Our new issue is currently making its way through the printer’s facilities.  We’re excited and we’ll send word again once 38:2 comes home.  

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The results are in. Here are Phoebe’s 2009 Contest Winners and Finalists.

Greg Grummer Poetry Contest

Judge: Bin Ramke

Winner: Sarah Blackman - “That Bloody Hammer”

Honorable Mentions: Gina Abelkop - “Godpaper (1930),” Nancy Naomi Carlson - “After I Xeroxed the Sky”

Finalists: Chuck Carlisle - “The Most Kissed Face in the World, 3: Mechanics” & “Where We Are, Where We Are Not,” Haines Eason - “Reservoir,” Sandra Marchetti - “Le Parc des Suicides (The Park of Suicides),” Judith Pacht - “Falcon,” Jonathan Rice - “Matins: Leonids,” Katrin Talbot - “World without end”

Winter Fiction Contest

Judge: Benjamin Percy

Winner: Jim Wyatt - “Blunt Not the Heart”

Runner-Up: Tate Higgins - “Hanging Tree”

Finalists: Vanessa Garcia - “33,” Ross Garrison - “Deer in the Valley,” Burt Michaels - “A Modern Couple,” Michelle Nichols - “The Holiness”

*The editors would like to congratulate our winners and finalists and thanks to all the poets and writers who entered our winter contests. We are indebted to you for yuor support and we thank you for allowing us to consider work of such high caliber.

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Please see the “Latest Issue” tab for more info.

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Checks must be made payable to “Phoebe/George Mason University” in U.S. Dollars. Foreign checks are acceptable only if they are payable through a U.S. bank and are denominated in U.S. dollars.

Money orders are also acceptable, provided that they too are denominated in U.S. dollars.

(Our apologies to the Canadian who already sent us an uncashable check.  We are currently returning your cash money and submission.)

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by Mike Maggio

 

Maurya Simon’s resume reads like that of a literary superstar. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and the Pushcart Prize in 2004, she has held residencies, won awards and has been granted numerous fellowships both domestically and abroad. The author of eight volumes of poetry, she has been published in a host of anthologies and has written in such publications as The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Pegasus and The Georgia Review.

            So it is with much disappointment that her latest collection, Cartographies: Uncollected Poems 1980-2008 arrives as her latest contribution to belle letters. It’s not that the book lacks substance or that the poems contained within are lacking. In fact, overall, it is just the opposite: Simon’s commitment to formalism and her depth of insight are prevalent throughout. However, the book is uneven, with some extremely powerful poems juxtaposed against others which, despite their formal elements, are weak and sometimes uninteresting.

            “City of Angels” (p.78), for instance, a dark poem written in rhyming couplets, strikes of discordance with its sing-songy rhythms.

 

Night beyond our wooded deck is murderous.

Pandemonium erupts in static bursts:

 

The radio’s high voices pitch themselves in waves

Of terror through the nervous house, and we, adaze,

 

Can only shake our heads in disbelief, certain

That before evening’s curtain drops its tattered hem,

 

The city of angels will have fallen hellishly to ash

Each palm and signpost flaming like a giant, struck match.

 

Against the poem’s rhymes, both full and slanted, lies a discourse that meshes hope for the child who appears a little later in the poem and whose future is unpredictable and fraught with uncertainty. The subject matter of this poem seems very much out of place with its formal structure, its cadence and its unambiguous rhyming distracting from its bleak message.

            Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps Simon wants us to experience the innocence of childhood despite the doom and gloom of the real world. Yet the rhymes (waves/adaze, collapse/lapses,  comfortlessness/blessedness) and the meter distract from the poem rather than add to it. And these same elements are repeated throughout the book to the same end in such poems as “Second Born,” “Simon Says,” “On Our Twentieth Anniversary” and “Revival.”

            Contrast these poems to those such as “Waste Management” and “Trees” where formalism informs rather than distracts. Here is the first stanza from “The Woodpecker” (p.63):

            sounds like a donkey braying

                        or a madman laughing

            from the depths of his grave.

                        Hee-haw, hee-haw, he says.

 

Here, the slanted end rhymes are far from distracting and, in fact, stir interest in the reader. The lines are at once descriptive and imitative of the woodpecker’s incessant hammering, and the preponderance of the “h’s and the two trochees and one iamb in the last line of the stanza break away from the rhythm of the first three and add to this onomatopoeic quality.

            Likewise, in “Waste Management” (p.62), Simon uses language to imitate the effect of a lumbering bear rummaging through garbage for his next meal. Here, she makes use of long lines and words with sounds that weigh heavily on the tongue, such as “forage,” “fragrant” and “trudging,” to further her characterization. Quatrains balance the poem out, preventing the use of such rich language from encumbering the reader and, when Simon does employ end rhymes, they are almost unnoticeable.

            One wishes that the entire book was made up completely of such poems and that the other, less interesting ones could be done away with. This would have made for a more solid, more interesting collection. Perhaps the weaker poems were included to round out the four sections of the book” “The Soul,” The Self,” “The World : Mountains,” and “The World : City,” though that would hardly be valid justification. The book could have been a lot stronger had they been eliminated. Overall, however, Cartographies is worth reading and leaves one hopeful that the next collection will fully exhibit Simon’s mastery of her craft.

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The Spring 2009 Issue of Phoebe is in our hands and by golly does it look good.  Chicago-based media artist, Paul Catanese, has created a phenomenal cover and art spread.  Fiction contributors include Dylan Lee, Jenn Scott, Craig Curtis, and Edward Hagelstein.  On the poetry end we have Rusty Morrison, Matthew Hittinger, Paul Fattaruso, Cathy Eisenhower, as well as a special feature of collaborative poetry.   

 Our table at AWP is Northwest 387.  We hope you will stop by, say hello, and have a look at the issue.

 Don’t forget your mittens.  Chicago is cold.  

 See you soon, 

Phoebe 

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by Robb St. Lawrence

In 1845, a writer for Littell’s Living Age wrote that an American looking onto the development of telegraph communication lines across the United States “will regard this new and mighty agency in interchanging thoughts, sentiments and feelings, as one of the indissoluble links of firm and enduring union, and of making us all feel that we are still one nation—with one language—one capitol—and more than all, with one heart.”  If we ignore the colonialist undertone, it’s a pretty notion: that to share information—and, importantly, to share a language—could lead to the sharing of a heart.  It’s a utopian idea, but borne from what we know a shared means of communication can/must do: make community, bring us closer together.

In Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story, a sense of community, or even of communication between the poet and the reader, might easily be the last thing on a reader’s mind.  Morrison’s collection dramatically foregrounds form—each poem consists of three stanzas of three unpunctuated lines, each line is right-justified, and each line ends with the word ‘stop’, ‘please’, or ‘advise.’  Each poem ends with ‘please advise’ and is titled “please advise stop.”  The lines accumulate their sense through parataxis for the most part, standing more or less apart from the others in a given poem by the way that the end words (‘stop’ or ‘please’) function as a sort of vanishing point, the place at which sense dissolves into speech, surface.  All we are left with at the end of the line resides in the speaker’s voice; the image or contemplation that comprised the line until that point is refined into that more fundamental pleading: stop.  please.   The speaker reaches out to the reader, and the reader completes the circuit of the plea by giving both an ear and a voice to these pleas, extending the gesture of crisis embodied in the poem even further, toward some further place, some further listener.  Or, that is, toward some audience—the highly repetitive and ritualized nature of these formal tropes (including the numerological symmetry throughout the book: 3 stanzas of 3 lines, 9 sections of 6 poems of 9 lines each) is reminiscent of prayer: as the speaker hopefully claims, “my repetitive gesture will eventually wear through its surrounding world please” (8).  A hope here, that repetition that might clear off the trappings of material existence, lead us beyond this world and to some other place.  Or maybe, as Robert Fink has written, in a study of Minimalist music, “We repeated ourselves into this culture.  We might be able to repeat ourselves out.”

This sense that the material world might just be temporary, a thing to worry our way through, is fitting, as the poems that make up this collection are elegiac in nature, for the most part seeming to respond more or less directly to either the death of the speaker’s father or (more often) the state of the speaker in some indeterminate span of time surrounding that loss.  For instance, in the first poem of section five:

I might travel his death a creaking and swaying beneath me stop

there are static expressions freed now and passing along the walls stop

an object isn’t what is hidden but what smiles out from the hiding please

(35)

“His death,” as the first line here has it, comes to encompass the whole of the book’s referential reach.  Even though section five of the book is the space most marked by the presence the speaker’s father’s death (followed by section seven), its positioning, so plainly at the center of the collection, means that even when we come across a passage far later in the book, and even if that passage has little obvious connection to the death of the speaker’s father, we are pressed toward the memory of what has come before.  Here is the first poem of section eight, quoted in full:

sullenly disposed to needing the sound of a second no stop

rootless in jars geranium-cuttings already telling time stop

spidery cracks in the wall’s plaster the breath of coarse masonry beneath stop

 

with each invasion of new furniture the same parade music please

patches of original carpet-color shine like exposed modesty stop

an impatience stiff and aromatic as sticks of cinnamon stop

 

crows on the lawn their shine so black it staunches modification please

some skies must remain unrecognizable to be kept stop

in the dark my flashlight is eager to toss its tight-fisted gleam please advise

(59)

Given the almost irresistible (despite the alternative mapping we have been given by the poet) pull of conventional narrative, it’s hard not to read this as a meditation on the clearing and re-staging of a deceased loved one’s house, though there is little in the poem itself to supply the suggestion that this house has anything to do with the speaker’s father.  One of the effects of the paratactic evolution in these poems is to scour out an ellipsis between lines, to supply a blank space into which the speaker invites the reader’s participation in creating the poem’s sense.  This is one of the ways in which the poetry in the true keeps calm biding its story functions as an invitation toward community: the reader’s mind and voice complete the circuits of the poems.  Whatever sense comes from these telegraphic packets of data, it is a sense that the reader has made in communion with the text itself and the poet, the assembler of these forms.  And since there are few umbrella-sized touchstones in the book aside from the death of the speaker’s father, that particular umbrella tends to cover what cannot otherwise be assimilated. 

So, on some level, the success of the book rests on the extent to which the reader is willing to lie across the synapse and complete the circuit of meaning themselves.  On another level, the success of the book depends upon the reader’s tolerance for repetition.  Some readers would, quite understandably, find the formal trope of this book either annoying or superfluous (perhaps the one because of the other)—a reason for that could be the self-reflexive tendency in some poems:

fill a page with words never letting a single phrase form stop

not for avoiding but for allowing what refuses to be remembered stop

displace all practiced confessions with a small shudder stop

(63)

Moments like these can lead a reader to question the purpose of a formal experiment—if the poem is about the process of writing the poem, what has the purpose of this formal innovation been, and what change has this brought about in me?, a reader might ask.  But to take that view of the poetry in this collection would be to ignore such compelling meditation, such purposeful constellations.  It would be to ignore the places where the poem makes the kind of invitation to be a part of its meaning that mark this book as truly interested in its readers, when it could have—given the locus of concerns it addresses at times—turned its back to them entirely.

Here is a poem from section six in full:

the driver wasn’t guilt-wracked but a pedestrian who saw the accident lost her sense of smell stop

according to the gondolier each wave strikes the hull in a different language stop

I find a new direction because every planet stays locked in its orbit stop

 

no way to tell the weeds that are flesh-colored from the flesh that is weed-colored please

listening is a composite of glossing novelty and following my fears around in the dark stop

emptied of questions and filled instead with the night-sky’s hooded throng stop

 

the road to the asylum forks each time I genuflect please

the entire morning gone callow with a rationale stop

now even the least leaf rustling must be theatricalized please advise

(43).

This is neither the ritualized and clichéd language of mourning nor the skittering horizontal parataxis of much of the (prose) writing that has been referred to by the label “the new sentence,” but something far more approachable.  A constellation that brings together the acute physical response of a pedestrian who witnessed an accident with a speaker’s inability to differentiate between color and texture, bodies and weeds, that pulls into the same orbit a speaker who finds new direction in—and is filled by—the swarm of celestial bodies in the night sky and a gondolier’s suggestive platitude about the many languages of the canal’s waters; the poem invites the reader to participate in the processing, in the making sense of, these fragments—yes—but it also invites the reader to gawk and marvel at the craft and emotional precision of each of its constituent parts.  The emotional space carved out by the line, “emptied of questions and filled instead with the night-sky’s hooded throng stop,” is both exact—that is, specific to this speaker—and open and available to the reader.  There is no retreat to private language, and that seems to be the point.  We’re reading an open communiqué, a missive sent off to us and folded into the codex. 

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After much consideration and a couple okays from our judges, we have decided to extend the submission deadline for the Winter Fiction and Greg Grummer Poetry Contests to February, 28th 2009. As long as your work is postmarked by that date, it is up for consideration. Information about contest guidelines can be found here. Thanks to all those who have already submitted and best of luck to all present and future entrants.

-Danika

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by David Heath

Last fall, American publishers faced the uncomfortable position of sitting on their collective hands as the Nobel Committee awarded the 2008 prize in literature to Jeane-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, an author with translations available in everything from Albanian to Vietnamese but who is largely unavailable in English. “America does not participate in translation,” Anne-Solange Noble, the director of foreign rights for Le Clézio’s publisher Gallimard, told the Washington Post in early October.

Even the Albanians have Le Clézio, it may tempt some to say, but all the more reason to appreciate a decent translation of poet Valentina Saraçini’s collection Vjedhnajë Ëndërrimi (“Dreaming Escape”). And given the troubled history of Albanian language and letters, we might consider it fortunate Saraçini put down any lines at all: 2008 marks only a century since the language adopted a standard orthography, and its writers have in the last two decades emerged from years of suppression in socialist Albania and Yugoslavia and the chaos following the latter’s breakup. But, as translator Erica Weitzman noted in the journal 91^st Meridian (issue 5.2, fall 2007), Albanian is a language with deep roots, sung, long before it was written down, to the twanging accompaniment of the two-stringed çifteli—and perhaps reaching as far back as the Homeric poets.

Saraçini, who is also known in Prishtina, Kosovo, for her work as a journalist, meditates on the recent and the distant, history and myth. And like Le Clézio, she seems to immerse the reader in a place only to evoke a desire to transcend it. But much unlike the novelist, Saraçini maintains short, frequently declarative lines, no punctuation, and spare imagery. And Saraçini’s place is ineluctably Albanian, from oaks and horsemen in the mountains of Kosovo, to its landlocked, riverless capital at Prishtina, to the sound of the Adriatic Sea off Albania’s coast.

The result is more than a little discomforting—Saraçini rarely allows her readers their bearings. The first poem, “Luftë e Heshtjes” (“War of Silence”), which opens the section “Antimythic,” may speak to the dead but feels more like an accusation—one that includes the reader—than any kind of elegy:

 

 

 

Ju nuk jeni fëmijët e Edipit
Eteokli e Poliniku
Efialti dhe Oti binjakë nuk jeni

Nuk mund t’u shpallni luftë perëndive

Ju mallet s’i mbani dot në krah
S’mund t’i zhvendosni
I zhbëni ato

Nuk do të vdisni në Had
Lidhur me gjarpërinj

Tashti vdiset kudo sido

***

You are not the children of Oedipus
Eteocles and Polyneices
You are not the twins Ephialtes and Otis

You cannot declare war on the gods

You cannot hold the mountains in your arms
Cannot move them
Cannot crush them

You will not die in Hades
Bound by snakes

Now one dies any old how

Weitzman and her co-translators Flora Ismaili and Rudina Jasini keep the language simple, which, according to Weitzman, owes as much to the Albanian language’s relatively small vocabulary as to Saraçini’s economy of words. This and the lack of punctuation can lend an abstract, uncertain quality to the lines—and when the imagery does stand out it often comes in fragments the reader must piece together, as in “Trungu” (“Tree Trunk”):

 

Kur bëhesh përmendore pritjesh
Ngre lart duart qafën gjysmëkëputur
Këmbëcung kohëve të leckosura
Të përgjërojnë erërat

Druajnë nga ankthet tua palë-palë
Nga toka jote heshtjen flori masin

Ti je me plumb
Dhembje plumbosur shekujve
Argjend zbardhur kokave të nënave nuseve
Dhe je degëkëputur pa pjekur frutat

Si foshnjë je

Luajnë me ty portrete
Londiniane Versajiane Parisiane Kremliniane
Dhëmbët zbardhin mbi përpëlitjet e tua
Të shtrojnë darkave të fshehta ekraneve

Kur të kenë kafshuar çuditen
Sa e lashtë je Arbëri
Ç’mëndje ke c’rrënjë të forta
Ta mbajnë trungen

Arbëri me plagë zhbën mjegullën

***

When you become a monument to waiting
Hands raised high neck broken
One-legged in a time of tatters
The winds beseech you

They are leery of your layered anxieties
They gauge the golden silence of your earth

You are leaded
The leaden pain of centuries
The silver-white heads of brides’ mothers
And you a broken branch where no fruit ripens

Like a baby

They play portraits with you
London Versailles Paris the Kremlin
Their teeth flash at your squirming
They set out secret meals behind screens

When they bite you they act surprised
How ancient you are Arberia
What a mind you have what strong roots
They hold your trunk fast

Wounded Arberia drive away the fog

 

We can see this tree trunk as a broken monument to waiting, but Saraçini never leaves us too sure what will come next—“The leaden pain of centuries/The silver-white heads of brides’ mothers/ . . . Like a baby” and cities and palaces whose “teeth flash at your squirming.” And by the end, the unpunctuated imperative for Arberia (an archaic name for Albania) to drive away the fog is decidedly unconvincing, an effect many of her last lines achieve.

If there is a criticism for Weitzman’s translation it is that she tended to stay truer to sense and spareness than sound and rhythm; it is unavoidable that we can’t hear the repetitive singsong of “Londiniane Versajiane Parisiane Kremliniane” or the internal slant rhyme “fëmijët e Edipit” in English, but in “E Shpirtikurës” (“The Departed”), for example, the translators have answered the line “As ti as mimozat e para s’kanë pse vijne” with the slightly awkward “Neither you nor the first mimosas have any reason to return.” Here and there, a few lines may leave some who do not speak Albanian wishing they could, or at least wishing they could hear Saraçini read it.

But this is certainly not true throughout, and Saraçini breaks her own patterns as well. “E Ngrohur” (“The Warmed”) looks a bit like haiku in its pithy simplicity:

 

Nuk janë mimozat
Lajmëtaret e stinës së re
Veç se djej të vegjël gjetheve gjilpërore

Pak ngrohtësi shpirtrave dimërorë
Përgjumur majave
I vockëli dielli im lajmëtar

Shpirti im hënor

***

Mimosas are not
Harbingers of the new season
Just tiny suns of spiky leaves

A little warmth for the winter spirits
Sleepy in the mountaintops
My little harbinger sun

My lunar soul

And “E Pyetur” (“The Questioned”) captures so well the tension of worry and rhythm in a set of questions, one after the next, “Was it winter or summer/Was there fog or rain . . . Were we flying through the sky/Or were we broken into stones . . . Did we dream of being born/Or of dying in our sleep . . .”

Some things are hard to pin down. The çifteli, distinctly Albanian, is a long, wooden, stringed instrument with frets up its thin neck and a bowl at the bottom shaped like a large teardrop. It sounds vaguely Middle Eastern, or Indian, although a banjo player might hear familiar notes in its music. It is how a harpsichord might play if two of its wires could be strummed, or how wind chimes might sound if they could vibrate like strings. It is a folk instrument that has survived conflict and speaks of loneliness in remote mountains, and it is frequently played at weddings and modern clubs. We may not hear the çifteli, precisely, in Saraçini’s poems. But, on the whole, even with the inevitable imprecision of translation, the instrument and poet share a set of indefinable characteristics, and when the music comes through—through repetition, through silence, through declaration, with the beat of the words—the poems resonate.

 ***

David Heath lives in Fairfax, Virginia, where he is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at George Mason University.

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  New Issues – Western Michigan Universityby Joe Hall

National Geographic Society excavations have unearthed flint fishhooks and mollusk shells amid sand dunes in the Sahara that rise half a mile high. Beneath these dunes satellite imaging reveals the faint courses of ghost riverbeds. From these remains scientists have traced the outlines of a giant, pre-historic inland sea and its tributaries on the same ground that is now some of the driest on earth.

 

Like fishhooks in the desert, Myronn Hardy’s best poems in The Headless Saints remind us of the alluvial nature of the present. As in “On a Bench: My Life,” the economic surfaces of the present moment of his poems suggest the imprints of the larger, messy, tectonic historical forces which have informed them.

 

Let’s talk about this poem.

 

Like many others here, the images are evocative, the diction simple, the texture of the language unpronounced but on examination revealing an ear concerned with subtleties.

Hardy also pivots quickly between thoughts and images, augmenting the often jarring effect of the book-wide device of substituting white space for commas.

 

We begin in an ancient Italian port:

 

   It’s cold

in Venezia but I sleep on a bench

the sea will soon swallow.

 

Here in a small jacket I’m observed by a poet

wayward in his search for a canal through his mind.

 

Ethopia.

 

Yes.

 

Italy to Ethiopia: two countries tied together through imperialist aggression and colonial exchange. Here the speaker reverses the typical current of capital-center extracting from colony, and, instead, through the movement of the poem, subsumes the canalled city in a vision of Ethiopia.

 

                        Return.

 

                        Yes.

 

                        To the desert lush as cantos.

                        The green place where we share bread is

                        all I need: my sister spinning about the room     dinner

                        of roasted fish      yellow lentils…

                        …my uncle in church

                        Speaking Ge’ez.

 

The potentiality of the desert is on par with the power of the Italian canto. Ge’ez, the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian Jews, reminds us of a religious heritage in Ethiopia as enduring as Italian Christianity (itself adopted through the routes of exchange between the seat of Roman Empire and the margins of its influence). Yet—and here is what makes Hardy who he is as a poet—as soon as place is evoked, as soon as a set of coordinates suggests and begins to narrow the spectrum of possible historical narratives, the poem turns to the speaker’s estrangement from these very places and his own cautious sense of agency:

 

                        In this head is all I have. My warm-poor

                        country these feet will never touch. I hope the water I

                        cup      let go      will spill over desolate land.

 

This is a fine example of Hardy’s restraint as he underscores his inability to conjure this idealized home. Estranged, all he does have is the poetic act of recovery, a simultaneous cupping and letting go, naming but not inhabiting.

 

Is there a touch of indulgence in the last line? Perhaps. The phrasing might be too familiar. This sort of undeveloped line shuts down too many poems in his first book, Approaching the Center. Ending on such a note, less generous readers might be inclined to group “On a Bench” with Charles Bernstein’s “I see grandpa on the hill / next to the memories I can never recapture” or “I see my Yiddish mama on Hester Street / next to the pushcarts I can no longer peddle” poems, a voice conforming to an exhausted model[1]. This reading depends on the reader’s willingness to relate Italy and Ethiopia and pursue the implications of Ge’ez. Persistent readers will find in Hardy’s restraint an invitation to dig into the connotational substrate of these places to make these connections, and in this push into the uncertain seams of his poems, Hardy’s work becomes not simply about recovering a sentimentalized version of the past, but about problematizing our relationship with it in the poem’s invocations of larger historical systems.

 

Other poems give us much less to work with. “The Living” is stratified rock:

 

                        White gold crowns on water      green

                        swirls into cobalt             light pieces.

 

                        Coral broken       a heart with exposed

                        valves        arteries      veins severed by currents

                       

                        Seaweed circles legs but will not pull

                        another body under. This time it drags

 

                        a living man to shore.

 

Prosodicaly, Hardy accomplishes something nifty. The generally trochaic habit of previous lines suddenly reverses at “another body under.” The man escapes drowning as the poem kicks free of its dominant sonic habit. What else is here? Introducing a living man seems like an effort at putting something at stake and allowing for closure before the poem can break out of its own hermetic symbolism.

 

Elsewhere we find poems like “1937” which more explicitly think their way through colonialism. This one ends pointedly: “My dear friends, is fascism perennial?” A conversation about colonialism between a diverse body of members in “Tea in Perugia” concludes, “I sit beside him afraid of future’s rumble.” Whatever pleasure might be taken from the texture of the poem is subsumed by the poem’s efforts to alert us to manifestations of hegemony. These poems don’t play to Hardy’s strengths—images that are lush, terrible and sometimes bizarre within the tense syntax the white space of his pulled commas allow. Yet, in light of Hardy’s first book—2001’s terribly earnest Approaching the Center—these shifts in his second book both toward hermetic imagery and historicism represent maturation, resistance to the over-lyric “I” whose moods efface the ostensibly vital places of the poem. E.g. from Approaching the Center:

 

…God

If I could see the moon

just one more time

maybe this life would change.

 

What the divergent modes of The Headless Saints make room for, unlikely as it might seem, is the cutting, surreal imagery that emerges in some of Hardy’s best poems. In “Lobsters: Arkansas, July 1983” sun burnt white people looking at an anaconda baking in the sun are two-hundred “lobsters in overalls      straw hats.” “Damsel Returns from Ithaca” features Polyphemus playing a cop who tosses addicts and kicks in doors. The point of these poems in not to conclude that cops can be monsters or white people forfeit their humanity in consuming cruelty as entertainment, rather, these are efficient, magical givens, from which the poems proceed. The cruelty of the spectators in “Lobsters” grows legs, infects the future:

 

                        …A woman (lobster)

                        yelled I need some pretty boots. Did she

 

                        watch Turner’s death? Ask for brown lampshades?

                        Were they all there        tongues long wet as worms?

 

                        When it really dies        will each try for a tooth? Place

                        in a box       pass it through a family.

 

                        This is who we are.

 

And it is this regular recurrence of outstanding poems which keeps us following Hardy across a spectrum of tones (surreal, hermetic-imagism, historio-political) and places as various as Italy, Brazil and Arkansas. What emerges from all this movement is a sort of twin map—the lushness of a multitude present places set against the enduring, diffuse havoc caused by Imperialist forces throughout the history of these places—each map always in the middle of over lapping the other. It’s an ambitious project, one that seems to strain the limits of an 85 page book. But Hardy’s poems are self-contained; they do not have to be considered in aggregate, and it is this finely accomplished balance between larger thematics and the concerns of individual poems that so successfully invite the reader to dig deeply into his work.

---

[1] “State of the Art” in A Poetics (6).

 

——————————————————————-

Joe Hall’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Versal, Cimarron Review, Handsome, Face Time: A Cygist Press Anthology and others. Founder of the DC reading series Cheryl’s Gone, Joe currently maintains a guest room for itinerant artists in his West Lafayette, Indiana home.

 

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