ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Book Reviews
Autumn 2004
* Note; these reviews are random, basically they are of what I have read over the past three months. If you wish to review books please submit reviews via email to editor@chicagopostmodernpoetry.com
Some Values of Landscape and Weather by Peter Gizzi
ISBN 0-8195-6664-0
Forensics:
is subtitled a history of lyric these are traditional stanzaed poems, that are using unique poetic modes within a traditional format. The section is filled with poems that challenge current notions smashing the division between "post-language" " avant garde" and " neo-formalist" to create a new poetic form looking for a moniker.
" for silence, rather than lumen chatter
recalling the better part of majesty"
these lines from the poem A History of Lyric are symptomatic of this new form of poetry, poem of couplets that do not rhyme but sing slowly a new poetic music of image and colors that are not normally found in poetry.
Wilderness:
Now we move, Jarringly away from formal forms of poetics to prose poetry and dense verse that require a dictionary and a strong drink to get through. The section Wilderness is a poetic obra, in the Spanish sense of the word something that encompasses the world and work at the same time. The poems have titles that vary from Hawthorne to Edgar Poe to Redon and this requires that each poem be read three or four times and like a painting that continues to move a person after 100 viewings the work moves forward to ask questions, this is a section that is truly "News" in the Poundian sense. The poem in this section " To Be Written in No Other Country" is the first fusion of the tandem traditions of Whitman, and Dickenson that have appeared in print, the personal and political the expanse of America with the personal little world in one poem. This poem is a triumph.
Below is an excerpt:
"To Be Written in
No Other Country"
"Lost as we are in the kiddy section of Wal-Mart?
As a youth did Grant wonder
that he would become both a drunk
and president and die like Melville, forgotten,
buried under ambition and guilt. "
Nerves:
The third section is called "Nerves" these poems are musical in the best sense they are not an easy read, Gizzi's poem " Masters of Cante Jondo" again uses traditional forms; couplets, enjambments, line breaks and post-language sensibilities to create again a new poetic form that is without a name. The newness of this work opens up doors and I am sure that it has been copied by many poets who stand in Gizzi's shadow.
"It was a structure-
cactus flowers, lipstick"
Industry:
The section "Industry" is a dense poem in which you move from one image, one idea to another quickly and try to slow down, and many times it is not possible. I felt in this section like I was careening down a hill and hoping I would not hot anything hard, and I was bruised by the work.
Song:
Finally we get to "Song" the last part of the book and these last poems reward the reader with songs that do not disappoint, " Is there no better presence than loss" the section is filled with lyrics that ask more questions and create more formless form poems and ask can we do more with this book
" Blue everywhere in the sounds we make dissolves, a breeze failing to reach you" this book reaches you and opens the innards of poetry unwritten.
In the end Some Values of Landscape and Weather is a book that will be emulated and read it is the best fusion of poetic forms and new forms into something innovative new and challenging to poet and poetry fan alike.
ISBN 0-9727684-3-2
I have seen
towers down-razed
loss loss
now this poem is superimposed over a complete formal Sonnet. The interplay of the two; Bervin's nets and Shakespeare's Sonnets make for a new experience that is engrossing in the best sense.
The interplay of these fine poems with the Sonnets almost creates a poetry book that is beyond reviewing. The innovation needs to be bought and consumed and enjoyed . " sovereign mistress" is what Ms Bervin is of her work the depth of interest in this book makes it a joy to read and to spend time with. If you are going to buy a poetry book this year, buy this one.
Bright Turquoise Umbrella by Hermine Meinhard
ISBN 1-932195-10-6
"when stone flies ruled, and
sulphur filled the earth, and white moths
flew across the water"
above is a good example of what I am talking about
the poetry here has a confessional tinge and just when I am ready to leave it I
am pulled back and forced to read on and read more. Much of this work is nature
driven and also intensely personal but not always confessional. It
is hard to do this in poetry unless you are Denise Levertov but Meinhard does at
times reach these heights.
ISBN 09723331-2-6
" by malamute crains"
Mark Tardi has created a book that is equal parts math, music, poetry and reflective piece. Euclid Shudders
come out of Litmus Press and the Southwest side of Chicago.
There are four sections in Euclid and they are dense and in Elizabeth Willis's words "unruly".
" a cough is a couch
idled into"
The Euclid Shudders section of this work is interesting because of the fact that it fuses math and poetry to do something that most poetry books fail to do work across genre and keep interest after the second poem. Some of the language is dense as to scare away the average reader but like Olson and Pound Tardi is not interested in the average reader and hence the poems work well for his thoughtful audience.
The third section, the Peter Kaplan Sequence is based on letters from a young prodigy who dies as a young man. The poems are letters and small pieces of poems and they are interesting because they open up fissures in thought that makes one ask more questions but these are not answered by the work and leave the reader empty in the way one feels after a funeral. The second section, Unnumbered Poems are interesting but a review of this length cannot possibly do them justice so I will leave them for another reviewer.
The last section , Eventual Horizon is dedicated to Hildegarde Von Bingen a Medieval mystic who was a master composer of plain and Gregorian chants for monastic settings. Of late many poetic/new ager hangers on have used Hildegarde as some sort of proto-new age icon in fact she is so much more and is one of the world's foremost composers and thinkers. Tardi does her justice with these poems which scream to be put to music preferably a plain chant in a stone cloister.
" misshapen pearl, problem or promise"
Euclid Shudders is a first book but not the last for Mark Tardi, it is a work that dabbles in the wide range of this fine poet and demands much from the reader while satiating only a little bit of our need for more.
Black Dog Songs by Lisa Jarnot
ISBN: 0-9710059-9-o
Lisa Jarnot is a poet who sells poetry books, which is saying allot in our orphaned artform. Her 1996 book Some Other Kind of Mission was a kind of Talmud meets collage meets story that was interesting but could only be read in small bursts as not to result in a coma from the depth of the poetry and the denseness of the language used.
Black Dog Songs is not such a book. Black Dog Songs is a transitional book kind of like Vita Nuova was for Dante moving from early work to a masterwork and it crosses the bridge well. The first section of new and uncollected poems has lines like the following;
"between denizens of silence"
Many of these poems are rough and show us a side of Jarnot's work that gives hope to those of us who yearn to be the kind of poet she has become.
The second section, " My Terrorist Notebook" I am sure has landed Jarnot on Brother Ashcroft's love list.
These poems are prose poem masterworks that attach ever so nicely the world in which we are now existing.
My favorite is "Indian Hot Wings" I can just see the boys at Hooters, GW, Rummy and Dick
" The little hot chickens are the lampshades of the night
glowing inside the burning of the dawn"
How does Jarnot combine in one poem allusions to Auschwitz, Tyson Chicken Plants, and George Bush and
disarm all comers the way that man in 1989 did standing in front of the tank in Beijing? This book is dense and timely along with being timeless. It is autobiographical without being confessional it is avant garde without being snobby or self absorbed.
The only critique I offer regarding the book
is that it may not be as stimulating as earlier work and has less of a density
but perhaps this is the antipasto to her upcoming book of Duncan and her novel? 
