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Julene Tripp Weaver: SLOW NOW WITH CLEAR SKIES

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SLOW NOW WITH CLEAR SKIES, Julene Tripp Weaver. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2013, 96 pages, $18.99, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

MoonPath Press editor Lana Hechtman Ayers says that she thinks of MoonPath as a community, and a theme of community permeates Julene Tripp Weaver’s MoonPath book, Slow Now with Clear Skies. Provided we see community in both the compulsion toward others and the tug away. In as complex a weave as this collection of poems, we might expect that another theme is surprise:

Yell when you feel like it, smile when you don’t; scream to release, Julene Tripp Weaver advises us in “Rules on Life from a Green Witch,” but, following on the heels of that scream: Expect surprises. In “The Things I Do Become Calendar”: Accept// the surprise violets in this long forward / dream. The call of the unspoken…  In “Wise Women Herbal Tradition Self-Care Quest,” a sonnet sequence: Blind-sided, I stop to hold myself still. 

Blind-sided, indeed. The actors here are surprised by diagnoses: schizophrenia, myeloma, AIDS, Covid-19. They’re surprised by a pandemic (as were we all), surprised by people’s on-going need for help, for human contact, for kindness. They’re surprised by stillness and unexpected beauty. Some family members disappear — a mother with hands like scissors and a mouth with no words; and (thankfully) surprised by new family bonds, a great-grandmother who stands up for the child who will grow into the poet who writes, Don’t wait till anyone dies to be your true self (“Rules on Life”). Tripp Weaver skillfully reveres and celebrates family, while refusing to hold (almost) anything sacred.

It takes a spine to write such poems as these, and she has it: in synch, / set, grounded solid on earth, a sturdy elongated spine rooted (“Safe Space”), and later in the same poem, one of my favorite passages:

Brain fogged, I start with each

finger — feel the pen, the fabric
against my thigh, my cool cheeks,
a hug across my heart — back doors
into this body, to the safe space
that begins with tactile presence.

I have to argue, however, that Tripp Weaver isn’t sneaking in back doors. She opens everything up here, happily taking on not only male-bent society but any norm you can think of, family,  sexuality, history. She takes nothing for granted. We gave it away / and it went awry she explains in “Those of Us Who Aborted,” We wanted to believe in something. Though she posits that statement in past tense, it’s obvious that wanting to believe hasn’t gone away. Consider this admonitory poem:

Learn to Love

A new world is on its way,
it started at Woodstock, with Vietnam
protests, long hair rebels took off
into the blue sky on motorcycles,
forever nomads, now how many
live in RVs on the move
like Romani travelers, changed
by necessity. Far from the standard
American capitalist lifestyle,
way beyond the reach of the buzz.
We travel through life and time, make a path,
create our heart-home — we carry
each other; hold hands
learn to love.

— Julene Tripp Weaver

Tripp Weaver is a therapist and an herbalist, and believes in the body’s — and the body politic’s — ability to heal. Joanne M. Clarkson, author of Hospice House, writes of Slow Now with Clear Skies: 

In post-pandemic America, this is the book I need to read….The title of the collection comes from the final line of the poem, “I’ve Lived Through One War.” She rallies us with the lines: We must ask / new questions, find unconventional answers…It’s time / for massive change… / Our planet, slow now with clear skies.

I can’t say it better than that.

Find out more about at MoonPath’s author page — including links to other reviews and Tripp Weaver’s website.

You can find Slow Now with Clear Skies at MoonPath Press, at Amazon, or by ordering it through your independent bookstore.

Carmen Germain, Life Drawing

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LIFE DRAWING, Carmen Germain. MoonPath Press, PO Box 445, Tillamook, OR 97141, 2022, 76 pages, $16 paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

Such a pleasure to spend the morning rereading these poems!

On the back cover, Joseph Powell describes Life Drawing as “poetry that embraces the ordinary and sees art as a way to both praise, and make sense of the world.” “Making the ordinary extraordinary” is how I would put it. Familiar territory, at times: Scotch broom, pickup trucks, a father’s war stories, wasps, “horse on a rope in the fog.” But also Van Gogh, Dante, Gorky. This is quintessential Germain, twining her themes together, making a whole that is both fragmentary and lush.

I keep picking out lines: “Only the poets / twine music line by line, / breath of being alive” (from “The Evil Counsellors, The Despots,” dedicated to the Ukrainian people); “hermit despising false / gold, sound of money clinking hand to hand” (from “Choose Your Own”); “finicky clutch, shifting gears as though conducting a symphony” (from “After Your Heart Attack, I Return to This Poem”); “Cochineal crimson / in July, the indigo of August / bursting into sugar among bees” (from “Thorn on a Riff of Sweet”).

Germain is also a (brilliant) painter (as you can see in the images), and this epigraph opens the book:

“don’t be afraid, and don’t try to make it pretty” –Vincent van Gogh

Germain has swallowed this advice. Life Drawing looks at many subjects, but we also get a sense of her whole life, the range of places she has lived, her obsessions, her loves, sifted and drawn, offered to us.

So, one poem to maybe illustrate:

Butterbur (and Wild Pansy)

on a painting by Morris Graves

Pure luminosity, the butterbur, scarlet off-white frothing,
striking and spirited, each stamen’s pinpoint of light

in a skyrocket of smoke and noise, the way happiness
like a festival takes over, fireworks staving off darkness

in a barrage of pyrotechnics.

In a translucent bottle, purple-blue petals in five directions,
a wild pansy poses next to this ballistic. It’s said violets
grew wherever Orpheus put down his lyre

and I like to think because he honored music so much—

his beautiful song—the viola spread its leaves
to open more to listening.

Three red-orange rosehips

lean forward, alert to the darker tone of these petals,
how men prefer this shade while women, like Persephone,
are drawn to the lighter. Still the butterbur catches me first,

stolid in its bronze vessel. How it thrusts shoulders forward
like someone in charge about to shout orders.

But it’s the wild pansy where I keep returning, how it emerges
from milky glass not shrinking, how two leaves rise like hands

to praise such fragile peace.

—Carmen Germain

If you visit her page at Moon Path Press, you’ll find a brief biography, and a recording of the Covid-safe launch (32 minutes!) of Life Drawing. 

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

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.