Winter Quarantine

It has always snowed,
white falling like words all day and night
speaking stones. And stars.
Of beginning in fire-hot galaxies.
In the quarantine of snow
we sleep and dream of radishes,
thousands of radishes in dark furrows,
their green ruffled caps.

For forty days and nights angels come
snowbound, coldbound,
whisper into the ears of sleepers.
The Alpine glaciers will be gone
in forty years. If a thing disappears,
does its name disappear?
If the world came into being by naming
what does extinction mean?
The glacial mass of language
slides down mountains picking up debris,
words scoop out ravines and valleys,
a moraine of words,
the names of things ground down.

Glacial stars in the early white.
Some mornings before dawn,
the still-dark is a presence, a protection.
Stars bound off the roof.
The moon is invisible,
and all things begin in fire,
something that returns and returns.

Cary Waterman,  Book of Fire.

Perhaps we can agree that our hope for each book of poetry issued into the contentious environment of contemporary American arts and letters is that it is worthy, a gift to its own milieu–that it manifests a brilliant sensibility unafraid to confront self, world, or soul.

Such a gift is Book of Fire and such a poet is Cary Waterman, professor at Augsburg College in St. Paul, and long an admired Midwestern poet.

Waterman may be justifiably proud of her collection as it crowns decades of achievement and the honing of her craft—publication in journals, grants and awards, the collection When I Looked Back You Were Gone, Holy Cow! Press, a Pitt Prize-winning volume, The Salamander Migration and Other Poems, a chapbook from the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.

This physically gorgeous volume (an impressionistic painting of blazing autumn trees by the poet’s late husband graces the cover), recently issued from the estimable Nodin Press, Minneapolis, is organized into five untitled sections each introduced with brief quotes by by H.D., Milosz and others.

Section I begins with a sequence of poems turning on the Demeter-Persephone myth; these focus on the burdens and terrible conflict laid upon Persephone—her obsession with her dark lover Hades and that as Demeter’s daughter, she must ever leave him to return spring/life to the earth.

The majority of the work in this section is structured in a progression of indented lines so that one is forced to slow down one’s travel over the page, to take in a deliberate and oracular telling and the questions offered up in revisiting the myth.

And these are indeed startling, beautifully wrought, carefully chiseled poems; in Persephone’s Return the speaker asks, “What is it that propels the girl toward dark?”;in Persephone in Hades, “It’s a girl’s job to go/to Hades/..How he’d wake her in the dark/his winter need/flesh/on flesh for warmth.”

In Persephone on Mount Oberg (on the north shore of Lake Superior) a further question: “How did she get here/the overlook where she sees into distance/travels her breath/remembers winter/when/her mother wept like death? …the sign says: stay back from the edge: or you will be ..falling/ falling.”

Mount Oberg is a place of respite for Persephone: “She walked through fire to get here/rock face lichen/blue iris lake/left desire, seduction behind…”

A sense of Persephone’s escape from her own destiny, and the implication that this is the speaker’s need as well, comes again in the poem Salvation, beginning with the poignant, “How fiercely trees grow in the north….the edge of things favors wildness…Mist burns her history from the dark water.”

While these poems ambitiously mine a mythical descent into darkness, the speaker/Persephone is in fact climbing up, out away from the dangers of love, reconnecting to and sustained by “the world”—the manifestations all around her of endurance and survival.

In the Garden is long and lyrical and rich with epiphany: “Everything needs help standing.” “It is almost/ August, the pause between bounty/and death.” The speaker feels…”. “…the high thin promise of/a whole life inside her body”—yet–… “ She is still that same girl,/her hair on fire.” In the fourth section: “Last light on lilies…What is there finally but gratitude?”. The mourning dove is “a peaceful bird with all manner of secrets/and hidden darkness.”

Infiammati Fire Circus relocates the myth: “Begin the reign of flame/Seats available next to Demeter/Pyrotechnics… Dancing girls/Shadow puppets/Aerialists on fire,” showing forth the mythical burning in a different context and resolving Persephone’s fate as follows: “She did not die/Remember this/ She did not die.”

The poem Persephone at the Spa is a tour d’ force: “You prepare for him again,/moist cotton patches/sucking light/over startled eyes….The esthiologist says:/hydrate, hydrate,/applies Ylang ylang,/love aphrodisiac/for the wedding,/the winter dark.”

Another exquisite lyric poem follows Descent—in six sections – turning on these lines: “Crow calls in this early light./She tells what we are rushing toward./The king of darkness stole/the girl of summer as she picked/wildflowers in the meadow,/ the earth opening, taking her down.”

The final stanzas of this poem make an ascendant peace with darkness and its loverly allure, emerging once more from their Hades axis: “Late October light comes filtered through/the white blinds of the bedroom,/a peace in this at last,/no cloying August brightness/…But the light, this last light… But still the light, it is lovely in its going, playing blues on the window blinds,/tossing up leaves to Mr. Bones.”

In the poem At the Minnesota State Fair the speaker contends “All girls want to be Persephone,” illuminating the sensuality of adolescence, how we are magnetized, pulled toward the Other and danger, even early, the boys in the show barns wearing their jeans on “butterfly” pelvises–and again the sense of mortality, its very immanence in that which seems most alive: “The sow in her pen/sees the white wind..coming/listens for the little man/to sing out…her name.”

The net effect of the poems in this section of Book of Fire is that fate is a conflagration, that all things are subsumed in the fires of existence…and, implicit, that one must not flinch in confronting them or enduring them. The work of the poet becomes clearer: it is a true re-membering, reconstruction and rebuilding after shattering, after being burned and burned down.

In fact, crafting the quest narrative of this book, delineating the journey we each make through our our torments, our resolutions, our epiphanies, Waterman’s referents are the survival messages of the natural world, again and again her speaker remarking on the processes of coming into being and fading out of it, how easily the life-cycle is born even by “the sow in her pen.” The beautiful Winter Quarantine is the crown jewel of this theme.

If Section I of the work re-imagines an overarching mythology of existence, Section II makes that mythology particular, even personal for the speaker. In the poem Writing in Bed the speaker says, “I sleep in my mother’s coffin./I just can’t leave her alone.” Her mother has said, “I don’t want anyone looking at me/when I’m dead” but the daughter disobeys, out of love and grief: “..I hung fast to her feet/as if to hold her back.” The descent of the mother into the grave, “..unseen into the ground,/down to the narrow space between cement walls,” reverses the Persephone story and it is now the daughter who has been abandoned to live on.

In Bonfire the speaker immolates the chaff of existence, shedding “skins, papers, check registers…directions for the electric waffle maker…” to do away with the old and its many burdens, to cleanse the soul: “She doesn’t own much./Only her long legs stretched out,/bone pencils writing the weather.”

The gorgeous love poem If It Hadn’t Been Summer turns on regret: “…if she hadn’t felt the way/her heart opened/its icy harness stretching/..loosening…”, in a movement to “..the next time it would be winter/she’d be pregnant/not able to keep up as he plunged ahead/through all that deep snow.” In the poem Honeysuckle the poet writes: “Mother, because we forgive the dead/almost everything, in fact rewrite/our entire history with them…so that it softens like an old scab in salt water…”, she drops a discussion with her daughter over whether a flower is a honeysuckle or a columbine, the poem closing with the recollection of a moment with an old lover who picked a columbine for her in the wake of lovemaking.

These lyrical, beautiful lines come at the end of the poem Storm Warnings:

At the end of the day what have I done? Seen a rainbow.
Watched for tornadoes north of here. Heard jets rush in
before the line of storm. A cardinal in church feathers sits
under the big linden. I want to go with him out of the
world of memory and desire. My glass on the table begins
to shake. Now the table is rocking and the red alarm of
weather radio blinks like a blind man.”

Indeed, at the end of the day what have we done, we who send the sensibility out like an unhooded falcon to see into existence, so compelled—and born to it – to write it all down.

In Lake Nokomis, the speaker sees two obese lovers swimming. There is such a paucity of stunning, startling and capable figurative language in contemporary poetry it is a delight to read these words:

Beaming
they take turns
carrying each other
within the small confines
laid out for swimming.
He lifts and cradles her
as if she were a delicate parcel of pastry
wrapped and tied with string..

Waterman’s poems are finally honed observations…carrying emotion beyond the instant of recognition to an exactitude of statement, as in White Horse, Kauai:

At the edge of everything
rip tides, currents,
rogue waves with no
sense of responsibility.
Return the waves to the sky.

Disambiguation is a poem of startling intensity and beauty, moving from inference to inference, drawn first in the course of meditation on cardinals, “…apostle of gold safflower seeds/like the garlands of safflowers found in the tomb of/Tutankhamen…”; nearly clairvoyant imagery follows as the speaker applies the recurring image of the cardinals to the meaning of “truth,” of words themselves, in “..this kingdom of relations.”

This poem stands out in the book as a diamond at the epicenter; the poetic insight/emotion and the intellect work in nearly flawless concert.

But again, one asks, what sustains the speaker, the speaking poet, this woman poet: to what does she return, take in to herself?

Section III of Book of Fire answers this question in part, as the speaker contends with the duality of the rich natural world and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Undeniably, place and the rich familiarity of locale anchors these poems, but they put out into the seas of the tough questions again and again: In January 31, 2003, “Before bed, I went out into the January dark, afraid of war./I looked for the raccoon that appeared here two nights ago,/down from her leafy nest to hunt for food…..Outside the raccoon snuffles through the dark.”

In Lake Superior Spring, an exulting moment, Persephone returning:

Suddenly I can hear the ice!
At first, I think it’s a boat,
but everything is frozen for miles out.
It’s the ice I hear,
alive,
doors opening.
All night under moonlight
The ice melts,
rubs bones against
the dark wind,
breaststrokes toward shore.

This gorgeous long poem exemplifies the attunement of the poet to the world, so intensified and deep she writes that she hears the ice, “alive,” rubbing bones against the wind. But it is clear that war encroaches on the psyche, creating perturbations that threaten one’s very sanity, as in the following:

Blood

When my mother-in-law died in her chair,
her TV on full blast to CNN’s bombing of Baghdad,
her head slumped suddenly to her chest,
blood pooling in her right cheek,
a brusing that would not go away.

The dichotomy of comparative safety, being safe enough to live without vigilance, to be filled by the natural world in spring against the backdrop of war on the other side of the world comes through as an intense dichotomy in this section.

Moreover, it is hard to write a good anti-war poem in the sense that unless one has been on the front lines, asserting the impact of war can seem gratuitous– but certainly in sections of these poems the poet shows forth the terrible irony of our on-living even as we killed in Baghdad. The speaker ably extrapolates the dirty business of war in her attunement to the casualties of the natural i.e. not man-made and not-at-war world: The Mice is a tour d’ force and a classic Waterman poem, the keen eyes of the speaker like lasers, and in a litany of comprehension: “…she found four dead mice/in their nest of dirt and fur/all with their small ears pointed like pilgrims/toward the trunk of the old cottonwood….now where the grave was there is a space/in the clump of iris,/darkness, an open mouth.”

In Dream of the Vietnamese Orphans, Waterman writes:

We try to fix our mistakes but they stretch out behind us
like phosphorus. Those babies lifted up on fumes,
jet fuel burning behind them,
we would take them
to mothers and sisters,
no wives even,
the pool of their mothers’ blood
counting for nothing.

How artfully, powerfully is captured our collective war-making folly in “ We try to fix our mistakes but they stretch out behind us/like phosphorus.”

The indelibly painful confrontation with atrocity continues in the poem Execution:

Yesterday, a young man was beheaded in Iraq,
a translator, blindfolded, kneeling.
He understood everything the masked executioner said
before the final word of the sword.

Rocking her granddaughter, the speaker continues,

I get up and lay her in the crib.
She sighs once before turning to sleep
like all the babies of the world
who have done the human work of this day.

The fires of war are perhaps at a low burn from time to time, but this poem reiterates that that in our contemporaneity we are positioned between the comforts and beauties we find in daily life and cannot reconcile these even in language, with such a thing as the beheading of the translator dying by the “final word of the sword.” In Failure, these words:

In my dream I am asleep/
in the old car. My father drives his Studebaker,
my head resting on his thigh.
Awake I go through the morning papers.
Bodies will never be found.
Star matter now. Ash matter.
Something raps the bowl of my heart.

Again, it is not easy to write of war; to do it authentically it more than raps the bowl of the heart. The poems in this section delve into the ash and mud to resurrect the truth, undoubtedly for the poet, at personal cost.

The poems in Section IV of Book of Fire open with a quote from the Midwestern poet Bill Holm; these poems arise from the time the poet spent in Iceland. How richly exquisite and assuaging are these lines from Midnight Sun, Iceland:

I haven’t seen the dark for two weeks.
Daylight at one a.m.
and the mind does not think of night,
the absence of darkness,
does not miss it as if
it could stay light forever,
maybe what God meant when he said
Let there be light
separated day from night,
the waters divided….
And of the mountain ahead: at three a.m. it is the color of birth water,
rose aureole of breast.

The immediacy of the journey the speaker makes through new territory here is amplified by use of the first person in these poems. They feed us with their beauty, place us alongside the poet/speaker as she records “the absence of darkness.” Here the world is inverted and there is a beautiful exactitude driven by a nearly mystical compassion in this section as in Polar Bear, written after the first polar bear arriving on the coast of Iceland in a number of years had been shot—

….he stood up
as the county-designated bear hunters
approached with rifles from the highway.
He smelled the new beast coming toward him,
something sweet and fat.”

The phrase “new beast” to describe humankind is as pointed and on target as rifle fire—we are the new beasts, with our tallow and sweetness—how terrible, that we do not recognize nor embrace, as it were, our own animal nature, the polar bear as our very brother.

In Holar, Iceland, in the chapel a “lithe-limbed Jesus hangs on his cross.” One sees the long pale limbs exactly this way, in this instant, this moment of apperception, our darker natures having wrought the very crucifixion, in a sense.

The brutality of the life and death drama the speaker wrestles with is softened in Economy, in a beautiful reciprocity of eider-duck and down collector, beginning with this startling image:

The eider-ducks are nesting by the Arctic Sea in old rubber car
tires that have been set out for them by the down collectors
who identify their tires with small, colored flags…”

In The Skull Waterman is at her best, bearing witness to finding a sheep’s skull and taking it with her as she continues her visit in Iceland, making her peace with it as icon and totem: .

After a long day of travel,
She rests her head on a blue geothermal pipe,
Wants her own terrycloth robe.

In the Iceland poems, the speaker is surrounded by an exotic, unfamiliar world in which everything is beyond human control; the bear cannot be saved, nor can anything else, in truth; hence, the retrieval of the sheep-skull, nurturing and carrying it with her :.

…Finally, we say goodbye outside the airport.
I can’t take her with me
no matter how much I have fallen
for her dreamy eye sockets,
her toothy, innocent grin.

We would not have the same perception of the grimace of the human skull—again this tenderness toward the natural world and encountering its innocence and vulnerability:

At the Culture House in Reykjavik

Outside the Culture House, it rains
all day on the billboard of children’s faces,
on the cod in the harbor,
the swans in Tjornin Lake,
on all giving and taking in this hard landscape,
edge of the world where light begins.

The poems in this section hone in on the startling, the unfamiliar, the exotic—such has been the benefit for the poet of displacing herself; she sees the world with fresh eyes, looking deeply into the narratives of survival there.

In Because:

I could not stop for every waterfall
for every ewe with twins like furry bullets dancing on grassy fields
because I could not stop
for every ice-blue mussel shell
for every golden hair of seaweed
for every cloud
for every sheep skull…
…I sluiced like the waterfalls
sliding everywhere to the sea.

Of course these lines are reminiscent of “I could not stop for death”—again the intimate and witnessing voice, the voice of telling and longing: the speaker has taken in this fierce, frigid and beautiful world and given voice to it in poems of unerring lyricism and power.

The final section of Book of Fire evokes a wiser Persephone, she who has contended with flicker and bonfire and is the rueful matriarch survivor. In the stunningly beautiful and evocative The Memory Palace, Waterman conjectures: “Memory, the first loss implying all others. After memory goes: then love, affection /the past thin in the thin places, a run in a nylon stocking:/the space once introduced grows and grows,/…the past nodding off, cigarette still lit.”

In the same poem, evoking the introductory and auguring narrative of the collection: “Hades. Shall we go in?/Flashing lights and siren. And what sweet/food and drink shall we have in the darkness? Pomegranate seeds,/red-stained fingers, lips marking us chosen: yes, let us go,/but do not drink from Lethe,/river of forgetfulness.”

This poem stands out as an epic in the collection, moving through history, describing the memory palace of Simonides, and as taught to the Chinese in the 16th century as a repository for cultural recollection, moving back and forth from archetypal to personal memory until the poem itself consecrates the very act of re-membering, asking then:

What are we if not all memory? What if she did forget
everything, her mind emptying like Pandora’s Box?
What if she were blowing away, scraps of paper down the street
chased after, almost captured: the whimsy wind lifts,
blows her along…

Someone had to begin, had to wind the clock and set it
tick-tocking: the second proof, Ultimate Good,
the phoenix of memory, to know God against which
She measures her own frailty,

Her own gains and losses.

Variations on Small is a brilliant series of meditations:

Dirty coffee cups cluck like chickens.
and a fat black fly is trapped
on the frozen window.
Get the swatter.
This insignificance.

…

The days are a knotted rope
Of incidents,
One bumping the other along
Until we fall at the end
Into a place in which we fall forever…
…
At night we turn toward
the white sleep of chrysanthemums,
sleep like a tongue licking
smally, the way a cat does.
First paws, then face,
saying I will never love you
more than this,
never less.

This is an evocative ending section for this wonderful collection, recapitulating and showing forth how it is that at the end of it all, the journeys through fire, how we must contend with its ashes and new growth: one finds solace, comfort, and anchoring in the particulars, the quietly luminous every-day tasks.

In The Baker’s Apprentice:

The doughy kisses wait for the oven,
sit obligingly with no fuss.
soon she will pull down the drawbridge of heat,
slide the pan in,
close the metal door behind them.

But Waterman as poet and speaker is no apprentice. The Labyrinth is masterful, turning on a walk with the poet’s daughter, proffering in direct lines the sense of journey once more and yet the journey that both does and does take us anywhere, so that it is a winding and we are not sure to what extent we have doubled back on ourselves. And the repeated recognition of what paying attention offers:

Even in this time of deep silence
everything gives itself to us
over and over.
The sere forsythia branches
against a stone wall…

There are loving and direct poems in this final section, each an exquisitely crafted world of interwoven symbol and meaning, each turning on carefully honed imagery. In Love Calls:

The Sunday sky lightens. Such a long life.
So many thoughts rising on a January dawn, appearing
as lost souls calling us back, insisting on their place among
the living, held in the difficult balance of earth and time
like clean white sheets and pillowcases on a line.

In The Transplant:

When you turn to me
all the pigeons of the world wheel and soar.
I open like the great cave,
like love, death. When you turn,
your hands on my heart
holding me, a shell to your chest,
she appears.
The world tumbles over and over.
I lift one languid arm,
the surgeon’s knife
sliding into love.

We inevitably open to love again and again, with its simultaneously white-hot and icy fire. In Fire Song:

What do grackles find in dead grass?
They gather, then fly away together
on a roof painted the color of flame.
rustle and breath of fire.
Our Lady of Grackles.
Pilgrimage of seed and wing.
Oh, unnecessary skin!
The red-gold tulips are somnolent
in a cold March dusk.
…

Soon moon, or no moon.
Bone-dark, black arms of cottonwood tree.
Only feather of candle
and the woman with wings standing
in the doorway.

So it is that Book of Fire is a poetry of statement, question, articulation of mystery, epiphany, grief and love. To read and live with these poems is to find in the work of Cary Waterman the astounding voicing of the continuum of experience in uncompromising and indelibly lyrical terms.

Book of Fire, Nodin Press, xxx.

To read my other reviews posted to this blog, click here.

Jenne’ R. Andrews, M.F.A., January 31, 2012

Nightfall in Verona, A Lyrical Memoir, Orfea Press 2011
In Pursuit of the Family, Minnesota Writers Publishing House
Reunion, Lynx House Press
The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press
January 2012

Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything.

Jorie Graham, Nothing.

Here, heart full of night, letting it billow long
And long.
Missa Brevis, low, burnishing all the rooms
Until they are a landscape of brocade.
Mouth full of warm cider, drinking
The soft light
From a veiled lamp. The gilded
Dog sleeps; her breath catches when
She dreams of racing the ice flats.

Now I want to go to the mares
Rigid in the cold, out on the stiff grasses
To house them in warmth.

I am speaking of this,
A deep late dark, its silences, that the male choir
Sings in the duomo nave so that the sound is long
And full and you can’t hear anyone breathing
How is it, then, that love goes
Even through the dark out to something
That endures the onslaught shards of cold.

ii

Someone is singing a laudate dominum. I know
His voice, someone I once knew, loved
For the purity of that sound he could make
That pierced the soul, so that the soul then knew
How God feels, how it feels to touch
Mystery’s face.

One is awake while the beloveds slumber
Like a sentinel waiting for the death of night
The young men singing, a sound so light
It is smoke
Can you hear their mortal tenderness
Unearthly, heralding

Even as we board the trains
Of night to pierce it, our own fleshly absence
The weeping soul, the gathering
Plumes of ardor, the awe that such a thing
Exists, that we tremble:
To think of being loved by something

Coming unto us, magnum mysterium
Like the rain, the clarity
Of first light, waking for a split second
Innocent of Self, of distinguishing
Oneself from everything:

As if we the broken, the lost,
The profaned, having nothing
Left to say, have arrived
At night’s station to disembark
With nothing left, but to stay
Our hands against one another
In something like belief.

copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2011, 2012

I would like to sleep once with each thing, nestled in its warmth; to dream in the rhythm of its breathing, its dear, naked neighborliness against my limbs, and grow strong in the fragrance of its sleep.

Rilke, Early Writings.

The sleep of default to solitude, how a dark corner
where your head rests pulls you away
from the world, turning your soul inward,
to weave a net for desire

And the sleeping with another thing—a dream slow
to wander off into the twilight. Speaking to that dream
cautiously, so that it stays, breathes against your hair

And memory. Memory the guaranteed lover, reverie,
the bridge over time, the green creek with its silt
of small bones
beneath the strained bridge.

For the dream come to life
makes the memory and then each one
a white moth pressed against the screen

…Through which light flows, as if to say
I am all you have.

If light is the final thing we know, our true intimate
if we reach for it, to tear open
like tissue paper

And then, someone begins to sing
of the Rhone in twilight

We, the completed, ascend with
our pale wings edged in fire.

Jenne’ Andrews

To read more of my Rilke Variations and other work, do visit La Parola Vivace. xj

Let me first say that one ground-breaking thing about this collection is that Ms. Kincaid is heretofore unpublished in the traditional sense but very published and lauded in the blogosphere. She is in fact, among the best of the poets who post their work online to make it available to a readership with a click, bypassing the tiresome ceremonies of submission, enduring rejection, resubmitting ad infinitum until at last, a placement.

In truth, not much seems to have changed since the days in which male editors controlled the literary magazines and if you were a woman writer you had to write like the male poets du jour to get published, i.e. with a dissipated, alienated voice in short lines, emotion controlled.

I remember those days well, when Lyn Lifshin, Marge Piercy, Carolyn Forche, Mary Karr and I were among those who hung in until we could be and would be taken seriously, our work appearing in the infamous The Little Magazine, in the early Ms., and other signature journals of the 70’s. With the rise of the blog and the many permissions we not so incidentally give each other to share and support one another’s work– some of us carrying on in both old and new worlds– we get to bypass all of that rigamarole.

More than the purists believe, the new practice of publishing independently online has become an entirely legitimate way to be read and a legitimate form of independent publishing and building readership. Witness that Ms. Kincaid has collected work that originally appeared on her blogs and had the mss accepted by the highly regarded Finishing Line. Witness that poets Floyce Alexander, Joy Harjo, Maureen Doallas, Dawn Potter, and yours truly post work to blogs with a host of others and that a number of excellent and traditionally published poets and poet/editors such as William Pitt Root post poems in “note” form on Facebook, “tagging” a wide readership accustomed to digesting vast amounts of information in very small type!

In fact, Ms. Kincaid hosts two blogs, Life at Willow Manor that has accrued quite a following as well as an award from Google Blogger, and a blog/meme called Magpie Tales wherein she posts a weekly prompt, a photograph of a cultural artifact or object of interest, to summon forth our associations and engender a poem. Many of us have been able to grow audience from Ms. Kincaid’s endeavor as well as to produce weekly drafts ourselves.

Patina is a collection of poems grounded, as the title suggests, in a valuation of the past, and the richness in the work surpasses the merely quaint or anomalous. Consider these luminous lines, from Pocket Watch for Peachy Bright, 1841-1865: You slip from the wool lens pocket,/and hit my hand full and hard,/like a splash of cold Mississippi. In this first poem Kincaid gives us a moment resonant with history and poignancy wherein a Union soldier hopes to return from the Front: April hope swarms a homebound boat;/dashed dreams blaze bitter-bright./’The Sultana sinks that night, at Paddy’s Hen.

Most of us read poetry not for history, but for language and beautiful and/or compelling specificity. And listen to the crispness and singularity of this music: April hope swarms a homebound boat/dashed dreams blaze bitter-bright. It is the distinctiveness of Ms. Kincaid’s language that pulls the reader into these poems; it snaps and cajoles the senses, and the imagery oh so thankfully, surprises.

The title poem Patina comes fairly early in the collection: I especially love, “Under his bifocals/his eyes had accrued/a thick luminous layer, ripe/with tales of the great depression.” While there is a disjointed predication here– that the mucousal elderly eye is ripe with tales of… we have the stunning image of under his bifocals/his eyes had accrued/a thick luminous layer– with their hard yet resonant consonance. And a sweep of tenderness in this poem: I listened, mostly, mute/afraid to shout large/enough for him to hear. And a killer final stanza “The sound might discharge/ the fragile pod, a burst/of woolly seed, his DNA/in parachutes. There is a linguistic confidence in these lines that deliver an old man’s fragility so distinctively.

The poem Fifth Street is a tour d’force of language and a beautiful casting of what we used to call local color, and Depression era American life. Here is the first stanza:

They declared their chips in Kansas
Ace came round in a new fangled motor,
Wore a fancy suit. She flew to him
Like a railbird. Freehand wrangler,
He scooped her up, built his deck
With brick and mortar..

Again, marvelous and crisp alliterative consonance: declared..their…round..railbird.. freehand wrangler…brick..mortar. Short descriptors distinctively and carefully layered give life to the subject of the poet’s attention.

In The New Order Ms. Kincaid comes to the book’s central disclosure: I am a magpie/My fleshy nest/is feathered in flotsam./ Not a hoarder, but rather/a hunter, gatherer of thoughts,/a scavenger of curios and the curious. Again lovely alliteration, compressed description—this poet has mastered several deeply significant principles of poetry: that meaning should emerge from the figure, i.e. the image, the metaphor—and that there need be no over-elaboration or commenting upon the image; the image should be trusted to speak forth as the bearer of meaning.

This poem’s last stanza is also telling and exquisite: I, too, am carefully wrapped,/boxed, and labeled “assorted secrets/and stories”, a discreetly forgotten casket,/stowed dowerless, in a thrift store of dirt. To be “stored dowerless”! Oh fate that waits for us each.

Another feature of the work is the judicious use of place names, themselves lyrical and resonant. In Apprentice the poet writes, I helped you tinker/clocks, remember? You gave me/a salt shaker in the shape/of a pink flamingo, like gold/from the ruins of Knocknasheega.

Again and again in the collection we are reminded that at issue is the object in which the past is incarnate. In Blue Plate Special: History grinds on,/as I yell out, “Blue Willow!”/whenever they pop up/on checkered tables/from here to Albuquerque,/in The Duke’s wild hand,/or as Stanwyck takes a film-noir sip. These lines of course refer to the Blue Willow-ware many of us know, love and remember that became part of the iconography of family gatherings, touchstone to those we love and remember, for generations.

I am impressed by the consistency of quality in this chapbook from poem to poem, as well as a congruence of moving, beautiful imagery: from I Am October: I toss my gathering/from harvest cradle/to the breeze of gods,/like an old galosh/pulled from a pond. The harvest cradle—distinctive; the old galosh—an exquisite, squashing, slapping and splashing surprise—wetter than wet.

Poem after poem in this book is dedicated to prior generations of the speaker’s family—people we don’t know but do know, as if each poem were an epitaph—but one of great tenderness. The person’s name is spelled out with exactitude, complemented by the resonant dates of the life span, e.g., 1891-1932.

Several of the  poems do not cast into the past, but offer up appealing intimacy and are again wrought with great care. Ms. Kincaid’s daughter is a soprano, and in Lamb Chop we are given a beautifully sustained metaphor:

Lamb Chop

It was a long hot summer
Of pastries and Pavarotti.

Little did I know,
Craving donuts and opera
Would bake up a tasty creampuff
With a mouth wide for song.

Not till the judge tossed his pencil
And leaned back in his chair,
Did I realize your splendid fare.

Sometimes the recipe was wrong,
But you opened those brave chops
And sang like a daughter of God.

The ovens have been hot;
Your crust is not as tough
As it seems. After the wild flour
Settles, your sweet bel canto
Puts Krispy Kremes to shame.

These poems with their wit and care put me in mind of the phrase The Unbearable Lightness of Being, title of the brilliant novel by the Czech Milan Kundera– ‘Insoutenable légèreté de l’être . With a deft, discerning hand Ms. Kincaid sketches a moment, a person caught in a revelatory pose with physical, resonant detail but lightly, gently; this is a book that doesn’t hit us over the head with the edict “Thou shalt value the past”, but compels us to think of our own histories and geneology as caches of poignant, lyrical information.

There are errant small weaknesses in the work—-occasional prosaic lines that would be better served by a figure, but these are minor and such things afflict all of us, no matter how accomplished. I have high hopes for Ms. Kincaid’s growth as a poet and am blessed by our interaction and interest in one another’s work. To this debut collection I say “Brava!”

Order Tess Kincaid’s Patina from Finishing Line Press. Visit Magpie Tales and Life at Manor by clicking on the live links.

About Tess Kincaid; she is “ …a self-proclaimed magpie, and Hoosier by birth, living in Dublin, Ohio at Willow Manor, a ramshackle limestone on the banks of the Scioto River, with her husband and resident ghosts.”

Poet, Critic, Blogger and Memoirist Jenne’ R. Andrews’ work has appeared in a number of journals including, most recently The Adirondack Review; her collections include the small press book Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House, edited by Robert Bly. She posts work in draft at La Parola Vivace in addition to submitting individual work and book-length collections to journals and presses. She has recently been writing “Rilke variations”—an exercise that has become a vital part of her daily writing practice.

In the interest of getting new voices out into the world, please link to this review. Thanks.

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It’s clear that Conrad Murray was uncomfortable with routinely putting Michael Jackson to sleep, if you believe that he would turn his head away when running the IV.

Here, for the record, is an entry from Wikipedia that seems to fit as a C.O.D. for the King of Pop:

Propofol infusion syndrome is a rare syndrome which affects patients undergoing long-term treatment with high doses of the anaesthetic and sedative drug propofol. It can lead to cardiac failure, rhabdomyolysis, metabolic acidosis and renal failure and is often fatal.^[1][2][3] Hyperkalemia, hypertriglyceridemia, and hepatomegaly are also key features. It is associated with high doses and long-term use of propofol (>4 mg/kg/hr for more than 24 hours). It occurs more commonly in children, and critically ill patients receiving catecholamines and glucocorticoids are at high risk. Treatment is Supportive. Early recognition of the syndrome and discontinuation of the propofol infusion reduces morbidity and mortality.

But more importantly, there is an issue in all of this that commands everyone’s attention, or should. What is an addict, anyway, and was Jackson one?.  Confusion reigns, as it emerges that MJ had long relied on booze and drugs in their many forms and combinations.

I wager that every one in this country who drinks does so because he or she likes the effect of alcohol. We’ve legitimized it for centuries; we’ve bottled ethanol so that a forty-year old Bordeaux is an objet d’art, a holy relic..We’ve made it all respectable, no big deal. I wager that nearly everyone looks forward to the 5 o’clock bell and the opportunity to rendezvous at the local pub. Or, after a day of working hard outdoors or at the computer, to getting out a nice bottle of crisp white something. Everyone is aware of the dangers of drinking too much and some people do it anyway. Some people drink nothing on one night and a bottle of wine the next night.  And, yes, some people pass the point of no return, get hooked and drink themselves to death.

Regarding the Rx pain killer dependency epidemic in this country, not everyone tells their doctor that they like the opioid high.  Because then, of course, you wouldn’t be able to get them. Opioids produce euphoria and make everything o.k. for three or four hours until they wear off. If you don’t want to be stoked on Vicodin or Percocet or Lortab all day long, you monitor yourself and try to take it just for your pain. Or, if you are at risk, you err on the side of caution and if you need it for minor surgery or a slipped disc, you get off it fast. I’m suggesting that all of us who drink, take pills or ever have, until late in the game, when dependency slides into addiction, have many choices.

I therefore do not see Michael Jackson as a victim any more than I see myself as one, although it’s easy for me to blame the several years I took percocet on my surgeon for prescribing it.  I knew why I took it; it was for the high. I stopped taking it at my initiation and am now addressing a related issue with a far less scary medication for pain.

In an ideal world, every person with an unhappy childhood would get into therapy and short-circuit the need for escape and/or pain relief.  But we have millions in poverty, millions in dysfunction who don’t even know what normal is, or what a family is.  Where was it that the ten year old kid just shot his neo-nazi dad? Moreover, many of us have absolutely no intention of letting someone dig around in our psyches to find out that we were abused and worse.  Or we tried it, and it drove us crazier.  Many of us don’t believe it’s a good idea to set up camp in old wounds.  So, we do what we have to do to tamp down the pain and keep going.  Does that make us addicts?

I have to say, after spending half of my life dealing with the addiction vs. dependency, no choice over substances vs. control issues, that I do not believe we can generalize and say that everyone who takes or uses a drug “recreationally” or drinks too much sometimes is an addict.

To me, an addict is someone who has to have a substance 24-7 to function, to cope, to face life, and who makes very bad decisions–like driving drunk or stoned– in the process. An addict obsesses about his or her fix and doesn’t like running out of whatever it is.  An addict loses control and is ruled by the substance and not the other way around.

That all happened to me with alcohol, and I’ve now made the decision to not drink– not for any reason.  I’ve never wanted to have just one glass of anything: I drank to get high and crazy and cut loose, and four years ago in that state I fractured my right leg, so that I’m writing this in a wheelchair.  How and why?  Well, I had a beautiful horse I was afraid to ride as I had fallen the last time I rode, so I drank a bottle of champagne and a few glasses of wine, tacked up, forgot to check the cinch, got a leg up and had someone with me, even, when the saddle slipped as I was dismounting and my leg was trapped in the stirrup so that I had to tear myself free. I would never have risked another fall if I hadn’t been drinking; my courage came out of a bottle.

A good exercise is to journal about how many times in a day one thinks about one’s substance of choice. Is one obsessive, leading to the compulsion to use, as the addictionologists (I hate it that there is such a word– very close relatives of the proctologist), say?  What about your behavior?  Do you make a fool out of yourself or pick fights?  Then maybe whether you’re an addict or not is moot.  Maybe you just need to quit, to make a decision to stop.  Stopping alone early in the game can be done– by tapering off and replacing “using” time w/ other activities, and the aid if necessary of a supportive friend.

I’ve taken swipes at AA on this blog because I personally found AA to be a very disempowering organization that is more like a cult than not. AA contends that alcoholics have lost the power of choice in drink, are beyond human aide and must throw themselves into the arms of a Higher Power of their understanding.  I did AA for about eighteen years and got crazier, evangelized and evangelizing, programmed. But there are other ways to get support for alcohol and drug abstinence these days that don’t require “spiritual surrender”, which is a cover for putting yourself in the hands of other ill people on a power trip.

No one should tell anyone else that he or she is an addict. No one should generalize and put all people who have substance abuse tendencies but have some measure of control in the same box as the gutter drunk– who himself or herself, is still a human being worth helping, and who is on borrowed time.  Check out Ray Liotta’s performance as an end-stage alcoholic on ER about ten years ago, and things will be clearer.

Back to Michael Jackson. A tape was played during the first day of the trial today in which Jackson is clearly stoned. It turns out that he had a history of reliance upon sedative drugs, and probably wasn’t honest about that to Dr. Murray until Dr. Murray felt he couldn’t abandon Michael. Murray states that he was trying to taper Jackson off the stuff that killed him, although he’d just ordered four gallons of it. As someone just pointed out on tunnel-visioned Dr. Drew, there was an employer-employee relationship going on between Murray and Jackson, not a doctor-patient relationship, although I personally believe that we all need to be far more assertive with our providers, ask them more questions and hold them accountable when they are wrong.  We pay them, after all.

But Michael Jackson was a bright guy.  He knew damn well that he was on thin ice.  He knew himself well, and he had his priorities:  fame.  A comeback.  To rid himself of awful feelings that allegedly include having been physically abused by his father, by any means.  To get the most out of life by foreshortening it–a working definition of an addict’s m.o. in a nutshell.

Jackson doctor-shopped and struck oil with Dr. Murray.  Murray drank the MJ  kool-aid and loaded him up with propofol to get him to sleep.  Now, come on; what doctor does that?  How crazy is that.  He is therefore culpable.  He contributed to MJ’s demise.  But Jackson hired him in the first place, however much the family would like to portray him as a victim, and chose to kill himself.  I half-buy the defense theory that when Murray’s back was turned, Jackson swallowed more pills and actually drank the anesthetic, as it was found in his stomach.  Don’t think that Murray put it there.  Seemingly he did not himself that afternoon administer a lethal dose.

I would say that if you die from an o.d., with the exception of the tragic deaths of college kids who don’t realize somehow and sometimes what they’re doing to themselves, you were probably an addict, and you probably did yourself in all by your lonesome, and chose not to get help.  R.I.P. you who have so chosen: MJ, Anna Nicole, Heath Ledger, Marilyn, Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Joplin, Hendrix, everyone…my own mother.  And God help those of us who do our best to face life on life’s terms and be honest with ourselves–especially in being self-forgiving and self-merciful when we don’t do life perfectly, or even, by some rigid perspectives, live altogether “sober.”  Dr. Drew claims that alcoholics are incapable of honesty, to which I say bullshit.  Self-honesty is key to getting off stuff that’s bad for you and people bust themselves on their own denial every day.

The family and the prosecution in this case cast Michael as a victim; the whole crrew is in denial.  It turns out that ativan and other things combined with propofol make a lethal cocktail.  This will all be a tough call for a jury that may not be up to dealing with the forensics in the case.

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But happen once more it has with the young poet Travis Mossotti’s first published collection of poetry About the Dead, winner of the 2011 May Swenson publication prize from Utah State University.

This year’s contest was judged by my old acquaintance and American icon Garrison Keillor. My initial response to his selection was driven by several things I’d like to clear up. One, that I could only find two of Mossotti’s poems online by which to make an off the cuff response to his work, which as it turns out are among the few weaker poems in his book, and two, that I feel strongly that no one should be allowed to enter a publication contest under the age of say, forty-five. Further, it seemed to me that the Swenson prize should be judged by a woman, as women are still under-represented in American arts and letters and Swenson’s oeuvre displays a brilliant woman writer in utter mastery of her craft.

These may be outrageous statements to some but hear me out. We have M.F.A. graduates pouring out of our schools now possessing a high degree of technical proficiency. They have enjambment and figurative language, the popular tone of alienation and focus on life’s many contradictions down. What they lack often, in my view, is the depth of experience and vision—and voice—to produce a coherent body of work in which the quality is uniformly high, and too many of their poems deal in pyrotechnics and surfaces without any soul to them. I make these judgments about my own small press book Reunion, published in 1987 while I was earning the MFA at Colorado State University. When I read the book now I see awkward turns of phrase, blunders of diction, convoluted, idiosyncratic imagery that I would now revise.

The other bone I’ve picked before on this blog: to me it is a shame that contest manuscript screening is most often placed in the hands of graduate students. I could name you at least fifty poets over the age of 45 who’ve been left in the dust because of the half-formed and often ill-considered aesthetics of MFA students who, it has been said more than once, are also dying to please their mentors.

Having said these things, I have lived with Mr. Mossotti’s book for several days, opening my heart and mind to his work. He is a fabulous poet and an exception to my broad-brush commentary on MFA’s.

Consider these lines, that come later in the collection but speak to the whole:

Extinction is such a harsh word. I pray for words/ that soften with each use until we may forget/their meaning altogether. I pray to never/become extinct or fashionable. I pray to live/inside the hallowed walls of your mouth forever.

An ambitious statement for a young poet. Mossotti’s book of course—although dramatically and glossily black, both cover and jacket– is not grounded in death but in life, and life’s apprehensions of mortality. His masterful long poem Decampment, which launches the collection,   is a lyrical coming of age poem that with steadily building and piquant imagery unveils the speaker’s relationship with his father.

Long before the night my father and I hiked the rim/of chicory and sedge that marked our property,/generations of ghosts already meandered down/the ephemeral streambeds’ smoothed cavities,/making camp under colonies of black elm, cypress.. And with this alluring invocation an odyssey begins.

This rich poem merits several re-readings for its exactitude and beauty of language, simple, spare and yet compelling: “…A train of empty boxcars slugged by before dawn /and carried us back to Aynor like kings/..defeated. I threw up three times in a ditch,/dunked my head into a bucket of rainwater, …stepped inside, a new man.”

This poem of Mossotti’s has received a great deal of exposure and been made into an animated film. You can see the film here—be sure to have the text on hand.

About the Dead contains poems of loss and longing interspersed with vignettes of southern life, spare and dry landscapes somehow rich in flora and fauna— moments both tangible, poignant and surreal, funded at times with a sense of detachment and alienation. In many of these poems Mossotti’s imagery is unerring—it is as if we are reading someone with a compass in his hand who plots his course carefully and both knows materially although perhaps not spiritually just yet, where he is.

The poet’s control over his material is thus admirable to me, and as noted I have encountered numerous unmatchable lines of lyricism, leading me to understand why Mr. Keillor selected this work. It strikes the balance between keen, singular  and often quite witty observations of the quotidian and it clearly comes from what one must call the American narrative.

In I’m explaining a few things Mossotti writes…

There’s an old bullet lodged in the field of scrub
behind my house that’s grown colorless as dirt.

The land is implacable, even as its familiar scene
of death and light retreats into the browning dusk.

Offspring of the offspring of the offspring
of crows cross over the thistle and brush,

Cross over ground that remembers nothing of human loss.”

While the poem alludes to an act of violence, the full-on descriptor—implacable, familiar scene/of death and light…browning dusk are quintessentially and referentially American lines wrought from the vast and great dreamscape/landscape ever giving rise to the survivor self.

Certainly the Speaker in our contemporary  tradition places himself or herself in the land from which he has sprung, the love and tenderness for place and all inhabitants of that place that dwell in his bones, as in the fabulous poem The Dead Cause:

On the porch, a grasshopper waved
its serrated foreleg at me while I juggled

Groceries for keys; it was the kind
of friendly wave I might’ve expected

From a loved one, recently dead,
reincarnated into this green husk.

The whole ordeal triggered an alarm
of distant thunder, stuffing my head

With dark seeds; so after waving back,
I ducked inside, fearful…

But the natural world is as disturbing to the speaker as it is familiar. As I read on in the collection,  the conflict between love and fear from which the work takes its dynamism led me to wonder what resolution might be waiting. And, most of the poems have backbone, ribs and flesh, have been hewn with an ax, worked at with a chisel and singed at to intensify their language.

This is not a convoluted poetry forcing the reader to guess and  unravel the poet’s meaning or to speculate whether the poem means anything at all, which is the case with so much poetry in currency now.  Mossotti’s work is highly accessible for the most part and saved from the prosaic by what feels like an unerring love of language.

I will touch on something that could be a matter of vigorous debate; this is a very masculine book; the work’s references/objective correlatives if you will,  arise from a young man’s world. Consider the referential maleness of these lines from Saxifrage:

The gym’s boxing room has the sunken décor
of a Fifties bomb shelter—a heavy bag
girthier than an elephant’s penis, loafing
pendulumatic, long after the barrage of punches
have stopped. I used to imagine pummeling

The chops of the guy who slept with my ex.
Thump, Wham! Thump, Thump, Wham!
Knucklebone, Catharsis. Winged prayer
field-dressed like a pheasant. But sooner
or later, everyone has to move on: tornado

swipples a huddle of yearlings from the field…

How unexpected knucklebone and catharsis, followed by a winged prayer “field-dressed.”  How indelibly male this voice, to write “a huddle of yearlings from the field.”

And the last stanza of Decampment:

Our house sank two inches
the day after my father died.

The foundation split. My mother
kept tripping over the new cracks
in the front porch, and Cora
spun a screwdriver on the rail.
My head filled with cement.
That night, I hiked four miles

over rotting trestle
to the abandoned quarry…

These poems do, in their own admirably direct way, radiate compassion, humanity; in general the speaker is the witness, the somewhat taciturn observer, as if to articulate comes with a price, as if one is unused to unfettered expression, another masculine/male aspect of Mossotti’s work.

The last poem, Only Then, returns us to the primal father-son relationship:

…My father would light those
stubby brown cigars and lean
over the rail of the back deck
like a Buddhist shaving his head
in the dark: he would smoke and
stare past the forest and imagine
the coming winter and the next….

I had a bit of trouble with the title poem of the book which I found compelling in its earliest stanzas– What remains/ of the dead fascinates me. In Paris, I wandered/ the Catacombs for hours looking at the bones- stacked so neatly. The plagues were so efficient/ at producing bones to stack—the churches’ graveyards /dug up and brought by horse-cart under moonlight/ to the vacant sarcophagi of the old Roman quarries…

However then for me, the poem takes a plunge; the speaker recounts literally arrested lovers on Jim Morrison’s grave in graphic language: “The man’s cock remained a hard, diligent protester/bouncing as they hauled him away over the cobblestone path/out of the cemetery—something still locked up inside him.”

All of us encounter surreal moments in human affairs and are so struck by the irony there we endeavor to give it voice. Certainly “diligent protestor” intrigues. But as a 63 year old fellow poet and reader–and woman– I trip over this blatant double entendre regarding coitus interruptus; I have no idea where this poem might have gone but we have wandered far from the intensely compelling image of the efficient plague, to something gratuitously graphic.

Despite this misstep, and here and there for me jarring diction—as in the use of the adjective “lithesome” which is so archaic as to jut out of a given line—I am impressed by Mr. Mossotti’s mastery of his craft. Mr. Keillor writes: “…like most readers, I am exasperated by so much poetry I read and exhilarated by some, and my reactions have little to do with schools or styles… this book struck me on first reading as an adventurous book grounded in real places and real people…I was struck by the rightness of his word choices, surprised by so many odd words that seemed so exactly right.”

A number of poems in the book have been awarded prizes and an impressive thirty-nine have been published. This speaks well of Travis Mossotti’s achievements to date. He is decisively launched, and the trajectory of his work will be rewarding to follow.

Jenne’ R. Andrews, M.A., M.F.A.
Reunion, Lynx House Press
Fellow in Literature, NEA.

Again, I am engaged in the dialogue around this case because I am concerned over the misapprehensions by the public of the behavior of a childhood abuse survivor.

Ablow speculates that CA may be bipolar, that the thirty-one days was a manic episode triggered by the traumatic death of her child.  He also says that George Anthony’s behavior, especially his “suicide attempt,” is inconsistent with how a grandfather would respond to a child’s death.  More speculation about George’s role is in the air.

I guess we all need to stay tuned to Phil McGraw’s interrogation of the Anthony’s on September 12.  In the meantime:  new details from the CA Is Innocent site– the remains were never underwater– indicating that someone other than CA put the remains there– or found them and returned them, i.e. Kronk.  The site has fascinating analyses of chloroform and duct tape issues up.

This saga begs for someone more erudite than I in the writing of mysteries to follow the clues to a reasonable denouement.  I bet there are already takers out there…. check out the vids and see what you think.

There:  I said it.  And I don’t like saying it. I’m a Civil Rights advocate and unfortunately, I would defend the riff raff’s civil rights at the drop of a hat.

I’m talking, of course, about the people who have turned Casey Anthony into a monster in order to have someone to hate and vilify.  The Casey Anthony they continue to threaten and slander doesn’t even exist; she is a figment of perverted imagination.

I am so very grateful that despite my many personal flaws, I don’t feel the need to scream “baby killer!” at anyone, and that I believe that the jury made the right call.

People with finely honed intellects understand the concept of innocent until proven guilty and while they may disagree with the verdict, manage to do so with civility.

I wonder if we do live in a civil society– when the chips are down, many people go for the  jugular.

Jose Baez put out a lot of fascinating info on the case and on CA tonight.  Check it out.  xj

As caught up as so many of us are in the quotidian, a historical novel seems hardly relevant.

Yet, NPR All Things Considered book critic Alan Cheuse has managed to write an epic that is exquisitely appropos; in his newly released Song of  Slaves in the Desert- A Novel of Slavery and The Southern Wild – Source Books 2011, he gives us the issues of ethnicity, race and  freedom in a new, eloquent light.

Song of  Slaves in the Desert begins with the searing account of a sheik warning his slave of his impending sale, that slave’s attempt to escape with his family, and capture.

Meanwhile, in mid-nineteenth century New York Nathan Pereira is a young Jew sent by his father to Charleston to monitor family interests.  So it is that histories collide and the colorful protagonist, delivered to the reader in a remarkable first person assemblage of detail, begins to confront how it is and why it is that Jews, themselves the indisputable victims of history, came to possess African slaves in the antebellum South.

Cheuse is a canny narrator, writing in rich prose:  “’Not long now, massa,’ Isaac said, another week or so later, holding up a handful of the rich and plumped kernels from the stalks at our feet, stalks that held their heads high, strong, in spite of the weight of the burgeoning kernels.”

“…Mute at dinner—retiring early to my room—reading (Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!) dreaming into the dark—that was my round after returning from the fields.  I felt as much slave to my condition as the dark people who went home to their cabins and took some feeble pleasures before sleep and the next day’s round of hard labor.”

The heart of The Song of  Slaves in the Desert is “The Passage,” a grueling journey, a tale oft told but seldom with Alan Cheuse’s exquisite poetry, delineating the unbearable brutality in which the children of the slaves were thrown into the sea: “Her heart pounded, the wind pounded the sails, the ship pounded its way into the rolling sea.  Where did they take those children? Lyaa asked in a voice raspy with thirst and emotion, hearing nothing but moans and hoarse shouting, the roar of wind and rush of water against cloth and wood.”

Histories intertwine when Pereira encounters the beautiful Liza, descendant of the desert slaves, crossing an heretofore unbreachable boundary.

It is a daunting task to explore the twists and turns of history, to sift through to find narrative threads and weave them together.  Writing such a book is tantamount to archaeology: you have the bones, then the flesh and then the emergent story with its revelations.  Cheuse paints a world that draws the reader in to come face to face with great disparities and conundrums, his characters justly fallible and ignoble and yet who are  redeemed, as we hope we all are,  by their efforts to overcome and come to terms.

From the San Francisco staging of Traviata last year-- Renate Stendahl, photo.

There ought to be a law against being as beautiful as Anna Netrebko– but there isn’t.  More importantly, there should be a law against how she can sing.

I started listening to Anna sometime back in the middle 2000′s performing with the Met.  A few weeks ago I found a cache of her videos on You Tube, many of which include her moments with tenor Rolando Villazon.

Today her CD of Russian arias came and took me over the top.  What a fabulously rich voice.

Those writing in the opera genre about opera and its divas may be a bit jaded in terms of their expectations. Netrebko has an immense repertoire, an inimitable range with gorgeous coloring, replete with coloratura ability.  When she sings, one soars.  One smiles, one weeps:  this is beauty.  This is the transcendance of the ordinary into something eternally exquisite.

Netrebko is first and foremost, a Russian singer, meaning that she is an athlete and marathon runner of the voice.  In recital she exudes warmth and grace to the audience.  In a production she is spellbinding.

The Russian arias are haunting in the best sense.  She seems the most at home in them despite the indelible beauty of her Manon, the poignance of her Mimi, the fire of her Carmen, and in recent years, the dramatic and lyrical color she brings to Lucia– even though Sutherland and Callas made that role their own.  No one has ever outdone Sutherland’s mad scenes in terms of the coloratura, but Netrebko in my view outdoes Nalie Dessay, whose Met Lucia was a little bit too crazy for everyone.

Not to fault Dessay, but she doesn’t have the darkness, the sweeping grandeur of voice that Netrebko does.

In 2008 Netrebko married Erwin Schott–quite possibly the best-looking baritone the world has ever seen.  They had a son.  In emerging from early motherhood Anna the woman, Anna the voice are as intense and beautiful as ever.

Netrebko and Villazon in the film version of Boheme....

Get to know her through her videos, and buy one of her earlier records.  She and Rolando Villazon made a La Boheme film together and it is beautiful.

Watch her scenes from Manon with Villazon; the two are romping in bed– a staging like that would have seen my own mother leave the hall– she walked out of a production of Lysistrata I was in in the 60′s.  Never one to leave in doubt how she felt about anything, my mother.

Like mother like daughter– and I credit my mother with introducing me to opera and giving me Sutherland’s The Art of the Prima Donna years ago.

I also recommend Pavarotti’s sumptuous singing, still, even in the face of the abundant tenori recordings of the likes of Kauffman, Vargas, Florez.  There was only one big Il Divo in my view.

Netrebko is a rose in the garden that sustains me on a daily basis.  When I hear her sing of the fatherland in these Russian arias, I know that ultimately, with all of our wounds and indiginities and things that are “awry” in the world, we have not yet extinguished beauty.