Face Painting in the Dark by Ann Cefola, Dos Madres Press, 2014

Full disclosure: Ann Cefola and I graduated from the same MFA class at Sarah Lawrence College. Looking back, I’m usually discouraged to find less and less of us are still working as writers.

W. H. Auden once made a prediction about successful writers: not one who has something burning to say, but one who is in love with with language. I find this to be a true measure of my MFA friends. Those who have continued to write are in love with words and sentences. Also, the successful writer is compelled to keep going, compelled to keep writing whenever they can. They don’t make excuses about having no time or inspiration. Their time is sacred to them and they defend it. Ann Cefola has kept going and she has been an inspiration to me. She’s kept working on her poems, on poetry newsletters and blogs. She’s published two chapbooks and now a first collection.  Over the 14 years I’ve known her, she’s kept on keepin on and she’s encouraged me to keep on, too.

My reading of her work has evolved over the last 14 years. Her poems are tight and her juxtapositions are advanced. Reading her now I see the art of containment and the order of her constructed phrases. Her poems sometimes feel like incantations in their brevities. The juxtapositions between poems are particularly good in the new collection so that even the older chapbook poems feel new.

I am beginning to see her phrases like very particular paint strokes, cerebral leaps. I have always loved that her poems express a kind of thinking in process.

There are many new, explosive poems in this book…the poem about Picasso's “Demoiselles” being one example, a conversation with the subject of the painting, the women. Full with very smart allusions and juxtapositions, Ann and the divas work through history's responses to the painting. I've recently read about two types of feminism:  that which deconstructs and that which reconfigures (or revamps) the situation of being a woman. I feel this poem does both, comparing the Demoiselles to WNBA players and ending with the incredible line,  “I am just a girl writing.” This poem blew my head off.

I found many exciting transgressive strokes all through the book. There are poems about identity and making ourselves up, poems about New York City, office spaces, a really unique 9/11 poem, a veritable stroke of a "before."

From "Shrapnel"

"A live hand across two world wars
astounded and mourning between lines
your point sharp, your No. 1 pencil so delicate,
so willing to be erased."

From "Express," a poem about taking the train into the city:

"Heavenly bodies, arching above
warm coffee, cinnamon and yeast below.
Stretching doughy muscles and sweet cells,
we like small loaves expand, turn golden, rise."

This time around, I notice Ann's 3-4 word phrases that are very tight and feel like assemblages that build to a mood. Ann also knows and uses the power of punctuation.

From "Forceps"

"Soul braces, Here we go. No cheers:
Cold city street. People rushing to trains,
What will happen to me? – I don’t know, sweet pea?"

Ann also captures the spirit in the suburbs. Fro the poem "Price Club"

“I want transubstantiation, to be taking up in cornflakes.”

She artfully weaves a phrase through the poem "North by Northwest" and "Anthem" is a lovely meditation on the afterlife of an ant. Time after time, Ann puts herself in wildlife poems.

I highly recommend this first collection by Ann Cefola.

Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield, 2001

I found this book at my local library recently and thoroughly enjoyed her poems of noticing and mindfulness, which I realize is not for everyone. If you've ever engaged in any Buddhist practice, you might love these poems, too.

Hirshfield has a particular quietness like watching monks chop wood or chop carrots. They are full of small rituals, meditations on choice. She expresses a kind of spiritual movement and stasis.

In structure and tone, her poems remind me of other lyric poems of the 1990s. At one point her sister asks, “Does a poem enlarge the world, or only your idea of the world?”

My favorite poems here deal with existence and changes. Hirshfield's book contains an ant poem, too: “Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand”

"The ant’s work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.”

From "Red Berries"

"The woman of this morning’s mirror
was a stranger
to the woman of last night’s"

In "The Room" Hirshfield expresses a fear of new love with the act of preparing the house for a new guest to come and then the  “shivering hopes” that “follow it in.”

From "Apple"

"One takes a bit, then the other.
They do this until it is gone."

This is the work of a spiritual practice. In "Rebus," she talks about the red clay of grief and asks "How can I enter the question the clay (grief) has asked?”

For me, some of the poems in the middle are vague. There are many contemplations of objects: buttons, pillows, carpet, an onion, a rock, clocks, ink. She is exploring thusness.

Dreams and identity are also recurring themes.

I've been sitting on this book, The World of the Ten Thousand Things by Charles Wright, for about 17 years, moving the book from New York to Pennsylvania to California (3x in California alone) to New Mexico (3x there, too). Finally I buckled down to read it and, like many things you put off for so long, you realize you should have read this years ago. But would you have loved the book's ghostly vagueness 17 years ago. Definitely not. So you then realize you've carried this book around so long waiting for the "Wright time" — as it were — to read it.

I'm working on a novel about the ghosts of a dying western town so of course this book's poems about the dead attracted me. Years ago I may have found Wright's poems difficult and distant, too much well-readedness on his sleeve, the type of thing Helen Vendler and Hart Crane would like…and my friend Teresa who loved Hart Crane and Jorie Graham and recommended we go to the poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to see Graham and Wright read. This is where I bought the book long before I was ready for it.

Wright gets at that under-layer of nature poems, the almost gothic, elegiac layer of it…without coming across as completely Southern gothic. The books is also full of poems about artists (Cezanne a favorite), incidents of mysterious beauty. His thoughts flow about seemingly unedited. He experiments with variations: variations of self-portrait experiments, variations of journaling (one poem written over a calendar year). There is a lot of religion here: transfiguration, crosses, sin and plenty of nature's surreality and landscapes that undo us, abstractions of the seasons. In this way the book felt like a giant (and I mean giant) haiku.

The poems fly across the page in indents and with parentheticals. There is plenty of high-culture here too: music, painting, wine. He takes lots of car drives, invokes the act of licking a lot.

True, Wright often gets lumped with the language poets and he admits, "Language can do just so much" but there is plenty of aboutness in his poems, plenty of scene, plenty of voice. There's almost a sense of a man in early 50s midlife crisis here.

I've lost touch with Teresa 15 years ago…but I can still hear her reading excerpts of these poems to me.

From "Composition in Grey and Pink"

The souls of the day's dead fly up like birds, big sister,
The sky shutters and casts loose.
And faster than stars the body goes to the earth.

Head hangs like a mist from the trees.
Butterflies pump through the banked fires of later afternoon.
The rose continues its sure rise to the self.

From "A Journal of True Confessions"

The new line will be like the first line,
                                                                            spacial and self-contained,
Firm to the touch
But intimate, carved, as though whispered into the ear.

Likewise I loved Adobe Odes by Pat Mora. I found out about Mora from a book on Southwestern literature and art. These odes are done in the spirit of Pablo Neruda (she even includes an ode to him) but they are fabulously about New Mexican subjects. My favorite ones were odes to adobe, guacamole, kitchens, chiles, chocolate, names, the cricket, tea, toes, bees, apples, church bells, and cottonwoods. I also liked some of the idea odes: desire, hope, courage.

Some of the odes wander a bit far from their target (ode to Santa Fe) but Mora knows what it takes to make a good ode, scrumptious and tactile language. I'm going to give this book away as a gift for my friends in New Mexico and my friends who love the state, but live elsewhere.

A few weeks ago I also read Mora's book Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints which is similar but about ode-like explorations of Catholic saints.

Good Poems for Hard Times." I got this book used and it was one of my bathtub poetry books. I need variety when I'm reading in the bathtub.

Having has so many hard times in New Mexico, I was expecting to like this anthology more than I did. I just don't think Garrison Keillor (the editor) and I have the same rubric for either hard times or good poems.

However, there were enough good poems in here for me to justify keeping this book on hand:

"There Comes the Strangest Moment" by Kate Light
The Carnation Milk poem
"Happiness" by Michael Van Walleghen
"The Rules of Evidence" by Lee Robinson
"Minnesota Thanksgiving" by John Berryman
"High Plains Farming" by William Notter
"In Bed with a Book" by Mona Van Duyn

and some poems that I feel would be very moving at a funeral:

"Dawn Revisited" by Rita Dove
"Crossing the Bar" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 The Everyman's Library of Pocket books puts out these little novelty poetry anthologies that I'm always wanting to buy: ghost poems, Irish poems, jazz poems, comic poems, Christmas poems. There's a ton. The only other one I have is Zen Poems which I did not love.  Because I'm working on a novel with a murder in it, an anthology of poems about murder seemed necessary to read. And so I bought Killer Verse, poems of murder and mayhem. Loved it!  Sections are divided between family murders, murder ballads, Vers Noir, the inner-workings of murders, psycho killers, victims and meditations on murder. You get both old and new here, from anonymous ballads to Robert Browning to Marie Howe. 

For years I've loved the segment of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour where Sonny & Cher sang called  "Stagger Lee" (famously done by The Grateful Dead) and in this book I came across the poem from which is was based: "Stackalee."

Truthfully, I bought "Yesterday I Saw the Sun" by Ally Sheedy expecting it would be the worst in a bunch of celebrity poets. I was again surprised.

This is actually Ally Sheedy’s second book. When she was a tween, she published a successful children’s book, She Was Nice to Mice. Turns out her mom is a publicist and there's a literary agency in her family, Charlotte Sheedy.

There's also a long list of thank-you’s in the front of the book that includes plenty of brat-pack names from her 1980s-era movie peak.

All that insider stuff aside, this was a pretty raw and interesting book. Sure, there are some cliches employed, including the typical "hanging by a thread," once when we were literally talking about a doll’s eye, later figuratively.

But what Sheedy did well was to capture the gamut of drama in a young teen girl’s life…and not the squeaky-clean kind of teen: all the tears, mysterious love, intense drama of feeling, bulimia, sexuality, loneliness, rehab (that poem even rhymes), imitations, ideals, mother conflict, the murder of a friend, abortion…all the serious teen issues are here.

Talking about friendship with other women in a poem called "A Man’s World" was a  strong moment and the poem "Amends" was clever.

Her search for magical womanliness reminded me of the discussion on Texas Chicana writers in the book  The Desert is No Lady, Chicana writers who have Aztec goddesses at their disposal, a heritage anglo women do not have.

Sheedy also provides snapshots of Hollywood circa the early 1980s, experiences with rock and rollers. Could Paris Hilton have written this at her age. I don’t think so.

Sheedy even rewrites herself. This is a teen's obsession with her coming out into complicated worlds of womanhood and love. And through it, I remembered all my 16/17 year old melodramatic self. This are poems in typical teen languages but what you get is literally a rite of passage in action. I don’t know why we don’t honor this.