Tender and Merciless Scrutiny

In contemporary America, the pursuit of convenience can eclipse our ability to decipher and savor details. A convenience-bound life seeks escape from intrusions of climate, season, flora, fauna, sound, and even smells—the fingerprints of an environment. Convenience demands predictability. It renders the place we inhabit generic and featureless, its unique spot on the map erased. How then do we find our way home, when, as the poet Larry Levis once wrote, we have “grown tired of amazing things” around us?
Some contend that poetry is an anachronism in an era where cultural attention deficit disorder reaches epidemic proportions. Yet the new books here show that poetry is a matter of urgency, not irrelevance. These poets alert us to meaning in “the things of the world . . . without which we are the living dead,” as Jim Harrison has said. Without such scrutiny of detail—at times tender, at times merciless—our stories would go missing on parched and barren terrain.

The Selected Levis:
Revised Edition
Larry Levis
University of Pittsburgh Press
240 pages
Softcover $16.95
0-8229-5793-0

In 1996, Larry Levis died of a heart attack at age 49. In an afterword to this impressive revised edition, David St. John writes that Levis’s poetry demands that we “examine . . . our growing numbness to the world.” His vivid, unflinching poems are driven by compassion. Levis grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, harvesting fruit with migrant farm workers. In “Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard,” Levis returns “in honor of them . . . [I] steady a bunch of red, Malaga grapes / With one hand / The way they showed me, and cut— / And close my eyes to hear them laugh at me again, / And then, hearing nothing, no one, carry the grapes up to the solemn house / Where I was born.”

The Radiant
Cynthia Huntington
Four Way Books
83 pages
Softcover $14.95
1-884800-49-1

Cynthia Huntington received the Levis Poetry Prize for this powerful collection. The Director of Dartmouth’s Creative Writing Program, she has crafted soul-wrenching poems: her lyrical, pristine language draws the reader close, to stare our worst fears in the face. Confronting multiple sclerosis, she writes with wonder and ache: “This world is where we die. / Let’s climb the mountain / and make a fire there / out of wood that grows with its roots in the black cold water / . . . Mice gnaw the fisherman’s nets for salt and the fish swim through. / . . . [A]ngels . . . carry the page held open to our names: let’s not be there when they come.”

A Breathable Light
Rodney Torreson
New Issues Poetry & Prose
56 pages
Softcover $14.00
1-930974-23-X

In Rodney Torreson’s hauntingly beautiful second book, man stumbles ill at ease and out of place into a capricious wilderness. The inhabitants of these poems are uninvited visitors to the landscape they believed belonged to them: “You the intruder / to a place / you lived half your life.” In “On a Moonstruck Gravel Road,” the family dogs “saunter home, wool scraps in their teeth ” while “farm boys, asleep in their beds / live the same wilderness under their lids.” Torreson seems to suggest that in our chests, the yearning heart waits like an unruly stranger, poised to disrupt our lives.

Embellishments
Virginia Chase Sutton
Chattoyant
82 pages
Softcover $ $12.00
0-9661452-5-9

A former student of poet Mark Doty, Sutton teaches college in Arizona and recently received the Alan Ginsberg Poetry Award. Her debut collection evokes the heavy labor of suburban normalcy, where mothers take refuge in a “fog of silver gin” and “drunks and lovers . . . can afford only an hour or two of madness” in an over-chilled hotel room. Dinners are loveless: runny spaghetti sauce, iceberg, gray sliced meat, and “pretty, foamy bread.” At Yellowstone, parents feed marshmallows “to young black bears that begged and mugged alongside us all the way out.” No one is missing meals here, but they are all ravenous—and it’s those cravings that let us know they’re still alive.

The News and Other Poems
David Citino
University of Notre Dame Press
96 pages
Hardcover $25.00
Softcover $16.00
0-268-03657-8 (HC)
0-268-03658-6 (SC)

David Citino has authored twelve books and serves as Poet Laureate of Ohio State University. Newspapers have a shorter shelf life than yogurt, yet Citino dissects the news for what endures: the awe and absurdities of human existence. At times keenly empathetic (“Ode to Billie Dove”) and often irreverent (“Funding the Dead”), Citino’s intense observations and wit yield irresistible poems. In “Thoreau’s Site Fouled by Nature,” sentimental nature lore disintegrates, as Walden becomes the House of Usher: “We don’t belong, / Walden is whispering. Thoreau himself / was squatter, occupier. And though / we saw it sink beneath the waters of the tarn, / that dark foreboding house is still here. / We’re inside, frantic at the bolted door.”

Union
Don Share
Zoo Press
66 pages
Softcover $14.95
0-9708177-7-0

Don Share leads a life of poetry, as curator of the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard College Library, and editor of The Harvard Review and The Partisan Review. Yet this volume marks his debut. “Service to the art form was my priority,” Share says. “I was not in a rush to have my own book of poems.” It was worth the wait. The “union” of the title is part paradox, part wish, as he grapples with things that fall apart: the sick cat, the garden, cities, a drowned flag, wedding vows. Share writes: “Our separation / brings spaciousness / to my life. / I make time / to stand alone / in the garden . . . listen to the loquacious evening dogs. / . . . Solitude is a bargain: / I hold up my end.”

Braided Creek
Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser
Copper Canyon Press
85 pages
Softcover $15.00
1-55659-187-x

When Ted Kooser was diagnosed with cancer, he and his friend Jim Harrison corresponded in short poems to “convey the essence of what we wanted to say to each other.” The resulting book unfolds like a Japanese kaiseki feast, a procession of delectable morsels. It is tempting to gobble them all at once, but a slow savoring leaves one with a sense of satiety and celebration: “All I want to be / is a thousand blackbirds / bursting from a tree / seeding the sky.”

A Fierce Brightness
Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, Micki Reaman, editors
Calyx Books
240 pages
Hardcover $29.95
Softcover $14.95
0-934971-83-8 (HC)
0-934971-82-X (SC)

This Art: Poems on Poetry
Michael Wiegers, editor
Copper Canyon Press
180 pages
Softcover $12.00
1-55659-184-5

In addition to the above collections by individual poets, these two anthologies stand out among new poetry books. When Calyx was founded to publish women poets in 1976, the representation of women in literary anthologies hovered around seven percent. Since then, Calyx has published more than 3,500 women writers; this fine anthology includes the work of poets ranging from Jane Hirshfield and Sharon Olds to Anna Akhmatova.
Teachers, students, and fans of poetry will relish Michael Wiegers’s top-notch ars poetica anthology. In an eloquent introduction, Wiegers states: “Poems taught preliterates how to live. Poems have passed along history’s great narratives and religious beliefs. Poetry helps us pay closer attention to the world around us . . . Poetry is as natural as breathing, not a cause for intimidation.”

When our secret delights and fears resonate in poems, we are less alone; the words reach us, as Cynthia Huntington writes in Radiant, “like a letter from a friend lost years ago to silence.”