Richard Froude’s Fabric reviewed by Megan Burns

Richard Froude
Fabric

ISBN 9780982989609
Horse Less Press, 2011
107 pages, paperback
$15.00

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Fragmenting the Book of Memory

Richard Froude’s Fabric is a journey into the making of songs and the weaving of subtle textures that amuse and disorient the reader. Subtitled “A Prelude to the Last American Book,” Froude tests the edges where lyric meets narrative and where structure has the freedom to dance into disarray. The word “prelude” is a loaded starting point as the reader sets off to define this text in relation to an unknown: does prelude in this sense mean as in music, a short piece free in style, or is it a nod to Wordworth’s Preludes, or is the phantom text of the Last American Book truly haunting this book. The answers are probably all of the above as Froude’s technique is quite similar to Susan Howe’s The Birth-Mark, where disparate impressions, images, and histories are brought together to tell a story, and part of the story is how the story makes itself on the page.

Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, reviewed by Megan Burns

Julie Carr
Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Coffeehouse Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56689-251-3
6x9, 74pps
$16

Reviewed by Megan Burns

A Doubled Woman: Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

This slim volume is a meditation on birth, death, grief, and nature in a series of poems designated by Carr as fragments, lines, and abstracts. The poems echo one another in images of birds, shores, rain, leaves, salt, and honey. The subject matter of the mother, the daughter, conception, and death are also woven into the tapestry, but it is the language, the sounds themselves, that interconnect and create a whole in a book that speaks about what is in pieces. The loss of the mother, a double loss due to the mother’s Alzheimer’s, is complicated by the speaker’s pregnancy. Images of birth and death as well as daughters and mothers become blurred and confused in the poems as the voice attempts to tease out with language an order built upon internal sounds. Sounds become a mainstay, propelling an investigation into complicated gestures.

The book begins with a poem titled “Landlocked Lines,” an important departure as the poems that follow seem to flow further from the shore and into the abyss. “It would be absurd to imagine the absent person in the margins of the book” this poem tells us, and here we begin to confront the idea of elegy and how this form shapes the person who is lost. This first poem introduces ideas or images that resurface, much like memories of a lost loved one; a physical object like the “red wall,” birds, and stories about giving birth to save a life all return in later poems. Alliteration and internal rhymes ground most of these poems; they escalate to a frenzy especially when grief seems to overpower the speaker:

now rectangles of fluorescent, of bold blonde daylight on walls of old dreck now shine like gestalt or defense, like splayed hair. Now old odes or seeds of thought turned snug in gummy mugs: I’m alone here in a day like an arrow or a lance in a gash. Day, don’t say things, don’t order (12).

Skip Fox's _ For To _, reviewed by Megan Burns

Skip Fox
For To
ISBN 1934289728
BlazeVOX [books], 2008

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Skip Fox’s newest book For To is nearly three hundred pages of various and intricate poems detailing the poet’s search for quantitative answers in what is understandably an oroboric quest. In fact, the image of the oroboros arises several times throughout the book, less a symbol and more a totem animal—a conundrum in form that parallels the poet’s wrestling with language. In his search for “straight answers,” Fox asks the hard questions and seldom lets up in his relentless gaze. His verse focuses on the smallest and most obscure human details, the odder the better. Fox is especially enamored with the absurd; language is paraded out to perform acrobatic acts of saying all and then some. The poet muses on the mouth of his sock as much as he does on the delicate rays of dawn punctured by the groans of bullfrogs on a southern Louisiana morning.

Fox tells us early on: “Even the boy raised by wolves had a language” (15). He wavers between presenting language as quintessential to the human condition and also limiting and laughable in its design. In witty aphorisms and slingshot asides, Fox pokes fun at us, the users of language, who think we know what we’re talking about when we do talk. “Reason is one thing that happens,” (61) he quips. Mathematical precision as a trope recurs throughout his examination into the accuracy of words. Fox’s poems read like math problems found in the school of ultimate knowledge. If we could solve them, the kingdom of bliss could be ours they seem to proffer. Take “30-31 Curriculum for the New Millennium: Basic Oblivion” that asks:

What is the nominal ‘distance’ between what you think you should feel and what you do feel, and all the supple calibrations gliding across your skin, touching with their tiny bare feet all the tender deposits of lives, the kinds of families, relations you may have had, and those you didn’t.

These questions have the ability to send the reader into paroxysms of doubt questioning all they thought they knew or more accurately all they never thought about at all.

Fox brings to the surface those items often overlooked; “very delicate, a word,” (36) he tells us as he celebrates the magic in the obscure. He manages to tilt our eyes downward and inward uncovering the invisible chemical reactions that make up our existence and laying them out in figurative language often reserved for fiery sunsets and lover’s laments. Fox describes the predicament of being human in all its flawed and messy compartments. All the while he is cognizant of the fallible tools in his toolbox: “all measure is metaphor” (52). In the same vein that a mathematical equation seeks solutions, these poems also seem to be searching for answers. In truth, Fox reveals, the search itself is the process and the pleasure: “I’d not miss it for the world” (127).

Form is a net that Fox refuses to be caught within; his poems throughout the book range from concrete poems to prose poems to lists and pages of notes and footnoted texts. At his most sublime and romantic, Fox muses:

insects passing my ears, cars
on the curve, rusty hinge
of bird in the field, cricket
frogs again,…once they
opened a door and I
walked in. It
seemed simple. (150)

These tranquil reflections are interspersed with wild “Sure Shots” as Fox calls them, a random recording of thoughts and witticisms such as: “Actually you can catch more flies with a corpse. (Sticka for the Godz!)” (199) or the flippant multi- choice option: “Eat what you fuck. Sticka for a. cannibals, b. cattle ranchers, c. post-feminists, d. ADM” (200). There is even the occasional Zen koan: “Zero is nothing realized, nothing beheld, not even absence, requires no article.” (199). It’s hard to pin down where Fox’s leanings are poetically, when he is constantly pushing the subject on what poems can say or how they should even look like while they are saying it. In “Forty Titles,” Fox will serve up the titles for poems that should probably never be written while a few pages later, he begins a concrete poem almost shaped like a heart with, “That little fuck, what was his name?” (217). Fox has the ability to unhinge the reader’s steadiness by vacillating between lyrical verses that lean towards the more familiar use of images and allusions to explicitly raw and hysterically funny lines that you won’t find in the pages of the New Yorker in any near future.

Occasionally, Fox manages that oldest of poetic tricks, to sum it all up in a line so poignant that all other lines seem superfluous as in the poem “Monday Nights: Ode to Mom”:

This should be titled “Miles to Go” with a trumpet solo that would blow into your notions of existence such ripe conception that you might live it again, all over from the beginning, as they say, only this time without the hardship.

The reader can see the nostalgic snowy paths of the past sounded out as a long horn solo calling us all to a place we will never venture again, except for here in the poem. Maybe that is the answer to the puzzling title of Fox’s book; whoever it is “for” and whoever it is “to,” they will know when they enter into the exchange with this poet that promises never to offer the expected.

Fox is not afraid to let his poems laugh or even laugh at him, and they reward him by revealing a lexicon that measures out our own careless joys from childhood. In lessons long forgotten, we see here again how playful language is and how mindful it can be of our own precarious conditions. Fox takes both the serious and the futile, compressing time into moments caught in his various forms for getting the words down. Far from simply playing with language like a toy, Fox confronts the reader with the open-ended question that rejects the neat closure in exchange for the messiness of life.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Callaloo, Constance Magazine, and YAWP Journal as well as online at horseless press, shampoo, trope_5, Exquisite Corpse and BigCityLit. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series.

Kristin Prevallet's I, Afterlife: Essays in Mourning Time, reviewed by Megan Burns

I, Afterlife: Essays in Mourning Time
Kristin Prevallet
Essay Press, 2007
ISBN: 9780979118913
$12.95

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Kristin Prevallet delves into loss and grief in this collection of essays and poems I, Afterlife: Essays in Mourning Time, where a stunning precision in language cracks open the elegy exposing both its limitations and its necessity. Prevallet begins by turning first to another poet, Alice Notley, allowing Notley’s “At Night the States” to function as an echo that reverberates around the edges of this text. Notley’s dedication to poetry and her direct handling of death become a springboard in this book, launching Prevallet into her uncovering of how the elegy performs on the page. Prevallet boldly confronts the reader’s expectations by heading straight into the burning core of this text: how to make sense of the suicide of her father, if such a process can even be approached. “Preface” begins the book with a narrative that outlines the events surrounding her father’s suicide and tries to define how sublimation works in regards to grief: “this is elegy,” the poet announces. In part one, “Forms of Elegy” Prevallet tries to understand the language of grief, exploring how emotion is handled within the form and how solid words try to capture the inexplicable. She even questions the function of poetry to communicate this at all:

There is a connection between the insect and my father that goes
----------beyond the physical presence of one and the absence of the other.
I know precisely what that connection is.
But you, in reading this, may never know.
I may refuse to reveal the truth of what I am mourning.

This statement forces the reader to examine what exactly is being revealed and what is being withheld; the loss of the father and the violence of his suicide become the surface for whatever murky waters lay beneath. This is how elegy speaks, Prevallet says, again and again throughout the text, but she also asserts that the voicing of grief does little to fill the holes in the story or to bring light to that which remains veiled in mist.

Prevallet’s spatial relation to grief is sharply condensed in this text as the reader is forced to confront at a rapid pace a movement that took the author several years to express on the page. The effect is startling and troubling; Prevallet’s language tears into the body and then seeks to keep the wound from healing. Visually, the layout of the book is jarring as black pages stand out starkly against the white space surrounding her text reminding the reader not only of the traditional Western mourning color but constantly drawing the eye of the reader back to the illusion of black and white interpretations. As well, the images that accompany, “Crime Scene Log” unnerve and throw the reader off balance. The grayscale, grainy images are presented as though they reveal something about the text directly below them, but what that is remains unclear. Are we seeing the crime scene or the lack of the crime, and what can be contained within these precise squares with their varying hues? Prevallet challenges the reader to “see,” and the lack of clarity is as frustrating as the author’s desire to know her father’s mind the day of his suicide. In these squares, Prevallet suggests that there are large spaces that are neither black nor white, and by looking into them the reader experiences the mind’s desire to make sense where there is none. One may discern a square, a grave, an asphalt lot, an ultrasound, a ghostly mirage, but how does the interpretation match the description of the police officer’s report about the crime given below each picture. Ultimately, the images and the words speak two different languages.

“What is the language used to describe a person who has deceased?” Prevallet asks bringing the reader’s attention to language’s ability to create a gap between experience and communication. Words literally are abandoned within part two’s poem “The Distance Between Here&After” as Prevallet tries to talk about the “unspeakable,” but she returns to words acknowledging that these are her tools for navigating through the gaps in her life:

------------------------------Commence. Again.
One more Time. Start over. Here.

This text is an investigation into the elegiac form and its context within the process of grieving; it offers no solution, but instead circles like a season haunted by loss that turns into another with no pause for the particulars of death.

***

Megan Burns holds an MFA from Naropa University. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was recently released by Lavender Ink(http://www.lavenderink.org/). She has poems in Exquisite Corpse, Constance Magazine and YAWP Journal. She co-hosts the 17 Poets! reading series in New Orleans (http://www.17poets.com/) and runs Trembling Pillow Press with poet Dave Brinks.