Joannie Stangeland

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THE SCENE YOU SEE, Joannie Stangeland. Ravenna Press, PO Box 1166, Edmonds, WA 98020, 2018, 60 pages, $14.95 paper, http://ravennapress.com/.

The Scene You See is Stangeland’s fourth poetry collection. It is luminous. Stangeland draws from the world of painting, capturing color and line (and texture and scent and…) and paying homage to numerous artists. (“Cast an eye for shadows” she writes in “Self-Portrait, if I Were Lebasque.”) But the poems here also pay homage to the gifts of marriage and shared meals and glasses of wine. It made me feel strangely grateful for the ordinary, for the chance to stay at home all afternoon and read. Which I seem to be doing a lot of. (Like you.)

Be sure to check our Stangeland’s blog and her Saturday poetry picks.

Our Bodies Given up for Light

An inch no longer measured by a thumb,
a foot for walking only–
old artifacts abandoned.

Particle and wave, what is the shape
of essential undulations
to which distance now is tethered, and time?

Its lambent body pummels me from the sun,
glistening minutes
shattered on the sand.

What is the shape of love?
Like a turtle pressing
slowly toward the lettuce,

a smooth river stone–or is it the river,
so often standing in for time
rushing over the rocks

like the horse galloping across a field–
or is it riding the horse, the wind in her mane,
in your hair, almost like flying?

Is love a peach, the fuzz a soft burr
in your hand? Or can you not hold love,
the fog that runs through your fingers?

 

Donald Kentop

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ON PAPER WINGS, Donald Kentop. Rose Alley Press, 4204 Brooklyn Ave. NW, Seattle, WA 98015-5911, 2004, 44 pages, $6.95 paper, https://www.rosealleypress.com/.

Donald Kentop loves traditional forms, sonnets and villanelles, rhyme and meter. Though he occasionally breaks into free verse, reading this entire, short book was a delight to the ear.

For a story about more recent work, see this article in The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/poet-reminds-us-of-price-profit-can-exact/.

But there is something timeless about a poem such as this:

The Winter Cherry

As I grew up, impatient for the spring,
I noticed that a fruitless cherry tree
would bloom behind my house in wintertime
and, counter to the season, blossoms burst
along the branches even through the snow.
Erupting wide as it was tall, the pink
anomaly would always startle me
like mushrooms in a morning lawn. The soft
rebellion had defied the solstice once
again, compressing months into days
in my mind. The prunus autumnalis
blooms again this year. How many more,
who knows? Except that trees have lifetimes too,
like men, and this one I am sure is old.
I no longer see the tree a joke
on nature, rather nature’s joke on me.
A wonder still, each petal when and where
it ought to be. Now I welcome winter
because the springtime comes too soon for me,
and I have gone to counting–having found
it easier to tally winter nights
than to subtract from sunny summer days.

 

C. D. Wright (1949-2016)

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FURTHER ADVENTURES WITH YOU, C. D. Wright. Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA., 1986, 53 pages, $8.99 paper, https://www.cmu.edu/universitypress/.

A friend gave me this book some years ago, and I can see from my notes in the margins that I have read it at least once before. No matter, the poems leap off the pages and, though dated at moments, might have been written this morning. In a prefatory essay, “hills,” Wright says, “There are luminous albeit terrible facts I must simply transcribe.” And she advises: “you have to strike down your own mythology, about yourself, your loves, your ravishing and atavistic homeland. I am interested in the vision beyond this confrontation.” These poems and prose pieces chronicle her sojourn away from her childhood in the Ozarks, but she can never get her images pried completely loose from their “geographic sovereignty.”

This is the first poem in the book and it seems to catalog both a particular time and a lifetime:

Nothing to Declare

When I lived here
the zinnias were brilliant,
spring passed in walks.
One winter I wasn’t so young.
I rented a house with Ann Grey
where she wrote a book and I could not.
Cold as we were on the mountain
we wouldn’t be moved to the plain.
Afternoons with no sun
a blanket is left on the line.
Hearts go bad
like something open on a shelf.
If you came to hear about roosters,
iron beds, cabinets of ruby glass–
those things are long gone;
deepscreen porches and Sunday’s buffet.
This was the school
where they taught us
the Russians send their old
to be melted down for candles.
If I had a daughter I’d tell her
Go far, travel lightly.
If I had a son he’d go to war
over my hard body.
Don’t tell me it wasn’t worth the trouble
carrying on campaigns
for the good and the dead.
The ones I would vote for
never run. I want each and every one
to rejoice in the clotheslines
of the colored peoples of the earth.
Try living where you don’t have to see
the sun go down.
If the hunter turns his dogs loose
on your dreams
Start early, tell no one
get rid of the scent.

 

 

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