These lines are from the final poem in Traci Brimhall’s debut collection, Rookery. The poem, “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” is a fitting summation of the book that has preceded it. Many of the recurring tropes and images show up: prayer, faith, madness, father, whales, God, love, joy, death, destruction, and resurrection.

The book, as a whole, is more than the sum of its parts, and it’s clear that considerable thought was given to the arrangement (though its also possible, even probable, that many of the poems that are grouped together were also written in the same timeframe). The book begins with a prologue, “Prayer for Deeper Water,” and ends with the “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” quoted above. Within these bookends, the collection starts with a series of aubades and ends with a nocturne. It is divided into three sections. The first is the most personal, filled with poems about infidelity and betrayal. The second delves into formative childhood memories as well as the poet’s conflicted relationship with her parents. The third contains a mixture of personal and persona poems, with a greater fixation on death and rebirth.

Throughout, the language is surprising and delightful, gripping in its deft turn of phrase. You can pretty much turn to any page and find an image that will draw you in as it is extended to an unexpected conclusion. Take, for example, these lines from “Concerning Cuttlefish and Ugolino”:

Or this, from “Possession,” which ends with a missionary in Brazil being attacked by an anaconda:

Many of the poems in this book form a collective whole; individual poems may be marked by uncertainties that are resolved by others. Poems in the first section, for example, are individually evocative, but collectively intense. In addition to “Possession,” the middle section includes other poems about a pair of missionaries and their daughter in Brazil. After reading these poems and others in the section, I suspect that the child is the poet’s mother (though there is nothing to prove that theory). If so, that knowledge adds another layer of depth to the poems about her parents. The father apparently leaves the mother, who subsequently (or perhaps causally) descends into a state of psychosis that recreates a reality based on her fundamentalist upbringing. Some of these are truly wrenching, as when she the poet visits her in an institution and decides to “let them give your body enough electricity / to calm it.” The flat tone belies a well of conflicting emotions.

The father is also an intriguing figure. He seems to have a thing for guns—in one poem, he shoots and kills a snapping turtle, in another, he commands the poet to shoot a caged feral cat, and in another, he (if it is indeed the father) collects bullets and takes part in a Civil War reenactment. He takes the poet to a “torture museum” and takes a photo of her next to a collection of chastity belts. In another poem, he heart “is a jar of nails.” And yet, in another the poet holds the father’s hand as they “crossed the icefields / and looked into a glacier’s deepening blue.” And another poems relates how the father “came home and held my mother and pushed her / curls behind her ears and said, That kind of loneliness / is dangerous.”

There is also something unequivocally American about this book. Partly, its the undercurrent of Southern biblical tradition—more than a third of the poems mention God with a capital “G,” and a good many mention angels or scripture. Partly, its the sense of place: different poems mention Appalachia, Kentucky, Ohio, Lake Superior, Ellis Island, the Triangle Waist Shirt Factory, the Empire State Building, Philadelphia, Charleston, Atlanta, Manassas, the Mississippi. Maybe something in the diction, too, embodies a distinctly American idiom.

Case and point, I leave you with the end of “American Pastoral”:

Ditto that! And I am looking forward to seeing more from Traci Brimhall.

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Text and subtext: everything in the work of A. E. Stallings seems to have at least two meanings, or layers of meanings. Her latest collection, Olives, is no exception. Even the title of the book is freighted. Stallings lives in Athens, Greece, named for the goddess Athena, who won the city’s allegiance in a contest with Poseidon. Each gave a gift to the city: Poseidon gave a wellspring (but the water was salty), and Athena gave… an olive tree. The olive, then becomes synonymous the whole Greek drive toward an enlightened civilization. Of course, the olive branch has also come to represent a gesture toward peace and conciliation—equally appropriate in a book that is woven through with scenes or hints of domestic tension.

The book is separated into four sections. The first is entitled “The Argument.” Double meaning again: it is the title of a poem in this section; but it is also an old term for an introduction or explanation of a work. Astute readers may recall Herrick’s “The Argument of His Book.” In any case, this first section contains more than a few actual arguments between people real and imagined. “Recitative” notes, “We cherished each our minor griefs / To keep them warm until the night / When it was time again to fight.” This is followed by “Sublunary,” which begins with a couple “Arguing home through our scant patch of park.” Similarly, “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia” begins, “To leave the city / Always takes a quarrel.” And then, of course, there is this section’s titular poem, “The Argument.” Given all this, it’s hard not detect a sense of domestic strife running through the other poems. “Burned,” which begins, “You cannot unburn what is burned,” becomes more than just a litany of life’s small failures, but a recasting of life’s major regrets—the words you wish you didn’t say, the decisions you wish you hadn’t made. “The Compost Heap” is at once suggestive of a new beginning, but also of buried sentiments that must someday rise again, perhaps in a new, more potent form. “The Dress of One Occasion” is an ode on a wedding dress; but within the context of this first section, it also becomes a requiem for lost innocence, optimism, and naive love. The following sonnet-like poem, “Deus Ex Machina,” also describes the loss of disillusionment, the existential angst of a couple that is past the honeymoon stage. The title refers to a contrived device whereby playwrights who could not compose a suitable denouement would simply cut the gordian knot and have a god descend from the rafters to settle the conflict on stage. In this poem, the two lovers have reached an impasse, a critical stage from which they see no exit, having assumed the roles that history and society have written for them. Intriguingly, the poem ends with no final punctuation, no period or exclamation point, suggesting, of course, that the requisite god is not forthcoming, and there will be no miraculous rescue.

The language in this section—indeed, throughout the book—is impeccably precise. Here’s a quatrain from “The Compost Heap”:

Perhaps not everyone knows what a barrow is (but Tolkien fans might recall the barrow downs), but it’s a rich and apt description of the compost heap. I love the description in “Telephonophobia” (fear of the telephone) as well. To justify such a fear, the poem notes that “We keep it on a leash” (though I wonder: will such a reference soon become apocryphal, as we make the final leap to cordless technology?) Furthermore, when the speaker lifts up the receiver, “Old anger pours like poison in my ear,” a phrase that can’t help summon an image of Hamlet’s father—which is all the more appropriate, if the true fear of phones is the news they bring of the death of someone near.

The next section, “The Extinction of Silence,” is a bit more outwardly focused, and speaks to or about specific people (many of whom are deceased). The standout poem for me in this section is “The Cenotaph,” which describes a visit to the first cemetery in Greece (where Schliemann, archaeologist of windy Troy, is buried). The speaker encounters both the living and the dead, and—most movingly—a small child who is both, that is, a statue that seems alive and playful. I love the phrase, “the rude democracy of bone.” Ultimately, the speaker comes to realize, “It was the grave of nobody I sought,” which on the one hand is the everyman, not unlike the tomb of the unknown soldier, but on the other hand, the speaker’s own grave, which is of course not yet there. In such a statement, the speaker on some level acknowledges the nobody that everybody is destined to become. The speaker also notes “the token of undying love / Some twenty years ago” that has become “garish” over time. In the final couplet, the speaker remarks that she “Wandered between two dates,” the birth date and death date inscribed on every stone. That’s one of those lines that stops you in your tracks, subtle yet overwhelmingly potent.

The third section, “Three Poems for Psyche,” is brief but packed. The three poems in this section ease the reader into a central theme of the final section—that is, motherhood—while recasting themes of domestic strife and the impassivity of time introduced in the first two. The first poem is remarkable, formally. It is essentially a palindrome, with each line of the first stanza repeated in the second—in reverse. In this, it bears some similarity with Natasha Trethewey’s Orpheus poem (see earlier post). This sequence does not focus so much on the main part of the Psyche story (her encounters with Cupid), but rather, on what happens next. For the Psyche in these poems is pregnant (with sensual bliss, according to the allegory). And, to appease Venus, she must descend into the underworld to retrieve some beauty from Persephone. Of course, the only beauty the goddess knows is the ageless beauty of the grave. And Persephone is not the young naive girl who first entered Hades, but is notably wiser, perhaps jaded (though of course, no older).

The final section, “Fairy Tale Logic,” strikes a somewhat different tone—at times exasperated, at times effulgent—which is not surprising, given that many of these poems focus on childrearing. The title and poem of the same name reflect on the impossible but completely accepted premises of fairy tales and nursery rhymes (and calls to mind Nick Flynn’s “Cartoon Physics”). The title poem starts out on a whimsical note, “Gather the chin hairs form a man-eating goat,” but ends with a devastating imperative: “Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.” There is some genuine rage and despair underlying these lines, particularly in light of the book’s first section. The double-entendres in “Two Nursery Rhymes: Lullaby and Rebuttal” are amusing and incisive. I love the way a figure of expression (two figures, actually) take on practical significance in the first lines: “For crying out loud, / It’s only spilt milk.” Same thing for the second stanza, told from the baby’s perspective, which begins, “I have drunk all I can of you” (and I hear an echo of “Drink to me only with thine eyes” in that line). A few lines later, it’s “the sorrow you call teeth / That gnaws at me.” Again, fabulous turns of phrase and double meanings.

I am particularly interested in poetry that does things that prose simply cannot do. Partly that’s why I am drawn to form. But I’m even more intrigued when the form itself tells a story. Such is that case with a particularly masterful poem from this section, “Alice in the Looking Glass.” Looking at the line endings, the form is not immediately apparent. They begin and end on the same word, “time.” But in between, the end words are not rhymes but opposites. So, “there” in the second line becomes “here” in the penultimate, “left” in the third line becomes “right” in the third from the bottom. In this way, the form is physically recreating the experience of gazing in a mirror. Even without the form, the poem is a poignant reflection of the speaker’s state of mind in thinking, presumably, about her deceased mother—an event that is perhaps occasioned by looking in the mirror and seeing the mother’s face in her own.

I read a review somewhere that chided Stallings for including the poem “The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons” in this collection because the reviewer felt it was in someway derivative of Sylvia Plath. I can’t imagine, though, Plath weaving in a reference to Aeolus and his bag of winds that famously send Odysseus back to his misery even in sight of his homeland (though I suppose she might begin a poem with “I hate you”). What’s more, I’d venture to guess that Stallings is not well versed in Plath, who holds very little allure for formalist poets of a certain age (a group in which I’d place myself). Indeed, a reviewer of my first book faulted it because it failed some strained comparison with Plath, whom I had not read since I was sixteen. So, let me just spell it out for all future reviewers: serious poets don’t read Plath. At least not past adolescence.

One final thing for which I must commend A. E. Stallings: her apparent disdain for book blurbs. Her second book had an “antiblurb” poem on the back, and this one also includes a poem on the back cover instead of the requisite treacle, which, ultimately, only goes to show how well connected you are, or what sort of clout your publisher has. I think it’s a good idea. Personally, I am not swayed by blurbs from poets that I admire, but I am definitely dissuaded from buying a book that carries blurbs from poets that I don’t like.

I’ve recently been immersing myself in the latest book by an old friend and mentor, Michael McFee. Even if you didn’t know he hails from North Carolina, there’s something in his poetry that tells you so right off the bat. True, many of the poems in this collection, That Was Oasis, specifically mention a boyhood in Asheville. But there’s something in the diction and tone and bespeaks an unmistakable Southern gentility. And I’d say that goes for all his books, not just this latest one. The voice is quiet and reserved, the language plain and straightforward, deliberative and decorous. And yet, altogether engaging. McFee revels in language as much as any poet writing today, maybe more so. He excels at teasing out the subtle and forgotten meanings of commonplace words, and clearly appreciates the physical sensation of mouthing select syllables. One poem in the collection, “Bunk,” is in fact set in motion by a fascination with varying ways of calling out a lie. Similarly, in the poem “Tipsy,” the poet is intrigued by the appropriateness of the word to describe a certain condition of inebriation; the language remains surefooted yet fluid, perpetually catching itself from an imminent fall. The final couplet, which describes a “tilted story / with a beginning, a muddle, and no end,” paints as clear a picture as any of the poem’s protagonist.

The poem “Tipsy” is a bit unusual for one subtle reason: the title is not a noun (though one might argue that the title focuses on a word as a thing-in-itself, and thus a noun in its own right). McFee maintains a remarkable focus on the things of this world—and more specifically, those things that are so common as to be overlooked and unnoticed. In this way, he shares a connection with another NC native, Robert Morgan, who has composed a vast array of “thing poems.” But where Morgan looks with an eye that is suffused with loss and regret, McFee’s view is still buoyed by a an innocence and wonder (and in that way, perhaps he’s a bit closer to Ted Kooser). Closure is not the point—rather, it’s the act of capturing an aspect of the world, like an ancient fly caught in amber. The collection opens with a meditation on the letter “Q” and continues with paeons on or inspired by common items such as salt, saltine crackers, pork rinds, keys, a bald spot, mistletoe. Even the colon flashing on a digital clock—”this heartbeat punctuation between hour and minute”—is worthy, in McFee’s eyes, of being immortalized in verse.

That colon, of course, brings to mind NC’s most famous poet, A.R. Ammons, who used it more liberally than Dickinson used dashes. One would be hard-pressed to show how Ammons may have influenced McFee stylistically, but there is certainly a connection. Indeed, McFee pay tribute to Ammons alongside Thelonius Monk in the poem “Thelonius and Archie.” It seems like an incongruous pairing, but turns out to be rather astute. But McFee is often at his best when he is discovering and revealing unseen or forgotten connections among the disparate components of life. McFee adopts the long lines of Ammons’ later work for this poem, which is something of a departure for him.

The book is roughly divided up into sections clustered around a theme. My favorite section is perhaps the third, which looks back on the first stirrings of teenage desire. McFee manages to capture the sensations without lapsing into sentimentality or the sort of editorializing the might seem natural decades after the fact. In “Study Hall,” for example, a group of young boys gazes longingly at a girl’s “never-ending legs / measuring out the shortest hour, / the quietest period in the history of that school, / as she slowly uncrossed them…” And already, they have learned (or are simply programmed) to overlook her imperfections, to turn her into an object of fantasy. And in “Holding Hands,” the fall from innocence is presaged in the language used to describe the innocent gesture:

The same poems ends, achingly, with the (postcoital?) concern that “somebody passing by / mistook for love our resigned / inability to quite let go.”

The sixth and final section is an extended meditation ostensibly centered on a baseball field in Asheville, McCormick field. But it’s not about baseball, it’s about his boyhood memories of his father, who is glimpsed both in his prime and in decline, just like the stadium itself. There is a sadness and resignation in this long poem, as the poet seeks to relive the past, confirm its existence, and accept its disappearance. And that is, after all, one of the primal tropes of all great poetry.

I first met McFee back in the late ’80s. I was an undergrad at Cornell, and he was a visiting professor. (I always made a point of taking classes with visiting professors because they tended to give better grades.) That class turned out to be among the most memorable of my time in Ithaca. The interest that he showed in my work, the insight that he shared, the challenges he posed, the encouragement that he gave me was unlike anything I have ever encountered since. In fact, if I have any confidence at all in creative writing programs, it is largely because of him.

A friend recently handed me a copy of Bridge and Tunnel by John Hennessy, whom he knew growing up in Rahway, NJ. A wonderful collection—though I’m sure that part of my enjoyment and appreciation came from revisiting some of the sites and sounds (and smells) of my boyhood home. The Merck factory, of course, the trains and neon, the rivers and gutters blooming trash (the ubiquity of iniquity?), the juxtaposition of cattails and oil slicks, the state pen (where I worked one summer)–they’re all here. The language, rhythm, and imagery, often jarring and disjointed, are intense and palpable, and Hennessy is clearly present in the moment when he reaches back into his formative past.

The book title is of course appropriate and evocative. The Rahway area is not far from New York, accessible from New Jersey only by bridge and tunnel. And even if NYC is not often mentioned directly, its specter haunts every poem, representing, as it does, the gateway to something bigger and better, beginnings and limitless vistas (at least from the perspective of a boy in urban/suburban New Jersey). But if New York is the promised land, the otherworld, a state of grace, the bridge and tunnel represent two ways of getting there, two world views and life circumstances. The bridge rises over and above, removed from the grit and desolation below. The tunnel requires a literal and metaphorical descent into the underworld, the base and worm-ridden bowels of the human psyche. The bridge and tunnel suggest an achievable heaven and hell—but while the bridge is always an option, most characters in this book choose the tunnel.

Both structures link two separate but nonexclusive places or states—and here again, the symbolism runs deep. Hennessy apparently grew up in the Irish catholic tradition, and the attendant symbols and references are plentiful. But this tradition (at least in my experience) focuses less on the desire to achieve a state of grace than on the need to repress basic human desires and emotions. Hennessy pairs that upbringing with the classical tradition, the Greek and Roman myths—though not surprisingly, he tends to focus on the myths that deal in some way with the underworld, a gestalt that admixes original sin and the baser elements of our nature. Persephone, the Minotaur, Orpheus, Polyphemus, and even Pan rub shoulders with Satan himself.

Hennessy’s Rahway is not just a figurative place, but a physical space with real inhabitants. Many of these are Hennessy’s boyhood cronies, but some are the neighborhood denizens, invariably damaged and cast off in some way. Of these, the most haunting is a character known as Dog-Star Freddy, an apparent sex offender or pedophile. He appears directly in at least four poems, emerging from his basement (underworld) only long enough to torment birds and lure away delinquent youths. Which brings up another salient feature of this book: it’s not just a collection, its a cohesive whole, and owes a debt to Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Many of the characters glimpsed in early poems return in later poems, often gaining depth and complexity in the interim. So the altarboy of one poem, Paul (whom I knew personally—the brother of the friend who handed me the book) is also seen delivering newspapers and ultimately retreating to a Buddhist monastery in South Korea. When the love/sex interest of an early poem (named Ball—and if that’s her real name, what a wonderful coincidence) returns in the final poem, we learn that his affections for her were much deeper and more complicated than the earlier poem would suggest. Taken collectively, then, the poems suggest a mind that is obsessed and fixated with the past as object, a puzzle that must be solved or a trauma that must be confronted before the poet can move on.

If I have any gripe about the book, it’s that it seems to be written for a small circle of friends, or readers with insider knowledge. But then again, I have to include myself in that group. Hennessy and I had friends in common, and I’d guess he remembers as well as I do the smell of burnt coffee in a certain house on Seminary Ave. I’ve lately been parsing through my memories, wondering whether we had met years ago. A moot point, I suppose: after reading Bridge and Tunnel, I get a sense that I know him.