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DOGGERLAND

ANCESTRAL POEMS

A tremendous volume of poems that will illuminate and linger.

King muses on physical and ancestral connections in his debut collection of poems.

The book’s title refers to a now-submerged landmass that connected Great Britain to Northern Europe until about 6500 B.C. King uses this “verdant tundra hunted and fished by ancient peoples” as a metaphor for the unseen bridge that connects each person to his or her hereditary past. For King, this leads to the West of Ireland, where one of his forbears was the newspaperman and storyteller James Berry. With echoes of his ancestor, as well as midcareer Seamus Heaney, King explores family and folk history side by side, all the way back to bog bodies, Neanderthal skeletons, and primordial fish. Showcasing an obsession for color and texture, plants and landscapes, he teases at the unknowable nature of the deep past in his mostly short poems, which often bear deceptively simple titles. In “Gods,” he writes, “Much in those first few / hundred thousand years was slowly new.” He contrasts the gradual, painstaking evolution of nearly every object and place with the evanescent nature of individual understanding; for his narrators, this is a cause of much muted sorrow and bemused joy. Overall, the poems are as worn and wondrous as the ocean floor where Doggerland now rests. King is equally adept at brilliant phonetic stanzas and concentrated verse essays. In “Uncles,” for example, the semantic meaning barely registers above the rhythm: “Augustinians, schooled / in Salamanca, smuggled / to the strand at Inisfail, / their father’s lugger / under half-sail, two / great prow lug sails / finding the wind.” In “Unsettled,” he delivers an entire ethnography in 10 lines: “Imagining ourselves / done with migration, we / imagined ourselves / done, not loosed. // We did not flow or go easy / We made such enemies / in our heads it pleased us / to name them // and give their antitheses / the names of gods.” King is a Boston native, but his collection is a must-read for devotees of the last half-century of Irish verse. The poems have few easy endings and rarely a dull line; they terminate where they need to, but the collection itself concludes far too soon.

A tremendous volume of poems that will illuminate and linger.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2015

ISBN: 978-0977842971

Page Count: 94

Publisher: Off the Grid Press

Review Posted Online: April 6, 2015

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STATES OF UNITEDNESS

POEMS

A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.

A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.

In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.

A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8

Page Count: 166

Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions

Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018

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Body Archaeology

Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.

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Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.

In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.

Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.

Pub Date: July 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4

Page Count: 58

Publisher: Lulu

Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

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