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Obliquities
Author:
Lynn Strongin
Binding: Paperback
(pp: 390) ISBN: 978- 81-8253-130-7 Availability: In Stock
(Ships within 1 to 2
days) Publisher: Cyberwit.net Pub. Date:
2009 Condition: New
Description: From above, as
it flew, the angel saw the city as a cross. It was
New York City in the 1950’s: North to South,
East to West, forming the two long arms of the
crucifix. The grid of the early city planners was
both logical and elegant, held by Park Avenue down
the middle, and cross-town streets horizontally,
the Cross-town Seventy-Fifty Street running
horizontally thru Central park.
About
the Author: Born in New York City in 1939,
Lynn Strongin's name comes up regularly in college
classes as one of the most unique voices in
American poetry. Strongin has lived in British
Columbia for more than a quarter century, but
considers herself a profoundly American writer.
During the 1960s, she worked with Denise Levertov
amidst the lively political environment of
Berkeley, California. One of the great imagist
poets of the 20th century, Strongin's poetry and
prose have been published worldwide in over 70
print and online journals; she has been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize in poetry five times. Her
book Albino Peacock: Tales of a Jewish Girl in the
South will be published in late 2008 alongside her
latest book of poems, Cape Seventy, nominated for
the Griffin Award for Excellence in poetry.
Anthologized in 30 different volumes, her work is
included in the award-winning Visiting Emily:
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily
Dickinson. She is the author of many books of
prose and poetry, including three recent books of
poetry: Rembrandt’s Smock (Plain View Press),
The Girl with Copper Colored Hair (Conflux Press),
and Wyves of the Fire Dye (Last Heron Press.) She
is also the editor of the anthology The Sorrow
Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy
(University of Iowa Press), and its companion
volume, Crazed by the Sun: Poems of Ecstasy. In
her four-decade career Strongin has received two
PEN grants and an NEA award in creative writing.
Only
$20
Crazed
By The Sun (Paperback)
by
Lynn Strongin with Glenna Luschei (Editor)
Binding: Paperback
(pp: 128) ISBN: 978- 81-8253-112-3 Availability: In Stock
(Ships within 1 to 2
days) Publisher: Cyberwit.net Pub. Date:
2008 Condition: New
Description:
i
thank You God for most this amazing
day:for
the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and
a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which
is natural which is infinite which is yes
E.E.Cummings
Robert Frost, a
rugged New Englander wrote that "Happiness
makes up in height / for what it lacks in length.
" Yet he had a lasting sense of light. Saints
and children are said to know ecstasy. Are poets
not kissing kin? I have culled a book of poems of
ecstasy. These include the private almost mystical
elation of a mother singing a lullaby to her child
as well the choral bliss of an Ode to Joy. These
luminous moments are otherworldly as it is to
imagine glimpsing a unicorn. Eloquent praise
speaks as much to our human condition as the
elegy, the wedding celebration, the eulogy. The
poems are involved with light just as light is
involved with breath. Whether the blind-sighting
that we call epiphany, or the somber light of
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) who translates into
sound that "certain slant of light / On
winter afternoons, " the poems in Crazed
by the Sun dazzle. Charles Wright has spoken
of "altar light" which suggests
religious feeling. Perhaps Wright intended the pun
of altered consciousness, that mind set which
occurs in twilight of the chapel, the temple, the
peace of communion and community outside the every
day.
“Lynn Strongin argues that elegy is a convention in poetry that praises as much as it mourns,
which is historically true and successfully executed in the poems collected here. Because
death is an ultimate reality shared by all—and understood by none—The Sorrow Psalms will
find a receptive audience.”
—Claudia Keelan, director, MFA International, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Only
$15.95
Crazed by the Sun,
by 2008, by Lynn Strongin, ISBN: 978- 81-8253-112-3,
pp. 128, Cyberwit.net
All
of us yearn for instances of ecstasy, what editor
Lynn Strongin calls “luminous moments” In a
tangled and often difficult world, we hope not
merely for respite, but for experience that lifts
us beyond frustration and fear and rage.
In her introduction to this anthology, Strongin
describes ecstasy as “at the highest end of a
spectrum of pleasure at whose lower end is
contentment and in between are various stages of
joy, bliss, rapture.” The poems she has
assembled illustrate all of these stages, as well
as the opposite for, as she points out “no light
is possible without darkness.” And light
is essential, whether it be the sudden light of
epiphany or what poet Charles Wright calls
“altar light.” She exalts both light and
ecstasy as they have been used throughout the ages
and in all kinds of human experience, ranging from
sex to doo-wop to carnival rides to children
playing. Although the poems here are
contemporary, in her introduction she quotes Donne,
Vaughn, Dickinson, and others. “To recapitulate
the themes of Crazed by the Sun, altar
light makes earth holy.” This statement
seems to be her mantra for this collection, which
intertwines ecstasy with light and breath.
Her introduction begins w/ the opening lines of
E.E. cummings “i thank You God for most the
amazing day,” surely one of the most exultant
poems of the twentieth century. The introduction
ends with the second quatrain of the cummings
poem:
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is
the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the ga
great happening illimitably earth)
The sixty-five poems in this anthology are grouped
into five sections. Part One, “most this
amazing day,” centers on amazing days marked
sometimes by rapture, sometimes by darkness,
sometimes by a blend. Theodore Roethe’s
“Child on Top of a Greenhouse” gives us the
pure delight of a child who, by making his
dangerous way to the top of a glass roof, close to
rushing clouds and tossing elms, exults as all the
adults below him are “pointing up and
shouting.” Liam Rector writes not of day,
but of a memorable evening marked by loveliness
and passion. “The Night the Lightning Bugs
Lit Last in the Field, Then Went Their Way”
vividly portrays hundreds of fireflies
“lighting their last night,” even as he and
his companion make love.
In Di Brandt’s “Deep Sky &
Sun” the ecstasy resides in warm memory as the
narrator recalls herself in a barn, the youngest
who watches her companions climbing to the loft:
i couldn’t reach the first rung so i stood at
the bottom & imagined what heaven was like
was my grandfather with Santa Claus beard
sitting on a wooden throne among straw bales
never saying a word but smiling & patting us
on the head & handing out bubble gum to those
who were good even though his eyes were half
closed he could see right inside your head
Enjoying
the scent of new-mown hay, pressing tiny blue
flowerets against her nose she “breathed /
deep sky & sun it was enough heaven for me /
for one day”
Other poems are more ambivalent. Chase
Twichell’s “Little Snowscape” describes snow
as both beautiful “Godlike glitter” and
that which conceals beauty (“shadow flakes /
darken the falling air”) or truth (“white
concealment / my lies to myself.)
Marianne Moore’s “Sun”also combines light
with darkness. Beneath the title is an
unattributed epigram, “Hope and fear accost
him.” The opening lines quote an ancient (unattributed)
poem: “No man may him hyde / From Deth
hollow-eyed,” then adds, in Moore’s words,
“For us, this inconvenient truth does not
suffice.” (One has to wonder, did Al Gore
get the title of his study of global warming from
this line?) In the remainder of the poem, the sun
is portrayed both as splendor--”a fiery
topaz”--and as “consuming wrath.”
One of the most moving poems in this section is
Charles Adés Fishman’s “A Child’s
Tale” II August 6, 1945,” set on that day when
the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The
first lines describe an innocent, lovely time,
when “a cool breeze blew under the gingko trees,
and the cicadas / [were] newly emerged from their
shelter in the earth” Then
comes the moment that changed the world:
. . something warm brushed your cheek as if the
hot August sun
had been reflected off a mirror and Tsutsuga
Village trembled
A column of pink clouds rose above the mountains
rose higher
deepening in the intensity of color: all the pink
in the universe
had been swept up into these clouds
Later, the light darkened and papery cinders fell
from the sky
thin slivers of scorched wood curled
scrapings of metal
bits of bone
and skin — these, too, rained down
Fishman
expertly moves from peace to pain honestly, but
without moving into melodrama. The ugly
facts speak for themselves.
Part Two, “Washing Down Noodles with Port”
gathers poems that celebrate sensuality.
Some center on food. Jonathan Minton’s
“Still Life with Orange Bowl” is perfectly
named, but this still life provides taste and
meditation as well as vivid visual images.
Barbara Crooker’s “Eggplants,”
“start as purple stars in a deep green
firmament, / swell into fullness as the summer sun
fills / July afternoons.” Then the blooms
become “white hot, washing / the blue right out
of the sky.” Penelope Weiss’s prose
poem, “The Wasp and the Pear,” opens with
sexual imagery:
The wasp was a brawny creature with study wings
and a sensitive face. His eyes were large
and luminous. He nuzzled the pear as she lay
open on a plate. Her sigh was too soft to be
heard by human ears.
Other poems commemorate events, always with
powerful images and metaphors’ for example,
Robert McNamara’s “At the Campo Dei Fiori”:
Lit by the sky’s blue flame
a rooftop cannon fires noon,
a market fills the square
with transubstantiated light –
the bloodshot oranges glare,
the strawberries’ boxed fire,
Jim
Natal’s “D.U.I” wittily plays with the
expectations aroused by its title :
Driving under the influence of a tequila moon
I’m pulled over by the night; high desert
starlight
instead of city stars obscured by light, the mesas
stark against a Pollock spattered dropcloth sky
In
Glenna Luschei ‘s “Fires at the Station,”
after twelve short but vivid stanzas depicting the
crash of a marriage, she moves beyond anger and
sadness to affirmation:
Light me the fires at the station
we’ll dance in Petersburg.
The time between Christmas and New Year’s
I’ll wind a week-long nest.
We’re all emigrants.
Nothing is loss when you dance.
“We’re all emigrants.” Indeed!
Part III, “The world was stained glass”
has to do with darkness as well as light. In
Kate Daniels “The Hatching,” the narrator is
one of twins burning with scarlet fever.
After giving them shots, the doctor brings in a
recording, one of “Nutcracker Suite”; under
the spell of the music, the narrator sees herself
suddenly as “the black swan / hatching in a nest
of white, the dark hum/ of music in a small tight
place that resists / giving way until the
final moment. Then it shudders/ apart in an
orgy of exit, and the shell--the shell cracks
open.” Such a brilliant metaphor
for the sudden turning from illness to health!
Jean Sprakland’s “The Light Collector”
centers on another kind of unwellness. A man
moves glumly through his day thinking “I must
make something of my life , as if it were /
a bag of rags for recycling.” Seeking some
light that will diminish his darkness, he
considers broad daylight, but he...
“can’t get excited any more by the tawdry
brilliance of it . . . . Gauzy scraps of dawn/
have begun to bore him.” He yearns for
“bites” of light, and finally opens the
refrigerator door to find that “the light
is so sweet and precise it leaves him aching.”
I’ve never seen a more precise picture of
depression.
“Aura” Jordan Smith acknowledges that
while he has had brief “Blakean
implosions” of light in his life, he never saw
that broken- / Spectrum’s flourish of energy, of
delight.” Finally, unbidden, his purest
experience with light comes “On this perfectly
ordinary, partially / Cloudy spring afternoon, in
the living room” where his boys are listening to
the Beatles. “I stood and rubbed the young
one’s head / As he joined the older one on air
guitar. / When I stretched out my own hand,
and there / Was hardly an interruption in our
common air.”
The most exultant poem in this section is
C.E.Chaffin’s “At the Carnival,” in which
the narrator brings us into the pure
pleasure of a day dedicated to pure pleasure. On
the Swinger, he tells us, “I close my eyes, /
lean back, go limp and let / my long frame hang
like spaghetti / beneath the pirate moon.”
Then, “three corn-dogs later,” he and his
companion board the Tilt-A-Whirl, in which “We
orbit the vortex / of our little track, our feet
sucked centerward.” I feel dizzy reading these
lines--a joyous dizziness.
In Part 4 “Deep in My Comforter” (“From the
Birth of Light to the Death of Darkness”) we are
given two poems from Laura Chester’s “Free
Rein,.” If these are typical of her work, she is
giving both mind and heart “free rein” to
explore anything, everything with no regard
for rules or logic. The first, “Go
Round,” is a prose poem comprised of a long
series of brief short sentences and phrases, many
apparently disconnected, like the visions
appearing in a dream, drug-induced fantasy, or a
vision:
We sing to leap the last of it. The nuts are
gathered in a cup. The arc is scent, the curve a
boat. To row and row the blinding stream. We
hope to cast a shadow yet.
Because
it is written as prose, we may miss the fact that
she includes a good deal of rhyme (or off-rhyme);
for example, in the preceding sample, “it”
“boat,” “yet.” Further along,
Sinking deep in Lions mane. Go round she say
to sign your flame. Seven stars are shining
bright. The round is fine--Just out of sight.
The
second, “Returning to the World” is also a
prose poem, though the phrases and sentences seem
less random and are gathered into five stanzas (or
paragraphs?) A brief excerpt, demonstrating
Chester’s dip into philosophy via metaphor:
I tightened up on the reins of life itself until
my hands ached as if from a horse ride. But we
know the fingers were just too eager to take, that
conscience doesn’t want you to cheat one bit and
that life is constant in its demand for you to
give. You cannot control The World.
Jordan Smith’s “Route 29” also gives us a
catalogue of images, but they are less random,
more cohesive The poem ends,
How still it is, how certain
In reflection, although below the abutment
Of the trestle bridge the state tore down
The waters of West Canada Creek, All sun-broken
glitter, let
nothing past their own
Self-gratifying presence, no hint of how those
sudden
Depths beyond the shoal might matter to the unwise
Fisherman’s footing, no trace of his steps, his
works, and no
Telling why this world is so beautiful
We cannot equal it, we cannot live in it for long.
These poems as well as others in more
traditional form all lead us into the center of
rapturous moments. From Hilda Raz’s
“Tenor Part”:
learn, croons the garden
from its fringe of weeds, Lamia
stretched over the brick walks,/
the Periwinkle fine mat
strangling Lilies-of-the-Valley
Aracelis Girmay’s “Invocation” also a
free-association poem is comprised of a long
series of invitations, each beginning “come”
Here is the joyous ending:
come holy, holy parade of dirt,
comemis muertos who dance in procession while
tubas
play, come.& a god who is a girl, marigoldsin
her hair, see
her blow, into my mouth, a wind of copalthat is
smoking,
smoking, & on it, come, ride into it, come,
family,& ride
through the rooms of my house. Into my veins &
brain,
come, the lace of nerves—oh, how you make me
heaven.
The fifth and final section is entitled “A
Presence We Pass Back and Forth, ”For Judith
Roche (“Gender”), that presence is gender.
For Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (“Red Quiet”), it is
friendship. In “Light and Shadow” Carolyn
Maisal considers the significance of a tortilla on
which was scorched the head and shoulders of
Christ, a phenomenon which brought its owner fame
and wealth, but which reminds the poet of the
light of the atomic bomb that left on pavement the
shadows of the people dissolved by the intense
heat.
Isn’t there some terrible shadow drama
of the spirit going on
even in simple objects
so that the domes of capitals
and churches seem constantly,,
uneasily alive with shadows
of flying crows although the sky is empty.
We do not know how/ to love anything very well,
and trust nothing.
In other poems in this section, poets lose selves
in snow (Chase Twichell, “Solo”), in a
magnolia tree “alive/ with bees” (Sarah Sloate,
“Hive,”) in moments when ordinary occurrences
lead the poet to “lie down in silence/ and touch
the world.” (Kate Daniels: “The
Way Christ Walked Over”).
The final poem in this section and in the book is,
fittingly, another by e.e.. cummings: “you
shall above all things be glad and young.”
Like the poem which opens this anthology, it sings
of love and ends in rapture: “I’d rather
learn from one bird how to sing/ than each ten
thousand stars how not to dance.”
Reviewing this collection, I am reminded of the
magazine Ode, subtitled “For Intelligent
Optimists.” An international magazine
founded in the Netherlands, but in this country
coming out of California, it does not deny the
bleak side of existence, but focuses on
brightness. This is no Horatio
Alger/Pollyanna journal, but one that seeks beyond
and beneath the hard times to find happiness and
hope--and sometimes, if we search hard enough,
ecstasy.
Towards the end of her introduction, Strongin
says, “Ecstasy, often involving epiphany, and
praise, may not be able to stop war but it would
seem to be war’s antithesis. Strengthened
with song we may have the surest power to break
the sword on this blue planet and to illumine.”
Amen and amen!
–
Sally Buckner
Sally Buckner Ph.D (full professor) who teaches at the Unviversity of North Carolina in the United Sates.
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