26 Sep

Review: The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog

Randomly inspired and yet meticulously woven, The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog, written by Daniel McGinn, is so fervently raw, it serves as a glimpse inside the process of a poet coming to fruition. “I don’t know what to write about I tell her…” McGinn states upon the opening of his second collection of poetry. “Just follow the light she says/the light is free to go wherever it wants she says/as she goes to the candle she keeps on the table/and lights its brittle wick.”

At once honest and masterfully written, McGinn effortlessly leads readers down a rabbit hole of poetic snap-shots and slice-of-life reveries that range from the complexities of childhood to the inevitability of death within the span of pages. In the poem “Mother Laughing,” McGinn effectively resurrects his mother in a stream-of-consciousness piece that juxtaposes the memory of her making strawberry ice cream to the vast feeling of emptiness the poet experiences as he mirrors her same behaviors, albeit, without her. “Roll it with the scoop your mother owned, it’s been in the kitchen drawer for at least 40 years. It belongs in your hand. Some things never change.” By reconstructing a memory with language, as well as highlighting the subliminal effects this memory has on the author, McGinn delicately forges a new line between past and present, grief and remembrance, and solidifies the idea that just because someone is gone, it does not mean they are forgotten.

Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog, is its sequencing structure, which is determined by content, and not traditional linear timelines. In the “The Passenger,” McGinn discusses a conversation he had with his father while driving a Grand Prix. “Every time you win two hands in a row, double your bet. Play your cards right, I do and that’s how I got this fine automobile…” In the subsequent poem, “The Mountain,” the author contrasts this moment with a darker one he experiences in his own truck, as an adult. “I cussed and smudged-up the inside of my window in hard circles like I’d smudged-up my life and I felt older than this beat-up tuck, which was all I could afford.” By breaking the fourth wall of the page, and allowing readers to have a more intimate view of a poet’s inner monologue, these concepts, loosely woven into recurring images, allows the collection to move as fast as the timing of life. Blink, and it’s over, the reader left to flurry the pages, reaching for whatever he or she might have missed from in-between the lines.

30 Jul

Review of Drop and Dazzle by Peggy Dobreer

Review by Julianne Carew

Drop and Dazzle

At once transient and yet powerfully grounding, Peggy Dobreer’s poetry collection, Drop and Dazzle, leads readers through an assemblage of life’s most defining moments, including birth, death, and every human emotion that can be found in between. By contrasting the intimacies of everyday life with the vastness of the universe, Dobreer successfully encapsulates the intensity of the corporeal experience, while at the same time making it clear that “we are stardust, hardly a thought, a fleeting note on its way to a verse or song.”

From the collection’s first poem, “Climbing the Moment of Birth,” Dobreer emphasizes an internal relationship with the outside world, and the impact this has on an individual. She states, “On a war-tired base, under desert skies, the only thing I remember of my birth is the smell of death.” By sensually connecting the first moments of existence with the reality of its imminent conclusion, Dobreer stresses the immediacy of life, the fragility of all that it has to offer, and sets the stage for the work that follows.

Sprinkled throughout Drop and Dazzle is the subject of continuity, and how the creation of something inevitably marks the beginning of its end. In “Genesis,” Dobreer writes, “Like, force, it has no opposition/until something moves against it.” In poetically highlighting the natural observer effect that humanity unconsciously adheres to, Dobreer emphasizes the simple fact that life has meaning because we provide it. Life, storytelling, the very idea of artistic expression, it is all a way of reacting to a force in which we have no control over. Dobreer follows up with this concept in a later poem, “Ashes to Ashes,” which concludes with the phrase, “You can finally forget the world, return unto the earth.”

In conjunction with thought-provoking, philosophical concepts, there are many sobering moments throughout the collection that speak for the immense struggles of the human experience. In “The Hands of Glory,” Dobreer brings attention to the obscured focus of public opinion when she describes a public execution. After a man is put to death and his handkerchief is stolen, “the execution crowd disbursed, they mourned the loss of the miracle, maybe more so than the life of the man on the rope.” On a more personal note, she later continues, “I checked. My breath was there/becoming deeper, more pronounced, the way breath will in the presence/of a body without one gasp left.”

In short, Drop and Dazzle lives up to its title. At once dazzling and thought-provoking, Dobreer’s ethereal literary voice leaves readers breathless, feeling at once empowered, and humbled within the star-studded universe she creates within the constructs of a page.

 

 

 

05 May

Staff Review: The Green of Sunset by John Brantingham

(the following review will also be published in Volume 2, Issue 1)

John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset is a beautiful collection of prose poetry. Brantingham explores the human psyche to depths we, ourselves, almost refuse to acknowledge until present with truths we prefer to not think about. And that is exactly what he does. Yet he treats each subject and each emotion with the utmost respect and humanity. The only judgment he makes, if any, is on his own follies and we, as readers, can learn to laugh at our own.

The collection is a series of breathless poems, power beyond the measure of each. He explores a wide range of humanity and human experience from youth to loss, people in relation to nature, memory, and even briefly a body swap all with deceptively simple language.

… but I wasn’t afraid because my mother was framed in the back door, calling to me, and that fundamentalist faith I had that as long as she was there even God couldn’t reach out his hand and strike me down for the sins written on my childhood soul.

from “Mythology”

Brantingham is a master of the written word—each choice is deliberate and reflects the meaning of the whole poem and collection, building into a crescendo for each ending. There are no punches pulled and nowhere left to hide from confronting his reality—a reality we all know too well. His personal reflections are those we recognize as fleeting moments in our own lives, these deep secrets we try to hide from are brought to life on the page.

Anders is probably the first poet I’ve ever known who distrusts academia and teachers and schools and education in general. …. He tells me about why he didn’t finish high school, about the physics teacher who belittled him in front of his friends. He tells me about how when I was in college, he was bumming his way through Europe, Asia, India, Africa, and South America. …. He’s like so many of the students I’ve seen, feeling like outsiders, being told that they don’t belong.

from “Up Here in Rural Canada”

The Green of Sunset is a collection to turn to at any moment, to read and re-read until the pages are worn. You may or may not find comfort within the book, but you will find parts of you that you didn’t know had wandered off.