Welcome to a new monthly feature to the online portion of our publication! Each month we will feature two poetry book reviews. For more information on submitting a review copy or writing a review for BSPJ, please visit our Submission Guidelines
Into the River Somewhere
By Mark Jackley
2007 Finishing Line Press
Georgetown Kentucky
ISBN: 978-1-59924-224-8
Into the River Somewhere by poet Mark Jackley is an invitation to view a collection of snapshots each with a minute focus on distinct moments from life (An Elderly Woman Staring Into a Boarded-Up Store; Fatalities; What My Father Smoked). Nearly a master of the short form, Jackley occasionally falters with common imagery that almost begs to be stretched a bit further into metaphor, but that isn’t quite his style. Many of his poems are intense with images of the natural world in a philosophical context. In his poem, ‘In A Parking Lot at Dusk, Cars Enter the River of Light,’ the second stanza is clearly directed at the audience suggesting consideration for deeper thought: “Think of stillness as/perhaps the road to waters/dark and brilliant where/we do not think but gleam.”
‘Human Survival’ describes the action and emotion behind a daughter falling off her bike and skinning her knee, a common incident from childhood. As we continue reading we see the balancing act between father and daughter, her slight defiance at not wanting to get her knee wet while in the shower, and her father one-handedly washing her hair. In the end he says, “God, if you’re still watching, /this is how it’s done.” Again, Jackley suggests the universe and his readers to consider the big thoughts behind tiny moments.Most, if not all readers, will connect with Jackley’s work on an emotional level. Into the River Somewhere is an accessible, thought-provoking collection. He invites you to enter a personal space that seems quiet and longing, confessional and story-like. In his poem ‘What You Are,’ you can easily forgive the moon as cliché when surrounded by well-crafted surprising lines:
What You Are
For Mary, in memory
Maybe you are luminous.
I doubt you are particular,
a cup of snow, the stillness
of a leaning rake,
cars abandoned deep
in grasses quiet as the sea,
shy gray rain that tiptoes
when the moon winks.
You are not my stumbling
tongue, my cranium’s
cartoons. I get it, dear.
Simply, you are not.
Domestic Interior
By Stephanie Brown
2008 University of Pittsburgh Press
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
ISBN: 978-0-8229-5997-7
Stephanie Brown is a poetic force to be reckoned with. After the release of Allegory of the Supermarket (1999, University of Georgia Press) it is difficult to imagine a follow-up as strong as her first collection. Domestic Interior delivers.
Divided into five parts, Neighbors, Education, Folie a Deux, Not Too Serious, and The Mother, Brown’s postmodern feminist flair distinguishes each poem from the next, yet streamlines them with a common thread of unquestionable truth, humor and vulgarity. At times her honesty is almost frightening. In the title poem, we are taken in by the adage, opposites attract: “A loose cannon always marries a wet blanket.” As we are dragged deeper into an unlikely relationship of machismo and worship, the poet reminds us that some marital associations are inescapable: “Really, she still likes the macho stuff. He likes, he hates/ her mouth.” Domestic Interior examines the tug of war between love and hate, confinement and freedom (Pension, Venezia; Legal Separation). In ‘The Divorce of Mr. and Mrs. Moore,’ Brown takes on a Dorothy Parker-like wit of the tale of the Moores and their disintegrating lives: “Her friends have told her about the whore and Mr. Moore/ And there are surely more lies in store–/ She wells up: “this can’t go on anymore.””
Part five, The Mother, is perhaps the most isolated section of verse in the collection and rightfully so. Brown entraps us in all her interiors of motherhood, wife and house. In ‘Good-Bye’ she writes of the boy who has grown up no longer in need of a mothers love, or so it seems, and the mother whose life has become the house itself: “ “Good-bye, Mom,”/ the voice a kid’s so sweet like a solitary bird at 5 a.m.– / unaware, unafraid, and I/ go back to the house that lets me take care of it,/ unlike the boy who will not let me hug him.”
This months reviews by
Heather J. Macpherson, Editor
BSPJ