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Bud Break at Mango House by
Jen Karetnick
(The Portlandia Group, Paperback, 31 pp., $8.00)
Reviewed
by Nick Vagnoni
Bud Break at Mango House, the title of Jen Karetnick's most recent chapbook, refers to the yearly blooming
of the mango trees. "Bud break signals the start of a new season," says the chapbook's preface. It's a fitting
title for a collection that deals with the cycles of the natural world in South Florida. The poems speak with authority about
the seasonal changes here, and the repetition Karetnick employs in forms such as sestinas and villanelles serves to transfer
that authority to the reader. After the first stanza
of the sestina "Bud Break," we know that the end word of each line will return again and again throughout the poem.
As still as wine, the pool robed in blueness Soon the dun robins will mistake plate glass for passage,
though the intervals will be unpredictale, while on the live oak trees the blue jays polish themselves like chefs' knives.
Then
the bees will leave their hidden hives. Karetnick writes with the
knowing voice of someone who has experienced these seasons many times, and the sestina's repetitions grant the reader a similar
knowlege and expectation. We are unsure how, exactly, these six words will reappear throughout the poem, but, just as
the author again awaits and welcomes the new mango season, we now wait for their familiar yet always slightly different return: Later, this
summer, we will pour into this glass juice pummeled from mangos, poke straws like
knives deep into the syrupy pulp,
flash paring knives over the seals of rum bottles that be- wilder sweaty hands when curved around glass that itself
has been left in the sun, hives of condensation running down blueness,
label sticky as if with the sap of trees. Though many
of the poems share this calm, observational tone, Karetnick also uses more direct address while still using form to reinforce
meaning. "Venetian Way," for example, begins: Let's keep things simple. There's
little story to tell. The early-morning night beats the
street with shadows and it's a pleasure to
add
my weight. Shoes slapping the arcs
that lead me
away from the man sleeping patiently with pillows, I run from island to island,
The tiny couplets continue through the poem, mimicking the tiny, opulent islands of Miami's Venetian Causeway, and
the frequently-enjambed lines serve as bridges that carry the reader from one stanza to the next. These
short couplets appear again in "Conga Duet: A Lesson," this time mirroring the poem's male and female conga players.
Along with frequent end rhymes, Karetnick makes ample use of internal rhyme, folding a slant rhyme into the middle of a line
or across a pair of couplets, to approximate a kind of syncopation, with some stanzas hooked to the next by the embedded rhyme: He hooks
his ankle around his drum the way he would rest his foot on the rungs of a chair . . .
or At the back of El Yunque bookstore
on the west side of the city, Annie arrives like a bride, still veiled with the snow slanting outside, silent
In many of these poems, the line between the Florida landscape and those who inhabit it is often blurred. In
"One Form of Therapy," we find a beach, "with a comb-over/of palm fronds." And in "Scene and Herd,"
Karetnick contemplates the effects a storm has on both the people and the place, ". . . watching/transformers spark and
sand rise/and the streets flood like shared happiness/around my ankles . . ." The collection closes
with the sonnet "First Mango of the Season," which revisits many of the events and images from "Bud Break,"—blue
jays, chefs' knives, and, of course, the coming of a new crop of mangoes. The poem begins:
The first mango of the season is in miniature, precise down to its blush
but smaller than a peach, skin and flesh hinged to a pit the heft of an almond
Again, Karetnick treats the new mango with familiarity, but also with wonder and excitement. Working in the tradition of poets
like Pablo Neruda or Kay Ryan, she takes ordinary things—fruit, the weather, the places we call home—and with
a careful eye teases out their complexities and shows them to us as the captivating things they are.
Nick Vagnoni recently received his MFA
in poetry from Florida International University, where he currently teaches creative writing. His poems and reviews have
appeared in Alimentum, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Florida English, Backwards & Ugly, The Secret of Salt,
and Solares Hill.
Hope, As The World Is A Scorpion
Fish by Liz Robbins
(The Backwater Press, Paperback, 84 pp., $16.00)
Reviewed by Nick Vagnoni
The speakers of Liz Robbins's poems all share a fascination with the outside world. More specifically, many of the poems
in this Flagler College professor's first collection, Hope, As The World Is a Scorpion Fish,
want to probe the connection between the mind of the speaker and the life that swirls around them. Taken as a whole,
Hope . . . is a meditation on the careful observer and the sense that he or she tries
to make out of the world. These poems seek connection—between past and present, between self and other, between
human beings and nature. Almost always, however, there is a pause, a moment of hesitation, that keeps the speaker from
connecting completely.
Sometimes there are literal boundaries, such as in "Women Picking Potatoes Outside Amsterdam," where the
speaker takes in the world from a train compartment, as visions of women harvesting pass quickly through the window.
The speaker's companion says, "You need to interact with people, which you don't do out of fear/ of rejection."
He gets up, opens the door of their compartment, and the activity of the rest of the train comes rushing in: ...the air-conditioned
air of the dining car, the hum of the people speaking Dutch and English
in low voices, pool into the space he's left. The clink
of silverware. I look around, meet briefly the eyes of a woman dressed in a suit, alone and reading, picking at her plate of steak and peas,
its mountain of potatoes,
and she reminds me of home.
In "Studio," the poem that follows "Women Picking Potatoes . . . " the speaker is again semi-secluded,
this time in their apartment, where signs of life such as cigarette smoke and music drift through both the floors and ceilings.
In the poem's final lines, we again find the speaker at the window, trying to make meaning of the outside world: "Stars
shine beyond the windows, two/ or three in bright clusters, and the occasional one, alone."
Even when there aren't floorboards or glass, there is still a pause or hesitation when reaching out to embrace the world.
In "Apology with Sunset Motif," for example, "the sky changes nonchalantly,/ stripping its clothes/ as though
I'd been married to it for years," after which the speaker immediately asks, "Am I wrong to see the world as finding/
ways to reflect/ its inhabitants, to hold them captive here?"
Such reflections on the powers and ownership afforded to the observer come through again in "Love of Mine,"
a sonnet written after Edna St. Vincent Millay, in which the speaker confesses:
For your desire's really mine on loan, as in your eyes I see myself grow wet,
thus ready to lure mself into the sack
(your want of me's the aphrodisiac). Here, even in
the most intimate of situations, there is still an observational awareness that pervades, that keeps the speaker from becoming
completely engaged in the moment.
This observation grip loosens slightly as the collection progresses, however. Robbins begins to experiment with other
subjects—her father, or Odysseus, for example—and other points of view. Many of the poems in Hope . . . 's fifth and final section are written in the second person. The final poem, "Running
the Race," comes closest to achieving the unity that the speaker of the earlier poems sought. The subject of the
poem, having just run a marathon, now sits in celebratory repose, and is told by the speaker:
Your mind has left
its tight prison during this, the big endorphin swim . . .
so you wil sit, and sip,
and win not from whatever your place
in the race,
but because you opened the floodgates
to let it all in. At last, Robbins
allows one of her characters to let the world in. It seems a fitting end to this collection of poems that are so often
intrigued with the world, yet still wary of fully giving themselves over to it.
Nick Vagnoni recently received his MFA in poetry from
Florida International University in Miami, where he currently teaches creative writing. His poems and reviews have appeared
in Alimentum, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Florida English, Backwards & Ugly, The Secret of Salt, and
Solares Hill.
Uh Oh Time by Kenneth Hart
(Anhinga Press, Paperback, 98 pp., $15.00)
Reviewed by Peter Borrebach
They come in out of the world, worker gnomes, matter-of-fact
drop their packs and talk business as they take off, and hang up
coats on labeled hooks —
This matter-of-factness, which belongs to schoolchildren’s conversations in “Monday Morning,” characterizes
almost all of the poems in Kenneth Hart’s Uh Oh Time. Hart writes with an unassuming voice, presenting anecdotes
of Americana, convinced, it would seem, that each contains its own truths, though the poems that do the most work in tying
the book together are those that reach furthest in trying to place where one “lone American male’s” stories
fit into a larger sense of contemporary America.
“Rush Hour in America” introduces a central motif, the commute. The poem's first person narrator betrays
a bit of edge towards his fellow commuters, but mostly wishes to interact with them, finding empathy with his colleagues in
envying a neighboring auto’s coffee and crullers. Beyond the speaker, an irate radio personality who
maybe hires someone to thump his desk or owns a thumping machine. takes a central role. As with many of the book’s
poems, the goal here seems to be to make a singular experience plural—to combine the personal narratives of Frank O’Hara
with the grander sense of an America of William Carlos Williams. This plural
experience is heightened in a later commute poem, “Keep America Beautiful,” where Hart adopts the first person
plural to voice the action of its short narrative. While the speaker is “uneasy sharing this time with myself”
in “Rush Hour,” he can’t get as mad as the man accosting him through the radio—accosting anyone who
will listen, really. This accosted mass of anyones is the “we” of the “Keep America Beautiful,” in
which "we're stalled in traffic."
The pluralizing hinges on the details of a commute, which, no matter how uniquely reported or identifiable the location
(this commute happens to be in Providence), will always be of the same ilk. The prison crew picking up garbage and the seagulls
hovering over the scene are not clichés, but universals. Just as he skirts familiarity, Hart also ably dodges politics
in this poem; the judgment is light, the reportage incidental. I found the skillful play of freedoms which dances through
the middle of the poem— bumper stickers announce the price of freedom,
claim liberty is our right. The guard in mirror sunglasses leans against
the correctional facitily van, props a shotgun on his knee like he's auditioning for
a movie. He's protecting our freedom to litter from
the inmates' desire to be free of litter. —to build an expectation for more direct political thought, but through the calmness of
the voice I was persuaded to take a simpler view: the poet was driving down the highway, and this is what he saw.
The “we” of “American Music” is similar to that of “Keep America Beautiful,” both
in import and in grounding. Again, even as the action of the poem itself remains anecdotal, the experience is written as being
social, plural, as though the speaker has taken it upon himself to be the voice for the stunned shoppers of the occurrence:
Most of us stood around making believe we were looking through the 'L' or 'T' section
of CDs...
The “we” also seeks to be historical and relational. The potential disjunction arises when the sensibility
remains committed to a singular set of quiet details and consistent matter-of-factness, while at the same time wanting to
be grander in scope (more American, broader in audience, whatever). The national
scope of the book becomes comparative with “The Russian Women.” The Russian woman of the title, a stripper, gives
voice to a more explicitly anti-American sentiment: her and her fellow immigrant strippers are better read than most Americans.
The environs of the strip club keep Olya (or Alyona—the speaker is uncertain) from sounding too vehement, however, as
even her attack on American literacy occurs within a well-described flirtation. The poem draws to its close with a mind towards
the small narrative, as opposed to anything of national scope. Olya brushes aside issues of national intellectuality, and
reckons that this strip club is staffed by Russians “because we are the most beautiful,” and “flounces”
to the stage.
Though these miniature scenes are inarguable in their consistency of voice, the consistency itself may be problematic
for some readers, as, however well controlled the lines, some poems do seem to blur into others. The few more formally rigorous
poems in the book are invigorating, as the formal conventions provide some much needed tension within the matter-of-factness
of Uh Oh Time. Peter
Borrebach lives in North Miami. He has published several poems and indie comics with small journals across the country and
also writes a weekly cultural criticism column, "Culturology," at the multimedia blog www.audioshocker.com.
Begin Anywhere by Frank Giampetro
(Alice James Books, Paperback, 64 pp., $14.95)
Reviewed by Nick Vagnoni
In “Begin Anywhere,” the title poem of this collection by Tallahassee-based Frank Giampietro, the speaker tries
several different approaches to depict the suicide of a family member. “I could begin with my father’s strong
right arm / heaving his shotgun into the lake,” he starts, then continues:
... Or ten minutes earlier with my father not consoling, but wanting to console
my half-sister as she stands there, a shadow’s length from the doorway watching
him hold
what’s left of his first wife... With
each starting point, Giampietro brings us a little closer, and we can eventually piece together an understanding of the events
that took place.
It’s appropriate that this poem comes near the center of this collection and provides the collection’s
title, as it can serve as a guide to reading the entire book. Really, one can begin
almost anywhere in this collection of poems and get a fairly accurate idea of the style and subject matter that flow throughout.
While the poems do not focus on the suicide, many are fueled by a sense of domesticity that is usually undercut by something
darker.
“Dope,” for example, begins: The inscription on the barrel
of the .20 caliber
derringer I carried in the front pocket of my coat when I went to buy drugs
is as lost to me
as one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” I memorized last summer
by taping it with Band-Aids to the hood of my riding lawnmower. In this first sentence, we are made keenly aware not only of the speaker’s
past as someone who regularly needed to arm himself when going to cop heroin, but of his more recent present as someone who
owns a riding mower, lives in a house stocked with Band-Aids, and has the luxury of enough time to memorize poetry.
Still, not all poems are split down the middle between drugs and Raisin Bran. Some are more purely playful, such as
“To Do List #5333,” which includes items such as “Discover all there is to know about pomade,” and
“Find the passage where God allows Moses to glimpse His back as He passes.” Others are more jarringly tender,
such as “Notes Toward a Long Marriage,” which begins: “Heather wanted James to read her by the panty liners
/ she left facing up in the bathroom wastebasket.”
Perhaps what makes Giampietro’s poems so accessible is the even-handed presentation of more jagged subject matter—smoking
crack on a rooftop with a pregnant woman, for example—alongside his treatment of the quotidian demands of parenthood,
such as waking in the middle of the night to bring one’s son a glass of juice (both occur in the book’s opener,
“Juice”). In writing about drug addiction, there is always the opportunity to condemn or glamorize, but Giampietro
wisely does neither. He presents events plainly, weaving memory into day-to-day life, and the result is a quiet irony that
never over-reaches. Rather, the speaker of many poems in Begin Anywhere seems, at
times, to have a sense of knowing tranquility, of the satisfied exhaustion that results from years of hard living smoothed
over by years of family life.
Nick Vagnoni recently received his MFA in poetry from Florida International University in Miami, where he currently
teaches creative writing. His poems and reviews have appeared in Alimentum, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Florida
English, Backwards & Ugly, The Secret of Salt, and Solares Hill.
Halfway Decent Sinners by
Michael Cleary
(CustomWords, Paperback, 120 pp., $17.00)
Reviewed
by Jesse Millner
Perhaps every poet
should drive a beer truck. Perhaps every poet should grow up with the rigorous rigmarole of Catholicism. If
that were to happen, then, and only then, would a poet craft a book as funny, sorrowful and beautiful as Michael Cleary’s
Halfway Decent Sinners. The
first section of the book, “Original Sins,” brings us “Boss’s Son,” which reveals key themes
of the collection. “Gradually they taught me their secrets:/ let your legs do the lifting and save
your back.” And herein lies Cleary’s genius: Within the literal, tangible
lessons that the other workers impart to the “boss’s son,” lie profound ideas about the worlds of work and
play. Much like Phillip Levine’s What Work Is, Cleary’s poems show us this wisdom
that comes from “sweat,” “sore muscles” and “hangovers.” The effect
of this poem is to show clearly a young man’s entry into that world and his ambiguous relationship with his father,
who is also his boss. Because the poet’s father will die young, a powerful light is cast upon this difficult relationship.
The real skill of Cleary’s
work is revealed in this first section as well. He creates concrete and specific situations, allows us
to enter into those places, and share the experiences imagistically. However, there’s much more than
a funny and/or moving experience chronicled in these poems: they often bring real complexity; a little box opens and out springs
trouble, beauty and insight. We read about childhood encounters with Catholicism, “I never heard a nun fart,”
and are surprised to find the speaker’s longing for a real girl nun, Sister Robert Claire, revealed in the poem.
Again, Cleary begins with the tangible and specific (and often quite funny) and brings in the much larger realm of
adolescent desire in a way that seems natural, even inevitable in the movement of the poem.
The second section of the book deals with the rather odd Aunt Sara, who provides a beautiful space between the first
and third sections of the book. Here the poems are less narrative and more lyrically risk-taking.
They deal with the sighs of illicit fulfillment, of strange love and lust as in “Aunt Sara’s Nap”:
“Nuzzling her cheek upon his chest/ She molds herself around him.” A remarkable simile
shows the intensity of this lovemaking in “Aunt Sara, Waiting”: “as his body gusts above her/like a kite
on an April day.” Within this section, there’s also the very uncomfortable poem “Aunt
Sara at the Meat Counter, “ where she encounters a child, “a boy, his face twisted with screams./
She knows she could comfort him, how easy/ to nurse any man’s child.”
The last part of the book, “Dirty Jokes,” finds the poet dealing with the most serious issues, including
the premature death of his father. These poems are intensely beautiful and rigorous examinations of loss
and longing. While the early parts of the collection document the loss of traditional religious belief,
including the soothing notion that heaven awaits the faithful and therein lies the opportunity to make things right, the final
section shows Cleary unsparingly looking for ultimate meaning, either in each particular poem or in the long meditation that
a book of poetry sometimes provides. In his case the poems add up to a kind of redemption in the hard-earned
realization that truly living means unloading beer trucks, learning crude jokes, falling in love, training a dog, getting
divorced and remarried, losing one’s father, instead of dwelling on the possibilities of an officially-sanctioned afterlife.
The meaning of Cleary’s meditation is the acknowledgment of agnosticism and his ability to accept the hard and
beautiful ambiguity that loss and sorrow, seasoned with those too-fleeting moments of laughter, even happiness, are the central
truths of our lives. The reader feels the imprint of a real life lived on every page.
But the most important effect of the book is shown in the poem, “Blue Barns,” near the end of the collection.
Here Cleary brings about a sad reconciliation through language: “so let me sweeten/ the lousy deal you got before
I let you go.” And the poem becomes the act of letting go of his father, and for a moment the “real”
and tangible world of sorrow merges with and becomes the words and their meanings that Cleary so adeptly shares with us.
Further, in “Blue Barns” the literal barns along the road are replaced in the poem’s closure by the
figurative Blue Barns of heaven. The real and imagined, earth and paradise, life and death, all exist simultaneously
in Cleary’s poems. And because of this amazing juxtaposition, he generously brings us along on the
journey between this world of light and love and loss, and the next world where perhaps the sorrows of this one will be finally
recompensed. Or not.
Jesse Millner has published three poetry chapbooks, The Drowned Boys (March Street Press),
On the Saturday After the Rapture (Main Street Rag Press) and I Give You This Ghost (Pudding House Publications).
A fourth chapbook, Holy Numbers, is forthcoming from Pudding House. A full-length collection, The Neighborhoods
of My Past Sorrow, will be released in February 2009 by Kitsune Books. Jesse teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University
and lives with his wife, Lyn, and dog, Sam, in Estero, Florida.
The Moving
Waters by Mary Jane Ryals (Kitsune Books, Paperback, 143 pp., $14.00) Reviewed by Kristin Kovacic
If still waters run deep, then moving waters are, by implication, shallow. Florida poet Mary Jane
Ryals puts this conventional wisdom to the test in her restless poetry collection, The Moving Waters.
Here the poet crosses the water many times—to Spain, France, Mexico, Ireland, Portugal, Morocco, Vietnam, even
the swamps of her native Florida—to navigate the eternal themes: love and fortune, beauty and temporality, motherhood
and romance.
Ryals asks both the traveler’s question—What to make of the riches of the world?—and that of the
rooted—How to savor what we’re given? The result is poetry that bounces between exotic wonders and more ordinary
ones, often with startling speed:
. . . I do not want to move, but to absorb this moment
that Genileschi understood,
not of Fate and of eating your children, but the story of how sometimes Fate delivers
you
to the left hand of Bosch’s triptych, to the god with the pink robe, Adam and Eve in an orange grove,
to the second chance,
almost to heaven where your children laugh and jump on beds when you get back from El Prado, and
angels float down
like bed feathers from coral fountains
into your life.
—“Finding Moses in Madrid”
Each section of The
Moving Waters has a watery title, invoking the streams, both literal and figurative, of the poet’s imagination.
The short section about Vietnam, the red bridge of the forever river, contains five astonishing poems about a country
disturbing in both its beauty and its horrors:
. . . the sidewalk is a shallow pool for surfing through the legless. —from “Red Chaos,
Old Hanoi, June, 105 degrees”
In Vietnam, the poet is moved, not just to look, but to see. She sees the color (turquoise) threading the
landscape and her own daughter’s flip-flops; she sees, through her twelve-year-old daughter, the injustice that is their
true connection to the Third World:
They are so poor, you said,
they have nothing. But
they still give you things.
—“To My Daughter at 12 in Vietnam”
I appreciate how Ryals
approaches motherhood with wonder but without sentimentality. Her kids appear throughout her journeys, as in utero travelers
and teenaged companions. They are insightful and crabby, touching and touchy—in other words, Ryals
makes them real. In fact, her approach to motherhood and to writing seem well embodied in the following
manifesto:
My son, my daughter, we will all die someday, but not now, not now. Look—
“To My Children on Father’s Day at Wakulla Springs, Florida”
This wide-ranging collection also looks hard at the world most writers truly inhabit—academia—but which
they rarely acknowledge as a subject. Ryals, a teacher at Florida State University, writes about her students,
about the soul-sucking odyssey of an MLA conference, and it’s refreshing, to say the least, to read a poet who acknowledges
where the money that fuels the poetic world (and the jet plane that takes you there) comes from.
Florida’s Big Bend is well served by Mary Jane Ryals, its Poet Laureate, as this ambitious first collection amply
shows. May the moving waters continue to flow for her.
Kristin Kovacic is the co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion (University of Iowa
Press). She lives in Pittsburgh.
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Published Florida poets respond to questions from Richard Ryal, for which they
deserve no blame. Question: It's right to call Florida the Sunshine State. The local sun can lull
us into rest or simmer us into an irritable frenzy. Florida's climate, always unique, is all around us and keeps
trying to get inside us. Is it in your poetry? If so, how? If not, why not?
Terri Witek: As someone who grew up
under the peerlessly overcast skies of northern Ohio, I keep a special trapdoor in my head for sunshine. When I was
sixteen, I was sent off to Brazil for a year I remember mostly as the vivid blues and greens supplied by intense sunlight.
I loved this so much that when I came to Florida for the first time I was moved by a sense of the longed-for.
I sit and write in a chair with the sun falling over my shoulder—this is as close as I get to a necessary poetic
position, I think! And (perhaps consequently), I have written many poems about sleeping and waking up in sunlight.
One I am happiest about writing is called "The Yellow Curtain": Googled with the quotation marks around it,
this comes up both as a gorgeous Vuillard painting and my humble poem, which actually references Vuillard. I love this.
As others long for sun in September, we are unthinking luxuriants in it. I hope my work will always be so happily sun-drenched.
Note: "The Yellow Curtain"
appears in The Carnal World (Storyline Press). Terri Witek is professor of English
and the Art and Melissa Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing, Stetson University, DeLand, FL.
James Brock:
I like to think of myself as an exotic to the Florida clime.
No, I'm not a Nile Monitor, or even Brazilian Pepper, but just a man who was born and raised in the semi-arid northern
rim of the Great Basin. That would be Boise, Idaho to those who aren't familiar with the geologies of the Intermountain
West. And so, I've taken semi-root in South Florida over the last ten years. It has been all too easy for
my hard-scrabble bitterbrush poetry to absorb all this moist, contrary, and fecund landscape of Florida, both natural and
urban, both Cracker and Caribbean, and both native and exotic.
In my poetry, it's just the problem
of Florida (or rather, the idea of Florida) that has been such rich fertilizer. Here is a place where everyone seems
to be arriving, on what sometimes feels like the true American West, on an unspeakably beautiful backdrop that is all to easy
to exploit, fill in, and inhabit. And in the trees are the mixing of languages, ghost tongues of Caloosahatchee and
"relocated" Seminole, of nasally Midwest twang against sharp New Yorker accents, of patinas of Spanish, Creole,
English, German. It's a place ready for any voice, which does make it exciting and possible.
The result is that
my poetry has taken all kinds of unexpected turns in the last ten years. Yes, initially, it was the predictable love-affair
a poet must have with Miami, where every line must be about sex, sex and sex. But then it was the drawing in of all
these other voices: I began to play with received forms, just as I was receiving all these new Florida sounds and colors
and light. Yes, some of the traditional forms, the villanelle and sestina, but also improvised and self-actualized forms.
The cityscape is all about erasure and renewal, and so why not in my poetry?
And then moving
to the "West Coast," that is, Fort Myers, where the cultural ties follow I-75 up to Ohio, a place trying its best
not to be the East Coast (meaning we get the development but not the cultural infusion), I landed in a place very familiar
to me, a kind of Boise, Florida. Here is where I began to appreciate the native landscape, especially the saw palmetto
and slash pine, just as acre upon acre of it was being swallowed up for gated communities and "towne centers."
So my poetry took a turn home, or imagined home in Florida. Yes, Florida critters infiltrate my poems (ibises and mammoths
most recently), as does the light and speed of Florida. I'm pretty sure I'm going native with it, as much as
those golfers who are now just teeing up on the 13th hole just beyond my lanai. Note: Author of Pictures that Got Small (WordTech) and nearly Florida (Anhinga Press), James Brock teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. On
the web you can find his e-chapbooks Tangerine, On the Windy Side of Care, and read his blog.
Richard Ryal grew up in the New York area. A South Florida marketing
writer, he has begun teaching interdisciplinary writing to graduate students at Nova University.
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 The Search for Florida's Forgotten Poet Laureate And check out our Editor's blog on the history and role of state Poets Laureate.
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To Stand in the Kitchen of Our Memories
Cooking Lessons, by Nina Romano
(Rock Press,
Paperback, 112 pp., $12.95)
Reviewed by Jill Drumm
When I first began to write about food and cooking, the sense of being planted in
front of the stove physically and emotionally defined the creative space in which I wrote and—yes, I'll say it—fed
the writing process. Nina Romano’s poems seem to spring from a similar location. Standing in front
of the stove frying zucchini or over the sink skinning roasted peppers, Romano connects to persons and places of her past
as exotic as the recipe for dried and salted mullet roe pouches called Buttariga. From the
first poem, “Cooking Lessons,” a sestina in which we observe the eleven year-old initiated into the female rite
of preparing a meal for a man she loves (her father), Romano invites us into her (mother’s) kitchen. Suffused
in memory, she asks, “When did midsummer girls // become sunbathed women? When did they begin to serve / strawberries
and cream?” At Romano’s urging, in the kitchen we may feast, yearn, celebrate, lament, observe,
and extend, as in the final lines of the book’s closing poem, “Form & Theory”:
I am my mother’s child learning cooking lessons.
Here’s one I haven’t
mastered—memories. I eat memories raw.
In form & theory I am my mother—every woman
is woman’s child. Our world passes by in silent roar—
all our friends are dying, no one’s left
to call our names.
Every
woman, Mom & I pass on.
Who
in this world will remember?
We
were every woman in our time.
“Lucky
Life,” a poem that closes the third section of the book (Food for Thought), draws similar parallels between memory and
kitchen work:
Lucky
there’s tidiness to wash away and renew.
Lucky for me, there exists the mechanics of cooking,
when my mind recalls minutely and I live vicariously
the past—moments
that make me wince or cry, feel guilty,
or want to re-live. And luckier still, I think fast and say,
when you enter the kitchen to catch me weeping, it’s
the onions,
or I’ve just nicked my finger with the knife.
The above passage also indicates how culinary ritual consoles and even provides refuge against emotions and
memories that are otherwise uncontainable. Food is inextricable from familial and romantic
connection, representing deep pleasure, nourishment, and devotion through the details as well as the more ambivalent aspects
of relationships such as duty, routine, and substituting food for emotional expression/gratification.
Food appeals to every sense and provides an immediate, visceral link to the physical body. It is
impossible to read, “The Crucifixion of Garlic,” and not to smell garlic, or to come across “halls, corridors,
and passage- / ways [that] reeked with boiling tomato soup from the refectory” and not smell that neglectful lunchtime
fare, see the yellow-lit institutional hallways, and feel our bellies contract as we read. Poems in which Romano trusts the
sensory image to do the narrative or lyric fetching and carrying are her most successful, as in “Lover of Baskets.”
My favorite lines appear midway through the poem—rich in image and sound:
Funghi were dusted of bosk coats,
and skinned in spots. When she’d picked a chilo, minus basket weight, she quit the thicket, headed home to slice, dice, and
dissect every floppy, fat cap and chunky stem till every white-villain-white-worm,
cajoled by scorching sun, inched
their tidy bodies out
“San Felice Circeo: Hunters & Gatherers” is
also an imagistic pleasure, whether read in vertical columns or broken horizontal lines. The last three lines of the poem,
“the
arbor the quiver the
honey
the
arrow the matchstick the
woodpile
the
whistle the twilight
the kindling”
conclude what is
a bold and satisfying lyric collage. Syntactically the poems sometimes stumble, with an
errant comma or modifier making the reader work toward clarity, as in these lines from “Alone in Guilin”: “when
you reached across the table / to take my hand in yours, so real the remembrance / of your touch, that startled, / I jump
backwards . . .” I prefer instead the direct purity of lines from “Tonight,”
where the narrator declares, “I pity everyone who is anywhere else / but in this windless, cloudless Sardinian port
tonight.” Or the intimate opening lines of “In Summer”:
it is the metronoming of dusk that sets my heart quaking: Lipari
Romano’s poems celebrate the labyrinthine connections between memory and food, and
they invite us to stand in the kitchens of our own memories. Her poems earnestly explore the recipe as
cultural and familial artifact. “And now I know for sure we never die till the last person we know
dies, for just as I am remembering her, so someone else I teach will remember me when I’m gone—even if it’s
just on a 3x5 recipe card.” Well-prepared food and well-written poems, from the gathering to the
eating, are best enjoyed when the provisions are ripe and fresh. Romano has set a long table for us, and I hope more poets
are encouraged to join the feast.
Jill Drumm teaches composition and creative writing
at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly Review,
Creative Nonfiction, Crab Orchard Review, Southeast Review, Margie, and RUNES Review.
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Hooked on Hook
Hook, by Haya Pomrenze (Rock Press, Paperback, 80 pp, $12.95) Reviewed by Alex Handwerger
It is a tribute to Haya Pomrenze’s poetry that I read it aloud to my husband who appreciates a
poem as much as I appreciate a good math problem. I know he’s not listening, but still I read on,
desperate to share her words with anyone in possession of ears. Pomrenze is that kind of poet. From the
first poem “Straddle” in which the speaker straddles the “merry-go-round horse/at Magic Kingdom, balancing
two worlds,” we ride the carousel with Pomrenze as she celebrates the joy, weirdness and struggle of life with a fearless
grin and whip-smart senses. The world of her Orthodox Jewish upbringing and the secular world pull in different directions in many
poems. It’s the juxtaposition of the sacred and profane, the spiritual and the material that interests
Pomrenze, but she doesn’t compartmentalize. Instead she bridges the gap with hilarity and beauty. In “Salute”
she remembers her family’s trip to the Pentagon for a dinner honoring her father. “I wear a
polka dot/ dress with a satin bow/ and we eat kosher TV dinners/ in disposable aluminum trays/ while everyone else dines/
on filet mignon. The brisket/ of my dinner hooks/ in my teeth, stubborn,/ determined to stay there.” Her voice
is playful, highly comical at times, especially when she writes about family members. In “Knipl,” her mother-in-law-to-be
informs her about her fiancé, “I taught him how to do everything,/ she said. Bleach out wine stains,/
prepare a brisket even, fold laundry./ He’ll feign ignorance but don’t let him/ take advantage.
Make him help.” With her in-laws and others, she talks frankly about the complicated relationships we have with family
members, the push and pull, the shaky ground of love and hate. In “Father-in-Law’s Yahrzeit,”
the speaker is cleaning out her deceased father-in-law’s apartment, his belongings telling the story of his life. From
his cufflinks to his coupons and his favorite brand of cottage cheese, Pomrenze gives such a strong sense of the guy, I felt
like I knew him myself. We get a close-up of the even more complex mother-daughter
relationship in the title poem, “Hook,” a prose poem that reads like a very short story. As
the speaker helps her mother bra shop after a mastectomy, she remembers fastening her mother’s bra for her every morning
as a child. The five hooks of the bra are tough to pull together because her mother wore it a size too
small. “What if I suddenly let go of the elastic? Would my mother fly against the room, smash into
the family photo gallery above the brass hamper?” But the entire house is organized
around serving her mother. “Even my youngest sister, Dee, who was exempt from the bra-hooking ritual,
was assigned the task of scratching my mother’s head nightly so she could relax.” We get the
humor and then we get the poignancy as the speaker faces her mom’s ageing, her mastectomy and their complicated relationship.
“Maybe it’s the garish light in the dressing room or the contour made by the polka dots but her breasts
take on the silhouette of the comedy and tragedy masks seen on the billboards of old movie houses.” At the back
of the book is a glossary for some of the Jewish terms and a list of errata with mock disclaimers for the poems, so, though
you may have cried, you’ll end laughing out loud. Reading Pomrenze is like experiencing a weird form of déjà vu.
She pulls images and ideas out that are instantly recognizable, but her eyes give it all a new spin, a thrilling freshness.
In “Grief While Waiting for a Car Repair,” she describes just that: “Powdered creamer clumps/ in your funneled
cup as/ you suddenly realize all/ that is unwell in your life.” This debut is truly an exhilarating
ride.
Alex
Handwerger is an editor of The Florida
Book Review and a student in the MFA Program at Florida International
University.
See more Florida poetry reviews in our Poetry Archive:
The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems by David Kirby, reviewed by P. Scott Cunningham
What the Blood Knows by Peggy Miller, reviewed by P. Scott Cunningham
Yellow Jackets
by Patti White, reviewed by Laura McDermott
and Neil de la Flor's interview with Florida poet Michael Hettich
Click here to visit our Poetry Archive. |
Books by other Florida Poets:
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