Years ago a friend of mine gave me the book Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Last winter, in a recent American Poetry Review essay, David Wojahn gave a great overview of her work. So although I've never liked her poems, I felt ready to give it another try.

Unfortunately, my journey through this book felt like a laborious slog. I had all the same problems as before I was schooled in how great she was.

And I'm sure this has everything to to with my particular taste than in something lacking in Bishop's poems. Because who doesn't like Elizabeth Bishop? It's heresy. But I had this overwhelming feeling these poems all needed a punch up. They felt clinical, stoic, dry, blah. Her plain word choices, her passive nouns, we went round and around things all to finally arrive at weak payoffs. Reading "At the Fishhouses" I figured she was the Ernest Hemingway of poets. 

The last stanza of "Cape Breton" is all you need to know:

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

Usually, one or two words would stick out in each poem that required a dictionary,  words made prominent for me because my friend had thankfully underlined and defined them all in a thick pink pencil.

But there were poems found in this fog that I liked. I loved "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore" about her mentor. I loved the storytelling in "Manners" and the lovely understated last line of "Filling Station." "Visits to St. Elizabeth" stands out in its nursery rhyme madness. My favorite poem was the surreal and whimsical "12 O'Clock News."

There was something biographically interesting about her descriptions of "awful hanging breasts" in the poem "The Waiting Room." But eventually this poem only reminded me of what I found missing in all her other poems. I kept waiting for something more, something profound, interesting or discombobulating beyond tedious descriptions of semi-exotic places. Everyone loves "The Moose" but I felt it took too long to get going. I've read "One Art" in almost many literature classes I've had and I've come to believe it's just a mimic of W.H. Auden. 

However, "Five Flights Up" does have my favorite parenthetical (a devise she is known for using effectively). And I liked the last stanza of her memorial poem to Robert Lowell, "North Haven"

…And now–you've left
for good. You can't derrange, or re-arrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song).
Their words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

And I loved her campy lines written to Frank Bidart in the  Fannie Farmer Cookbook. I guess what I was hoping for was the kind of revelation I had re-reading James Wright. At one time I found his poems to be dry and a slog, too.

Wright's simplistic language once irked me and made my eyes glaze over as well. But then coming to him later, I found some of my favorite poems in his collected works. The bang doesn't have to be big. It just has to be found somewhere in there.

Take "Saint  Judas" and its first line "When I went out to kill myself…" I'm hooked until the final fulfilling line after he meets a man beaten by hoodlums, "I held the man for nothing in my arms." There is music here. 

And in "Autum Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio:

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

In "A Blessing" we go through some of the same plain language description Bishop takes us through, but we get to something unexpected at the end,

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Here are two of my other favorites: "A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862" and "To You, Out There (Mars? Jupiter?)."

Interestingly, I feel I should have more in common with Bishop than Wright. And I'm not that sure if that's enough anymore. Maybe commonality will draw you into a set of poems, but you have to find something you need inside.

A Book of Forms: The Optimist by Joshua Mehigan, 2004

I've had a copy of this book  for years. Bought one after hearing Mehigan read at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books almost ten years ago. Mehigan's poems are primarily formal poems with rhymes. They're more narrative than confessional. I liked this about the book. Although I never felt I got to know Mehigan in a thread through all the poems, the narratives created unique characters. Unfortunately, formal poems sometimes just don't gel properly. Striving to meet the demands of the form, the resulting lines suffer from vagueness. And although most of his poems exhibit impressive technical skill, the poems often lack passion.  A good sample of vagueness can be seen in this couplet from "If Ye Find My Beloved…"

"He touched his wife's stiff arm and eyed her back
the way a child confronts an almanac."

There were poems I liked. In "Past Bedtime" the playful rhymes serve the children's point of view with whimsy.  I enjoyed the sonnet "The Tyrant" which read almost like form perfected. In the poems "Progress" and "The Story of the Week" we see vagueness actually serving the pieces. And the title poem is fascinating on each re-read. Mehigan has a strong command of his forms, complex sentence arrangements and unique narratives; I would just prefer his poems be less studied.

A Book About Life as a Woman; She Be by Tina Pisco, 2010

Tina Pisco is another poet in command of her rhythms, sentence structures and building dramatic movement within her poems. I was intrigued by her book's section titles: Woman, Lover, Thinker, Writer, all which create a kind of mathematical equation out of "She be woman, she be lover, she be thinker…" I also liked coming across Irishisms in her poems like Y-front (instead of V-neck) and smallies (for kiddies). Pisco has a sure sense of purpose about each poem as well. She always gets somewhere.

"Photograph" starts the book out strong and is one of the best poems in the set. I loved the experimental "DOGFOODCATFOOD" and the grrl power in "Contradictory Expectations." I also enjoyed the musical momentum of "Artists' Exemption."

What I would like to see more in her next book of poems is more specificity of word choice (show v. tell).  I was missing the juicy exacting word in many places. In revisions, she could improve upon the generalities of phrases like "take me in your arms," "bed of roses," "lived and loved hard," "with the best of them." These types of cliches also hampered my reading of her characters in these poems. Her husband comes across as simply the generic husband. I had no sense of who he was with any specificity (body or heart).

For instance, there are meaty phrases in this poem "From St. Andrews to the St. Alixe"

The watchfulness/of shoes….
…through towns where Weather is a citizen…
…store my words in salt.

Here the specificity is really percolating. The final poem, "For Sharon" is another great example of beautiful particularity.

It's in the silence
between the crow's caw
and the wind's rush

It's in the stillness
between the last heartbeat
and the next breath

that the poet
find the

poem.

   
A Book About Boxing: Apocalyptic Swing by Garrielle Calvocoressi, 2009

This is another book I picked up at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books years ago after hearing Calvorcoressi read on a panel. I like this book: it's gritty, brash, sinewy, concise–just like a boxer. It was a hard one, however, to get into due to some enigmatic and complicated opening poems. But I was drawn in by the sixth or seventh poem.

One theme of the book is salvation. There's a small-town-Americana gothic suffering to an array of religious poems. The best ones are "Jerusalem Baptist Church" (with pressing incantations of I have seen/I have heard/I have counted), "The Chapel, Now Quite Open to God," "Epistle From Her Daughter Yet to Be Consummated Back East," "Prayer After a Long Time Away" ("All those saints/calling to me from the bars"), and "Rosary Catholic Church" ("This is just one day of suffering").

Calvocoressi explores sexuality and salvation unflinchingly in poems like "Elegy Scale" and explores stark sexual imagery and control in poems like "Pleasant Plan Missionary"with lines like:

"Fill her up with so much fire
even Jesus will have to look away."

Violence and religion come together in the poem "Every Person in This Town Loves Football" which  begins with the line "Even the nuns come out," weaving sexuality in with

"Who's your daddy?

If he lived in this town he played
the game too and every girl
held his name in her mouth…

He walked down the halls
smelling of Old Spice and chew.
Who could break a boy like that?"

With that final line, you're not sure if Calvocoressi is calling for sympathy or vengeance.

Most of the poems are set in gothic rural settings but "LA Woman" is an interesting exception. There are other interesting odds and ends. "Fence" is a great mournful poem about the death of Matthew Shepard.  "Late Twentieth Century in the Form of a Litany" is also an excellently delirious pop-culture rant.

As interesting as the sexual-religious poems
are, the heart of the book lies with the boxing poems which expertly
explore boxing truths and the redemptive qualities of violence. "Glass
Jaw Sonnet," although not boxing-specific, preludes to a taunting anger.
"Boxers in the Key of M" introduces these boxing poems with lines like, "Have
you/ever gotten hit or thrown against a wall?/ There's a sweetness to
it, that moment when/your God would forgive you anything."

In the poem
"At Last the New Arriving," it is the glory of fighting:

"It will leave
you stunned
as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut
who's told he won
the whole damn prize…

O it will be beautiful.
Every girl will ask you
to dance and the boys
won't kill you for it. Shake your head.
Dance
until your bones clatter. What a prize
you are. You lucky sack of
stars."

"Training Camp: Deer Lake, PA" is a great long poem. In part iv, the boxer believes he's losing his girl
to another man: "take a thousand
punches in the gut./Your heart is a field with a thousand gulls/upon
it. Let them settle as you work the bag,/as he puts his clothes in your
drawers,/as she changes the locks and forwards your mail."

The poem "Box Fugue" ends with the lines "We are all so beautiful/with our face against the mat."
"Blues for Ruby Goldstein" is another great poem about the weakling boxer:

"In the gym or
the
ring all you gotta do is get up
one more time that the other guy thinks
you can.

In these poems, boxing is religion, sexuality and redemption.

…who's gonna
say, 'Stop.' They don't want to. That's the
truth."

I was disappointed with this book. Although it gives a good overview of Shaw's political activities and influences, and a thorough timeline of his sex-capades, the books and plays seem to pop up out of nowhere with no explication of his craft although the biographer does deal with political and social themes in his plays at length.Don't come here for any insight into Shaw's writing technique.

And politically, Shaw is a mixed bag. Although Shaw spent time as a Mussolini and Hitler apologist at the beginning of World War II, before all the mass killings, he did come to his senses before the end…but mostly because he was not an anti-semite. He didn't seem to be against fascism itself. A lifelong socialist, he also became mislead by Stalin. Dictators seemed to be his achilles heel.

That said, he had some interesting things to say about democracy and the ills of capitalism. In his will, he also called for a new English phonetic alphabet that didn't come immediately to fruition, but since come to exist through the use of shortened text messaging phrases like "I luv u" and "Wd u plz."

And early on he had a refreshing life view. The Shavian credo:

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; and being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little cod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

The author A.M Gibbs also provides a list of works by writers who dealt with the theme of apocalypse due to the new horrors of World War I:

• 1916, D.H. Lawrence, Woman in Love
• 1916-17, George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
• 1919, William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
• 1922, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Who couldn't use some apocalyptic reading about now?