The Cimarron Review has become in recent years one of my favorite journals. Physically, it is attractive and comfortable—the size, the fonts, the cover images all convey a refined aesthetic sensibility and a sense of seriousness. And as for the work, I usually find at least one poem (and usually several) that stick with me long after I’ve put the journal down. The Spring 2013 issue is no exception. Noteworthy items in this edition include “Wasp Nest,” by Robert Gibb, a poet whose name I know, but whose work is not familiar to me. This poem follows in the what might be called the Southern imagist tradition (that includes the likes of Robert Morgan and Michael McFee), which prods the reader to notice, appreciate, even extol the most ordinary items in the ordinary world. Collectively, such poems serve to accentuate the improbable and mysterious fact of existence, fixing in time the temporally fleeting (which includes not only the observed but the observer as well). There’s some wonderful wordplay at work here, as when Gibb alters a vowel to turn the wasps into “wisps” or a “bundle of battered duct tape” to a “bindle of stiff gray rags.” (And who could help but love a word such as “bindle?”) There’s also a curious attention to sound, with a number of true rhymes (“year” and “wear,” “shape” and “tape,” “zigzags” and “rags”) but no apparent rhyme scheme.

Also gripping is the poem “Losing Limbs,” by Ariana Nadia Nash. A recent review of my latest book notes that I “participate[] in what seems the current fashion of describing suffering in almost pornographic detail.” I wasn’t aware of any such fashion, but if there is one, then I confess that I am a slave to it. Nash’s poem also follows this fashion. It presents a visceral description of a leg amputation from the perspective of a military surgeon in the field. There is nothing in her bio to suggest that she has any experience in this area, but I must say, the perspective is convincing and the imagery is indeed haunting.

Which brings me to the next notable poem, “Haunted,” by Charles Harper Webb (an LA local like myself, though we’ve never met). I’ve never been a fan of “stand-up” poetry, but Webb at his best shows how effective the genre can be. It’s hard not to be charmed by the insouciance of the narrator—which seems to be one hallmark of the genre—as he relates a quasicomical anecdote while pretending to pretend not see the underlying tragedy and horror. This poem is a fine example; it describes a Halloween haunted house that was erected by a mother of two kids who died in a house fire. The pathos is real, if not exactly subtle, as we come to realize how the death of the boys still haunts the mother, and how the house of horrors forms an objective correlative for her internal psychic state. The details of the tragedy (“their heater— / bought to keep them snug—lit / the drapes she’d hung to help them sleep”) somehow escape being maudlin, perhaps because we accept them as the obsessive retrospection of the grieving mother and not the words of the poet (who should know better). But the fact is, people turn to poetry precisely because they believe they lack the skill to give proper expression to their difficult emotions. The challenge for the poet is to be true to those emotions without appearing facile (Yeats famously decried “easy sentiment,” but he was apparently OK with complicated sentiment). The final stanza of the poem hones in on the gravestones in the front yard, noting that “the actor in the giant-suit / takes care, in his stilt-high stumblings, not / to knock them down.” The actor, of course, is the poet’s doppleganger, stumbling around the mother’s inexpressible grief without belittling it with an attempt to do more than acknowledge it.

Flipping through this issue of Cimmaron Review, I’m struck by how different the poems appear—some lines extend nearly to the page margin, others are extremely spare—yet all achieve the single overriding criterion of being well worth the reading (and rereading).