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Open Books: Event Archive
January 28, 2007 03:00 PM
MONICA FAMBROUGH & DEBORAH WOODARD
The poems in Monica Fambrough's first chapbook, Black Beauty, ($5
Katalanché Press) are beguiling and off-kilter. "I am the new colt. I took
the creamery road to the palace," begins the poem titled, "I love them as I'
m defying them." Her work is plain in tone yet evocative -- "It is almost
early, so the sky // is dog-empty whiteness. I don't flower." -- as pure and
unsettling as a fairytale, but with a contemporary edginess.
Many of the poems in Deborah Woodard's first full-length collection,
Plato's Bad Horse ($16 Bear Star Press), deftly investigate the telling --
and tellers -- of stories. Whether drawing on the personal or the mythic,
her work is often a meditation on memory and perspective. "My memories have
become too blurred / to be of use, like horses that cannot be ridden." The
language of her lyrical poems is finely crafted yet pleasingly dotted with
colloquialisms and humor, as in a poem with an imagined, thieving magpie, "a
bespangled ur-bird / to whom I might say, 'Er, bird, / could I have that
ring, gleaming in your beak?'" Particularly striking are the poems focusing
on her parents -- poignant, vivid, and inventive.
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