EDRIC MESMER and MATTHEW HALL Review
Desiring Map by Megan Kaminski
(Coconut Books, 2012)
Flash Bang by James Cummins
(Burner Veer, 2011)
Gloss to Carriers by Ian Heames
(Critical Documents, 2011)
HGFED.JANVr; some stars by Jo Cook
(Perro Verlag, 2012)
The Katechon: Lines 101-200 by Michael Cross
(Compline, 2012)
Peaches and Bats, Issue 9, Spring 2012 edited by Sam Lohmann
the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA by Eileen R. Tabios & j/j hastain
(Marsh Hawk Press, 2012)
Sorry you’re Occupied: Spontaneous Order, edited by James Louden
(Idiot Society Press, 2012)
wherein? he asks of memory by Jeremy Balius
(Knives Forks and Spoons, 2012)
Words on Edge by Michael Leong
(Plan-B Press, 2012)
[Previously published in Yellow Field 6, Buffalo, N.Y., Edited by Edric Mesmer.]
Desiring Map
Megan Kaminski
Coconut Books
2012
In Sarah, Plain and Tall, an eponymous heroine struggles to reconcile her displacement from the east coast to the plains—nowhere more palpably than, in the film adaptation, Glenn Close likening the wind in the grains to the ocean. So with Megan Kaminski’s Desiring Map wherein place is its own sympathy, and where amid “the estuarine marsh / the signifying process joins us.” The piscatory and the pastoral needn’t be sutured for Kaminski; they are her forte and her field: “walled in the forested gorge / upriver she hears whispers from the Pacific / belated by five years.” And such translation, or mapping, is not without its casualties, where the poem rends lucidly how “sentences accumulate spread across country lines / soak up lake-water / silt strangle invasive plants.” The map desired is all-at-once nowhere and accumulatively dispersive, as in my disjointed pairing of this diarist’s cartography—
Here I am Here I
carving rivers am resting
silken space glub glub
partitioning plodding towards
lake to clumps
tree of grass
ESM
Flash Bang
James Cummins
Burner Veer
2011
Flash Bang is James Cummins’ explosive foray into the syntactic, emphatic, atrophied and chaotic field of war from Veer books. The opening line reflects on Clausewitz’s maxim: Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. Taking the quotation and the parenthetic thought through the broken narrative plain, argot, technical language and the explosive articulated space of the experiential rupture and redouble the subjective expression in the poem. There is a highly charged energy to the “movement / as if / neo industrial” a concatenation of discourses trailing through the poem’s twenty segments. Meta-structural details as if readerly direction, “each section / subjugated and subsumed” by the last calculated look into a personal history, but a movement also cadenced in remembrance: “the lights / in a row / one by one / around the outside / the colour green / next to yellow / your scrawl / reminds me / yet again.” Compounding and transformative, “the sound stops.”
MH
Gloss to Carriers
Ian Heames
Critical Documents
2011
From Critical Documents is Ian Heames’ Gloss to Carriers, which is one of the most beautifully crafted Documents in recent recall. A post-Prynne war report, replete with a refined and caustic utilization of war argot. Heames title poem is scintillating in its mix of reportage and the contestation of notions of objectivity, safety and the privilege of exemption associated with the long-standing war in the Middle-East and the Abu Ghraib photo release. The collection’s integration of pastoral motifs admixed with reportage holds to antecedents prevalent in recent English poetry, but does so with a striking lyricism that disintegrates the subjective identity of the speaker and casts the experiential account of the war in a technical, maligned, cupric light. Gloss to Carriers is an exemplar of a thread of modern British poetry which has managed to grapple back the vernacular of war and media reporting [see also: James Cummins’ Flash Bang, reviewed above] and used it a brilliant effect, instilling within language an understanding of its efficacious and deleterious means, its potential to create and form violence. As Heames writes: “Holding a copy of The White Stones / Cropped gun show I walk on / Or a stars weight in keystrokes / Up the hill, in the warm last line.”
MH
HGFED.JANVr; some stars
Jo Cook
Perro Verlag
2012)
“As we leave now the shore of the textual,” elsewhere written…This thought, already apprehended by poet, bookmaker and publisher Jo Cook, in evidence between Cayman-green covers bound in black cloth strip; doubled front endpapers of black enclosing stars straight-edge drawn in white (reminding anyone local to Buffalo of the ceiling at Sixth Dimensions glassworks on Lexington Ave., where leaded glass snowflakes of mathematical model hang above a moveable glass-paneled helix). So with the paginated directory to Cook’s vocabulary: celestial charts, navigational grids, preambles, glossaries, letterpress leading—all unfix the textual from the typographic, as well as from the literal. How warm, the overlain textures referencing, like “To make a [ ] oyle of of talck and ƒalt nitre,” partially obliterated by the measure marks along a scalene’s base. Or where ess-shaped brackets hold open the diagrammed pendula of skirmishing parallels smudge envelops. And elsewhere, in negative and on blue paper, where protracted rays share occupancy with figures “IN SIGNIS BOREALIBUS,” the reader fully grasping now a whole lexicon of the visual.
ESM
The Katechon: Lines 101-200
Michael Cross
Compline
2012
Picture Jonah, yet to be vomited, bolas in the thorny belly of humanity, “stretching / the meat of my death, stretching to meet real intimacy so the sun might eat (a sacrifice / which only posits a second, more sacred, ‘thing’)”. We recall, per Syria, per our own poverty, how human rights are born of civil rights, rather than self-evident: “blush spread rather than blood spread -- not so born to blush for his begetting, ass-begotten, / sort would have brought a blush to your rule all this time --” What is the Jonah fish’s debt in this economy? Where place this economy asea? These brittle whorls sustain the quasi-epic’s embarrassment for ignobility present and past—for the false currency of high modernism’s polity, for the debts of empty policy—“every disfigurement / of the human face is god’s image elapsed (pander rather than panther).” Or, Rilke qua Moore, “You must change your”— —“innocence, / what is our guilt?”
ESM
Peaches and Bats
Sam Lohmann, ed.
Issue 9
Spring 2012
Blue thread matches the light blue free endpapers illustrated by Nate Orton in partially raised flags, wilted husks, mown trees; this within orange papers letterpressed with red circular motifs linking the title font to numeric issuance of “9”…such are the carefully stitched and stamped aesthetics of Peaches and Bats’ ninth number, edited by Sam Lohmann out of Portland, Oregon. This mag remains seated in its Portland locality—as it should be—but with hands, feet, shoulders, knees & toes spread from Gloucester to Buenos Aires; its head, so to speak, is in the contemporary canopy. For example of this far-reaching body politic, Glenn Mott’s “A stereo on / Satie has threatened // thought,” Maryrose Larkin’s “no infinite structure labeled The Canon // extends throughout illness // may you find / the sentence a part of // it occurs to all,” Andrew Hughes’s “Bee & fly, side by side, making love / like cold lemonade in the sun,” and Allen Edwin Butt’s “We want ‘a government // that works for us’ / —on this point / I have excellent assurance.”
ESM
the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA
Eileen R. Tabios & j/j hastain
Marsh Hawk Press
2012
The gift, we recall, of feminist theoreticism is the paradigm shift. Tabios and hastain place this at the crux of collaboration, and that’s its success: that the recognition of difference might make unlike circumstances empathetic frameworks. Begun through appropriated “word problems” from grammar school math equations, Tabios is able to ask: “What algebraic relationship moved you to bestow on mundane pigeons the halos of peace and other faux debris from trawling old memories of desire-ridden imagination that would come to plummet into ruin?” Transcendent then of equation, the series is abler to interrogate “remainders” of information fallen outside the easiness of “whole sets,” or any given. In response, hastain posits xir own questions regarding the crepuscular—O favored of poetic words!—and relational identities: “Patina does relate to positing. Scratches secrets into the underside of blocks or blocs. That stone did hold that child’s expression.” The pairing also invites each poet’s critical reception of xir collaborator, as well as a startling sequence of stances through which hastain permutates “different set[s] of lovers” approaching the limit of Tabios’s partial problematic: What is a[p]parent?
ESM
Sorry you’re Occupied: Spontaneous Order
James Louden, ed.
Idiot Society Press
2012
From James Louden’s Canmore, Alberta based Village Idiot Society Press, comes a curious collection ruminating on the occupation movement and working to provide discursive space for the Occupy Movement’s most well known activists and theorists. This chapbook houses appropriated manifestos of Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and David Suzuki, mixed with video transcription, poems and the narratives of witness. The poems which appear offer a predream of the fall, a response to the call to arms and placards of Kalle Lasn’s ‘invitation to act’ against the hegemonic power structure of economic factionalism and subjugation. Predominantly based on experiences of the poets Dave Eso, James Louden and Tim Murphy this is a collective response specific to the city housing Canada’s main oil and gas companies, Calgary, Alberta. A troupe of these poets are soon to be touring the Eastern Seaboard as Death by Pedestrian, and the book will be freely distributed wherever they land.
MH
wherein? he asks of memory
Jeremy Balius
Knives Forks and Spoons
2012
I was talking to a friend about Dorn, per Michael Boughn’s: “Why not Dorn?” I had posed this to a more informed reader than I, who told me of Dorn’s more graceless latter days of defamation. Ah. Perhaps it is the fraught persona that plagues the poetics, now brought back to us from Canada, and from the UK and Ireland, as from Australia via Jeremy Balius’s triptych. Rife with epigraphs from Dorn, its companion sign is sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard. Her work, For Paul, operates on Balius’s mien like stylus on slate, layering, occupying, and obfuscating ultimately any elegiac ersatz in memoriam. From I: “Stop For Paul! Ok? / Just cut it right there: / momentum negates, / discontinues, / makes obsolete / in the floods of progress—” II: “No. Words are / Echoes For Paul says. // Cruel comes the HOPE that / whiles away Time seductively…” III: “Our For Paul here, our dear Paulismo, our dear // come in from the dirty mist, antediluvian FERN-SEHER / out from beyond the VAGRANT ‘n all of that double-speak.”
ESM
Words on Edge
Michael Leong
Plan-B Press
2012
An aspect of Leong’s poetics I like best is his thoughtfulness untoward the grammatic (dia- & ana-) sensibilities of the visual (see Yellow Field #5). One finds this allover his latest chapbook, whether it’s through the flowchart synergies connecting ‘A RIM EDGE’ to both ‘A MERGED I’ and ‘RED IMAGE’ and the last again to ‘MIRED AGE’; or the curving wing of etymologies flung as to Hyacinth in “Oath”—“But if / to dis is to curse, / then I’ll slur / my words”; or the title poem’s horizontal brackets which enclose coinage described in arched asides, such as in action: “Lights, camera, painting!” and in sign: “Language on the dotted line of the times.” Lastly, the tango of phoneme and grapheme found in the poem “Acronymic Bliss,” like “Incunabular séances shall / bridge lacunae in subjunctive stereotactility,
because life is somatic seriality,
because likeness is sampled sustainability,
because longing is stalagmitic supplementarity,
because language is scintillating surrogacy […]”
ESM
*****
All reviews initialed “ESM” are authored by collator, with those marked “MH” by Matthew Hall, with thanks by EM for his invaluable input.
Matthew Hall, doctoral candidate at the University of Western Australia. Matthew writes on poetics and the arts; his most recent collection, hyaline, is forthcoming from Black Rider Press.
Edric Mesmer is the collator of Yellow Field. To receive a copy of Yellow Field, contact the collator at yellowedenwaldfield(at)yahoo(dot)com.
You are welcome to send books for review care of Yellow Field, 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apartment 802, Buffalo, New York 14209, USA.
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