A forceful argument for Stock’s growing relevance as a West Coast poet.
A rousing retrospective of the more recent work of a prolific poet, by turns wide-ranging and piercing.
Ezra Pound taught readers most succinctly about the power of juxtaposition in his famous—and famously brief—1913 poem “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” By bringing together two unlikely images, Pound opened up new meanings in both, and the relationship that links them remains tantalizingly mysterious. Such juxtaposition is one of the tools that Stock (Just Like in the Song of Songs, 2009, etc.) ably wields in her new volume of selected verse, culled from just one decade of her work as a publishing poet. In “While the Men Prayed,” for example, Stock sets people at prayer next to a “large sabra cactus” with “yellow blossoms / which grew red and exploded / before my very eyes.” In “Torture,” tiny jellyfish are compared with egg yolks “before / being broken into by the tine / of a fork.” Most startlingly, in “Cho,” the narrator describes the moment that a charging deer collides with her automobile and then deftly shifts to reflections on the man who killed dozens at Virginia Tech. This collection is thus a kaleidoscope of surprising images, arrayed in a pattern whose logic, while alluring, is sometimes elusive. The volume pulls from more than a dozen different books, but unlike similar collections by others, it’s organized in reverse chronological order, so that readers see Stock’s more recent work first, starting from 2008. (The final section, however, from 2009, is an exception to this rule.) This idiosyncratic arrangement is an excellent decision, for it turns the reading experience into a process of excavation and lets Stock’s mature work serve as a heuristic for earlier offerings. Throughout, she deals with heavy themes—death, war, religion—and yet never lets them become ponderous, instead situating them in the real lives of real people. For instance, she reflects on the murders of five homeless men while her “laundry is in the machines down the street.” Of course, the poet subtly reminds readers that laundry and murder exist in the same world—our world.
A forceful argument for Stock’s growing relevance as a West Coast poet.Pub Date: May 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9909203-0-4
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Merging geographic precision with detailed lyricism, Berry’s collection of poetry spans continents and states of the soul.
The best poetry focused on a particular locale tends to evoke sensory stimulation as much as meaning, and Berry’s collection of nearly 60 poems is no different. Born in England, the author has travelled widely throughout Africa and the United States. With a doctorate in geography, she casts a discriminating, discerning eye on the landscapes to which her travels have taken her. In unrhymed, compact poems—few more than a page in length—the poet speaks with seriousness about the relationship between the natural world and one’s inner world. In “Music of Place,” she writes: “Carried in the wind is the music of place, blown / like washing on a line, white sheets flapping, sending / large billowing folds of sound back to me,” which typifies her ability to translate a place into a finely detailed, highly specific moment in her past or present. Some poems set in North Africa elevate journallike jottings into sharply etched experiences. The dominant moods suffusing these poems are calm and meditational, perhaps reflecting the influence of poet Elizabeth Bishop, who was also attuned to inner and outer geographies. The final 20 poems shift focus from geography and place to reconciliations or frictions with family members; many relatives have passed on but are vibrantly alive in the author’s memory. These family sketches often turn on a particularly poignant phrase spoken to the author by a parent or loved one: “Windows” pivots on Berry’s father’s comment, “I could drive if I wanted to,” as the author notes that her father never owned a car. Few books of recent poetry reveal such a penetrating awareness of how the environments in which we live affect us as much as we affect them. An extraordinary, nuanced collection by a gifted poet.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1935514749
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Plain View
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wise, kind and lively verse that truly “dances to a tune that’s / gloriously redeeming / of anger, hate, and envy. / It’s an...
Engaging lyric poetry that manages to be sensual and cerebral, fun and profound.
Readers willing to dig deeper than the work of poets Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph will find that exciting new worlds of Caribbean poetry await. Although some lesser-known Caribbean writers tend to get bogged down in the exotic fecundity of their island landscapes, others write with a grace and steadiness that highlights personal experience within the larger context of culture and environment to reveal something universal. Trinidadian novelist, painter and poet Drayton (The Crystal Bird, 2012, etc.) most decidedly falls into the latter category. Her personal poems often focus on singular moments in her past, yet her evocation of the slippage between past and present, of how we manage to exist in both times simultaneously, speaks directly to readers. The exploration of how “time…magically overlaps generations” pervades this collection. Her narrators are buffeted by nostalgia but are never fatalistic or cloying; instead, they treasure the past and the present as a single fabric of interwoven threads. One narrator, for instance, revisits a memorable beach and finds that the “scenery I knew has all but gone, / except for the sea. / Longing and waiting, I dream of the days / that never can be again. / The sea waits while I dream a dream / where I stand on the balcony of this precious day.” Drayton invests symbols with a similar complexity; the titular brown dove, for instance, is at once a symbol of maternal devotion, sexual allure, rebellion and quiet endurance, and is rife with gender and racial resonances. Occasionally, her more contemplative poems suffer from excess erudition, and she is sometimes prone to distracting alliteration, but she also delivers unmatched similes such as, “The morning stormed my day / like a drunken party crasher / with streams of gold and white ribbons / coming through the window.”
Wise, kind and lively verse that truly “dances to a tune that’s / gloriously redeeming / of anger, hate, and envy. / It’s an awesome authority / with boundless energy.”Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478160045
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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