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New Books - 05/08
Rising, Falling, Hovering by C.D. Wright ($22 Copper Canyon) This new
collection of personal, lyrical poetry by a masterful talent is welcome. Two
of the book's five sections, which comprise the majority of it, record a
trip through Mexico and her "funnel of feelings about going anywhere /
during a war." Ms. Wright is unstinting in her visceral reaction to the
war -- "rage could be my issue." But a variety of human conflicts are
explored in her work. The plight of undocumented workers heading north and
the Iraq war's ubiquitous media presence are mixed with her son's
post-adolescent goofiness, including his joining a fight club -- "can't you
just stay inside and read / (turning pages) / until you're thirty or
something" -- as well as the way a long trip can exacerbate small conflicts
between a couple -- "He tells her to turn off the light though he has his
own light / and it is switched off." While she is attuned to our human
minutia, Ms. Wright's voice at times nearly booms like a prophet's
proclaiming the slide toward doom -- "Have you ever attempted to count the
storage tanks when you / passed them on the way back. Have you ever reeled /
under the magnitude of petroleum's ruin." Note: C.D. Wright will give a free reading at the Central Library in downtown Seattle, Wednesday, June 4, at 7:00 PM. We will be offering her books for sale at
that event.
Sea Change by Jorie Graham ($23.95 Ecco) This is poetry in real-time -- that is, as you read it, you are given the exquisite, intense opportunity to
think along with one of America's most rigorous, searching, innovative
poets. Her poems do not seem predetermined, as if she sat down to write
knowing where she wanted to end up. Here the eye and the mind -- and the
heart -- are shown in motion, moving across the beloved and degraded
landscape. Her focus is wide -- environmental destruction, war -- yet
profoundly intimate. How does the self perceive, act, endure -- or not -- in
this assaulted world?: "You are interrupted again and again by change, &
crouchings out there / where you are told each second you / are only
visiting." Each poem has a similar form -- lines move left and right from a
median point on the page, like waves rolling slowly over and back across a
beach where the reader stands, a movement soothing yet relentless, and
cumulatively powerful. Awareness of an irretrievable yet echoing past, acute
attention to the beautiful, vulnerable, damaged present, and contemplation
of a once unfathomable future, these shape Ms. Graham's work -- "make of
your / compassion a / crisper instrument, you will need its blade."
This Dirty Little Heart by B.T. Shaw ($14.95 Eastern Washington
University) With crackling wit, and seemingly with cracking knuckles, Ms.
Shaw's first collection of poetry comes as a vibrant force. For an example
of her wit here is, in its entirety, the poem "Portrait of My Grandfather as
Rhett Butler" -- "Frankly, my dear, / I don't give a darn." And, for the
knuckles, this from "The First Time Your Daughter Runs Away From Home" --
"And when it's no longer late dinner but predawn, / a shadow you recognize
crosses the lawn, her feet raising a drift / of fallen cherry blossoms that
were -- as it turned out this time -- // only mimicking winter." Ms. Shaw's
work is jazzily musical, caustic, comical, and quite gleefully alive.
Seven Notebooks by Campbell McGrath ($23.95 Ecco) The latest from this often wry yet plainly caring chronicler of contemporary American society
charts a year in his life in prose and poetry. The seven notebooks of the
title cover spring in Chicago, summer in Jersey, and winter in Florida, that
"glorious and venal" state that's come to be a prominent character in his
work. Along the way he ponders Neruda and Whitman, teaching and surfing, Van
Gogh and Hiroshige, the act of creation and the fact of mortality. The poem
"Existence" concludes:
Driving from Miami we stopped to watch the manatees
that shelter all winter in the Homosassa River
and happened upon an island inhabited by monkeys.
There was a sign explaining how they had been pets
of a local eccentric but now lived without interference
on their mangrove-shrouded refuge, kept healthy
by a diet of fresh mangoes and Purina monkey chow.
So the myth of a benevolent, all-providing god.
But what was the monkeys' opinion of their captivity
in the midst of that astonishing, spring-fed river?
Were they aware how much their predicament
resembled our own? Could they feel the current of time
swirling past and around them? Did they even exist?
The sign was hand-lettered, the morning silent,
the story preposterous though hardly impossible.
We saw no monkeys, but what does that prove?
And take a look at our May 2008 calendar listings for descriptions of books by John Burgess, Elizabeth Bradfield, Sean Hill, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, and John Olson.
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