Chapbook Roundup

Staring at the Animal, poems by John Cross. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2009. $10.95

This is an attractive looking chapbook from Tupelo Press, winner of the Snowbound Series.

“I’d like for someone//…to explain to me/…why I hear…emptying out// I hear breathing,” Cross says in “The Quiet Store,” a mournful poem of delicate, broken feelings. Cross offers compelling images, but more than that, his poems are to be felt. In “After Marie’s First Mechanical Bird” describes a landscape full of broken birds, “the disassembling glitters,” he says. The line is apt and applies to the collection as a whole—these are disassembled poems, imagistic, broken things that ache in their jaggedness, but the disassembling does, indeed, glitter.

In “Heat,” Cross uses anaphora to show the many faces of “a good sun” which adds a kind of not just warmth but loving-warmth to the world; “a good sun gathers leaves at night/murmurs blankets of snow/faint light cusping the ghostweed.” “The Buzz Between Nearly Equal Wavelengths” gives us the title in a kind of love poem: “spring & you’re perfect/ light & everything/ sex (but nothing’s new:/radio static/ too many ghosts)/ & I remain/staring/at the animal.” Cross seems to disdain the animal—he searches for something higher. Throughout the collection, Cross searches for something higher than base reality and experience. In “The Off-Scourings of the Hog” he continues this theme: “If I succumb to hunger,” the poem begins, though the hunger seems to be more ephemeral than stomach pains. “To knock at your house of uncertain aspirins/…And all these brittle slivers…/And these awkward hard-ons.” Here, Cross plants the poem firmly in experiential imagery. But he’s still fighting this settling-in. In the final line, he states: “To convince my wracked windows it isn’t time/By screaming out of them It is not time”.

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Lost and Found, stories by Meg Pokrass (art by Cooper Renner). Boise, ID: Bannock Street Books, 2009.

This is a collection of mostly micro-fictions that originally ran in the journal Elimae with artwork by the former editor of Elimae, Cooper Renner. Pokrass crafts compelling scenes with quirky, but realistic details. Many of the stories focus on telling details of relationships (whether physical or familial)—moments that define the future. Pokrass’ stories read like diary entries from her characters. These are perfectly sculpted moments, often with a playfulness that makes the collection a real treat.

Pokrass opens with “Junior Mints,” a vivid scene. “I am playing the girl,” it begins. “The brother is played by a bad actor.” Pokrass seems to be describing a failing relationship which her narrator is watching “in the theater of my inner eye, kicking back, plucking Junior Mints from a long box, holding them in my mouth until they die on my tongue.” In the same way the narrator savors her experience, Pokrass lets the reader savor the moments she’s chosen in these stories.

A common theme is pet ownership, especially of dogs. “She Wanted a Dog” describes a woman coming to terms with the failings of her relationship. Renner includes illustrations of a dog and a bird to complement it. Sex is another theme. “Viking” describes obsession. “Mari” and “Found Memory” describe encounters. Pokrass uses lists in a couple stories as well as a triptych structure in the title piece to shake things up. Though it’s a brief collection, I wouldn’t say there’s a dud in the book. Renner’s art compliments the stories nicely.

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The Possibility of Recovery, poems by William Delman. West Somerville, MA: Cervena Barva Press, 2009. $7.00.

This is a hefty chapbook—at 43 pages, almost a full-length collection. Fortunately, along with heft comes weight. These are powerful poems. Delman deals with the fallout from war and trauma, illness and family history. He’s a poet who actually has something to write about.

Delman begins with “Advice to a Young Telemachus,” “To make it more real I will offer up/my father’s stroke…” Delman describes the accident his father’s stroke caused and the argument they’d had the night before. Delman paints a vivid, bittersweet memory and, abruptly, shatters the image in his closing lines, “That is when/I feel my wife turn into me. I shut/down the alarm, place my feet on the floor.” The allusion is apt as Delman is, like Telemachus, searching for his father in these poems, both fathers warriors, both lost, in a way.

“After the Stroke” continues the theme of a son searching for a father with a wedding scene in which the father has too much to drink and tells stories “about the bridge in Vietnam,/ the one he watched/from almost a half-mile off (was he/sixteen or seventeen?). The rifle/boomed. As the Vietnamese fell/one at a time they tried to lift their fallen/from the river.” Later, he defends himself, “That’s how it was.//You did what you had to,/pulled the trigger,/and to hell with everything else.” This poem is a wonderful foil to ‘Telemachus’ in that in the previous poem, Delman was woken from a dark reminiscence on his father’s suffering into a somewhat comforting world, and now, Delman is ‘woken’ from the happy day of his wedding by his father’s reminiscences of lost innocence.

Delman is a real talent. his language is tight and evocative. His scenes are clean. He focuses on the most telling moments, creating fine poems that haunt the reader.

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-Reviewed by CL Bledsoe