March 19, 2016

Pictures at an Exhibition: A Review of Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence by Angele Ellis

Cover Credit: Sundress Publications
Confluence by Sandra Marchetti
Sundress Publications (2015)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Reading Sandra Marchetti’s first full-length book of poetry is like being immersed in a series of works in an art gallery. Each scene of unfolding—in rich brushstrokes of language—pulls the viewer/reader in, and doesn’t quite let go. Like paintings, Marchetti’s mostly brief but lush lines convey both miracles of beauty and intimations of strain and mortality. (Confluence’s cover is a detail from early 18th century Dutch painter Jan van Huysum, in which a rose and peony are captured on the cusp of over-ripeness, and a zinnia’s stem already has fallen.)

This artist’s view of the world is made explicit in some of Marchetti’s poems. In “Saints,” the poet’s eye glides from the “stars” of the Virgin of Guadalupe to an evocation of the techniques of such classic Dutch painters as van Huysum, as in these lines:
…They say
a glass of water
is the very hardest thing…

… The Dutch could do this—
hold water in their eyes—
inside the painter

a glass would become full,
a flower fresh
with drops of dew,
insects on the petals.
And “Sur l’herbe” is a direct allusion to 19th century painter Édouard Manet’s erotic shocker “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.” Addressing a lover, perhaps, the poem’s speaker directs her own scene like a master:
… Don’t move:
you can’t see
you are a strange
portrait.

Like Manet,
I strain each stroke
of cup and nape
to show I can…
These excerpts demonstrate Marchetti’s command of not only the images but also the music of poetry—including alliteration, enjambment, rhyme and near rhyme, and the punch of the spondee (a metrical foot in which both syllables are stressed—DUM-DUM—as in “Don’t move”). Marchetti is frank about her poetic influences and the ways in which they haunt her work. This is particularly evident in this passage from her essay “Rhyming with the Dead” (The Turnip Trucks, 1-28-2016):
… My influences include the confessionals, Bishop, Hopkins, Dickinson, and others. I have done it both intentionally and unintentionally; indeed, this is very common in contemporary poetry… I have found all of my poems are part of this interconnected web and that is why certain lines ring in my head—they are not wholly mine; they chime with other voices. In short, I rhyme with the dead.
Later in this essay, Marchetti compares her poem “Lunch” to Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” a mid-20th century classic that Marchetti has learned by heart. She reflects:
… When Sexton says “June” on the Poetry Speaks recording, she gives such weight to word. I remember my initial reaction to its heavy vowel jab. I have never forgotten it. “Lunch,” another poem of mine, incorporates the same syntactical maneuver of Sexton’s “It is June…” line. The second stanza of “Lunch” reads:
Sorting the demands of red-orange,
pink, cream, I flick stems on the bank,
watch them wash downstream. It is noon,
the bees are circling for somewhere to land.
(Marchetti, “Rhyming with the Dead.”)
Nourishment, sex, art—and the ultimate inability of these things to hold back destruction—make every object in Confluence (animal, vegetable, mineral, the very landscape) a precious yet vulnerable body. In “Orange Bouquet,” one garden-harvested cauliflower encompasses a world of meaning, from “loos[ing]” to “snap,” as in these lines:
… The dark farm in diorama
crams between each branch.

I brush caterpillars into the sink
and geese wink out, smatter

dirt on my hands
in their landing.
Again and again in Confluence, the speaker uses smooth and sharp turns of language to meld with her subject. In “Borderland,” an ordinary fenced-in swimming pool becomes the center of a mystery, with something “… gnawing at your waters.” When the poet asks the pool “What are you?” the answer is “A country.”

The word that provides Marchetti with this book’s title, confluence, has multiple meanings. Literally the merging of two bodies of water (as Pittsburgh’s Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers merge to form the Ohio River), it is figuratively any coming together—of factors, ideas, cultures, beings. At the point of confluence, something is both lost and gained. The book’s final poem, “One Secret” (perhaps echoing Elizabeth’s Bishop’s “One Art”), is both a love poem and an artistic credo. In the last lines of this poem, the speaker’s consciousness expands to embrace her lover’s body in the present, its inevitable demise, and the “rhythms” that define her art and world:
… Dusk flares the bones’ groan, so I rub your stomach
until you sleep. I neat my breath to yours,
as if you were a child; the confluence
of rhythms begins. It is only sound
and meaning. Sound and meaning.

March 5, 2016

A Personalized Americana: A Review of Bethany Reid’s Sparrow by Mindy Kronenberg

Cover Credit: Writers & Books
Sparrow by Bethany Reid
Big Pencil Press (2012)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

Bethany Reid’s poems come off the page like a mix of polite gossip and prayer. She writes with the quiet eloquence of Mary Oliver, the raw honesty of Sharon Olds, and shares details of her heartland childhood and coming of age as with Ted Kooser’s sacraments of the everyday. She begins the book with “My Country,” a detailed recounting of life events that, in youth, combine with faith to become a cautionary yet celebratory tale:
Life and death held hands and said grace
over my childhood, every cat that got into rat poison,
every dog hit by a logging truck on our creek road,
every calf with scours….

… Never a way to embrace
All that suffering arm and arm with all that joy,
That astonishing joy I knew as a child in my country.
These are often subtle but substantial poems, a tour of the rural and emotional landscape by a woman who takes nothing for granted and is unabashed in sharing her discoveries. Broken into three sections (Three Horses, Death Must be a Waitress, and What Tongue but My Own), Sparrow takes the reader through a litany of reveries and moments of ripening, rites-of-passage and emotional metamorphosis, and finally a sensually rendered meditation on mortality.

There is an earnest curiosity and humored cynicism where religion, a considerable force, is concerned, as in “What Broke Loose:”
What broke loose when all hell went?
I didn’t have that kind of childhood.
We kept buttoned up. We minded.

Somehow I learned
to experiment with possibility—
the earth crackling like a too-hot stove,
bones budding like exotic flowers.
The same goes for “Rapture,” where the poet remembers savoring the word as a girl, undaunted at the prospect (“A fervent child, I never feared I’d be left…) but wondering how life would be for those on earth, even the mild sinners (“My history teacher who had once / inserted a casual ‘goddamn’ into a lecture…”). Once the faithful were plucked from their everyday lives on the planet, the poet wonders about “…what chaos / we’d leave behind us, my dear, drunk uncles / with no one to fix their suppers, / our cows finding no one at the barn / to throw down their hay.” She also puzzles over the world continuing, unrepentant and unaffected by the absence of the righteous:
What if the world didn’t miss us,
but remained steady on its course,
one ear cocked to the susurrus
of a Pentecostal wind?
In “Prodigal,” we meet the girl-poet in the midst of her early rural life, awakened by birds in the garden, and where she “…chopped wood, / made beds, folded clothes / fresh from the line... picked strawberries, read books, dreamed.” A line that could be a slogan for Sparrow’s underlying sentiment is when the poet admits, after growing up and away from experiences that become cherished in adult memory, “…the smallest of things still beckons.” From the intimate ritual of a waitress undressing and unwrapping her inner selves (“Matyrouska”) to the mother shaking a thermometer like a wand to relieve a fevered daughter (“Pond Girl”), the private scenes in Sparrow echo with heartache, persistence, and joy in dream-like spurts— the totality of a lifetime pieced together in wondrous, ephemeral episodes.