writing

Whoa, December

Rae Spencer4 Comments

December 1

Whoa, December, wait one minute
I’ve hardly roused from my feasted slumber
When you start to number my days

Set clocks and worry flocks of shoppers
Lost in evergreen lots and sticker-shock
Tick tock, sweet silver bells ring the hour

As if to hurry my step into line
My dour minuet with Father Time
Stumbling on to the end

The bitter end of another year
Another calendar page, scrawled
With duty and a glitter of waste

With things I never desired
The blouse gift-receipt, creased
In haste and taped over the size

I couldn’t accept; a final refrain
After the glaze is scraped
From cold and golden morns

And oh, December, please wait
For the lights to change, for fire
To blaze through our litter of wrappings

Pause tonight among muttering beasts
In their scatter of straw, their dusty ease
From lust’s numb ache, from labor’s strain

Rest among these flight-tired geese
Mid-route, heads tucked under folded
Wings, murmuring psalms to themselves

Review: While You Blue-step

Rae Spencer3 Comments

While You Blue-step by Mary Belardi Erickson
(Aldrich Publishing, 2012)

The poems in While You Blue-step examine the verge between nature and man. Some images are ordinary while others are strange. Swallows nest in metal culverts, butterflies and weeds invade a trash heap, minnows swim under railroad crossings, and a lone pelican lands beside a barn. Trains rattle across many of the pages and water flows throughout.

Like water, the book seeps and eddies from one poem to the next. The connections aren’t always obvious, but there is a general sense of movement. Of momentum without acceleration. By the end of the book, I felt as if time had passed and wisdom had been gained, even though I had not been aware of either process.

For me, the author’s voice is subtle, almost plain. But there are intriguing complexities in these poems, which depend more on meaning than music:

“Life swallowing you       like the whale did Jonah.”    (“Whaling Song”, pg 9)

“you fling pebbles
as if equating impact with answer
in a lifetime of making all blues
a wishing pool.”    (“A stone plunks”, pg 14)

“Winter takes off its gloves and cold
snaps its fingers like a magician
giving his audience an icy look.”    (“Cold Snaps”, pg 44)

While You Blue-step is not a book to be read once and returned to the shelf. My copy will undoubtedly end up creased and scarred, written-in and highlighted. Unmistakable signs of respect.

After Mother’s car accident, I stayed in her house a few months, in Huntsville, Alabama. While You Blue-step reminded me of those months. Chipmunks lived under an old shed in her back yard, and train whistles woke me with their unfamiliar cries in the night. Then there were months of emptiness and grief, after Mother died, and I’m only just now reaching the point where the world is familiar again. I am like the leaf on pages 18 and 19:

“touching ground means finding
waters, yourself flowing from time
to time.”    (“As a leaf”)

Review: Elegy

Rae Spencer3 Comments

Elegy: Poems by Raphaela Willington
(unbound CONTENT, 2012)

In the foreword to Elegy, John Briggs begins by saying, “Raphaela Willington died on January 6, 2004, of ovarian cancer. Death became her muse in her last years.” He goes on to describe a woman of admirable strength and a poet of considerable talent.

The first poem begins: “Sometimes you wake / into silence” (“Sometimes You Wake”, pg 20). From there the book proceeds to muffle death’s dirge with birdsong and rustling leaves. The poems’ gardens are vividly alive. Zucchini and paperwhites thrive there, tomatoes and zinnias. Deer, squirrels, and groundhogs roam the pages, and “The sun is today a citadel / falling falling / yet standing” (“This Day”, pg 28).

In Elegy, death isn’t a morbid centerpiece, nor is it draped in mourning. Instead, it is herded into place as simply another visitor in the gardens. When the author finds the skull of a buck, antlers still attached, she says:

“One ear remains intact, as if listening, I imagine,
for the sound of the voice of my father calling us,
     mother and me,
in from the dusk of the garden
     at the end of a long day.” (“Endgame”, pg 45)

Later, she hears her name in winter’s approach:

“deer feasting on our hearts,
tomatoes crystallized into summer’s rubies
set in circlets of dying vines” (“Growing Seasons”, pg 76)

The foreword says, “A culture plumped with its belief in self-importance and fixated on amassing accomplishment might judge that Raphaela didn’t ‘do’ much with her life.” (pg 12) I say she did much that was remarkable, and I’m particularly grateful to her for writing Elegy. It seems to me as if she peered through the veil that separates life from death and fearlessly recorded what she saw. Then she wrote her observations into beautifully lyrical, meticulously revised poetry.

  • Find out more about the book here.
  • Six poems from Elegy were the inspiration for a song cycle that recently premiered at Western Connecticut State University. Read about “Wrensong” here.

Last week, my trip included a morning in Elora, Tennessee, where my mother’s father is buried alongside his parents and a handful of other relatives. I never met my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, and I have few memories of his parents.

My visit was intended to honor Mother’s memory, more than theirs, so I was surprised by how their headstones affected me. I became intensely curious, wandering past name after name. Who were these people? How much of them lives on, in me? My connection to these graves was strengthened by my recent experience reading Elegy, which I had finished the day before our drive to Elora.

Review: A Strange Frenzy

Rae Spencer1 Comment

A Strange Frenzy:  17 poems by Dom Gabrielli
(unbound CONTENT, 2012)

This smart, nuanced little chapbook pairs each of its seventeen poems with a quote from Rumi. Printed in an interesting horizontal format, complete with delicate artwork, the airy expanses of white space invite marginalia.

The author’s short introduction asks “From what star in the skies of the Outside do these poems gather their light?” These poems glimmer and burn with a unique light of their own, making no attempt to outshine Rumi’s timeless quotes. In fact, the poems are stripped of punctuation and mostly devoid of capitalization, as if deliberately deferential to the accompanying quotes.

Despite their unassuming arrangement on the page, these poems are refined. And, while love is the unifying theme, this is not a collection of love poems.

“once i courted a diamond / to cut my wrists / in the thunderstorm of battle / and love poured down like rain” (Poem II, page 11)

“i say me / i should eliminate it / i should stretch it out / and flatten every notion of person” (Poem IX, page 25)

“every drink they offer is poison // all the food they have is dangerous // if you do not eat // you shall starve” (Poem XII, page 31)

I’m delighted to add A Strange Frenzy to my poetry shelf, and I’m already looking forward to the moment, perhaps years from now, when I pull it down from the shelf and discover its poems anew.

  • Author Dom Gabrielli and unbound CONTENT publisher Annmarie Lockhart discussed A Strange Frenzy in this blog talk radio episode.
  • Poem II appears on the poemblog at vox poetica.

Review: A House Near Luccoli

Rae Spencer6 Comments

A House Near Luccoli: A Novel of Musical Intimacy & Intrigue in 17th Century Genoa by DM Denton (All Things That Matter Press, 2012)

Every facet of this book is wrapped in beautiful language. The plot and setting, characters and pace, all live within layers of poetry:

“…Nonna blamed a tendency to malinconia on her granddaughter’s English side with too much rain in her blood. As if climate could be inherited…” (pg 20)

“She wanted to show ability beyond the ladylike diversion of scribbling thoughts or painting in a journal, obsessing over the responsibility for something greater than nothing better to do.” (pg 35)

“She hoped they would be early or late to avoid scrutiny, but they were on time for her to be judged as an unescorted woman passing through a hall made for giants…” (pg 71)

I know very little about classical music or opera, and even less about 17th century Genoa, so the book unfolded for me as a lovely riddle. Musical terminology and Italian words added ambience, even as I stumbled over their strangeness. Scenes hid behind place names, ambled through unfamiliar streets and landmarks. But the story never failed me. I never felt forced out of the plot or detached from the characters.

The book’s “Intimacy & Intrigue” are subtle, a veiled background of motive. The settings are lush, the characters complex, and the pace measured. It’s an intricate portrait of loneliness, of the fragile passions that inspire music.

  • Find the author’s website here.
  • Find the author’s blog here.

I can’t resist adding a photo. These doves, lit by the setting sun, reminded me of musical notes.