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Open Books: Events
November 08, 2009 03:00 PM
TOD MARSHALL & RON SLATE
The tangled line in Tod Marshall’s latest, The Tangled Line ($14 Canarium), is the family line. At the core of this moving and inventive collection is the issue of the custody of a male child. The intensity of feeling here is profound, and ironically mythic -- "Chicken-necked Daedalus will stew / for days and gloom around / the house, asking dying plants, the new / photos on the wall, a mound // of unopened mail: 'What did I do / wrong?'" The poems range in style from direct reportage to lyrical flowering, always to strong effect. Themes recur; one of several garden-tending pieces provides this complicated insight -- “What does not blossom here // may blossom elsewhere, and be just as beautiful. / And if I said that was solace, the lie would not be untrue.” Marshall teaches at Gonzaga University. He has published a prior collection of poetry, Dare Say, a book of interviews with Northwest poets, Range of the Possible, and an anthology of those poets’ work, Range of Voices.
Ron Slate comes to us with an unusual history. After earning a MA in creative writing from Stanford in 1973, he entered corporate life, eventually becoming Vice President for global communications for EMC. In an interview he said, “corporate communications are typically urgent and concise.” Slate virtually stopped writing poetry until 2001. His first collection, The Incentive of the Maggot, won the 2005 Bakeless Prize. His second book, The Great Wave ($23 Houghton Mifflin), is a collection exceptionally rich in characters, unusual circumstances, and the difficulties and magic of communication. Slate’s past gives his poetry a grounding few poets have. In “The Meeting in Madrid” he writes that, after a threat caused the evacuation of an international conference, “we waited on the plaza / while the band wondered what to play / at a time like this -- something / to console or wake the world / or simply to please themselves.” He lives in Milton, Massachusetts, and runs an active website at www.ronslate.com.
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