Poetry Book Reviews by Ralph Haselmann Jr.
Lucid Moon Poetry Website (Oct/Nov/Dec 2000)

American Minotaur and The Sane Man Speaks, poetry books by Leonard J. Cirino. 2000, 66 pages, $9 Cedar Hill Publications, 3722 Hwy 8 West, Mena, AR 71953 and 2000, 100 pages, $10 from Anabasis, Oysterville, WA 98641-0216. Leonard J. Cirino writes classical verse such as sonnets, haiku and free verse in a terse, powerful, gripping manner. He talks about political and environmental issues, about the self wasting away, and unbearable lightness of being. His poems are harrowing and effective. Poem On The Morning Before The 30th Anniversary Of My Daughter's Death from The Sane Man Speaks reads: "A long morning walk deep into the other opens the window with no exit. There he finds a man paralyzed by fear, one child dancing in Heaven. Because the journey is long he takes off his cap. Rests by the side of the pond. He observes snow falling in large petals, realizes the holy brow of the hill stunned in wonder. When he kindles the light in his dark cabin he feels the pain of living twice in the same breath has let the trees bloom once more and he thinks, As long as the candles speak what they mean, I will listen and strive to be kind." A beautiful tribute to his lost child. The Taste Of The Sun Breaking Down from American Minotaur reads: "Autumn arrives. I bite a pear rich with the tastes of sun and frost, broken open, ripe with heat, and fill my throat with lust. The fruit bursts with water, soil, juice so sweet I think, life begins in the orchard, dreaming alone and one with God." Succulent prose, you can almost taste the fruit in this poem. Leonard is blessed with the talent of the old school, but his poetry is remarkably modern and powerful. These are some of the best poems I read this month.

The Angel Of Death: O Anjo Da Morte Poetry chapbook by Hugh Fox. 2000, 34 pages, $4 from Ibbetson Street Press, 33 Ibbetson Street, Somerville, MA 02143. This is a mind-numbing collection of poems dealing with deaths from cancer and Aids, trying to reach long lost friends for one last get-together before they die, trying to cheat death and life-time (dasein). Poem 12 in Part II reads "Hanging on through surgery and chemotherapy, after having always said "When the quality of life degenerates, I'm gone…morphine…or some more accessible substitute," and when IT comes, beating its wings suffocatingly around you, and you fall into the usual routine, hang on to the old oak woodwork and the oak staircase, the willow and the apple tree in the backyard, the way the whole landscape gloriously curves and swells and dips, sitting and just being, the right chair in the right wind, sucking on the dark, glorying in the rain, leaf-fall, snow, as if this were your first day on Planet-X, creating a phone-web reality, holding grandchildren, trying to locate long lost friends, as if you were rising, taking on flesh, solidifying, instead of falling, unfleshing, dissolving forever." The poems are fragmentary lists of ideas and things, as if the mind is wasting away with time. Well-done, worth a look.

Bitchslapped, Poetry chapbook by Catfish McDaris, artwork by Mike Tolento. 2000, 32 pages, $2 from Phony Lid Publications, PO box 2153, Rosemead, CA 91770. This collection has a rude feel, as if you are being bitchslapped while reading it! Some priceless funny shit from Catfish, and a hilarious centerpiece drawing by Mike Tolento of Mickey Mouse stuffing money up a politician's bum! Funniest is Bad Ass Smoke, about a stoner who unwittingly uses his roommate's winning lottery ticket to roll a doobie.

Death And Fame 1993-1997, Cosmopolitan Greetings 1986-1992 and White Shroud 1980-1985. Poetry books by Allen Ginsberg. 125+ pages each, paperback, around $13 each available from your local bookstore or by special order from HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, NY NY 10022, phone 1-800-331-3761. These are the last gasps of Allen Ginsberg's output, long after his prime. Only 2-3 memorable poems in each collection, including Hum Bom, Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke), and Cia Dope Calypso from Cosmopolitan Greetings, and Death and Fame and Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgia) from Death and Fame. Here Ginsberg is in rare form waxing on political and social issues and personal nostalgia, but the goods are few and far in between. Better to forget these last three collections and soak up Collected Poems 1949-1980 which includes the monumental Howl, America and Kaddish among other visionary powerful epics. These were works that changed the poetry scene forever and launched the Beat Generation.

Dog, Poetry book by Michael McIrvin, 1997, 66 pages, $9.95, Pygmy Forest Press, P.O. Box 7097, Eureka, CA 95502. This is a wildly unpredictable and inventive collection of poems told in the story of a dog in human form that roams the alleyways rife with hookers, searching for God and meaning to his life. His great grandmother was a Native American Indian and was raped by the white man. The novel is told with the hallucinatory mystical language of the Native American Indians and poetic descriptions that delight and surprise. Dog And The Virtual Real reads in part: "At Dog's end of the bar hangs his nightmare given form, in an anonymous shamaness' vision of overburdened being, of our weary selves encoded, alternating current, yin and yang bottled to electric purity. Abdication of the animal at light speed. Benevolent addiction in a bottomless digital box. Maybe, thinks Dog, flesh has become anachronism, its silly selfish demands at last more than we can stand. No eating, fucking, dreams rising out of frosted libidinous ponds. Might be blessing. No lament rocked slow over plains of desire. No dancer, but pulsating particles dancing…Maybe to evolve is to dissolve to shifting punk strands of energy within what we have made . Maybe to pray is to transubstantiate to uncritical wave, bouncing…Maybe, frequency and velocity are transcendent essence of need… An ice cube explodes in a blind man's glass at the far end of the bar, throws amber sparks toward the sky like a holy man's gift…" This was a pretty creative collection of poetry, and I enjoyed it immensely. I don't know what it all means, but sure reads well!

Haiku Guy, novel by David G. Lanoue, 2000, 152 pages, $14.95, Red Moon Press, P.O. Box 2461, Winchester, VA 22604-1661. This is a very clever novel about a guy who is writing a novel about Japanese haiku poets. The novel darts back and forth between present day and centuries ago, in a mystical, funny, stand-up comic Flaubert way. The main character, Buck-Teeth, is a not so bright character who is learning how to write haiku from a master, Cup-Of-Tea. So far, Cup-Of-Tea's greatest haiku is the famous "Little snail/inch by inch/climb Mt. Fuji!" Buck-Teeth writes okay haikus but Cup-Of-Tea never comments on them, he just looks disdainfully at Buck-Teeth. One of Buck-Teeth's less innocuous haiku is "In the dead cat's eyes/harvest/moons". A Lord Kaga enters the picture and also wants to learn how to write haiku and is smitten with a woman. In the throws of love he writes 99 love haikus, all of which Cup-Of-Tea declines comment on. Finally, tired, Lord Kaga musters up "The old fart / stacks the winter / kindling" to which Cup-Of-Tea smiles and approves of! The humour here is witty and welcome. The novel is told in a colorfully descriptive way and is a real page-turner. The author's friends in his writing group visit the ancient time of the Japanese poets to enjoy a festival and then come back in time to write the three versions of the last chapter. It all works to clever comic effect. Along the way we learn lessons in how to write and edit haiku, and some Zen proverbs and life lessons. The author visits modern day Japan to try to find where Cup-Of-Tea, Lord Kaga and Buck-Teeth used to live, to no avail. I found myself transfixed by the tale the author spun, how he wove together different time-frames.
This book works on many levels, first as a comic novel, second as a haiku primer, and third as a historical piece. The author breaks down the fourth wall in an amusing way and tells us halfway through the novel how his dad read the first chapter of this work in progress and says, "Why don't you write about Richard Nixon? We can never have too many books about Nixon!" The author seems to be familiar with many Japanese customs. Cup-Of-Tea, Buck-Teeth, and three other students have a Forgetting-The-Year party on December 31st: "Buck-Teeth tried to follow Mido's advice, but did not go out of his "right mind" the night of the Forgetting-the-Year Party. After three cups of warm sake, irresistible waves of sleepiness overcame him. By the time Mido leaned over the writing table to refill the young poet's cup, Buck-Teeth was slumped forward head cradled in his arms, deep in a delicious slumber. After so many nights tossing and turning to the tiny comings and goings of the mice, Buck-Teeth finally slept; would sleep all that night and much of the next day. He would wake up late on New Year's afternoon and rise a new man." Then a funny scene occurs when Cup-Of-Tea and his other three students write a haiku in the snow with their pee, and only one of them can complete the haiku because they run out of fuel! I really dug Haiku Guy by David G. Lanoue and will revisit it often.

Journeyman, poetry book by Stephen Thomas. 1997, 128 pages, $15 to Tsunami, Inc., PO Box 100, Walla Walla WA 99362-0033. I hate to be brutally honest, but I found this collection of poetry to be uneven, listless and dull, little juice or passion in the poems. Time and time again I was led on an achingly dull path where I became lost in the morass. Sea Mind/Shore Mind reads: "Sorting the same things over again: hardware, lumber, tools, parts: I find new categories new adhesions. Shift. Sift. Drift." Ho-hum. Occasionally, a good poem crops up but they are few and far between. The last poem, Stars, is what the entire book should have been like: "i. The deeper night they burn the brightlier. On what is not themselves they shed no light. Of nothing they show more clearly as among them stand the parchments dark and emptinesses. ii. Here's where fancy paints his most cerebral tales. Highways of spilled milk unicycling animals ursine ladles fishless scales Sky is not a picture mind can otherwise hold. Sky is piercing nonsense, arrows, spear points, blades. iii. How we enter outward balancing envy's beam, the gymnasium of desire. Naked, we dream of standing alone where there's nothing to breathe." Now that's an intriguing thought, the other poems should have captured my imagination as well. A mixed bag.

Lost River Mountain, poetry book by Charles Potts. 1999, 99 pages, paperback, $13 to Blue Begonia Press, 225 S. 15th Ave., Yakima, WA 98902-3821. Charles Potts is a cerebral thinker with a sharp mind. In Lost River Mountain he waxes nostalgic about family, roots, the rivers and valley of his home, and politics. Idaho Before English reads: "Idaho before English was no Neolithic picnic. Shortly after Lewis and Clark penetrated Lemhi, George Drewyer shot a deer. The starving Shoshonis appalled Captain Lewis by scarfing up its guts hot and raw. Idaho after English putters along in the Pleistocene, suffering the fate of all acquisitions: The wild game exterminated The minerals extracted The land surveyed The water polluted The soil vitiated The desert radioactivated The children semi-educated The wolves howl in court with their own pack of lawyers." You can feel Pott's pain, to sound Clintonish. Potts ends the book with a beautiful elegy for all that has been lost in No Where: " When I go back to places I used to be trying to make sense of the distance between the same place I've sometimes been to more than twice, I notice what's not there anymore, dead friends, old barns, spaces that were once filled by buildings long since knocked apart. The looming Idaho Mountains lock the Lost River landscape in with rock, rock and stone. I have to keep moving. There's no back to go to, no where here to get." Potts combines a sense of nostalgia for place and time with a sharp political criticism and a humorous bent on life. A fine read throughout. Nice rustic cover painting and chapter photos by Robert McNealy.

Outside The School Of Theology, poetry book by Teri Zipf, 1997, 72 pages, $10 to Tsunami, Inc., PO Box 100, Walla Walla, WA 99362-0033. This is a tightly constructed collection of crisply detailed poems rich in imagery. There is a sense of joy, wanderlust and lust coming through the poems in this book. The author is lonely and alone under the stars. Why Mormons Think They're Special reads: "Last summer I drove to Arizona as if I was trying to find my way home. Slept by the side of the road, drew pictures in the dust--a simple highway life. Sleeping bag, coffeepot, ice chest. Toothbrush, washcloth, comb. In Utah I could understand why Mormons think they're special. I would too, if god gave me a country where angels and gargoyles decorate arches as graceful as Chartres. And no rose window could compare colors with the fractured landscape. Red rock, green pine, blue sky deeper than pain. I decided to angle into Colorado, dig around for the root of America. The night before Mesa Verde I slept at the foot of a mountain outlined in stars. All that country I pulled around me and wore like a ceremonial dress. I wanted it the way I want food or sex. Sometimes new landscapes satisfy desires I didn't know I had. Maybe I was looking for God or a way out, or a way into the grace of cliff dwellings secured by mud and faith between earth and heaven." Some brilliant descriptions in there, such as "blue sky deeper than pain" and "all that country I pulled around me and wore like a ceremonial dress". A 1998 William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award Winner, this was a very enjoyable book. Teri Zipf has a keen eye for detail, and I'd like to read more of her work.

The Strain Of Healing: 21 Vietnam Poems by Ben Wilensky. Poetry chapbook by Ben Wilensky, 2000, 24 pages, $8 to Pygmy Forest Press, P.O. Box 7097, Eureka, CA 95502. This is a gruesome, powerful, gripping collection of Vietnam War poems by Ben Wilensky. The poems leave nothing to the imagination, with scenes of rape, soldiers' rotting flesh, bodies blown apart by war. No other dehumanizing event in the 20th century save the Holocaust in the 1930's and 1940's has had as much effect on our national conscience as the Vietnam War in the 1960's. This was the first war to be brought into our living rooms in living color, bloodshed and mayhem night after night until a younger generation rose up against the war in protest. Here, Wilensky lets his tortured memories fly like ash from a burning pyre, scattering this way and that, danger where they may land. Is This The Day I Eat My Gun? Reads: "Is this the day I eat my gun? The answer is a critical one. Do I open doors and greet the light, inhale the heat, the jungle rot, lie naked in the blinding sun, reshaping Vietnam martyrdom? Do I bend a knee to cancerous pain and end the fight? Certain wounds never heal. Certain crimes reveal baseness in my skull. Breathing in and breathing out exhausts my brain. When I lift a lid to urinate, the piss is bloody and the blood is stale. What will they call me if I suck this gun? Slide a bullet up the spout, only one. No one to punish. No one to blame. No words to shout. Life is done. The string's played out. Without the rage, the soul is gone. Without the soul, the will is gone. So load it, cock it, aim it right between the eyes. Slip it softly between the lips so that nothing breaks. Push it in. Shove it in towards the roof of the mouth, back of the head, top of the world. Boundaries are blurring from the sweat. Throat is dry and the hands are wet. My veins are pounding like a bleeding heart." Powerful stuff, suicidal thoughts and anger that sears the brain. This is an important collection of work, our leaders need to read this so that we never have war again.

This House, poetry book by Jim Bodeen, with photos by Rob Prout. 1997, 236 pages, paperback, $15 to Tsunami, Inc., PO Box 100, Walla Walla, WA 99362-0033. This is a strong collection of poems centering around family, cooking, music, dreams and the goings on around the author's house. The book has a frenetic energy, and the poems are told in rich detail with many things going on at once, almost like a stream of conscience diary journal or an internal conversation with oneself. A passage from Book Seven reads: "I take the pork chops and a plate of tropical fruit leftover from Karen's party. A man says we pay for any meat, we don't kill ourselves. Any point of view that leaves out our cruelty sees a mirage. This morning promises only long solos of Coltrane. I do get it. The sheets of sounds, the music arriving on multiple levels, the man standing and breathing, playing for what comes up, settling into one river of ascending or descending sound. I pour juice from the pineapple and mango onto the pork chops, squeeze lime, and add garlic. The music's coming all the time. I have been released from good and evil. From seeking justice. There's more passion now. I feel where Coltrane's trying to go. I'll cook these pork chops slow, in wood smoke. The smoke drifts through the garden mixing with the saxophone. I am pruning in the roses. The long stems from the spent blossoms offer their throats. Flowers know. The knife's blade is clean. I get back in the way that I take. I am being watched while I cut." There is a richness of spirit, Spanish heritage and culture here that makes this an irresistible read. The cover photographs by Rob Prout are beautiful too, rich blue peeling paint against a black cover background. The cover gives you a feel for what lies inside. Mi Casa Su Casa. A fine read altogether.

Women Of The Beat Generation, Biographies by Brenda Knight, with a foreword by Anne Waldman and an afterword by Ann Charters. 1996, paperback, $14.95, 368 pages. Available at your local bookstore or by special order from Conari Press, 2550 Ninth Street, Suite 101, Berkeley, California 94710, TEL 800-685-9595, FAX 510-649-7190, E-Mail Conaripub@aol.com. This is a terrific collection of chapter-length biographies of women of the Beat Generation, including sections on Helen Adam, Jane Bowles, Ilse Klapper, Madeline Gleason, Josephine Miles, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, Vickie Russell, Helen Hinkle, Carolyn Cassady, LuAnne Henderson, Anne Murphy, Edie Parker Kerouac, Stella Stampas, Joan Haverty Kerouac, Gabrielle Kerouac, Eileen Kaufman, Mary Fabilli, Diane DiPrima, Barbara Guest, Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Billie Holiday, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Joanna McClure, Janine Pommy Vega, Elsie John, ruth weiss, Aya Tarlow, Mary Norbert Korte, Brenda Fraser, Lenore Kandel, Anne Waldman, Jan Kerouac, Natalie Jackson, Jay Defeo and Joan Brown. In July 1994 at the Naropa Institute tribute to Allen Ginsberg, a woman in the audience asked "Why are there so few women on this panel? Why are there so few women in this whole week's program? Why were there so few women among the Beat Writers?" To which Gregory Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says, "There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the 50's if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them." This book is indispensable for its accounts of the lives of dozens of Beat women writers, and includes poems or writings from each subject. I was amazed that Edie Parker Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac, Jack's wives, were unpublished until now. Also gripping were the sections on Eileen Kaufman, Bob Kaufman's wife, and Diane DiPrima. This book erases the image of Beat Women as just hangers-on in black tights smoking cigarettes, and gives them character and purpose, shedding light on their achievements. Thoroughly researched, with bibliographies at the end of the book. A gripping read and a joy throughout.

Please send poetry books, chapbooks, cds, broadsides or whatever for review to Ralph Haselmann Jr. at 67 Norma Road, Hampton, New Jersey 08827. I will review them within 1-2 months and send you a copy of the review. Publishers have my permission in advance to reprint any part of my reviews as long as they send me a copy of what it appears in. The reviews go out to several small press discussion lists, after which they will be archived on my Lucid Moon Poetry Website.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah,
Ralph Haselmann Jr.