Stephen C. Behrendt

The Battlefield Photographer, and: Fool's Gold, and: Rotogravure, and: Wayfare (review)

This review may strike some readers as an odd assortment of poetry, especially if they are looking for garments cut from common cloth. In fact, it is the diversity, the sheer ‘‘differentness,’’ of these four collections that suggests why we might consider them together. The poets represent a broad spectrum of contemporary American poetry, and all have college or university ties as teachers and writers. This is a ‘‘grown-up’’ poetry, informed and illuminated by mature reflection upon the community of human experience and richly nuanced in sound, sense, and artistry. Take Carmine Sarracino’s The Battlefield Photographer, a meditation in many voices on that most tragic—and heroic—of American experiences, the Civil War. Framed by the voice of the Gettysburg Battlefield Museum guide, the poems consider that great war’s human toll through voices ranging from Walt Whitman’s and Mary Chesnutt’s to those of fictional (but historically based) characters like Corporal Joseph Hughes and Sergeant Kurt Miller. Miller, who commands a charge at Chancellorsville despite a wound in his hip that fills his boot with blood before he falls, worries in touchingly human fashion that his wound may not be sufficiently ‘‘heroic’’:

Davenport's Version, and: Not So the Chairs: Selected and New Poems (review)

anything we expect to keep us alive,” can be trusted or understood as steady beneath our feet (“What to Count On”). But even as Shumaker takes away our old certainty, she provides us with new knowledge. In “Hillclimb,” the speaker ascends toward a hardwon equilibrium by turning to narrative and to the painful memories of her parents’ troubled relationship: an abusive mother and an unfaithful father. In a bold move, Shumaker waits until the last quarter of her collection to provide the psychological underpinnings for this speaker’s difficulties with men, which have been apparent throughout but unexplained. Once this initial memory is exposed, Shumaker pushes further back in time, providing a clearer picture of the past and a stronger justification for the rift between the men and women of her poetic universe. Because Shumaker has a generous vision, however, she ends with rebirth rather than pessimism, carrying us to the previously unexamined landscape of a small, Norwegian village. “Easter Grave, Tending” could take place a hundred years ago or yesterday. In this timeless setting, one solitary woman – surrounded by chilly silences and unaccompanied by men – tidies the gravestones of her ancestors, preserving the memories of those who have died. Later, as she sews a piece of needlework, whose beauty outlines “what’s no longer there,” we are meant to recognize that some small measure of grace has been achieved through the act of memory and through the process of creating beautiful art.

The Hills of Holland, and: Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees (review)

The Hills of Holland is Esther Schor’s first collection, and it is an auspicious beginning. Her work has appeared widely in periodical journals, but the format of the full-length book shows to a real advantage the richly textured and interrelated nature of Schor’s poetry. Not just the long, multipart poem that lends the collection its title, but also the intriguing, tight sequence of eight poems sub-titled “Cumbria” set up an ongoing dialogue with one another and with the poems in the first two sections of this four-section collection. That the poems have a strong academic flavor undoubtedly reflects Schor’s own professional situation, but that flavor also reflects the careful layering of materials in the poems themselves. The most conspicuous example of this layering comes in a catalogue poem called “Two Foods I Hate,” which consists of a dozen lines of nouns related to one another in no apparent way save for their lively sonic interplay (“Chisel, balloon, osprey, / Ode, curio, foolscap, parch . . . ,” p. 46) and concluding with what the title predicts: “Limes and lima beans.” This sort of sonic playfulness forms one important element of Schor’s poems; they have a sure ear and an eclectic voice; over and over we are surprised (even delighted) by unexpected juxtapositions of sound, image, and suggestion. Thus in a particularly deft poem in the “Cumbria” section, we learn about a calf named Buster whose mother and siblings all bore names starting with “B.” Thus personalized, Buster is remembered for the kindly feedings by the boys who knew him – especially Nicholas, who “gave him his feeds / looked after him, groomed him / with the dog’s brush. Had games with him –” (“Helen on Buster,” p.55). This seemingly calf-pet is then “sent off” at the age of two “to a man near Darley / down the A31, who sent him back / in steaks and mince. And was he tasty! and tender!” (p. 55). This contemporary account of living off the Cumbrian land is juxtaposed in these eight poems with the experiences of earlier Cumbrians like the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, in an extended, witty, and poignant mediation on past and present by a scholarly poet with an obviously deep reverence for the past – even if it is a past that comes only at third or fourth hand, in fragments rather than entire, and in occasionally incongruous juxtapositions. The textured, layered, catalogued nature of Schor’s poems are perhaps best illustrated by a sonnet from “Cumbria,” which demonstrates the stylistic and linguistic features that characterize the poems generally:

The Idea of the Ordinary (review)

both her books. Besides proving her to be a master of received form, using meter and rhyme not so much to contain emotion or to measure feeling, but instead to amplify them, the poem also accomplishes the most difficult work of narrative across form (and perhaps even more effectively than Trethewey, who largely abandons her experiments with form in Ophelia). Furthermore, it seems all the poet’s most essential themes: love and grief, mortality and rebirth – indeed, those most impenetrable and mysterious ingredients of our humanity – are given voice by Schulman in this indispensable longer poem. One sonnet in particular, in its humble recognition of what cannot be fathomed, perhaps demonstrates best of all the awesome power of poetry, speaking as it does both to unknowable worlds and mind-boggling wonders: