Tag Archives: book review

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Review: Seven Places In America by Miriam Sagan

seven places coverFrequently while reading Miriam Sagan’s latest poetry collection, Seven Places in America, I was struck with waves of jealousy. The book is constructed around her journeys and residencies at what, at least through her writing, must be some of the most wonderful places in the country for a poet to meditate on things great and small. This is especially true for a poet like Sagan, who has an affinity for the more rustic or natural places.

Some of these places were official writers’ retreats, while others were just places that accommodated her, and she accommodated them. Either way, she made the most of these visits, as good writers can, by using the foregrounds and backdrops as gateways for her poems to pass through or stretch out within. Her poems ride “the boat of the mind/that floats on air” tacking through waterways looking for purchase. When they land on hard ground, you know it, as in “10,000 Islands,” part of a series titled Ever/Glade (which, incidentally, made me think of Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia.

I longed for departure

As if it were love

As if it would take me out

Of myself, of my accustomed way—

Sandbar of white pelicans

Lifts off, wheels into the sun

Silver flash of fish before the prow

Maze of low islands, one after the other,

Gives way

to open water.

Do you see what she did there? The very quiet leap from the silent meditation of longing for departure to the dramatic scene of birds rising and a boat rushing among islands. For me, these poems are at their strongest when she uses her environment as the A in an ongoing Q & A with themselves.

While I found poems to relish throughout the book, I think my favorites are in part V, which were written at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, New York. Maybe being a Pennsylvanian drew me to these poems as they describe scenery very like my own home.

In the first poem in that section, Sagan uses, with dramatic effect, the refrain “body of” in a chant-like list of things you might find in any eastern woodland.

meadowlark

body of liberties

forest

body of knowledge

dream

body of research

fireflies

body of principals

That’s fun, as are a lot of the poems in this book. You can feel the author’s delight coming off the page. At the same time, there are also haunting moments, such as in “Tree House,” where the speaker reflects in attendant language (“The creaks and meows of night,/Shadows of the copper beeches.”) on the material landscape of a childhood while simultaneously acknowledging the psychological landscape.

There were moments I thought the poet may have fallen into her own traps—pushed a metaphor a little too far, took the readers’ trust for granted, but then come moments of wonderful self-awareness, as if she knows where she’s taking us and is grinning a little inside, like here, in the poem “Stone Quarry Hill”:

If this poem were Chinese

I’d say my hair is gray (which it is)

And that I haven’t heard

News of you in a long time.

If I’m being played, I’m OK with it. Even when she asks “Why must inspiration be a vista?” you know she knows the answer is more complicated than that. “An inner self/that also shifts shape” is the visita we’re really meant to contemplate: “how what we ignored or couldn’t explain/remained in plain view.”

You can buy Seven Places in America here on Amazon.

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New Review of The Trouble with Rivers

My book The Trouble with Rivers was recently reviewed at Almost Uptown.

Here the reviewer calls the collection  “unpretentious, lyrically beautiful, and surprisingly deep. Clauser’s sparse, densely- packed words frame his images and experiences with a zen-like quality that allows them to expand before the reader like, well, like a river… Clauser’s writing is unabashed in its harsh sentimentality, merging bitterness with love, death with renewal, and hope from the darkness- all without ever losing his simple, melodic tone…”
Read the whole review here.

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Review: Big Silences in a Year of Rain by Doris Ferleger

The poems in Doris Ferleger’s first collection, Big Silences in a Year of Rain bear a level of seriousness, responsibility and impact—and a heavy dose of insight. They dwell on memories and moments, usually painful ones, with both an astuteness and humanity that will prove rewarding to the reader. Professionally, Ferleger is a psychologist, so it’s probably no coincidence that many of the poems in this collection deal with suffering, loss, anticipation of loss and the methods of coping with all of the above.

Many of the poems, particularly those in the first section, deal directly or indirectly with the poet’s heritage as the child of Holocaust survivors.

In “Victory” she writes:

My father considered

himself a success

when he found his children

still breathing. Each night

another victory over Hitler.

I learned early

to pretend I was sleeping,

to not be a burden.

In this collection we find a mix of narratives and lyrics, family histories, odes and elegies. She’s a deeply engaging writer, both of the world and people around her and of the perceived reader. While many contemporary poets seem to hold the reader almost in contempt, as if the act of communicating is a sort-of afterthought to the poem, Ferleger’s poems are meant to be affective. That’s something I like in Jack Gilbert, in Mark Strand and Betsy Sholl; and it’s something I especially like here.

Ferleger is not afraid of opening up, of revealing more about her life in a short poem than many people will reveal to friends they’ve known for years. That doesn’t make these confessional poems, truth for shock appeal. No, in these pages the poet’s spiraling toward truths comes across as a way of life, or, more likely, a way of dealing with life.

From “To Try Again”

Almost unbearable, this body,

unbearable the weight of this

snow cover

thick as a lover’s absence

on a spring day

when you have lost

the one you have slept

and eaten with longer

than three childhoods,

There are many times the reader feels invited into a family conversation, but these are heavier conversations than most families probably have at the dinner table. These are the moments that seem at once oppressive and also extraordinarily generous.

From “Scared”

Last night our son spoke to me

in a bristly tone but it didn’t

scrape me down this time. I just

said whoa, like that, a big whoa

came out of me in one short punching

breath. He stopped, even nodded.

My mouth felt like it could

blow away rock coral.

This poet is knows how to charge her language with emotion, but not sentimentality. Her imagery can be spiritual and concrete and compassionate, and clearly lived. This is not the book of a passive observer, and she chooses her words carefully to communicate that intensity. In “Oh Sages” Ferleger describes a scene in which a woman falls, dying, into the poet’s arms:

as she fell into my arms,

and she let go the last

particles of her supper,

leaving me there

to hold her bones, fat, flesh

the soul always leaves

to the care of failures?

 

Big Silences in a Year of Rain can be purchased from Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

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Review: The Best American Poetry 2010

Question: How is reading a contemporary poem like banging your head against a wall?

Answer: You feel better when it’s over.

Actually, that’s not being fair to the wall, because the poem is more likely to result in permanent damage.

The feeling of banging my head against a wall, and not breaking through, is something I experienced throughout the annual anthology Best American Poetry 2010. This year’s guest editor, Amy Gerstler, pulled together a group of 75 poems that seem to me to embody what Tony Hoagland recently described as the poetry of vertigo (see Poetry September 2010)—verse that tries hard to make you dizzy.

But that’s not quite right either. Vertigo demands perspective. You find yourself at a great height, and the act of looking down, viewing the wide world, instills an overwhelming sense of unease. You become unstable, unsure of your footing. You think the world will come smashing up to meet you, and often it does.

No, this is a poetry of WTF. The poetry of being dumped in a forest without any breadcrumbs to follow, no perspective to tell you which way is up or down. The person who dumped you in the forest couldn’t rouse enough empathy to care that you’d never make it out alive. What I find here are many poems that have taken Archibald McLeish’s dictum, “a poem should not mean, but be” too far. It’s not that they defy explication or understanding. They defy engagement. They set themselves up as their own barriers as if daring the reader to get interested enough to give a damn.

Devotees of BAP (I have maybe eight of them) will know that it’s an inconsistent series almost by design. It does not represent the best poems of the year. What it does is (I hope at least) represent that year’s guest editor’s favorite poems from books and lit journals (online and off). Gerstler basically admits as much in her introduction when she writes “I could no more escape my own proclivities, preferences, and tastes when editing this book than I can when writing my own poems.” I respect her honesty in that regard.

This edition is heavily peppered by what passes as contemporary surrealism, non sequitur and postmodern gimmick. There are about ten prose poems, something I think is flarf, a whole lot of random associative poems and at least one that reads like a compilation of Facebook status updates. How a Billy Collins’ poem fits into this I can’t figure, but maybe the series editor, David Lehman had to remind Gerstler that Collins sells.

And there are even a few poems that left me gaping—in a good shock-and-awe way. Both Tom Clark’s “Fidelity” and Amy Glynn Greacen’s “Namaskar” are so stunning as to make me not regret the $16 I spent on it. “Namaskar” was particularly surprising—love it.

Finally, as much as I’m clearly not a fan of the selections in Best American Poetry 2010, I’m glad the book exists. Each year BAP is (along with the Pushcart annual) one of the best ways to take a crash course in major (?) trends in contemporary poetry. I may not like all those trends. I may think that too many writers get too much attention for too insignificant work, but at least it gives me something to think about. At least a publisher has put out the money to back a major poetry project like this. At least there are hundreds of poetry outlets, thousands of poets and readers (mostly the same people) and a strange little thing called po-biz that takes it all semi-seriously.

Also, and this is a good thing, The Best American Poetry 2010 is completely different from the Best American Poetry 2009. I don’t mean simply that there are different poems, but there’s a completely different aesthetic at work. This series allows the guest editor to say to the poetry world, “hey, this is what I think is important.” And as much as I may disagree with what Amy Gerstler thinks is important, I believe it’s very cool that she gets the opportunity to say it so loudly, and I’m glad I get the chance to pay attention. For a collection like this, it’s more important for the potential buyer to be familiar with the editor’s sensibilities than it is to be familiar with the included authors.