Lynn Levin
Review of Smoke and Mirrors by Antonia Clark
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Smoke and Mirrors Antonia Clark 31 pages | Finishing Line Press 2013 | $14.00
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You miss dead
relatives, even if they were difficult people, because they were your
people, and sometimes the more trying and troubled they were, the
more they stand out in memory. So it is with many of the departed
family members that Antonia Clark recalls in her new chapbook of
poems, Smoke and Mirrors. Mother, father, and grandmothers
appear in these unstinting and elegant lyrics as, I imagine, they did
in life: severe, repressed, sometimes angry, but always strong,
stoic, and able to endure. Much gentler is the presence of the
speaker's younger sister, who died, one surmises from the poems,
sometime in adulthood. The sister is the person with whom the speaker
seemed most deeply bound, the one she misses most, and the one whose
image fades the fastest, a phenomenon that Clark evokes in her title
poem. The dead, whether elegized or recalled in their discomfiting
moments, haunt these poems. They are the smoke. The speaker's
memory is the mirror. But "smoke and mirrors" is also a
magician's phrase; the question pokes and prods: how much can you
trust your memories of the dead?
A poet whose rhythms
range from the quiet and contemplative to the assertive, Antonia
Clark has a love of poetic organization and composes in a number of
different stanza patterns, among them octaves, quintets, and
couplets, and includes several sonnets in her collection. She also
has a fine ear for the sonic, and many of the poems feature pleasing
end rhymes and internal rhymes. Above all, Clark is a master of
strong sensory imagery. I can see jars of preserved fruit biding
their many years on a basement shelf in "Unfinished Marilyn." In
"Widow's Weeds," I can visualize an older woman's sere
countenance and disciplined housekeeping habits as she continues to
dust and sweep in accordance with the strict demands of her late
husband. In the skinny poem, "Savor," I can taste the sour and
bitter foods--raw onions and horseradish--that the speaker's
mother lived on during lean times, harsh foods for which she remained
nostalgic.
I find myself returning
to Clark's nonce sonnet, "Home Permanent," about a young girl
forced to tough it out as her mother administers a stinging and
pungent home permanent. The mother feels it is necessary to suffer
for beauty's sake:
She wound my hair
relentlessly around the plastic rods we'd
sorted out by size, pulled so tight tears
stung my eyes. The thin pink lotion burned my
scalp, dripped in my ears. Complaining only makes
it worse, she said.
Not only do I get a
whiff of the permanent chemicals, I can also see the formation of
stoic family values in which the ability to suffer is a prime virtue.
Other poems haunt in
more ethereal ways. Take the sonnet "Orthopedics," in which the
poet personifies advanced age as an "old woman" who "leaches my
calcium day by day." In the Shakespearean sonnet "About the
Dead," the departed
...linger near their loved ones,
listening and leaving clues-- a bar of yellow light
across the floor, scents of earth and
river, muddy shoes
The dead seem to be
calling for the attention of the living, but are they really trying
to connect with us? Is this instead the play of the mind, more smoke
and mirrors? Clark's speaker seems to be a rationalist who recalls
and converses with her dead without the rituals, consolations, or
beliefs of religion. How poignant this becomes in "Smoke and
Mirrors," in which the speaker sees her beloved dead sister
gradually dissolving as she imagines their conversation:
My sister dressed in
the colors of water and stone, walked out
on foggy mornings in search of misted
rivers, folded herself into
low-lying clouds.
She insisted that none
of this was for the purpose of
deception. It's a matter of
becoming
accustomed, she said.
It's incremental.
There's something of
the transcendental in this beautiful poem, but I think that it has
more to do with the processes of the mind than the preternatural. At
the end of the poem, Clark inserts a stunning shift: "The hard part
is what to do with the body,/she told me. The rest is nothing./It's
easy to disappear." The physical fact of the sister in life cannot
be denied. Recalling that sharpens the pain of loss. George Szirtes
awarded this poem first place in the Interboard Poetry Competition, a
well-deserved honor.
My favorite poem in the
collection is "The Bridge, When We Came to It." Clark presents
the bridge as a symbol of the dying process. In this case, it is a
shining bridge, but still a bridge of no return. The dying people in
this poem have lived long full lives. As they cross the bridge, they
get their last look at existence: "Far below us, the water
lay/black as the night, crowded/with floating stars." There is no
heaven or afterlife on the other side of the bridge, only those last
sparkling moments in the world. The clear eye of the poet reports on
the awe of dying. This is a profound and stunning collection, the
first, I hope, of more books to come from Antonia Clark.
Review of The Body's Bride by Miriam Kotzin
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The Body's Bride Miriam Kotzin 76 pages | David Roberts Books
2013 | $18.00
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What does the term
"bride" signify? Hope, romance, youth, beauty, white lace and
flowers, sexual readiness, a state of not-yet-disappointed love? In
The Body's Bride, Miriam Kotzin's fourth collection of
poems, the poet engages these concepts. She also treats us, in this
startling array of lyrics and narratives, to meditations on time and
piquant observations on contemporary culture and relationships. The
collection is a treasure trove of triolets, rondeaux, rondels,
sonnets, villanelles, a sonnenizio, and a host of other musical and
delicately rhymed metrical stanzas. But the technical virtuosity is
only part of the delight of The Body's Bride. Time and again
in reading the book, I found myself falling back into its blossoms,
its dark green shadows, its poems that speak of life's renewal and
its passing seasons.
The cover of the book,
an especially striking portrait of a many-petaled fuchsia and pink
flower, evokes the themes of nature and sexuality that inform many of
the poems. Floral imagery abounds and entices in these poems as in
the triolet "Nuptial," which I quote here in its entirety:
Each
year I wait for the old pear to bloom, to
stand adorned again in frothy white, a
brazen backyard bride without a groom. Each
year I wait for the old pear to bloom, I
stand beneath the tree, the air a tomb of
scent and petals. Spring's a passing blight each
year. I wait for the old pear to bloom to
stand adorned again in frothy white.
I can see the lacy
whiteness of the bride evoked in the blossoms of the pear tree, and,
in the refrains, I can hear the speaker's turns of mind. Here, too,
is the melancholy that perfumes a number of the poems, especially
those that engage loss and the passage of time.
One of my favorite
poems is "Iris." This is a rondeau, one of the more challenging
French forms, and Kotzin executes it perfectly with elegant rhymes
and graceful confident iambics that impart a sense of knowing and
wisdom. But the poem is much more than its prosody; it speaks of both
mortality and continuity as it describes a garden of irises:
As
they once were, they are today-- a
green and lavender display on
either side of our back door. They're
growing now, just as before, to
bloom in time for Mother's Day.
The poem goes on to
observe that unlike irises, people don't get renewed each year. It
concludes with these true, beautiful, gently heartbreaking lines:
This
vegetative metaphor expresses
what we're all here for: Our
spikes of bloom last but a day as
they once were.
The refrain "as they
once were" means something different each time it returns in the
poem. First, it asserts constant renewal, then the toll that time
takes on people, and finally lost youth. I especially love the jot of
violence in the term "spikes." The harshness and aggressiveness
of life surge in that line.
Lovers and mothers
occasionally come in for some wry commentary as in the poems "Dinner
in Babie Lato" and the rondel "Thundergust." Kotzin
pokes fun at the politically correct catchphrase "sustainable" in
a series of poems in the second section of the book. In "How to
Write a Sustainable Poem," she takes on free verse writers in a
nonce form comprising the trickiest ever series of double-line
refrains. Then there is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poetry
Reading," Kotzin's hilarious send-up of Wallace Stevens's
over-estimated (in my opinion) poem. Here are a couple of stanzas:
I. Among
twenty folding chairs, The
only moving thing Was
the eye of the poet.
II. I
was of three minds, Like
a bookstore In
which there are three poets.
And those are just two
of the thirteen witty, laugh-out-loud stanzas.
In the third and final
section, The Body's Bride turns to the theme of threat in
such poems as "Lurkers," "Bait," "The Marriage," and the
previously mentioned "Thundergust." Especially notable is the
narrative "The Listener," which follows a young girl's
anxieties about her mother's reputation and the girl's fears for
own safety. Kotzin incorporates a variety of traditional forms in
this tense dramatic poem; I found triolets, rondeaux, a rondeau
redoublé, and a villanelle. By choosing to write in forms that
incorporate refrains, Kotzin is able to enact in language the young
girl's obsessive (and well-founded) fears.
In the past several
years, readers have been lucky to have a bounty of new books by
Miriam Kotzin, including a novel, The Real Deal; a collection
of flash fiction, Just Desserts; and the poetry collections
Reclaiming the Dead, Weights & Measures, Taking
Stock and, now, The Body's Bride. Kotzin, Professor of
English at Drexel University, a contributing editor of Boulevard,
and a founding editor of Per Contra, has given us some of her
best work in The Body's Bride. I will turn back to this book
again and again to savor its beautiful verse and grave depths.
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