March Street Press
Book Notes
Pamela Steed Hill's poem "Two Vignettes for the Art of Living," which was published in the 1997 volume of Parting Gifts will appear in her first full-length collection of poetry, In Praise of Motels, which will be published in the spring of 1999 by Blair Mountain Press, Martin, Tennessee.
Philip Waterhouse, a frequent contributor to Parting Gifts, expanded on his poem "Silver Is Her Name" by sending me the image at the right below, which he says is a photograph of the inspiration for the poem. Here are the poem and the picture together:
Moss
among red cobblestones. Trying
Girl
Walks among
I would
I promise her them soft.
Silver Is Her Name
Philip A. Waterhouse
to survive
one more summer moon, who knows tomorrow?
in the flat below
shampoos in moonrays for it, tomorrow.
In the natural
state, so say her shadows.
the moss to dry in perfect, natural composure.
be the moss. Though, cobblestones
would do.
from Ring Online (http://www.ring.com/nprofit/clubs/writers/Dec5_97.htm)
Looking for Elinor? Michigan Poet Found in North Country
ELINOR BENEDICT assures us that she is still very much alive in spite of the poetry prize named for
her as founding editor of Passages North, now published at Northern Michigan University in
Marquette. Use of her name is an honor, not a memorial!
Elinor has just published a new chapbook, The Tree Between Us, with March Street Press, 3414
Wilshire, Greensboro NC 27408 ($6). She has also recently co-won first prize in a new international
competition called The Sandburg-Livesay Award with the title poem of her still unpublished collection
about China, Paper Flowers. She read the poem in Toronto at a festival in October.
For information about this award and other Canadian/American competitions for anthologies and
chapbooks, write James Deahl, Unfinished Monument Press, P.O. Box 4279, Pittsburgh, PA 15203.
Elinor also recently won second prize in Explorations with "Waiting for News," judged by John
Haines. Other recent publications are "Just Before the Ice Breaks Up" in The Driftwood Review and
"The Crick" in Controlled Burn.
From Review of Texas Books, published by Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas.
Alejandro, Ann. Beauty Parlor Poems. Greensboro: March Street Press, 1995. 31p. Paperback: $6.00, ISBN 1-882983-20-3.
Alejandro has tapped into the mind of a slightly off-beat woman who regularly attends a beauty parlor and visits her stylist, Vera, as a therapist of some sort in this refreshing collection of poetry. In “Mirror” the speaker tells Vera how much she hates her new therapist, who parades as a born-again Christian but is really notrhing more than “trailer trash and fat, wears those/polyester crepe shirtwaist things, got a/housewife perm and sensible shoes.” She then moves the conversation to the fact that whenever she was mad at men she would have Vera cut her hair shor, “exactly like a marine recruit.” The poem concludes with the speaker saking Vera, “If you were one of them [men], wouldn’t you/just be crazy about me, or you?/No I won’t cut it this time/Just bleach it Vera/Bleach it white.” The rest of the collection, like “Mirror,” delves into the thought processes of a woman not content with her life and not content to take it at face value. What Alejandro ends up with is a delightful speaker who, though somewhat whacky at times, is actually quite well-grounded and an excellent observer of human nature.
The only potential drawbacks to the poems are Alejandro’s extensive use of the run-on sentence and almost complete lack of punctuation. However, this style of writing effectively mirrors the thought processes of the speaker and actually adds to her personality. Alejandro is also the author of Liza Dreams the Irises, another collection of poetry. —J
From Link-Up, the newsletter of the employees of Washtenaw Community College)
English/Writing Instructor Deborah Bayer’s chapbook of short-short stories and experimental prose, Jailer’s Inn, has been published recently by March Street Press, and it is a wonderful book.
Let me show you what I like. One of my favorite pieces, “Passion Pit,” starts with a woman in the act of throwing away a wig. As she throws it away, she remembers something about it. “When I was fourteen, Sammy Cohen asked me out. Right away I knew I’d wear the wig.”
She went to the Dairy Queen with Sammy but it didn’t work out. A few paragraphs later she remembers asking her father if she can go to the drive-in with Sammy’s older prother Hal. Her father says of the drive-in: “The passion pit. Well, if you haven’t learned what I’ve tried to teach you by now, you’ll never know.” “Oh Daddy, you can count on me,” the narrator says. And he can. We never hear about the date with Hal. Instead the character’s father suddenly dies and she gets a job at the concession stand of the drive-in whose owner describes her as a girl with “both feet on the ground.”
As I read it, Godiva lives in “the passion pit,” and the narrator does not; but she knows that place well, and gives it to us with humor, dispassion, a low-key and understated wisdom. And that is a pattern I see in other pieces here, including the title story, in which a narrator stays in an inn which was once a prison and in a room in which a rapist and murderer was confined before being hanged.
There are 16 pieces in Jailer’s Inn, and the longest is under 2,000 words, but the space is used well. The stories are dense but not obscure. They give me back, in small jewel-like settings, a world that routine and custom tends to cover with dust.
—D
But this is only one strand of the story. Another is what is happening in the present. The speaker presents her neighbor, who introduces herself as Godiva, but whose boyfriend shouts in the night, “Go to hell, Jennifer.” Godiva is a wonderful, quirky character, one of those people who tries to wrap herself in glamour, but shows you with every word her capacity for getting into trouble. Trying to find a link to the narrator, Godiva says, “I’m pregnant. It’s a boy. I’ve seen your son.” “That guy is my husband,” the narrator says. A little later “a glass repair van pulls into her driveway. That’s when I see the smashed bedroom window.”
Deborah Bayer
From The Creativity Corner of the College of the Menominee Nation
Whitney, College of the Menominee Nation Teacher,
Review by Tom Davis
J. D. Whitney, an instructor at College of the Menominee Nation, has just published his thirteenth volume of poetry under the imprimatur of March Street Press. Entitled What Grandmother Says, this particular volume sets a new standard for Whitney.
His poetry has always been funny and profound at the same time, achieving an elegance and spareness that forces readers to exercise their imagination in order to catch the meaning and sense of the poem. What’s different about What Grandmother Says is that he has managed to tap into an historical/mythological power that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end while you chuckle and delight at the word play and images.
From the first poem through the book’s slender twenty-four pages you can tell this is a book by a northern Wisconsin poet. There are fishermen, frogs, caterpillars, blackbirds, great horned owls, winter nights, and the feeling of the north woods. Grandmother loves, sneaks, teaches, remembers, trots, and waits as she changes shapes and identities and tries to make people, birds, and animals humbler and more aware of themselves and each other.
sneaks
real quiet
up
behind people
when
they
squat by water
waiting
for fish.
Pokes them
in
the bottom with
her stick!
Just
to see them
leap into the
water
like
bullfrogs.
Plop!
Publishes What Grandmother Says Poems
GRANDMOTHER
Whitney says,
GRANDMOTHER
teaches
birds
NOT
to eat
sick-making
awful-tasting
many-legged
furbaby
rainbow
caterpillar magic.
Says
let them be
flowers
that fly!
This is not the poetry of academia, filled with personal symbols and a difficult obtuseness that leaves the reader searching for each poem’s meanings. Its free verse form and modern poetic structure plays with the eyes almost as much as the ideas and images play with each poem’s sense, but in the end nearly every reader can understand what each poem is about. Straightforward stories and images lead to meanings as playful as they are profound.
Whitney’s straightforwardness is not to be confused with simplicity, however. In the end Grandmother is a mystery as powerful and wonderful as the earth itself. She “likes/ to make herself a/ spider,” “trots/ on her bony moose legs,” “remembers/ one of her husbands. Coyote,” and “always/ comes/ when/ people make/ fire/ &/ music together.” She is obviously an earth power. She doesn’t spread her wings and fly off into the Big Dipper of the Milky Way.
But she is not an earth spirit that is easily defined either. She may sometimes be a spider or a moose, or at least a part of the spider’s or moose’s spirit, but at other times she calls to raven, makes thunder, “puts/ red/ on/ blackbirds’ wings,” and generally goes about educating and ruffling up the world.
She is, in a sense, everything, and yet, not everything since she “wakes/ in her/ hump-shouldered/ smells-bad/ stands-like-a-man/ shaggy-foot/ coat.” She is creative spirit, lecturer, maker, be-er, and observer.
There is simply no more delightful or profound poetry than this. It reaches into the celebrations and history of Native American lore and spins out a modern sense of life and celebration that is rarely captured by modern poets, and it then spins laughter and joy, as well as an occasional dollop of sadness, into the mix, making the reader’s head sing in sync with the poetry.
From the book cover.
The Tree Between Us
I was mesmerized by the surefooted, many times indirect strategies Elinor Benedict’s observant eye calls upon to drive the reader into a galvanizing moment, a moment where the intersection between a hard-sought revelation and a beautifully rendered landscape detail ignites. The private life captured on the proscenium of these poems is offered
with an uncanny ear, sense of timing and humor. I’m looking forward to rereading The Tree Between Us for the rest of my life.
—R
From the book cover.
Flat Lands
“With precision, clear-eyed observation, and true humor, Paul Hadella travels across rugged American landscapes to arrive at sites of unexplored emotion.”
—T
Paul Hadella is an ex-New Yorker who has lived in New Mexico, Arizona, and Arkansas. He now makes his home in southern Oregon with his wife and daughter. He is the founder of Talent House Press.
From the book cover.
Half the Story
Radiant in their fresh play of color and tone, their engagement with nature, Geri Rosenzweig's poems give us whole-hearted evocations of an Irish childhood remembered and revisited, of family sorrows and losses set in a world whose every hedge, fern, bird song, and starry constellation is lovingly recorded. This is the work of a moving and generous poet; it deserves wide praise.
—C
Geri Rosenzweig was born and grew up in Ireland where she worked as a nurse before coming to America to begin the rest of her journey in New York. Her first book of poems, Under the Jasmine Moon, was published by HMS Press, London, Ontario, Canada, in 1992. She lives with her husband in Ossining, New York.