A rich, thoughtful collection that generously breathes life into its ancient subject: very fine.
This cycle of poems focuses on Palamedes, credited with inventing letters of the Greek alphabet and dice.
In these poems, some previously published, Anderson (Songs of Bethlehem: Nativity Poems, 2014, etc.) takes the few surviving references to Palamedes from ancient texts and tells his story. According to mythology and surviving fragments from sources including Euripides, Plato, and Ovid (but not Homer), Palamedes was a Greek, the son of Nauplius and Clymene. He reputedly invented dice and 11 consonants in the Greek alphabet, and he notably made an enemy of Odysseus after exposing his stratagem to avoid the Trojan War. In one version of the story, Odysseus writes a fake letter that gets Palamedes stoned to death as a traitor. Paradoxically, the creation of writing is Palamedes’ doom. And though the miracle of written language is that it withstands living memory, almost nothing inscribed about him survives. Anderson conjures a vivid life for Palamedes that fully explores these paradoxes and others. The author’s voice ranges flexibly from lyrical to conversational, as when Palamedes’ brother tells him his efforts are futile: “Palamedes, stop.... / Before you finish this book of alphabet / A thousand poets will have sung what you want to write.” These strong lines, seeming both inevitable and surprising, are characteristic of Anderson’s poems. This effect can be emphasized by rhyme, as in “Sea Language of Palamedes,” in which the Greek imagines fleeing Earth’s demands for his grandfather Poseidon’s realm: “On a sea horse, I will ride the surf and breathe salt air. / Warriors, if you want to go to war, walk there.” The collection is deepened and complicated by several sequences in which figures address and respond to each other. Palamedes replies to Odysseus’ reluctance to leave Ithaca, not seeing his own danger to come: “Here you will rot like fruit in ripe manhood / While we write on the walls of Troy.” In his poems, Anderson beautifully considers the ghosts that haunt language.
A rich, thoughtful collection that generously breathes life into its ancient subject: very fine.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5245-2694-8
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sturdy, exuberant verse.
Like the demigod from which it takes its name, Defining Atlas is a durable, uplifting volume.
A strong current of self-affirmation, self-love, and self-confidence runs through this work, and readers will come away feeling their spirits improved. We feel some of this current in the clever “Limited”; Michaels takes the titular subject and turns it on its head: “I’m new, but I’m old / Not limited beyond my means and methods / But limited because I’m special / Special beyond the heavens and everything that surrounds me / That I’m among…limited.” Elsewhere in “From the ashes…I am,” he sings a hard-won song of renewal and rebirth: “I am victory in its rawest form / I am hope that never conform / I am the will, the drive, and the truth / I am like everyone, like you.” But Michaels does not hoard specialness or victory for himself; he wants it for his reader too, and in “Wake Up!” he urges us on toward a bright future: “There’s something good here for you / Your purpose can never be defined by just one blue / Your destiny awaits you.” Underpinning Michaels’ stirring message is a strong faith in God, whose presence infuses many of the poems here: “But I always thank God for the latter / For the strength and will it takes / Shines so bright / Shines so right.” Michaels often adopts a loose scheme of rhyming couplets, and this decision leads to one of the book’s few weaknesses. Too often, the poet picks awkward or odd pairings; e.g., “And if I could become a perfect saint / I would make believers out of the ones who say they ain’t” and the “you/blue” couplet mentioned above. But such missteps are infrequent, and they don’t dim the warm light that emanates from Michaels’ fine volume.
Sturdy, exuberant verse.Pub Date: March 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-4785-8
Page Count: 106
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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