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Contents: click on blue title to go book review
Vivian Shipley, Hartboot
by Cynthia Hogue
Ross Talarico, The Reptilian Interludes (and a child’s prayer).
by
E. K. Mortenson
Cynthia Hogue
Vivian Shipley. Hardboot: Poems New & Old. The Louisiana Literature Press: Southern Louisiana University, SLU-10792, Hammond, LA, 70402; ISBN# 0-945083-12-2. 123 pp. $14.95.
Vivian Shipley’s latest collection, Hardboot, is in a sense an extended meditation on the legacies of love and loss, but into the contemplative is woven a golden redolence of bold and witty poems that are, though elegiac, celebratory of a hard life well-lived rather than mournful. Shipley’s poetry is distinguished by her sharp eye and sense of humor. She can be as droll as Dryden and as deadpan as Swift, for she has an unerring ear for the well-turned phrase. In a poem about her grandmother’s death, Shipley recalls that she’d snuck off after church at sixteen to wait for a boy, only to be called to the kitchen because, in the world of her grandmother, “Frying chicken// came before sin” (“Sitting with My Grandmother, Parealy Stewart Todd”). Shipley’s roots in Kentucky bluegrass country may help her to spin a yarn here and there, but grief and grit thread the true warp of this splendid collection.
Hardboot opens on a muted note, with the weather that determined the fates of generations of Shipley’s people, who were in the main farmers. While waiting for a blizzard (the first poem’s title), the speaker declares: “I have salt, sand, an extra shovel,/ a gallon of milk, both cars gassed up./ You get the picture./ I’m a safety pin, belt, and suspenders type.” These are the collection’s first lines, and they are taking stock of the coming storm (and life) matter-of-factly. Prone to terse understatement rather than melodrama, the speaker will weather all that fate brings her. As she puts it in a poem about aging and writing, had she been a jockey, she would have been nicknamed by Kentuckians “hardboot” (hence, obviously, the book’s title) for her “thick hide that’s held up// through years of nettling by tongues of other poets.” If she hasn’t yet won the Kentucky Derby of poetry, unlike Red Pollard who rode Seabiscuit to glory, “There is always revision, change in literary taste, The New Yorker” (“Why an Aging Poet Signs Up for Yet Another Summer Poetry Workshop”)! (In truth, Shipley has a distinguished record, but I wouldn’t trade her modesty for these funny, sly poems.) Another poem, “What to Do about Sharks,” gives advice about how to deal with those sharky, sharp-toothed poets: since “Sharks have short/ attention spans,” the poem counsels, take a break from reciting poems at your reading and sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic until they leave!
If Shipley pokes back at the at-times snarky poetry scene, a love poem contrasting property boundaries and marriage is equally acerbic. Two Appalachian farmers who could not agree on their shared property line created a no-man’s land, called “Devil’s Lane,” to separate their fields, which the poem’s narrator, visiting family, and her husband are walking along while having a marital spat. The husband suggests at one point, however, perhaps amelioratively but also unromantically, that their love is like “gauge blocks, machine shop measure that did not / need anything except their trueness to keep them together” (“This Is Bluegrass Country”). The characterization is as deft a metaphor for love as it is clumsily human an argument (and indeed, the speaker’s anger is unabated), and captures well the pace of Shipley’s ironic sensibility.
The series entitled “Metamorphoses” is oblique social commentary, revisionary myths that are relevant in the way that feminism is still relevant, because girls are still socialized into being dominated in any dynamic of power, although they’re told today that feminism is passé. Shipley wants us all to wake up. Her vision in this series is the tragic (women are subordinated, sometimes violated, and they return, like the repressed, with violent fantasies of their own). Shipley laces the series, however, with the frills of the tragicomic (and like classic comedy, these poems are truly serious). Daphne, an aspiring poet who writes rhymed couplets, such as “If men were golden rods growing, / women would get scythes for mowing,” must run for her life, but instead turns wooden, planted in place, numbed. Io marries a god but loses herself. She lives luxuriously, shops at Saks then Bloomingdale’s (“No Wal-Mart/ for Jove’s wife”), plays tennis, hires a personal trainer, takes Prozac, but cannot “silence the lowing/ filling her throat.” In short, she is still a cow. To literalize an insult, however, is to defuse its power over us.
In one of a number of poems about family losses, the speaker sees herself and her dying mother in a mirror and comes to a hard-won insight, that her mother showed “that she cared// by ironing my blouses,” not by “wasting breath” on praise she had no time for. The speaker “needed her [mother’s] words more/ than starched collars,” and, it is implied, was writing out her frustrations in poems. But she is at last able to realize that “Without saying it, my mother taught me the word: love.” That elegant contrast of speech and act is not obvious but discovered in the material of a lived life: the mother’s speech absent while the daughter grows up, the daughter’s love enacted finally by caring for her mother as she lies dying. Shipley dances along the charged contrasts without missing a beat:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Unlike poems, mirrors
will not interpret or correlate internal and external self, present
experience as a simile. Like helium that seeps from birthday
balloons, words of praise my mother did not give me were not
in her.
(“Alice Lee Todd in the Looking Glass”)
Marianne Moore defined language that shocks us awake as having “gusto,” writing that interfaces the real with artifice (think of her own image of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”). Shipley notes in the passage above that a mirror holds no similes, and then moves wryly into simile: the real mother with imaginary praise in her. And the why of that to which the poem points is quietly eloquent.
A term Shipley herself uses is also associated with the culinary appetite: zest. As she puts it, “the act of zesting can engender a Zen state of being” (“Cooking with a Dominatrix”). Zesting shaves a bit of the lemon skin to release the scent and sharpen the taste to piquancy. These poems, too, sharpen our senses with their large-hearted and zestful humanity. As “Cooking” notes, “Only a practiced / hand knows how to lift golden peel from bitter dross, / the exact force needed to tease apart mesh of pain // with pleasure,” for as the speaker confesses, “it is the mind I am after.” In the deft meshing and separation of sorrow from joy, these poems are mindful, honest and witty. Hardboot has grit as well as zest!
E. K. Mortenson
Ross Talarico, The Reptilian Interludes (and a child’s prayer). Bordighera Press: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 5 West 43rd Street, 17th Floor, NY, NY 10036; ISBN 1-884419-93-3. 136 pp; $15.00.
A whole lot is happening in Ross Talarico’s new book, The Reptilian Interludes (and a child’s prayer). In no particular order, we have a speaker musing on the deterioration and death of his mother, his wife accidentally shot to death by their three-year old son, the subsequent “education” of that boy, a burgeoning romance for the speaker, auto repair, and the building of a small house. Prior to any of this, Talarico’s “Author’s Note,” informs us that this work is “an in-depth view of the species itself, one that tries to see our evolutionary connection to technology” (vii), and further, in the “Foreword,” we read that “Talarico has set himself to repair the breach in our sensibility and to recover the lost territories and languages of natural understanding” (ix). A whole lot happening, indeed. The question is, how much of this can Talarico accomplish? More specifically, how much does he accomplish?
This is a single, “long poem,” albeit one that is presented in two “Books,” each with multiple “Parts,” further divided into a number of “Sections.” While this serves the purpose of segmenting the poem into manageable, readable “chunks,” I found myself wondering why sections (and parts and books) were broken where they were. Why not one continuous journey, reflective of human evolution—his stated goal?
Further distracting was Talarico’s choice to center his verse on the page. The centering of verse places extreme stress on each individual line, demanding each to be, in and of itself, a complete poem. While this is arguably the goal for free verse poets, it is not so easily attainable. Talarico’s centered verse gives weak lines no place to “hide.” Each is, literally, dead-center, calling for attention. Many times, Talarico’s images support the weight each centered line must bear:
What finally burns pure
is our love
for leaves burning, for the moment
at the smokey (sic) verge of disappearance,
for the universe as we know it,
a mild and clear October night
filled with creatures made believable
by our ancient memory.
(Book 1, Part 2, Section II)
In fact, Talarico is at his best when his concrete imagery drives his verse. When he lapses to abstraction, when he tries too hard to make his point, the poetry fails him. It is at these points his formatting further exacerbates the problems. Compare the section above to:
All night we
sit before each other, hardly saying
a word, forgiving ourselves
the few incidental utterings
between us, knowing there is neither
speech nor language
to express the knowledge woven
into the dark yarn of your fingers;
What are you making?
(Book 2, Part 4, Section I)
Problematically, it is at points like these that we ask Talarico the same question: “What are you making?” Here the enjambment fails to carry both the sense and the weight of the individual line. Further, how can there be “neither / speech nor language / to express the knowledge”? The Foreword claims that Talarico would “recover the lost territories and languages of natural understanding.” This is not the case.
Talarico’s project might bn better served by a more “traditional” volume. By that I mean individual lyrics carved from the verse Talarico already has. There are marvelous poetic moments in The Reptilian Interludes. Had these been selected and presented on their own, Talarico’s related but disparate subject matter need not be tied together by the abstract “narrative” moments of the volume. The lush images of individual poems would bind the whole together and complete Talarico’s project far better than his abstractions and the reliance upon prose commentary at the end of the volume. For example, consider the subtle technological ties among these disparate sections: first, from a description of the speaker’s return home for his mother’s funeral and the linking of the mended glider to the speaker’s earlier description of his mother on life support:
as I sit on the swing
on this cold autumn day, the sun
gleaming off the buffed weld
which holds like a miracle
as the glider squeaks and I swing higher,
higher, knowing I must contact
the garbage service
to get rid of this hulk,
and swinging higher
knowing the weld will hold
longer than I can hold the spirit
of a summer afternoon
with my mother in full bloom . . .
(Book 1, Section 3, Part 1)
Second, from the description of the speaker walking with a woman to whom he explains the recent unearthing of two sets of 3.5 million-year old footprints. Nothing has changed in that time, nothing at all:
We stop
and glance off in the
same direction,
seeing nothing but
the faded moon abandoned
in the deep blue
of millions of skies, all that
time to
think over, and yet
we turn, a moment
of doubt,
inheriting the grace of hesitancy,
and then continue,
companions,
toward the faint
mysterious light . . .
(Book 2, Part 2, Section III)
Lastly, from the “education” of the speaker’s son, Joseph. Want to teach your son what makes us human? Try this:
I toss the small leather ball
high into the air
and my son has a danceful way
of being under it
when it falls.
I give him the advice
of a 17th century philosopher,
to see the world as it is;
and he follows the spin of the sphere,
the windy slant
of its graceful descent, and determines
the speed of the falling object
seeking its proper place in the world,
his rich, dark, leather glove.
The slow curve I pitch to him
hangs in the air,
and I can’t explain
the sudden misdirection, or the force with which
any two particles in the universe
attract each other.
He simply swings the bat, and connects.
(Book 2, Part 1, Section I)
There are many such moments in this book, and if these were parts (or the whole) of individual lyrics, Talarico’s project might have gained traction through the slow accretion of connectedness. Rather, Talarico includes abstractions throughout as the ties that bind these otherwise wonderful images. We are given:
Fear is accumulative,
hope is a clever series of postponements,
but love is the dividing factor.
(Book 2, Part 3, Section 1)
“To see the world as it is” is advice Talarico not only might have heeded himself, but allowed his readers to grasp for themselves. He would have been well served to give us more scenes where uncertainty and the “grace of hesitancy” take center stage. We are not “less” human for our technological advancements, but perhaps even more obviously so. It is allowed us to not know, to admit “I can’t explain.” It is the poet’s job and the scientist’s job, and the engineer’s job, and the cleric’s job to remind us of that distinct feature that arguably makes us most human. We need not a single, unifying voice to tell us this, but a choir of distinct voices, of which Talarico’s can be a strong one if he would only let it sing its own part.
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