Guest Post by Nora Aronson

There is little between the word and the flesh in Thomas Cook’s daunting and terrifying Light Through a Pane of Glass. “There is perfection in the early dark / the smell of moist figs,” he writes in “Three Meditations,” yet life and death lurks beneath this observation, as it does beneath so many others in this debut collection.

Cook has been the editor and publisher of the longstanding journal Tammy and their chapbook press. His poems have appeared widely, and in several chapbooks, but until this collection there has not been a full understanding of his poetic project, which comes, anachronistically, on the heels of pastoral philosophers such as Lorine Niedecker and James Wright—this book features its own “Journey Westward,” has its own “deep water”—while it also pursues an existential agenda in poems such as “Two Figures”:

Afraid to accept a purer perception,
they busy themselves
with the intelligible world,
leaving much lost;
a thought, persists

Are we dearer in absence, you and I?”

Light Through a Pane of Glass will leave you thirsty in the Mojave Desert and abandon you to the Midwest. It is unflinching in the face of inheritance, addiction, and death. In it, you will smell figs, taste dates, and be grateful for afternoon onions. It will make you real.

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Light Through a Pane of Glass by Thomas Cook. Big Table, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Nora Aronson is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her first book, Instances of Calamity, was a finalist in the Uninterrupted First Book Contest. Her work has appeared in Bat City Review, Exhume Magazine, and Terra Firma.

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Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Let.

Timothy Liu wrote the most beautiful homage/obituary for poet Linda Gregg, published in The New York Times (“Linda Gregg, Poet of Taut, Vivid Verse, Is Dead at 76,” March 27, 2019) and Plume (“My Own Private Parthenon,” Issue #93, May 2019). Look these up if you have not read them. Let your tears flow, but not only for Gregg, who is known for her “chiseled in marble” poems, but for Liu, whose language explores the ruins of these, also a very serious poet; yet different, a very tongue-in-cheek poet. I imagine him exploring various surfaces and various crevices with his tongue, letting it slide and ride and taste all life has to offer. He does this in his latest book of poems, Let It Ride. He takes us to scenes exploring the aftermath of ecstasies of the body in low-brow and high-brow places, in City Mouse and Country Mouse places. Liu is a poet who rides in both places and steps back to let us also see the scene. Continue reading “Let. Goings. Disappear.”

Guest Post by Elda Pappadà

Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy is a well put together ensemble of Plath’s deeply honest poetry. Her writings were vulnerable and held profound personal thoughts. Reading her poetry, I hear the voice of all women.

As Duffy mentions, Plath wrote confessional poems. She represented women and our challenges. Her voice is the voice we hear but quietly dare not express aloud, but still desperately feel and can never altogether ignore. I especially felt this from her poem “Mirror.” It is troubling and candid: “in me she has drowned a young girl, and in me/ an old woman/ rises . . . .”

She explores many motifs. At times, her poetry can be gripping and sad, but she also captures beautiful flashes and makes light of dark situations like in the poem “Last Words.” She has lines that make you smile because they are intelligently crafted even though the context is nothing to smile about, considering what we know about Plath’s life: “I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!”

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Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy by Sylvia Plath. Faber & Faber, 2012.

Reviewer bio: Elda Pappadà recently self-published her first poetry book, Freedom—about love, loss, and understanding. A book about defining life and giving weight to everything we do. Twitter: @poems_elda.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Bodwell’s Crown of Wild, with its gorgeous cover of an abstract painting (by the poet’s late father), is an exciting reminder of our own moments of wild abandon and others’ wild abandon gone right/gone wrong.  In “Summertime” we get to read a list of pleasurable freedoms: “. . . swim the length of every pool . . . / . . . French kissing Matt Matera . . . .” later becoming abandoned to the larger universe as this poem closes. What are the answers, this poem seems to be asking. Can anything be held and kept, or is even capturing memories an act of abandon as this very idea is also in survival mode?

I’ve been reading these poems with the cover in my mind. Its brushstrokes seem to be a visual companion to the pain of grief and anxiety of what now overwhelms: forest fires, death and abuse, a madman at the helm.

What does abstract art do but tell a story in a different way, a way that leads to musings and fresh starts? There are no easy answers.

In “Where Rivers And Mountains Remain,” one of the poems in Crown Of Wild paying homage to Kayla Mueller, the captured American woman who was held and died in Syria, we see wishes for Mueller: ” . . . silvery dreams” and ” . . . a crown woven from stars” as gentle acknowledgements and gifts of praise.

What Bodwell constructs in Crown Of Wild are sculptures and sketches and shapes so each poem can express what was unthinkable. Where will the brush go? What color will it pick up as it merges and is dragged through what is already there? What is soothed? Stirred?

These poems do not need explanation, they seem to be saying. They stand alone on their base, on that which protects and extends and illustrates what is “wild” to what is really wild and beyond our imagining. They say here is beauty and the redemption that moonlit/starlit rivers and mountains bring because they remain after all that has happened, is happening.

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Crown Of Wild by Erica Bodwell. Two Sylvias Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson has work forthcoming from Loud Coffee Press, Sleet Magazine, and Finishing Line Press.

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