, 2015, 52 pages, $12 paper, www.redbirdchapbooks.com.

What a delight to spend my morning with this book. It’s an abecedarian of poems, and a work of art itself, hand-sewn, a print of a needlework alphabet sampler on the cover. Several of the poems are ekphrastics (poems about works of art), beginning with “Annunciation,”  after the Botticelli painting. The poems continue through the alphabet — “Before I Can See,” “Cold in the House,” and so forth.

I was mightily tempted to share Kirk’s poem for Q (“Quinsy,” a two-page riff on Q words: “Quirky and antique,” “the dear quotidian”). But I think the poem that really has me dazzled is the last one. In addition to working in band names (such as Feist and Morphine), this poem itself is an abecedarian.  Look for the letters A-M down the left margin, and N-Z, up the right. What a hoot!

(XYZ) ABCs of Woman’s Work

John Sloane, A Woman’s Work (1912)

A woman’s work is better done with a jazz
background, I learned late in life. Hanging laundry
can be a breeze with the right music, and sex
doesn’t drag with a lush instrumental. How
easy now to polish the lav,
Feist on the boombox, or U2.
“Genteel euphemisms” aside, it’s hot
here in the kitchen, cooking with gas.
I am a realist, not a Realist with a capital “R.”
John Sloan can’t paint me as his Susie Q–
Kathleen, Poet with Dust Mop, 
leaning over the fire escape railing to shake it to
Morphine, “Early to Bed,” earbuds in.

My morning’s response was to write an A poem…but I think an abecedarian (A Waitress’s Alphabet?) is definitely in the works.

Maurice Harmon

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LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Maurice Harmon. Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, 2010, 105 pages, €12.00, www.salmonpoetry.com.

I blogged about Maurice Harmon‘s Love Is Not Enough in April 2018 (click on the link to go to that longer post). His 90th birthday is coming up fast, and though I can’t be in Dublin for the party, I thought rereading his book and sharing another poem would lessen the distance.

As I’m working on a poem of my own about walking, I wrote this stanza into my journal this morning —

I could make magic too.
But this is real, the old road part of me,
an artery strafed by rain, the bay
from Skerries to Clogherhead a seething cauldron.
I cycled this road to Streamstown,
the ditches filled with Queen Anne’s Lace,
hawthorn’s communion cloth,
the chestnut’s candlelabra,
the rowan’s offerings
beech canopies,
grasslands kings desired,
woods ringing with song,
sturdy stands.
My holy road, my pilgrim path, my royal way.

from “The North Road”

Love Is Not Enough includes a range of Harmon’s work, and he never flinches from the controversial (see his long poems about the Catholic Church, Irish politics, and academe). Harmon is a scholar-poet, and other books include a translation, The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland (2009) and the anthology, Irish Poetry After Yeats (1978, 1998). His more formal poems (rolling rhythms, unexpected rhyme) are my favorites.  This poem, for instance, which first appeared in The Last Regatta (2000):

Slow Learner

We lived so far from town I did
not go to school for years,
truant of woods and shore.

I knew the ways of birds,
could track the rabbit and the fox,
guarded the hens against the hawk.

When goats were born I raised
them as my own, when pups were drowned
I mourned, but loved the one we saved.

I got no marks at school for flinging sticks,
could neither read nor write, so late
to class the Catechism was my ABC.

Christ sat upon the mat. Morality was strange:
commandments, mysteries, big sins, little sins.
I was a rabbit trapped within the furze.

I reared away from priestly bit and ban.
I shied from sin. What I knew best
was climbing slowly through dreamy firs

until I hung above a swaying world,
could see the castle turning on its hill,
could feel the ocean roll toward Rockabill.