Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems

Bell tells us that “[t]he dead man, like you, entered through an archway of effects,” echoing the first line of another iconic poem, “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?” where he declares, “Late at night, I no longer speak for effect.” In un-death, as in late-night delirium, Bell’s other-self has found the means to integrate worldly overwhelm since, for the dead man, “[i]f it were not for the lateness of the hour, everything he sees would be too much.”

The effects he rejects include “the tautologies that cloak war and torture” and glitzy marketing-speak. Through an at once more direct and more off-kilter relationship to language, the dead man can “[enter] your consciousness without tripping the alarm.” And so, through a broad range of different tactics, including humor, pathos, and brain-bending syntax, the dead man slips in his meaning, juggling around the sometimes-awful truth like the fool in King Lear’s court.

The book opens with two quotes–one about the curious nature of philosophy and another about the naturalness of making art. Bell invokes concepts from philosophy, such as Buber’s “I-Thou”, Zeno’s paradoxes, and Occam’s razor, yet the dead man himself is not loyal to any insignia, treating religion, superstition, and science alike, for he “has worn the lone Star of David and the ankh, the good luck rubber band, the medical alert.” Despite this, “he is at peace with the one fact that most informs science, puzzles philosophy, and troubles medicine: that things end.” The dead man is god-like in this way, an idealised alter-ego capable of great empathy, as well as the “seen it all, done it all” detachment of the immortal undead.

Yet Vertigo is hardly abstract in its philosophical musings. Far from it, this is Bell’s most political collection to date. This dead man lives in “a time of troop surges and redactions, leaks and fire starters, a time of bush-league government.” (Note the lowercase “b” referring first to second-rate baseball, and second to second-rate presidencies.) Of presidents he thinks punningly, regarding the effigies of Mount Rushmore, that “it would be a long way down from these four.” Like Bell, and the rest of us, he lives “in the flickering tube light of rampant capitalism.” Still, his allegiances lie not with the conceptual, but the human, for “[t]he dead man is not loyal to America but Americans.”

This is a decidedly American, cunningly political, and fiercely unnerving collection. Philosophy mixes easily with quantum physics, zen with zeitgeist, held together by deft syntax, archetypal images, and the musical underpinnings of natural speech. Spinning like a dervish to transcend the muck through art, these poems will leave you dizzy, make you think.

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

Sometimes a book chooses you. Sheltering from the rain in Black Gull Books in East Finchley, I browsed the poetry section, arranged alphabetically by author, until a familiar surname leapt out at me. I knew Mervyn Peake for his fiction and illustrations, but not his poetry. The opening image from The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb stopped my breath–an infant curled up, crying out into inky blackness. It recalled to me, simultaneously, the earliest images of our son in utero, and our own anguish at his death.

I read the first few musical stanzas about Mervyn’s babe “born in the reign of George”, during the height of The Blitz, down to where “the murderous notes of the ice-bright glass / Set sail with a clink of wings”. It reminded me of one my favourite lines by one of my favorurite poets, the moment in William Blake’s “The Tyger” “when the stars threw down their spears / and watered heaven with their tears”.

The whole poem, and its accompanying illustrations, are Blakean in scope, bringing together images and poetry in a dazzlingly imaginative metaphysical ballad about the resilience and splendour of the human spirit. Like Blake, Peake also describes a hellish world, in this case riddled with one-ton bombs, through the music of English and light-filled imagery:

And a ton came down on a hospital,
And a ton on a manuscript,
And a ton shot up through the dome of a church,
And a ton roared down to the crypt.

And a ton danced over the Thames and filled
A thousand panes with stars…

And in the middle of it all, “… the babe that was born in the reign of George / Lay asleep in the sailor’s arm, / With the bombs for his birthday lullaby / And the flames for its birthday dream.”

The sailor discovers “the tick of its heart beat quick” and tries to protect the infant, whom he affectionately calls “little fish”, declaring “We’d be far better off where the soldiers are / Than naked in London town / Where a house can rock like a rocking-horse / And the bright bricks tumble down.”

When the infant opens “its new-born eye / To the shuffle of the warm, red, restless air / And the dazzle of the witchcraft sky”, the sailor entertains him by dancing. This image, of the sailor dancing with the Christ-like child, is as startling and archetypal as the frontispiece to Blake’s “Songs of Experience.”

L. Frontispiece to "Songs of Experience" by Wiliam Blake. R. Illustration to "Rhyme of the Flying Bomb" by Mervyn Peake

Sheltering in a church, the sailor asks if the child will listen to him sing. Magically, the child replies:

“I will! I will!” cried the new-born babe,
“Though I’ve lived it all before
For there’s nothing new when the womb is through
With its restless prisoner.”

He continues, “You have only to sing, my war-time friend / And I will know what to sing.” After they sing of their past together, the bombs continue, and the sailor is suddenly seized by fear of death. The magical child tells him:

…out of your love, O frightened sailor
You showed me the coloured lights,
And the golden shoals of the falling stones,
And the scarlet of the streets;

And I am rich on my natal day
With such rare tragedy
That I have no fear, but only long
That you could be rich like me.

And I who have died a thousand times
Will cheer you as you die–

As the dying sailor’s visions in the church become increasingly hellish, the infant explains the enduring nature of love, and that the sailor’s death will be the ultimate proof of his love for the child.

The tick of a bomb is heard, and The Virgin Mary appears beside the Tree of Life, while the sailor is filled with strange visions of maritime war, and a headless horse is resurrected. Then a blasted wall “waved and waved and could not fall / Through such portentous air, / While silence like a ghost let down / The long ice of its hair”. And finally:

…the church leapt out of a lake of light
And the pews were rows of fire,
And the golden cock crowed thrice and flew
From the peak of the falling spire.

…the dust rose up from the hills of brick
And hung over London town,
[...]
While the babe that was born in the reign of George
Lay coiled in the womb again.

This long poem was written in 1947, nearly two years after Mervyn Peake was sent as a war artist to the newly-liberated concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where he produced images of the dying. His son Sebastian later described this experience as “my father’s ‘Heart of Darkness‘”. Rich with Catholic symbolism and fantastical imagery, written in well-tuned metre and alternating rhymes, this poem must have been considered out of fashion when it was finally published in 1962, at the height of the vogue for more plain-spoken poets like Robert Frost.

Yet The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb is, at its essence, a timeless and ambitious act–reconciling worldly atrocity with the beauty and magnificence of the human spirit. I do not know if Mervyn is a relative, since I can only trace my paternal line back to an itinerant great-grandfather. But in coming into possession of this book, it seems as though an artistic ancestor has reached through time to deliver this at once dazzling and disturbing vision, showing, as Peake himself put it, “man’s continuing hopefulness in adversity.”

I read the book aloud to my wife. At the end we turned to one another with tears in our eyes, as if to ask, “What on Earth was that?” Mervyn Peake’s epic poem is nothing on Earth at all, but something that transcends it–an allegorical vision of enduring love “[at] the height of a world at war.”

For both its personal and artistic significance, I am grateful to a Peake I never knew.

These are poems of homosocial collusion and collision. In “Jacks” the speaker tells us, “My mother was nifty, cool, gorgeous, / could scoop up fours-ies easy as ones-ies. / She was so close, I could almost touch her.” And “When Wives Dream,” she tells us, “We roared. / We snorted. The men turned around / to find out what was so funny. / We shut right up, stood, smoothed our skirts, / rearranged the salads, and asked them when / the hell the chicken would be done.”

But this short, snappy collection gains even keener focus when treating the rougher sex, who smell like “cumin” and “leather in the sun.” (“The Smell of Men”) In “Squirrel,” a woman friend delivering a coup de grâce to the trapped and suffering rodent “became a Jinjaweed raider, / a stromtrooper on Kristallnacht, / she entered all the killing fields / of history, and for the first time in her life / she began to understand men.”

In the riveting and terrible “Alone in Africa and Therefore the World,” the speaker’s violent evasion of an attempted rape becomes an allegory of womanly power, focused on the “orange bud” of the cigarette she smokes after the speaker knocks her attacker unconscious and barricades herself in her room, “dragging the killing fire / closer and closer to my face.”

Besides violence, desire pervades this collection, as she tells the iconic crooner in her “Letter…” that “They say you were a womanizer, / I hope that’s still true.”

As seductive as a Manhattan night, and as direct as a prizefighter’s jab, Hechinger lands a series of poems that will leave you aching for more.

In “Pulling at the Dark,” the younger daughter is doing her math homework upstairs when her mother “stomps into the rain-slicked night / slamming the door / so it shivers in its frame, / her head screwed tight with a quart of Jim Beam, / her hands held out as if to tear off headlights– // Stop bugging my house, she roars / with a rake of rigid fingers as if to dig noise, like dirt, / out of the night.” The daughter goes out after her, and observes rough tenderness as, “The policeman grabs her, / pulls the sleeves of the wool sweater down / so the handcuffs won’t bite into her wrists.”

Next, in “Visiting Day,” the daughter visits the presumably older mother in an institution where she “tells me it’s not safe around there and Rita has absconded / with one of her sneakers and Claire stole the sheet of paper / where she was making words out of NOTICE. / I had a whole list– / ice, tone, tin, tine, tic, ten, cent, once.” The daughter enters the mother’s world of word-making, picking a different sign and, collaboratively, “we start making words from it, / hinges for a story, / once, text, note, lonely.”

It seems for Jospé, words are just this–hinges for a story, keyholes into rooms. I remember this delight in word-play from our time together in the Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. She has since honed this delight into an accessible and meaningful craft in itself, as in “Liubilu:”

Liubilu, to echo love you
with a subtle b
like the saddle-red glaze,
gold-flecked bark
in today’s stray light,

Liubilu
pulls in, gathers skeins of sound,
hollow whorls of thought
for the wind to unwrap
into word.

Most admirable, though, is how this word-love fuses with deeper human meaning, bringing the keen narrative observation of the mother-daughter poems together with an equally well-tuned and playful ear, as in “When I say first frost etches / the curl of leaf in shards of white, / pollen no longer streaks / the pale coat of our old, old dog. // I mean to say how time / pocks the field with brown burrs / strips down the woods, / how the sun streaks its light, / strips shadows off the trees.”

This is a rich first collection by an American poet with strong pan-European, especially French, influences, ranging in theme everywhere words strike notes, sounds make meaning, through the many descending cadences of our lives.

Hand-bound editions are available from Foothills Publishing.

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

For each poet, I have been jotting marginalia on my tube journey to work. I include these notes here, in a similar fashion to the notes I took on Modern American poets during my MFA degree. Unlike those notes, however, these are taken on a short sampling of work, as opposed to a whole book. I therefore intend them as starting points, not summaries.

In my notes I have also included broad designations of geographic origin, since to my outside ear a poet from Leeds and a poet from Northumberland have an auditory relationship to language more in common with each other than they do to a poet from Oxford (hence my coarse-grained designation “Northern England.”) I realize I may be missing out on subtle distinctions in language and even politics. But for now, I am concerned with puzzling out in general how these poems would sound read aloud by the authors themselves, and taking a first pass this broadly has been helpful.

Compiling in this way, I am particularly struck by the complete absence of Welsh and significant lack of Scottish poets from this volume, and the controversial inclusion of so many poets from Northern Ireland. I would be interested to hear who else you think should have made it into this book.

Here are my notes:

Seamus Heaney, from Northern Ireland, blends image and music deftly, treating The Troubles in Northern Ireland with universal, humanistic insight and a rich, gravelly consonance that is his signature sound. Favorite poems from this set include “Churning Day,” “Punishment,” “Casualty,” and “The Otter.” It should be noted that Heaney’s inclusion in this volume prompted his lyrical objection, in an open letter, to being called “British.”

Tony Harrison, from Northern England, examines human cruelty and disdain. His work blends rhyme and violence, affection and disillusionment, treating subjects both historical and familiar. One fine example of each is “The Nuptial Torches” and “Long Distance.”

Douglas Dunn, from Scotland, treats class war and imperialism, mostly in long, continuous stanzas. He examines the working class both through persona and direct address. I particularly liked “Men of Terry Street” and “Gardeners.”

Hugo Williams, from London, elevates the mundane through the music of plain speech in terse, observational poetry. I especially enjoyed “The Butcher” and “Confessions of a Drifter.”

Derek Mahon, from Northern Ireland, living in London, blends quietness and careful progression with a fanciful turn of mind, celebrating the music of plain speech, and the dizzying power of whimsy. Favorite poems include “Afterlives,” “The Apotheosis of Tins,” “The Snow Party,” and “Lives,” the last poem taking a dig at Seamus Heaney for extensively applying the metaphor of anthropology to his examination of contemporary political events.

Michael Longley, from Northern Ireland, mixes the profane and human sacred fiercely, taking a direct look at quotidian violence through strong narratives with explosive endings. Great examples of this are “Wounds,” “Swans Mating,” and “Mayo Monologues.”

Fleur Adcock, born New Zealand, living in England, merges the real and surreal in shocking, cryptic, devil-may-care examinations of the inner and outer worlds. I was amazed by the long poem “The Soho Hospital for Women.”

Anne Stevenson, born on the east coast of America, now living on the border of Wales, treats romanticized and historical American settings through miniatures and epistles. That said, I liked the simple and more universal poem “The Marriage” best of all.

James Fenton, from Oxford, writes long, dark, strange poems that could be the love child of Wallace Stevens and Edgar Allen Poe. See, for example, “A Staffordshire Murder.”

Tom Paulin, born England, raised Northern Ireland, now living in England, treats politically-charged topics with a mildness and quiet attention to music. Favorite poems include “Settlers” and “In a Northern Landscape.”

Jeffrey Wainwright, from Northern England, takes on the topic of revolutionary class war through commitment to personae. I particularly liked the long poem “1815.”

Andrew Motion, from London, writes quiet, observational poems that are highly controlled but not contrived. There is a sense of persona always, even in the “I” voice. Consider “In The Attic” and “Anne Frank Huis.”

Paul Muldoon, from Northern Ireland, writes persona poems that are irreverent in the extreme, shifting like quicksilver from line to line. Favorite poems include “The Big House,” “Cuba,” and “Quoof.”

Peter Scupham, from Northern England, now living in the South, writes in same-length stanzas that are often imagistic, even haiku-like. I especially liked “Early Summer.”

Carol Rumens, from London, writes mostly in long single stanzas, giving close examination to objects as they represent human concerns, much like Dutch miniatures–where the physical stands in for the metaphysical. Good examples of this are “A Marriage” and “A Poem for Chessmen.”

Penelope Shuttle, from Greater London, now in Cornwall, brings the dream world into this one, exploring the intersection of imagination and terra firma. Favorite poems include “Three Lunulae, Truro Museum,” and “Travelling.”

Craig Raine, from Northern England, now in Oxford, demonstrates a keen eye for observation of the absurd in the mundane, to a sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply-felt effect. For a delicious taste of each, consider “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” and “A Cemetery in Co. Durham.”

Christopher Reid, born in Hong Kong, living in London, writes light, glancing verse that relies on indelible images. “A Disaffected Old Man” is a favorite poem from this set.

David Sweetman, from Northern England, now in London, brings an intellectual regard to charged emotional matters, exploring the contrast between surface and depth. One fine example is the aptly titled “Looking Into The Deep End.”

Medbh McGuckian, from Northern Ireland, brings a focused, persona-like observation to self-contained settings, objects, and events. “Slips” is a favorite from this set.

Each chapter of John Rember’s MFA in a Box can be read in the time it takes to travel between Finchley Central and Leicester Square station on the Northern Line of the London Underground. I know because I read it this way. At least, I read full chapters on the days I could claim a seat. Other days, I read what little I could at the distance of two inches from my nose, using the book as a v-shaped shield against the armpits of businessmen’s suit jackets as they made their way into the The City to plan the next financial collapse.

A recent transplant to London from a rural town in California, I was following the “when in Rome” adage–immersing myself in written ideas to transcend the fact of my animal body crammed in with the warmth and smell of my fellow humans in a speeding subterranean metal box. Each article in the tabloids unfurled all around me had been engineered to be read in the length of one tube stop. By a precise mix of fact and moral opining, they were also designed to provoke an “Isn’t that terrible?” reaction, before being discarded in the overflowing waste bins at the top of the stairs.

I was reading a book about why one should try to write literature. But in fact, MFA in a Box is about much more than this. It is about how to survive, and perhaps even thrive, through writing, in this highly-engineered world.

I met John during my first residency in the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program. It was less than a year after the death of our infant son. John gave a talk that was to become chapter eight, about The Book of Job, and Leviathan, and why one should “go deep” in the process of writing–as “conscious dust” in a cosmos that we can only pretend to control, wrapping our arms around the big human questions because we are human, and questioners, and big and deep at our core, despite our cultural contract that says we should instead keep lacquering the surface.

Here was someone I knew I could talk to, and I found in our conversations what came back to me, in John’s voice, through this book: depth and sensitivity; compassion and quick, wry humor; a willingness to embrace life’s irony, and a fierce commitment to make of one’s life good art. More than once, while reading this book, I found myself smiling–or was it wincing?–with what Rember calls the “shock of recognition.” The narrator in my mind jotted down the sudden change of expression–mine the only upturned mouth in a long row of slackened faces. For all the written attempts at journalistic provocation, I seemed to be the only one in our high-speed, newspaper-lined birdcage who really felt anything at all.

I would emerge onto Charing Cross Road, lined with as-yet-still-surviving small book shops, enter the cafe where the Italian woman at the counter looks down whenever she meets my gaze, and past the homeless man in the “God Loves You” denim jacket, smiling into the eyes of each passer-by to wish them, “Good morning!” He sells copies of The Big Issue, a current events magazine that helps people like him earn their way off the streets. I think of John and his book, comfortable with big issues, and unafraid to look me, as a writer and person, straight in the eye.

My only qualm I have with the book is its title. Rember’s unique mix of philosophy, depth psychology, and artistic vulnerability is anything but “in a box.” Nor is it much like a traditional MFA in itself. Instead, every writer who has honed their craft through an intense period of writing–be that a formal MFA program or something else–should pick up this book from the other side of those newly-won skills, to rediscover them as survival skills, both for writers individually, and perhaps for our world.

Rember’s “why to write” book is a memoir of the creative heart and mind in conflict with itself, which is to say a universal struggle that any artist will recognize. More than this, he emerges triumphant over big issues–family, violence, bearing witness, estrangement, grief. Gilgamesh, “Hansel and Gretel,” Greek mythology and Paris Hilton all figure in to his survey of literature and culture, teaching through the age-old workshop mantra of showing, rather than telling us, what good, deep writing is all about.

More than a review, this is an open thank-you note to John for giving me this life raft of a book, which is about how to live as a writer, go deep in a shallow world, and not only survive but, at least as an artist, thrive.

Gwendolyn Alley

Much has happened in this time, and the collection reads as somnambulistic reportage of pregnancy, motherhood, and the death of both her closest poet-friend and her mother. In taking up Emily Dickinson’s charge to “tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Alley also tells it sleepily, through her dreamlike “315 mind.” Poems are arranged chronologically, titled by date, as though we were reading a diary of the poet’s late-night self.

The poems in this collection celebrate a mother’s adoration of, and fascination with, her son–before and after his birth–as in this excerpt from “Tuesday, August 2, 2005″:

I had never seen
a child in child’s pose
before I had a
child of my own
I never saw how completely
they can pull themselves
up into themselves all tucked in
never saw how tortoise like
they retract their arms their legs
the soles of the feet
slipping in under the torso
only a few toes poking out

Peppered throughout the collection are references to the speaker’s own mother as well, including footnotes such as “written on the eve of my mother’s birthday,” and in reminiscences such as “Friday, August 25, 2006,” which begins with a nod to Shakespeare, declaring “My mother’s hands are nothing like the sun.” It goes on to recall, “Every time her hands touched water / she rubbed the lotion in / a remedy from housework / from houselife / from housewife.”

These are poems that celebrate new life, and mourn death, as only a poet and mother can, transformed by “the baby in my belly / the pen in my hand.” Middle of the Night by Gwendolyn Alley is available in limited edition from En Theos Press.

Holman does employ plain speech. The opening poem admires the onion for its “frank gaze.” Like Acts of Contrition, the poems in this collection touch upon the relationship between mother and daughter–allegorically through the myth of Persephone and Demeter, and directly through narrative poems like “No Mood” and “Arguing With My Mother Over My Father’s Ashes.”

Holman also questions the trustworthiness of plain speech in this collection. “After the Ark” is an experimental prose poem that employs the strike-through to convey the impact of narrative revisionism:

I walk backward and drop a shawl over my mother’s nakedness. My mother is being beaten. I cover her nakedness. My mother is left for dead. I cover her nakedness. My mother runs away from home. Mother on the day father died in the house. I cover her…

The effect here is actually that of underscoring the stricken-out sentences, heightening their impact and veracity by the very fact of the speaker wanting them to have been removed. Such revision, left intact, creates two layers that function simultaneously in the poem–the plainspoken and frank, which is lined out, and the sanitized version that remains, and which echoes the biblical story of Noah’s drunkenness, wherein his sons covered his nakedness.

Holman also employs more dream-like, surreal language, as in the poem “Catching My Death Of,” which narrates the speaker’s parachute-less fall from an airplane. In “Letter to the Wound Dresser,” the wounded awakens to “flies / democratic as the mercy of God.” It is through the dream-like that Holman finds a more trustworthy language, and one which transcends words.

As the speaker says to her brother in a poem about dandelions, “I blow into your ear / to make you dream of wind.”

Welcoming in the Starry Night of the Lightning Bees is available in New Poets | Short Books Volume IV from Lost Horse Press. Read more reviews from the Lost Horse Press New Poets Series.

I am off to the office supply store now to get prepared to sign and ship out books this weekend. As a special thanks to everyone who ordered directly from me, I am also including an audio CD of me reading all of the poems in my collection. I only have a handful of copies left from this first shipment, but will be ordering another box from the publisher shortly, and taking additional orders as soon as I can. Meanwhile, it is a thrill to hold in my hands such a beautifully-produced book of poems, and know that many others will do so shortly. [UPDATE: I am taking orders again. Details here.]

Each order that has come in so far has felt like a small vote of confidence in my work. Collectively, they represent a substantial community of encouragement and support. By taking and fulfilling these orders myself, I feel personally connected to readers. I can also see where the books are going, as shown on the following map:

The first two boxes of books are scheduled to land on my doorstep on Thursday, and nearly all of them already have homes. Almost as soon as they land, I will need to request more books from the publisher in time for my readings in March.

This, to me, is the best the Internet can offer–a sense of personal and meaningful connection to a global community of support. Prior to this experience, if you had asked me to name fifty to a hundred people who would be willing to pay good money to make extra sure they got a signed copy of my book, I’d be hard pressed to name them. Now I know who you are.

I look forward to shipping out books this weekend.

Return of the Fist

Indeed, Lingafelter never gives the reader “just one thing.” It is from “Days of Grace” that the theme of the title emerges, through an extended metaphor comparing ear-nibbling “Mike T.” to the speaker’s own animalism, indecision, and inability to avoid returning to “the fist.”

This signature combination of absurdity and pathos, dealt like a one-two punch, culminates succinctly in “My Cousin,” where we learn:

…My cousin was kicked in the face by a horse,
pregnant, indoctrinated, working at a Dollar Store,
in the Air Force, naked behind a shrub,
pregnant, married for three weeks,
when all of a sudden, she evaporated into a POOF! of tiny spores
she rode the wind southeast,
searching for the right conditions under a tree, a large stone,
to mold on, groove on, get kicked in the face by a horse,
pregnant, promoted and given a key,
felt up by a doctor, pregnant,…

The two most startling elements of this poem, that the cousin is “pregnant” and “kicked in the face by a horse,” recur and interweave through a series of believable and unbelievable “facts,” juxtaposing the plausible and tragic (“felt up by a doctor”) with the equally-shocking, but clearly surreal (“she evaporated into a POOF! of tiny spores.”)

“The Summer I Started Pickling Things” finds poetry by taking the Midwest tradition of pickling to new levels of absurdity–mirrors, siblings, even Shame itself are suffused with vinegar. “Monotremata” casts an at-once poignant and nutty glance at female fertility. Lovemaking, mirrors, tanning, and cell division recur in the ever-shifting worldview of these poems.

Other poems are a bit more straightforward. In “The Counterfeiter,” the speaker, continually “backing up” a charming man comes to realize that, “I will be a happy woman / the day I realize / the secret to your charm / is my charm.”

The secret to Amy Lingafelter’s charm lies in her uncanny ability to hold reality and unreality squarely in the binocular vision of these poems, admonishing us, as she does in “Days of Grace,” that, “‘Remember’ is not the opposite of ‘forget.’” These are poems you will both remember, and whose dizzying effect you are not soon to forget.

Return of the Fist is available in New Poets | Short Books Volume III from Lost Horse Press. Read more reviews from the Lost Horse Press New Poets series.

Death Song for Africa

The opening poem, “Bar Mitzvah for Seth,” reminds me of the celebrated Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai in its ability to confront the weight of history through striking imagery:

My son does not know
That he is the oak outside the window
Whose leaves are blowing away,
That he is a raindrop,
A word someone might say,
That his name is not written
In any of the prayer books that his visitors
Pick up in the outside hall,
That the Jewish dead,
Lost on their way to Israel,
Are burrowing into the Synagogue walls.

Many of the poems in this collection are haunted by the past. The dead, skulls, and the skeletal recur, as does blood. In “The Monster of the Dead,” the speaker tells us, “At night the water in the tire tracks beside my house / Becomes my blood.” And in “The Disappeared,” the speaker admonishes himself, “I should remember that the pencil I put on an empty page / Is a thin finger of some anonymous starvation.”

Other poems are haunted by the present. “The Newspaper” series captures the anxiety of bearing witness, through the news, to global atrocities and the “anonymous dead” that “nobody grieves.” The experience of ingesting remote suffering continues through other poems, including the title poem, as well as “The News Tiger,” where “black throats cough up bullets when they scream,” while the speaker lives in “the place where murder is done only in newspapers.”

In the final poem, “Today is Easter,” the language of religion and news interweaves. Referring to “the bible of the newspaper” and “the mosque that is the radio,” the speaker tells us, “I know about a death that cannot be held in a communion wafer,” contrasting the tragedy that “Indians in Guatemala are being ripped inside out” with the banal annoyance that “the weather here has become unkind.”

The poems in this collection are poems of conscience, set in the comfort of the modern first world, looking guiltily but unflinchingly at the terrors of the third world, and of the past. Through striking imagery, and carefully-controlled religious and political references, Camillo embraces love, marriage, and fatherhood against the backdrop of an at-once beautiful and terrible world.

Death Song for Africa is available in New Poets | Short Books Volume II from Lost Horse Press. Read more reviews from the Lost Horse Press New Poets series.