A Queen's Man: A Review of Laura Madeline Wiseman's Queen of the Platform by Sally Deskins

cover credit: Anaphora Literary Press

Queen of the Platform by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Anaphora Literary Press (2013)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Poet Laura Madeline Wiseman burrowed through hundreds of historic newspapers, three books, and letters, poems, and hymns while researching her great-great-great-grandmother, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman (1842-1909). Although “a photograph of Matilda has yet to be found,” the author introduced us to her kin in Men And Their Whims. With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman lets readers in deeper with the 19th century lecturer, suffragist, and poet, as well as Wiseman herself. With her graceful rhythmic flare, and real and imagined homey narrative, she presents upended views of the meaning of equality via the men around her suffragist ancestor in the time before women could vote.

In Men and Their Whims, readers see deep insight into the relationship between Wiseman and her brother, Civil War veteran and accused murderer George Felts (1843-1921), as well as her first husband, John Fletcher. But in Queen of the Platform, readers see more of Matilda through her second husband, Wiseman’s great-great-grandfather, minister Albert Wiseman.

Readers peruse Matilda’s first meeting with Albert in “A Door Opens.” He is seen as a “doorway of light,” which foreshadows his heartening presence. In “Prothalamion,” the title refers to a poem by Edmund Spenser, composed for the twin marriage of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester. Although Albert Wiseman does not become married to two women, perhaps his two marriages are to Matilda the woman and to her speaking career. She writes:

“Do you wonder

that when you travel alone
whether he will light the lamp,

clip the paper headlined
by Matilda Fletcher,
and wait
for the distant roar,

for a whistle
to pierce the night?

Don’t wonder. He will.
His heart is man.”

As the story continues, we observe Matilda as a professional woman before women could vote. She asks herself honest and still resonant queries in “Votes for Women:” “Who deserves rights? Which of us gets to be fully human? ...Which doors are shut to women? ...What do I want to do?”

Matilda’s active spirit is risen again as she dines with Susan B. Anthony in “Traveling with Luminaries with Friends,” wherein the author takes readers on a dreamy spin, as many-a-women have wished to dine with their heroes. She writes: “…She squeezed my hand. / I felt myself go pink as I thought of my talent / for the platform, my ambition, this life I chose. / I squeezed hers and said, I’m adding my voice.”

The anticipation and excitement for the cause mounts with “A Spirited Lecture.” Wiseman writes: “Equal Rights Party delegate meeting to nominate their presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull, New York, May Day, 1872.” And readers feel the thrill as the author describes the sounds, garb, the moment the first woman was nominated for president: “All arms lifted in the call to her, Victoria! A country girl / turned millionaire, Victoria! A Wall Street Broker, Victoria! / / A leader who listened to voices, Victoria! A namesake / of victory, Victoria!”

Perhaps the most striking poems of the book come from the last personable pieces that read as though they are written from the author’s point of view, and instill feminist mutual support. In “Speaking to My Dead: Matilda Fletcher Wiseman” she movingly questions her own research, echoing that of Matilda’s previous own questioning and self-actualization. She asks:

“Will the dead hear me, Matilda, if I call? Will you?
...
You patented a traveling trunk for women. You wrote bills
passed into law. All of your brothers served in the war
….
You’ve been dead a hundred years. I begin this search for you.”

Wiseman then collages descriptions of Matilda in “Spell for Appearances: Clipped Notes on Matilda” and “Charms Against Critics: Contradicting Opinions,” exemplifying the cyclical nature of politics, sexism in media, and hearsay. Too, the ever-diligent life of a professional woman in “II. Judge Hilton and the Women’s Hotel” is displayed as doors literally open and close for Matilda. Wiseman describes:

“…Lady physicians couldn’t
Have libraries in their rooms. Lady artists couldn’t have
Easels. Lady musicians couldn’t have instruments.
…
Sheesh, she hated to kneel to any man for charity.
…
It isn’tLike a kingdom. But if it were, he’d never be selected as King.”

Ironically or considerably, then, the author claims a man as Matilda’s main support system—as almost the reason for her strength and contentment: “a good husband.” For example, in  “III. Secrets, Spells and Love”:

“Her neighbors seethed. She had an enchanting disposition
and a good husband. Wise woman! All this, her secret.”

In the 1960s, a feminist slogan was preached widely: “Behind every great man there is a great woman.” With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman suggests that there is a great man behind—and moreover, beside—each great woman. In “A Memory of Trains, of His Consumption,” she explains: “Is man an angel? / —mine were, Al, John, Geo.” Again, Wiseman challenges perceptions of feminism and justice, with her poignant and heartfelt writing via the perspective of the inspiring Matilda and the men around her, whose “names are written in water / and this history is all that we have / rippling between us” (“The History Between Us”). These lost stories of strength and endurance are brought to life as echoes through Wiseman herself: “I write to you” (“Speaking to My Dead: Matilda Fletcher Wiseman”). 

The Grass Was the Country: A Review of Sandy Longhorn’s The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Jacar Press

The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths by Sandy Longhorn

Jacar Press, 2013

Review by Angele Ellis

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. ―Willa Cather, My Antonia

In her second full-length collection (winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Full Length Book Contest), Sandy Longhorn reanimates Cather’s prairie—a fierce, enchanted landscape that becomes as fully realized as the people who inhabit, fight, and succumb to it. Like the dreamy and defiant girls of her fairy tales and myths, Longhorn’s prairie—an anthropomorphic presence, half-human, half-monster—seems to be running, as in “Fairy Tales for Girls in Love with Fire”:

…The horizon

caught fire and the eldest girl fell

for the smell of smoke, craved the heat

of flame and ember. Every adult tried

to hold her back from running toward

the leaping fervor… (38)

All four elements (fire, earth, wind, and water) contribute to the seduction and destruction of Longhorn’s yearning “girls,” in the throes of adolescent angst intensified by the isolation of Longhorn’s personified prairie, and by the patriarchs and matriarchs who abide by its harsh rules. In “Cautionary Tale for Girls Kept Underground in Summer,” a girl abandoned in a “clammy” basement by parents who “had lives to live / in the heat above the ground” becomes part of the earth itself:

…curled in upon herself, her fingers digging, digging

at the crack until she could slip her hands closer

to the dirt. They found her there, immovable,

her limbs tangled in the dense bed of roots, her speech

the foreign tongue of all things planted. (2)

And in “Fairy Tale for Girls Enthralled by the Storm,” “a girl who loved the prairie wind,” and whose father is “unnerved / by the way she smiled like a woman” bides her time until a season of tornadoes provides her with an otherworldly means of escape:

 …One night she slipped from bed and walked

into the rain. She took her place on that slight rise,

called out, was ready to be lifted and transformed. (35)

Longhorn’s precise language, alliterative lyricism, and masterful use of rhyme schemes ground her poems, making their fantastic endings both plausible and moving. Another technique that Longhorn uses brilliantly is the repetition of certain words in her titles and poems, including fairy, tale, cautionary, map, cartography, saint, girl(s). This repetition draws the reader into Longhorn’s spell—as when reading a book of fairy tales—transforming Longhorn’s stories into the reader’s.

Perhaps no story is complete without blood, and without the bloodlines that connect us to the artist’s past, as well as to our own. In “Midwest Nursery Tales,” a fox kills a girl who wanders heedlessly into a ripe field of alfalfa:

…all they found

were her shoes and a patch of blood-red

poppies. Each year those flowers bloomed

no matter how deeply they tilled the soil. (5)

In “It Matters, the Kind of Wound,” “poppies & chilies” bloom from a soil whose accumulated blood “…seeps and stains, marking a new / navigational point—a compass rose, / useless to the one who bled it.” (9)

Bloodlines become particularly poignant in the last of this book’s four sections, “Cartography as Elegy,” which moves from feminist mythmaking to speak more directly of life and death. Armed with “…a map of my home well folded, / creased along gossamer bloodlines” (“Autobiography as Cartography”) (53), Longhorn explores her family history. Throughout “In the Delicate Branches,” she traces her grandmother and mother’s decline:

            …Strong bones and a healthy body

           

can only take a person so far. At some point the heart

has to do its own bidding. At some point you

have to admit that the wolf guards the door. (55)

The mortality of her elders leads the poet to the realization that she may be the last branch of her family tree, in “Choosing Not to Bear”:

…Now, as the hourglass of my womb empties,

I refuse to turn

the moonlight sands

on end again…

           

yet my empty womb is a bursting star…

                      Meanwhile, my mother

lines her life with the silver and gold

            of her last,

                                  her starburst daughter… (56)

As Willa Cather’s “starburst daughter[s]” (in Longhorn’s phrase) rise from the prairie waves to seek and find personal and professional freedom—or in some cases, to be tragically pulled under—so do Sandy Longhorn’s. As Cather makes her “running” prairie the archetypical American heartland, reaching far beyond regionalism to capture the imagination and sympathy of a wide audience, so does Sandy Longhorn in The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths. 

Searching for Permanence: A Review of Jacar Press's What Matters by Marc Sheehan

cover credit: Jacar Press

What Matters

Jacar Press, 2013

Reviewed by Marc Sheehan

Jacar Press set out to bring together poets to speak about topics core to their being—a truly admirable task. Because if poets can’t address what matters, why spend the time forging one hundred well-crafted poems?

           

It’s a high bar to set, and What Matters largely succeeds in clearing that bar. 

Almost all of the writers, according to their bios, have some connection to the South, and particularly to North Carolina, Jacar Press’s home state. Despite that, What Matters does not, for the most part, read as a collection of southern poems. However, some of its best poems deal with race, an issue by no means exclusively southern but one that is inescapably associated with the notion of “southerness.”

           

For example, in her very fine poem about the legacy of Emmett Till, “Perpetua Holdings Inc.,” Rebecca Black writes:

                        I wanted to stop writing about the South,

                        but then the mother possum and her babies skittered

                        out of the casket lined with shredded satin, its glass lid heavy

                        and still unbroken—Emmett’s first casket left rotting

                        in a shed by some gravediggers and their office manager

                        who’d pocketed the funds donated for its preservation.

Black’s poem is followed by Michael White’s “Coup.” Set in Wilmington, N.C., the poem continues Black’s exploration of how the present is haunted by the past. A walk along the banks of Cape Fear becomes a meditation on the racially-charged Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.  The poem ends:

                        One of the last men killed that night was killed

                        right here, on Water Street. Two white men claimed

                        an unnamed black had “sassed” them. Therefore they shot him;

                        therefore they “toss his body off the dock,”

                        where fathers & daughters ramble, & lovers talk,

                        & everyone loves to go for an evening walk.

In this same vein is Joe Mills’s slyly effective “My Daughter Continues to be Annoyed by George Washington,” in which the poet offers to keep his daughter’s allowance so she won’t be sullied by money bearing the slave-owning president’s portrait. “I saw the struggle, the realization / that this wasn’t how it should be, how it is,” Mills writes. 

           

In addition to strong poems about race, there are wonderful odes to place, family members, life-partners, and nature, among other objects of desire. However, a couple of the finest pieces are characterized less by their subject matter than the sheer joy of language they employ. Tony Morris’s “Night Time Closes In” is one long sentence in praise of—among other things—automotive repair. It begins:

                        Kenny popped his head above the hood and yelled

                        over the roar to shut the engine down

                        because the timing wasn’t right and as the night

                        pressed in we know we’d need to cap the headers

                        with a muffler or the cops would soon be called

                        and nothing killed a buzz like quitting on a rebuild

What matters here, more than anything else, is language that rushes along more powerfully than “…a 327 cubic inch, bored 30 over, high- / torque cam lobe, [with] Headman Hedders…” 

Equally compelling is Al Maginnes’s “Love Song for Electricity,” which has the wonderfully Baby-Boomerish lines:

                        For the kool aid, the strobe, the nightmare wash

                                    of black light, for the tape and the tape loop,

                        for the recordings and the gaps in recordings,

                                    how different would this present be without you?

More than others in this collection, these two poems manage not just to reflect and meditate upon what matters, but also to embody and luxuriate in it. As Archibald MacLeish so famously wrote, “A poem should not mean / But be.” There’s no denying these poems’ striving to mean. If anything, it’s their being, their existence on the page, that is not fully realized. Although this is a good anthology, a few different editorial decisions could have made it even better.

Holding the anthology back is a lack of context. Although I admire gathering poems about essential things, What Matters comes across as overly broad. Poems are often grouped thematically, and it would have been better for this to be more overt—for the groups to be in discreet sections focusing on themes of family, place, etc. In addition, incorporating white space to create breathing room between the sections would have given readers a moment to re-group and re-focus.

Also, though lengthy introductions and forewords are usually unnecessary, here the single-page editorial text could definitely have been longer to single out some of the themes and perhaps individual poems. Although a poem has to stand (or fall) on its own, some editorial insights would have helped the book’s cohesion. Additionally, it is unclear whether the editors took regional affiliation into consideration when making their selections because a few international poets are represented, which drives home the fact that meaning exists within different cultural contexts. Knowing more about the editorial process and expectations would have helped make those contexts clearer.

Overall, What Matters is an ambitious collection of poems whose goal could have been even more fully realized. But whatever its shortfalls, the anthology brings together both accomplished and emerging poets to remind us that words do matter, that they point to things and events beyond themselves, and are not an end unto themselves.

A Thresher of Dust and Dreams: A Review of Miriam Bird Greenberg's All Night in the New Country by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Sixteen Rivers Press

A Thresher of Dust and Dreams in the Promised Land

All Night in the New Country
Miriam Bird Greenberg
Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

Miriam Bird Greenberg’s disturbing, recent collection of twenty-three poems chronicle episodes of a future America driven by a desperate migration. In a time of ecologic and social collapse, citizens move to survive, congregate, and keep madness and carnage at bay. As one reads through each poem, there are echoes of other cautionary tales of environmental disaster and human conceit—The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Road by Cormac McCarthy—and the uneasy reminder of historic migrations to stake claim to the great potential of this vast country.

The first poem, “Before the World Went to Hell,” sets the stage for this dismantled realm, and we are introduced to the early stages of pending disaster (“…people theorized the earth’s orbit / was off-kilter, time had stopped moving right,…”) in an uncomfortable juxtaposition of the frightening with the poetic (“My sweetheart steamed a pot of wild mustard flowers / by the roadside, rain sizzling on the lid…”). This cleverly keeps us off balance as we travel through these pages, creating a longing for the familiar or fabled past, clinging to old gallantry and social convention—a belief in empowered heroes and the guidance of ancestral ghosts—even as the world around us is dying. In “All Night in the New Country,” there is the pain of loss of legacy and self, “…it is like a body walking next to you in the night, ghost / of the lost one keeping you / company, or only your own grief stumbling / beside you in the darkness.”

This tour of deteriorating Americana emerges in scenes of surprisingly casual violence within a backdrop fit for Normal Rockwell. For example, in “I Passed Three Girls Killing a Goat,” Greenberg writes:

I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgun
leaned up against a tree and the entrails
spilling into a coil on the ground. It was hooked
between the tendons of its back legs
to a high branch that gently creaked
like a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil.

Or these haunting lines, from “Remember:”

Remember the ruined caravan
we approached at dusk where boys lolling on the lip of the well
idly sent three bursts of bullets

into the air, neither welcome
nor threat? Remember, one told us of another who’d fallen
into that same well,

treading water for three days
and calling like a baby bird for its mother. Only
they didn’t say it like that. …

Death is harvested more than food or quarry stone; nature teases the promise of bounty amidst rot. In “Night Trembled All Around Me,” we are told “But what you really had to watch for / were pits dug in the ground in empty places.” We’re told:

Watch carefully
when the moon is at this angle; people
go out to the woods (no—are sent) with shovels.
Fallen fruit sweetening the air, pungent
where saplings will sprout from the stones
in spring; but the pits they are digging
are meant         for a different thing.

There is a combination of beauty and terror in each poem, bearing witness to the ravages of the landscape yet clinging to the persistence of the human spirit. They compose a journey for survival through a landscape of dying dreams and create a disjointed tension as we learn in uneasy and evocative stages how things fall apart.

Meandering Through Bear Country: A Review of Katherine Ayres’s Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae by R. A. Voss

Cover credit: Autumn House Press

Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae by Katherine Ayres

Autumn House Press (2013)

Reviewed by R. A. Voss

Katherine Ayres was already enamored by the legendary world of bears when an encounter with one—coupled with intellectual curiosity—turned an attraction into an obsessive crush. The result is Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae, a collection of essays that come from her heart and conscience regarding the myriad ways mankind and bear-kind have intersected across time. Intriguing epigraphs preface fascinating explorations of the bear-mystique throughout world history.

In the opening piece, “Protection,” the author notes how the series derived from a visit by a black bear outside her residence in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. When she sees the bear roaming her property, she initially registers it as trespassing. On further contemplation, she recognizes the behavior as territory-marking, which signals the bear declaring ownership and leads Ayres to speculate whether the visitor has caught her scent and “wonders who and why.” Alone in her new home, as the bear claims the yard, Ayres marks the house. Poetically, she shares how she rolls her “loneliness from paint cans onto drab walls, making them glow—lemon sorbet, rose parade.”

As she meanders deeper into the bear’s sphere, she probes the incongruity of laws established to shield bears against human predation, observing that:

“We humans protect these large, magnificent giants of the forest so we’ll have more of them to hunt and kill” (5).

Such topical revelations ponder the intricacies of how to determine the bear population a territory can support while considering farmers, residents, hunters, and wildlife management agencies. A gruesome example of how parties clash over these issues occurred on December 9, 2013, when an 18-year-old Pennsylvanian-woman was mauled by a mother bear during a deer-hunting expedition. While recovering from her wounds in the hospital, the traumatized woman received a letter from a representative of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The official suggested that the woman discontinue hunting and consider the terror that animals experience at the hands of hunters. The incident underscores the relevance of Ayres’s book in the ongoing conversation.

As the essays unfold, Ayres delves into the disjunction between people’s admiration for bears and cruelty against them—amidst images of cuddly bears and the fierce reality of mammals in their normal environment. This separation is brilliantly illuminated by her recounting of how Teddy Bears were created after a political cartoon satirized an event that was by turns terrible and noble. She writes:

“President Theodore Roosevelt had been on a hunting expedition, but had not shot a bear. Companions on the trip chased a bear, hounded it, exhausted it and tied it to a tree. When they showed it to Roosevelt, he refused to shoot such a beleaguered creature” (28).

The story inspired a toy manufacturer to produce Teddy Bears to commemorate Roosevelt’s presidential pardoning of the badgered beast. Its inclusion reveals Ayres’s ability to parallel external events with internal scrutiny of the concerns that plague these iconic animals. Covering subjects as diverse as dancing bears, endangered species, bear stock markets, and Russian political bears, she seeks answers to the central question: How can people and bears coexist harmoniously? Ayres’s appreciation for the natural world inspires every page as she examines the ecological, global, and personal—searching for the bear’s-eye view without slipping into anthropomorphism.

In “The Wise Man,” Ayres discusses the merits of labeling while pointing to the dangers of stereotyping and value judgments. Even the scientific nomenclature for bears—Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Carnivora, Ursidae, Ursus, and Ursus americanus—becomes something thoughtful and accessible through Ayres’s uplifting prose:

“I realize that I’m drawn to these names—to their scientific accuracy and their musicality. Writers are lovers of words after all—connoisseurs of sound and meaning transcribed into symbol” (24).

In some essays, a light-hearted approach balances the serious tone imparted by others, like in “Bear Etiquette” when she compares the “bare etiquette” practiced by nudists—“One doesn’t stare. One doesn’t walk too close or… touch by accident.”—to the appropriate “protocol when a bear has come into sight.” 

“Fake Fur” reviews the species of bears that currently prowl the planet. From the common brown bear to the South American mountains’ little known speckled bears, which are the only bears to roam the southern hemisphere, she informs readers about survival risk factors like habitat loss from shrinking forests and climate change, noting that though black bear numbers are increasing:

“The Sun bears, Sloth bears, Spectacled bears and Asian blacks…, also face human poaching and predation for food, folk medicine, and sport hunting, as well as capture to secure animals for performing, fighting and even as pets.  As a species, we humans have a very mixed record of living respectfully with our Ursidae neighbors” (40).

The woe worsens in “Unbearable,” which provokes stomach-turning outrage and a wilderness of misery due to images of bears suffering immense cruelty that linger after one finishes the read: bear baiting, Russian bears playing hockey in ice skates, and circus bears performing unnatural acts. And “In Sickness and in Health” awakens readers to the procedure of bear milking—bile extraction for homeopathic medicinal treatments. Ayres explains:

“Somewhere between eight and ten thousand live bears are currently being farmed in Asia for the production of bile. These bears are obtained as cubs, then caged in enclosures so small that an adult bear cannot fully stand or extend its body. The caged bears have injuries to their heads and faces, and broken teeth from trying to bite through the bars to escape” (154-155).

This deplorable practice continues despite the fact that the efficacy of using bile for the treatment of such ailments as hemorrhoids, fevers and alcohol over-indulgence has never been substantiated.

Throughout this all-encompassing survey of bears, Ayres’s respect and affection for them is evident. Facts are plentiful—deftly interspersed with answers dispensed at the exact instant questions arise in readers’ minds. By journey’s end, having used research, folklore and anecdotes the author accomplishes her task of raising awareness while creating an entertaining, absorbing, and well-formed portrait of these impressive creatures.