Cheryl Dumesnil. Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. 90 pgs. $15.95.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

Let me just say right off the bat that Cheryl Dumesnil’s Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes is among my favorite collections from the last few years. I’ve been thinking about why that is, and this is what I’ve come to: the writer’s confidence in her voice. These poems are tight but accessible. Every word pulls its weight—so often in less accomplished poems, the language is hesitant, characterized by a few too many modifiers and imprecise verbs that flatten the lines. Dumesnil’s poems, in contrast, are pleasurable, occasionally because they’re overtly fun and funny, but more often because they present experience exactly and concisely. It’s not just their content but their aesthetics that reward the reader.

Most often, these poems are composed in couplets, a particularly rigorous form because the abundant white space highlights lax writing. Poems written in couplets can be spare, reinforcing their stark appearance, or they can be almost hyperbolically rich, in ironic contrast to their appearance on the page, but it’s difficult for them to succeed at any point between. Poets can get away with more in long dense stanzas than they can in briefer stanzas that will never be mistaken for paragraphs.

“Notes to Myself on the Morning after His Birth,” for example, gestures toward the catalogue, but the items it refers to are developed so fully through imagery and implied metaphor that it quickly surpasses the expectations of that form. Having just given birth, the speaker hopes to remember everything, what it felt like to notice her son’s skin, breath, aroma for the first time. She captures that paradoxical combination of awe and loss that occurs so frequently to parents:

…his body’s
plumpness in the first hours,

like a cake’s perfect rise held only
for a moment, as if on the breath

of god before the exhale—you will
never get that back. Nor will it ever

leave you.

Although she will witness the miracle of her son’s breathing over and over again, she will never again be quite as stunned by the experience. The structure of this poem enhances the reader’s experience, partly because the couplets seem to float on the whiteness of the page, but also through the frequent enjambment which encourages the reader to hesitate, wondering if the meaning of the line  will shift after the break. In the excerpt above, the enjambment sometimes reproduces the meaning of the sentence, as in “held only / for a moment” where the reader pauses just as the breath is held briefly at its peak. The next line break accomplishes something similar, the baby’s breathing held “as if on the breath // of god…” Dumesnil emphasizes the subject of these lines—breathing—by breaking the line and stanza after “breath,” separating that phrase briefly from its object, “of god,” a phrase that heightens the significance of the infant’s breathing to the universally sacred. Then, the next break works differently: “you will / never get that back.” Initially, “you will” seems to gesture toward a positive accomplishment, and it is only as the next line begins that we realize the grammatical move into future tense signifies loss. But not complete loss—although the speaker will never again experience this awe in exactly the same way, the subsequent line confirms that she will always remember it.

The most poignant lines occur a few stanzas later, as the speaker begins to understand how radically her life has changed: “Mama, he warned, / you have signed on to witness / / a daily parade of exquisite / losses.” Parenting includes many experiences beyond this witness, but it never occurs entirely apart from this witness.

Throughout this collection, the speaker pays close attention to the world. In “The Flock,” for instance, Dumesnil asks, “If a house sparrow arrives on my sill, / sprig of language pinched in her beak, who am I / / to tell her no?” The “sprig of language” is one of the most evocative metaphors in the book, exploiting the habit of birds to carry literal sprigs in their beaks, juxtaposing that with the patterns of birdsong to accomplish some of the tasks of language, while also suggesting a closer relationship between humans and other animals than the characterization of humans as language-using animals would suggest. This poem concludes with imagery that indicates life is fundamentally paradoxical, that wishing it otherwise is a futile even if understandable desire: “The window-stunned robin who hunkered // on my deck for hours—that she flew away meant / one thing, that she left a red stain meant another.”

The poems I’ve discussed are thoughtful and thought provoking. I said, though, that some of Dumesnil’s poems are actively amusing, so if you’re looking for humor, be sure to read the genuinely funny (yet also poignant) eight-part “Tampons: A Memoir.” It encapsulates the experiences many of us have shared—so many of us in fact that I’m tempted to edit an anthology called Feminine Hygiene.

The control Dumesnil exhibits in the craft of each poem extends to the entire collection. It’s tone and content are nicely balanced between the internal and the external, the personal and the social, the serious and the lighthearted. I’m grateful I live in a world where this collection can exist.

Ruth Bavetta. Flour, Water, Salt. FutureCycle Press, 2016. 73 pgs. $15.95.

The titles of the poems in Ruth Bavetta’s most recent collection, Flour, Water, Salt, will certainly pique the interest of most readers: “If I Were a Maker of Marzipan,” “Grandmother’s Bird’s Nest Pie,” “More Than Thirteen Lemons in the Rain,” “A World with No Chickens.” These titles suggest an imagination that is attentive to the world, to its detail, and one that is also engaged with language. These characteristics are born out in the poems, which consider the rituals of daily life, particularly of food and cooking, meals eaten with family members, the bodies that are nourished in kitchens.

The collection is organized into three sections named with the three nouns of the title. Several poems in each section somehow incorporate the subject, creating a thoughtful coherence, but the approaches are unique and intriguing, analogous to a collection of related short stories in which the protagonist of one might appear only as a fleeting pedestrian in another. The reader begins to anticipate the appearance of flour or water or salt and remains aware of the connotations of these necessities even when the poems don’t mention them directly.

Among the most successful poems in the collection is “More Than Thirteen Lemons in the Rain,” written “after Wallace Stevens.” Through its startling imagery and associative organization, this poem demonstrates the influence of Stevens’ famous thirteen ways, but its references and connotations are less obscure than in much of Stevens’ work. The poem is composed in couplets, each of which could stand independent of the others, but the accumulation of imagery contributes to a more pronounced effect than any individual couplet could. Here are the opening stanzas:

The tree, not in an orchard
but alone in an overgrown garden.

The fruit, brilliant
on this grey day, each one its own sun.

Lemon after lemon after lemon,
all the same, yet none the same.

Sour surrounded by bitterness
surrounded by light.

We see the tree first amid disorder, and then we see the fruit as light amid darkness. Couplets are perhaps the cleanest and most crisp stanzaic form, especially when each second line is end-stopped. Immediately, therefore, the poem brings order to the overgrown chaos of the garden, and to the almost profligate abundance of the tree, the “Lemon after lemon after lemon.” The poem is embedded with paradox—not only order and chaos or “brilliant” yellow against a “grey day,” but sweet and sour, wine and lemonade. The speaker refers to human beings in only three of the eleven stanzas, including two of the most memorable, stanza five: “He thought it was a ball until / the fragrance stained his fingers” and stanza nine: “Blood running down my mother’s arms, / the lemon’s thorns.” A lemon distinguishing itself as lemon through “fragrance” is not surprising, yet it is startling in the context of this stanza, when it is unrecognizable as fruit or even as living object until “He” smells it. This couplet prepares the reader for additional references to human engagement, but we are unprepared for the implicit violence in stanza nine. Aside from the “grey day” in stanza two, the poem overflows with yellow and yellow and yellow—shining bright warmth. Then in stanza nine, and only in stanza nine, we see a color that is equally bright and warm. Unlike lemon juice, however, blood is neither sour nor bitter but intimates passion and danger. This poem would have been memorable even without stanza nine; with it, the poem is haunting.

Bavetta exploits concrete imagery throughout this collection; her skill with imagery is perhaps her greatest strength. The poems are most successful when she permits the imagery to imply metaphor or to suggest significance. In some of the poems, the metaphors—especially as constructed “the x of y” with “y” and abstraction—feel self-conscious and even unnecessary: “whipped / into a meringue of longing” (“Queen of Puddings”), “dredged in the flour of expectation” (“Honeymoon”), “Drank the water of discontent” (“What We Did”). Some of these metaphors would be stronger if they were implied, e.g. “dredged in expectation” or “drank discontent.”

Flour, Water, Salt is a thoughtful collection whose arrangement creates a narrative of relationship. The tone is often compassionate, even when the speaker expresses anger or explores bitterness. That is, she treats others, including an ex-husband, fairly—although he’s described negatively, the speaker most often includes herself in her critique. In its entirely, the book is an exploration of anger and joy, hope and sadness that equates, ultimately, to acceptance.

Sarah Estes. Field Work. Cider Press, 2015. 68 pgs. $17.95.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

Sarah Estes’ Field Work had been sitting in my to-be-read stack for several months, and every once in a while, I’d sort through the pile and think, “I should read that.” Now that I have, I wish I’d read it much sooner, for it is a thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of lyric poems, grounded in wisdom and informed by struggle. The poems acknowledge grief and loss, but they strive toward acceptance of these experiences as components of the life we are given to live.

The opening lines of the opening poem, “The Fall,” encapsulate one of the book’s major themes: “This is what God is. Water. / This is what survival is. Swimming.” The title, of course, evokes a foundational Christian teaching about human nature, that we are inherently disobedient, sinful, unwilling to accept limits. The poem, though, never again refers overtly to that Biblical story, and its exploration of human XXX is much more gentle. Here are the first three stanzas:

This is what God is. Water.
This is what survival is. Swimming.
You don’t realize until entirely immersed.
Until your suit is a purple skin.
Until the lines of yourself
have begun to slip

from meaning.
And you see your hand
plunging you forward, the way a fish
jumps into what it was not made for.

When it is your own hands pulling you
through the water, you begin to think you
are strong. That strength is something
like loving the air, but not the air you
breathe into your own lungs.

Ironically, the poem suggests, it is when the boundaries separating ourselves from the rest of creation dissolve that we most believe ourselves in control of our circumstances. Theologians and psychologists have asserted similar ideas, but, for me, the abstractions of theology are never as pleasurable as the metaphor of poetry. The ideas Estes explores in “The Fall” are interesting, but the poem is successful because its language is vivid. The extended metaphor is so effective that readers forget they’re immersed in metaphor until we reach the end of the poem, pause, and return to its beginning.

How does Estes seduce her readers into interpreting figurative language as realistic, accurate description? This poem demonstrates Estes’ mastery of craft. Its effect on the reader reproduces the water’s effect on the “you”: “You don’t realize until you’re entirely immersed,” in water or in language, what it is that surrounds you. Both the sounds of the words and the appearance of the lines on the page reinforce the imagery, for whether this water is river, lake, or ocean, its rhythm is recognizable. The relationship between end-stopped and enjambed lines illustrates how Estes exploits craft to develop her theme. The first four lines are end-stopped, and the first two also contain definite caesuras; the rhythm of these lines is abrupt, just as their content is stated directly. After line four, however, the next two lines are enjambed, with end-stopped lines occurring further and further apart.  The rhythm, that is, becomes smoother and softer as the “you,” the reader, imagines herself more and more fully immersed. Where the lines are enjambed is as important as that they are enjambed, for meaning resides at least as much in the line as in the sentence. In stanza three, for example, the meaning would shift subtly if a line broke at “strong” or “strength” rather than at “you” and “you” and “something.” Estes places “strength” close to “strong,” so that the synonyms themselves increase their strength, but not nearly as much as they would if they’d been placed at the ends of lines. Their placement in the middle of the line instead subtly undercuts their strength. Estes also relies on assonance and alliteration to both vary the rhythm of the poem and reproduce the rhythm of water. Because so much is going on in this poem and because its elements so enhance each other, the pleasure of “The Fall” increases with each reading.

Clearly, “The Fall” explores the relationship of the self with the divine. Other poems expand Estes’ exploration of relationship, incorporating the self and family, the self and strangers—often much less privileged strangers—into this primary relationship. Or perhaps a better way of saying this is that the collection is organized to reproduce a speaker’s emergent understanding of her place in the world. The last section of Field Work consists of several poems set in southeast Asia. In these poems, close relationships among members of the speaker’s family merge with encounters with others. Although poems that depend on foreign locales for their content often drift into superficial presentations of exotic sites and sights, Estes is as committed to accuracy and understanding here as she is in poems set in middle America.

Field Work contains poems that vary in form as well as content. Estes is particularly adept at exploring the nature of the line, not only where to break it as I discussed above, but also whether it ought to begin flush left, how far to extend it or how radically to trim it, what its relationship is with the sentence and with the stanza. The voice, though, is consistent throughout—thoughtful, serious though not solemn, quietly inviting. It is a voice that, I hope, will have much more to say.

Zach Czaia. Saint Paul Lives Here (in Minnesota). Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock), 2015. 54 pgs. $9.00.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

Zach Czaia’s Saint Paul Lives Here (in Minnesota) is an examination of betrayal by individuals and institutions, of innocence and guilt, and of forgiveness—which doesn’t come easily and sometimes doesn’t come at all. The poems in this collection accomplish a difficult task—succeeding as poems, attentive to their craft, despite the temptation their content provides to rant or sermonize. Many of the poems address the sexual abuse scandal that erupted within the Roman Catholic Church several years ago, not only the harm caused by individual priests to individual children, but more appallingly through the complicity of bishops and other powerful men who serve one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. Despite this content, the poems aren’t confessional so much as inquisitive, and their emotional pitch ranges from outrage to dismay to, occasionally, relief. Significantly, the collection also includes poems whose central commitment is love—of spouses, parents and children, siblings, friends, and of the speaker for God.

One of the poems that thematically anchors the collection is “Memories of Father X,” composed as a four-part sequence reminiscent of sonnets. The speaker served as a lector during his school days, and the poem addresses his physical proximity to both Father X and the altar during mass. Section ii explores the complexity and paradox of sacrament:

Death poured out his mouth along with the gospel,
teeming with its interest for life. The blood
of Christ in the cup, raised, and my friends
on the altar ringing their bells at the priest’s raising
of the cup and all of us staring.

Communion, the golden tray

beneath our chins to catch the crumbs of Christ, our tongues
extended to the host like waves, licking God
then lapping back to rejoin the sea, our seats
on the altar…

Thematically, this poem is complex, linking as it does the gospel, which translates literally as “good news,” with death. Literally, the eucharist is linked to the death and resurrection of Christ, but participation in the eucharist is understood to bring life to the people. Here, Father X breathes death as he consecrates the wine, breathing out death upon the people even as they are in life.

Poetry, though, needs to be more than theology even if its impulse is to express theology. Here, Czaia exploits the capacities of English so that his language is at least as memorable as his ideas. The excerpt I’ve quoted relies on alliteration (raised/ringing/raising, catch/crumbs, like/licking/lapping) and assonance (blood/cup, crumbs/tongues).  The simile of “tongues extended to the host like waves” extended to illustrate the communicants “lapping back to rejoin the sea” is an apt description of the forward movement of parishioners as dozens or hundreds of individuals approach the altar and then return to their pews.

This passage also illustrates Czaia’s facility with the line. The opening line of this section introduces the paradox of the gospel affiliated with death, but then in the second line, Czaia uses the caesura not only for rhythmic effect but also to enrich the meaning of the line, augmenting the meaning of the sentence: “teeming with its interest for life. The blood.” According to the sentence, it is the gospel that is “teeming with its interest for life,” but according to the line, it is the blood that teems. Linked together, the line and the sentence attest that both interpretations are true. Such attention to the relationships between form and content is what I most appreciate in poetry, the potential of craft to magnify meaning.

The most memorable poem in the collection, though, is “Benque, 2005,” a five-page prose poem that therefore relinquishes the opportunities line breaks create. Although this poem circulates around a narrative, the speaker’s experience as a young man teaching in a Central American village, its tone is contemplative. Despite its length and the implicit narrative, “Benque, 2005” is not a narrative poem so much as a reflection on meaning. The poem refers to young love, adolescent misbehavior, religious emotionalism, and the rape of a boy by his uncle. But it is not about any of these things; it is about a man’s coming to terms with the fact that his world contains all of these things—play and tragedy, love and evil. The final paragraph accepts these facts, but it also asserts that life consists of more than these facts:

Some day I will be dead, as dead as any martyr or heretic, as dead as any willful human bereft of will, memory and desire. And then Benque will only be dust in my mouth, dust with other dust, mixing and mingling beneath my skull. And I will wait as others wait in the valley, to be remade, to dance in my fitful way with the other resurrected bodies. I will wait to be clothed again with flesh.

Saint Paul Lives Here (in Minnesota) is a memorable collection written by a poet with something to say. I look forward to reading more of Zach Czaia’s work.

Carla Drysdale. Inheritance. Finishing Line Press, 2016. 29 pgs. $14.49.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

We might be entering a new age of the chapbook, just as we’re entering (I think) a new age of the prose poem. Dozens of presses are now publishing chapbooks, and writers who’ve published multiple full-length collections are embracing the form, often for projects well-suited to this publishing mode, sequences of related poems, for example, that gain substance from being published together without the context of additional unrelated poems. Although poets still often begin their careers with chapbooks, the form, in currently appealing to established poets also, is redefining itself and elevating its prestige.  Finishing Line Press is no longer an upstart as small presses go—it’ll celebrate its twentieth anniversary in two years—and it specializes in the chapbook, publishing multiple titles each year. It has become, in fact, one of the most influential chapbook publishers in the country. Carla Drysdale’s Inheritance is her first chapbook, but it follows a full-length collection, Little Venus, which was published in 2009. The poems included in Inheritance are thematically linked, as the speaker considers the lives of her children and her parents. The content is often difficult, but Drysdale is able to articulate strong emotion by recollecting it, if not exactly in tranquility, then with measured concern.

The opening poem, for instance, which is also the title poem, explores her two sons’ differences which align them with her in distinctive ways. The poem intensifies as its proceeds, until what’s most surprising is also what’s most unsettling. The opening lines are straightforward, and the tone seems calm, nearly objective, but it is also deceptive:

One of my two sons devours books
as I did, bespectacled, silent.

There are childhood facts I’d like to check,
but the past is unpopular

with my mother. Her husband wasn’t a reader.
His eye was on me during the day

and at night,…

The transition from assurance to ominous occurs already in the second couplet, which—through Drysdale’s line break—initially seems to refer to the son. Readers are startled, then, at the introduction of the mother, and slightly uneasy therefore with the husband who “wasn’t a reader.” Drysdale exploits her options with the line again between couplets two and three: “during the day // and at night,…” The poem narrates the speaker’s experiences with her mother and stepfather and then turns again, at the 2/3 mark, to discuss the “other son.” He

peers into

the legacy behind my eyes,
at what I’m trying to hide.

His pleasure and pain
are always mine

as when he kisses his cat or bends
his pen in half and yells at me,

enraged by the words
on the page.

This son initially seems empathic and affectionate, and again meaning bends across the turn of the line break. He “bends,” not for a hug or caress, but to break the pen that won’t properly write the words he can’t properly read. Superficially, this son is the opposite of the first who “devours books,” but this son is devoured by inarticulate rage, just as the speaker is as she recalls the actions of her stepfather and the inaction of her mother. The sons, by responding to print as differently as they do, create a composite of their mother’s apparent and hidden character. Drysdale, in choosing the restraint of couplets and the flexibility of the enjambed line, permits the poem to reveal rather than to declare its meaning.

Many of the poems in Inheritance work similarly, including the final poem, “Rafael’s Question,” which is also composed in couplets and also concerns the speaker’s position generationally between her sons and her parents. This poem imagistically and thematically links the chapbook’s end to its beginning, but now there’s an implication of reconciliation with the events life has brought rather than rage at them. The son’s final question regarding his grandparents is poignant—“He asks, ‘Do you still love them?’ / So gently, so gently”—because it’s ultimately a question about whether the speaker’s ability or inability to love as a daughter will be replicated in her ability or inability to love as a mother.

Formally, the most unusual poem in the collection is “Labyrinth,” which relies on anaphora to establish a chant-like rhythm through the first half. These stanzas describe the speaker’s mother’s protection:

She who bore me, supported my slack newborn neck
in her palm while she bathed me in a small basin,
warm water tested on her wrist

At exactly the half-way point, though, the tone and content shift:

Who covered me up in the sun, but neglected the darkness
I was in…

There is no more “She who” protects the speaker, but lines like this: “Abandonment, it sounds so harsh, then and now, / well, doesn’t it?” If it sounds harsh, it is because maternal abandonment is harsh. The final stanza describes the speaker’s relationship with her mother as a “labyrinth of denial”—complicated denial, for its unclear whether it’s established by the mother or by the speaker, and so is attached to both. A labyrinth, though, is different from a maze in that the path of a labyrinth never leads to a dead end. The path of a labyrinth always leads to the center and then to the exit as long as the pilgrim keeps walking. So although the poem ends with the word “dead,” some hope remains, at least implicitly.

Although short, Inheritance is not slight. The poems are thoughtfully composed, and they will stay with you.

Carrie Shipers. Cause for Concern. Able Muse Press, 2015. 84 pgs. $18.95

Carrie Shipers. Family Resemblances. University of New Mexico Press, 2016. 70 pgs. $17.95

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

Carrie Shipers’ second and third collections of poetry appeared within a few months of each other, and I read them within a few days of each other. Stylistically, the poems in the two collections are similar—most careful readers would with reasonable confidence identify them as composed by the same author—but they differ in theme and tone. The first, Cause for Concern, explores Shipers’ experience as primary caregiver for her husband as he recovered from kidney surgery, while Family Resemblances includes a broader range of material, though many of the poems examine the speaker’s position within her family of origin. In both collections, the poems rely on implicit or explicit narrative, comparatively even line lengths—though the lines nevertheless contribute substantially to the rhythmic interest—and language that is interesting yet direct. Both collections include a series of poems scattered throughout—in Cause for Concern it’s a sequence of haunting dog poems, and in Family Resemblances it’s a sequence of poems narrated by “The Woman Who Can’t Forget” (one of which was recently featured on Verse Daily)—that function as commentary on the poems that surround them. Throughout the collections, the speaker’s reliability is provocatively questionable, but her character is also reassuringly familiar. Like it or not, we’ve all been this speaker.

Despite the often somber content, the poems do contain some humor. “Field Guide,” for example, from Family Resemblances, reveals how the certainties of a relationship can become both less certain and more interesting: “She married him for what he knew— / names of trees, animals, how to hot wire / his Mercury…” She is gullible, however, or naïve, or both: “They had three kids before / she caught on.” Shipers delays the reader’s gratification for a few lines—“caught on” to what? Revealing the answer to that question, Shipers shifts from the names of birds to other names: “Did he make up socket wrench? Phillips head?” The husband has been answering all along, but his responses have included more fantasy than fact. The stanza breaks here, at approximately the 2/3 point, and the beginning of stanza two becomes more serious. The speaker also fantasizes,

…by pretending
to know what she only hoped, each time hoping
he’d catch her out so she could tell the truth:
I’m scared too.

Telling the truth often is a relief, and the truth the speaker is able to acknowledge demonstrates Shipers’ skill in exploiting an anecdote to reveal the poem’s own deeper truth. By its end, the poem circles back to its beginning, with the speaker asking about a bird and her husband stating, “Three-toed warbler.” What began years earlier as curiosity and play has grown into ritual, a practice that in its simplicity sustains the relationship. The poem circles back to its beginning, but that beginning has acquired more significance. Looping back this way, tying the poem’s final image to its first, is a common strategy that, in successful poems, redefines the opening. Through these twenty-three lines, readers understand how the speaker has grown through decades.

The primary factor in the success of “Field Guide” is its structure. But Shipers is also skilled in other areas of poetic craft—choices made at the level of word and line to enhance rhythm and image. Although the poems are most often free verse, the lines are informed by English poetry’s iambic history; they are not shackled by a compulsive adherence to regular meter, but the echo of meter is suggestively pleasant. Here is the last couplet of “Appetite,” a disturbing response to the tale of Hansel and Gretel: “And while I talk I’ll dish up supper—black pudding, / potatoes, a roast as sweet as suckling pig.” The first of the lines begins with three iambic feet which are interrupted with syllables “up supper” that include an internal rhyme, with the “p” repeated two syllables later and then repeated again at the beginning of the second line. Following “potatoes,” the final line returns to an iambic meter, emphasized again with alliteration and assonance. Other lines adopt similar strategies, and they are able to do so because of Shipers’ reliance on concrete, often monosyllabic vocabulary. The creepiness of this poem’s content is ironically contradicted by its pleasing music.

The poems in Cause for Concern are also memorable for their concrete imagery—one would hope, of course, that poems describing sick and wounded bodies would be concrete. The opening poem, “Wound Assessment,” alternates between references to Doubting Thomas, as he’s often called, reaching into Christ’s wounded side, and descriptions of the speaker changing the dressing on her husband’s surgical wound. The speaker here isn’t an idealized nurse but an afraid and resentful young wife. Everything begins to signify her husband’s illness, from scissors to her dining room table. Her husband’s wound is as obvious as Christ’s, but the speaker’s wound is as invisible as either doubt or belief. The poem succeeds, like “Field Guide” which I discussed above, in part because of its structure, the references to Thomas woven throughout, and also because of the language itself, particularly the verbs.

Both of these books are provocative. In Cause for Concern, the speaker acknowledges unattractive, if understandable, traits. Some readers will empathize with her response; others will not. As in fiction, it’s much more difficult to write well of an unsympathetic speaker than of an attractive one. These poems raise ethical questions, not only about marriage and the care we owe each other, but also about the responsibility of the writer, which must include a commitment to truth, especially when it’s a truth, like resentment of a spouse’s suffering, we would rather not acknowledge. The speaker in Family Resemblances is generally more sympathetic, but the family dynamics explored are nevertheless also often troubling. We could say the same about many poems, of course, including many badly written ones. The content of Shipers’ poems is interesting, but it’s her craft that’s most admirable.

Kristine Ong Muslim. Lifeboat. University of Santo Thomas Publishing House, 2015. 109 pgs. $18.00

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

The poems in Lifeboat feel haunted. Although the syntax and vocabulary are exceptionally straightforward, the imagery and tone leave the reader unsettled. Things are not as they seem—the poems describe horses “that thump the oceans flat,” spiders as “the stuff made of time,” companions disguised by fog. Deceptively accessible, the language of the poems hovers above a   suggestive depth of meaning. Word by word, readers understand the sentences, but poetic language is nothing if not figurative, and the metaphors here disconcert. The poems are memorable, therefore, not only through their striking imagery but also through the emotional resonance.

Here, for example, is “First Day of September”:

The house crouches,
an angular juggernaut
of gray, brown, and green
against an infinity of white.
Inside, even Mahler cannot
drown the hush. This time
of the year, we are all wolves
drunk with stealth, misled by
the stillness of the dirt road
that leads to the ranch,
and we understand that
the horses are the whole world,
remember the half-light striking
the water in the trough where
the cows drink—their thirst
a ripple on the water’s surface.

At first glance, the title seems simply descriptive, a phrase to anchor the poem that will follow. (Muslim’s titles are most often direct and minimalist—“Horses,” “The Pilot,”  “Spiders”—though occasionally they are more unusual—“The One Called Sunday,” “The Discovery of Laughter,” “He Ate Himself to Death.”) By the time we finish the poem, however, and return to the title, we realize its significance, for “This time / of year,” when summer is fading into autumn (at least in the northern hemisphere) and the year is veering toward its conclusion, caution does increase, in contrast to carefree spring.

Initially, the house in the poem seems abandoned and its setting, “an infinity of white,” desolate. If Mahler plays inside, though, even if only in the speaker’s imagination, the house is inhabited by at least one consciousness. Muslim’s word choice, “hush,” is evocative, suggesting a soft restful quiet rather than, for example, a fearful silence. Yet fear is exactly what emerges in the next sentence as “we are all wolves / drunk with stealth.” Such a line suggests that stealth is much more than the caution that distinguishes predator from prey, for we are “drunk” with it. We are overcome, our judgment dissipated. Overwhelming our self-control, our stealth exerts control over us. Then the sentence, at its midpoint, makes an odd turn: “we understand that / the horses are the whole world.” Maybe the horses are prey, for to an intent predator, prey can form “the whole world” of attention. I think there’s more going on in this poem though. I think this line captures the speaker’s epiphany, that each moment comprises the entire universe, that every creature is here now, and that here now is the center of all life.

If such a statement seems too mystical, let me support it with some discussion of craft. The speaker’s insight, “the horses are the whole world,” occurs on line twelve of sixteen, at exactly the three-quarter point. Effective lyrics often adopt the strategy of a sonnet, with a turn occurring somewhere between the two-thirds and three-quarter mark. In this line, a subordinate clause—for it actually begins with “that” on the previous line—is treated as an independent clause so that the line sounds like a sentence. That is, through Muslim’s use of the line, “the horses are the whole world” reads as if it stands alone. The verb “are” conveys presence without action or movement, so nothing is changing in the line; the moment extends into eternity. As the sentence continues, the speaker moves from the present into memory, conveyed through image, such that the horses remain in the continuous present:

…the half-light striking
the water in the trough where
the cows drink—their thirst
a ripple on the water’s surface.

The speaker’s vision of the horses evokes through association her memory of a trough and the image of “half-light striking” the water. The speaker has been attentive to detail, noticing how elements of nature interact. Her habit of attention has prepared her for the epiphany she describes in the poem. Although the individual sections—the house, the stealthy wolves, the horses, the cows drinking water—could seem disparate, they all eventually serve the poem’s purpose and contribute to its meaning.

Many of Muslim’s poems open out like this, into mystery. The final poem in the collection, “Hunger Strike,” explores presence and absence, layering human physicality with emotional weight. It begins with a statement that is strange in what it finds strange:

Strange how we do not alter ourselves
to fit the dimensions of this room
in order to fill it completely.

It’s impossible, isn’t it, to alter ourselves that much, or to fill a room completely—unless, of course, the poem isn’t talking about simple bodies. The poem explores the location of childhood, its tone midway between sinister and nostalgic. It concludes with a description of the past infusing the present:

Upstairs, we hold hands with the
versions of ourselves, the dead girls
who will live and live and live.

Read in isolation, the last line of this poem and the book would indicate that the collection is extraordinarily optimistic. But the last line cannot be read in isolation; “the dead girls” echo through it. Muslim exploits language this way throughout Lifeboat. Her sentence structure most often illustrates English at its most basic: subject, verb, object. Her word choice is most often monosyllabic. Yet her patterns of imagery and thematic concerns are deeply complex. One closes the book the first time, and the second time, strangely puzzled, as if comprehension waits just out of sight, not to be grasped at but to be patiently awaited.

David Lehman. The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. 198 pgs. $24.95.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

David Lehman’s The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 collects the introductions he’s written to introduce the individual volumes of The Best American Poetry series over the last twenty-five years. Taken together, these brief essays—for they are much more broadly conceived than the word “introduction” would indicate—trace the controversies and other points of attention within the American poetry world over the last quarter century. Often as I read, I thought, oh, I’m glad we’re through that phase—the theory wars that not only pitted scholars against each other but also unnecessarily pitted scholars against creative writers (as if many of us don’t fill both roles), the flurry of trash-talking reviews by William Logan, the perennial complaint that there’s too much bad poetry because of MFA programs or slam poetry events or the ease of online publishing (a discussion we’re, alas, not yet through having). More often, though, I found myself glad to be a poet in our time when there’s so much vibrant poetry being written by so many different writers, and when there’s such energetic conversation occurring in libraries and cafes and bars and, yes, universities, about our art.

Too often, introductions to anthologies are written as if they are formal necessities or polite niceties that no one actually reads. Too often, such introductions fail to provoke or even inform. I find myself wishing that the five pages devoted to an introduction could have been devoted to five more poems instead. No so here. Lehman seems to think deeply about poetry every breathing day, and his thoughtfulness shows. He notices which canonical poets are exerting fresh influence on their contemporary descendants, and he notices when allusions to poetry increase in pop culture. He can speak about poetry’s relation to sit-coms and to boxing, to politics and to celebrity.

The essays earlier in the book are comparatively brief and focus more directly on an introduction of that year’s co-editor and the specific contents of that year’s volume. As the book develops, the essays become fuller, Lehman’s discussion of poetry and poets augmented by his observations about the wider world within which poetry circulates. This shift is appropriate, I think, as the series has lasted probably longer than anyone anticipated, and as Lehman himself likely discovered that he had more to say. And though he wouldn’t have been thinking of a collection of introductions early on in the series, the variety of topics he addresses through the years makes for a much more interesting book. I suspect most readers will still prefer to read The State of the Art two or three essays at a time over the course of a couple of weeks rather than reading them all straight through—but that’s how I prefer to read most collections of essays by a single author. I prefer to listen to the same voice in shorter segments, twenty or thirty pages at a time, but paradoxically, in terms of content there’s also much to take in, and I want to mull over what I’ve read, to think about what it means that Adrienne Rich included a poem by a high school student in the volume she edited, for example, while Harold Bloom, editing a best of the best of collection for the tenth anniversary of the series, included no poems from the volume Rich edited. (As with many issues, I find that I have my own knee-jerk response to these facts and then my more considered one.)

In addition to the obvious fact that The Best American Poetry series has lasted now a lifetime as far as some younger poets are concerned, The State of the Art also illustrates how thoughtfully Lehman has been in selecting co-editors. The first was John Ashbery, certainly an influential poet every aspiring poet in 1988 had to reckon with; the second was Donald Hall, perhaps equally influential though his style is dramatically different than Ashbery’s. Subsequent editors have included poets as diverse as Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Robert Creeley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lyn Hejinian, Paul Muldoon, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, and many others. This list reveals Lehman’s commitment to inclusion of many stylistic preferences, to a refreshing fairness.

I’m glad I’ve read The State of the Art. I’m glad The Best American Poetry series exists, even when I’m irritated that particular poems weren’t included or occasionally that certain ones were. Every year, the series alerts me to the work of poets I’d been unfamiliar with and lets me know that there’s just too much good poetry for one person to read. How could I be anything but grateful for that?