 Möbius PO Box 7544 Talleyville DE 19803-0544 USA ISSN 1071-9865 $10 visit Möbius' website Before commenting on this review please read the FAQ page Home page Notes for publishers Want to be a reviewer? Anthologies. Books. Audio. Magazines. Software. Video. Artefacts. Web design by Gerald England This page last updated: 4th April 2005. |
Möbius Vol.18 #1 | |
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Möbius is as large as life, and twice as wholesome, with 191 poems in this issue. Editor Jean Hull Herman combines an assiduous attention to accuracy and detail, with a broad-minded approach to both form and subject matter. Despite its commendably international horizons, this magazine is most striking for the broad and sweeping view of contemporary writing in the U.S.A. which it presents. Unconcerned with fashion, or the fears of seeming too radical or too conservative, the editor seeks diverse styles of writing, viewpoints, and perhaps even quality among the poems.There is plenty of quality, within each of Möbius' loosely-grouped sections. A selection from the many poets represented gives a flavour. Much original wit and humour can be found, as in the lengthy piece THE HARBRACE COLLEGE HANDBOOK, where Sharon Carter has considerable fun satirizing a grammatical handbook. Each term that might have appeared in the original is picked up and thrown around with vigour. For example: Are relative pronouns for or against families? A heroic couplet is where two men have sex and fight over the breakfast tea.The writer's irrepressible energy is refreshing, and the broader verve of many contributors leads to surprises on most pages. At 65 lines, Peggy C. Hall's extraordinary CANZONE: IN CASE OF BEARS ripples with multiple observations and scenarios involving the word 'bear'. On the one hand Hall clearly demonstrates that the word does not necessarily refer to the animal: Yellowstone Park — I can hardly bear To contemplate each wild thing there.The larger impetus behind the poem is the statement buffaloes can never be bears,a deliberately deceptive piece of triteness extracted from a walk where: . buffaloes that bear heavy shawls like stocky Sherpa bear- ers.Subsequently, Hall dives into a series of connected observations about anything from Alice in Wonderland to the death of J.F.K. These are punctuated by rhetorical questions, and the bigger and underlying enquiry: what is identity anyway?Marty Walsh takes the reader on another enticing and fantastical journey in WHITMAN AT THE CROSSROADS, where the writer is imagined to have observed the minutiae of ordinary American life from a better (or at least a higher) place. What he sees is an animated version of the humdrum: . I heard America revving, revving — a motorcycle blatting — reverberant — urgent somewhere a boom box — far off a siren — the car behind me honking, honking.Many of the writers represented here have a natural affinity with sensory detail. We see places. We hear events. PIKA-DON, by Jonathan Barrett, gathers impressions of an acute sharpness to recreate a Japanese holocaust: She awoke to sharp pillows of glass, Burnt pieces of skin hanging down her arms like shirt sleeves.Deftly, the poem concludes with an incidental and evocative image — which could mutate into a haiku with little difficulty: On the other side a mass of driftwood littering the shore.The editor has a knack of spotting poems which are playfully serious, Claudette Bass's THE PHONE being on example. The personified machine is characterised as something sinister, obstructing communication with a lover: . disappointment is an enemy. Contact is sticky paper on shelves. Untouched, this plastic beast waits.The poem is a telling exercise in describing how slowly time can pass. Ellaraine Lockie's also mixes regret with wit, in the delightfully-entitled WHERE THE WANT WENT. Both sardonic and wistful, it's an exploration of desire, lost perhaps when it: . shreds from the sharp tongue of sarcasm, resentments souring the taste of spousal seduction.From outside the U.S.A., there are a number of enjoyable contributions, not least Alessio Zanelli's THE BOOK, an eerily lucid monologue, directed at someone close, who has become distanced by 'the book'. It stands for any number of other barriers, of course, but the poem's language and form are tightly controlled, prohibiting specifics, and completing the sense of a contemporary allegory. It must be expensive to send Möbius across the Atlantic, which is a pity. The magazine clearly has an extensive and lively North American catchment, but its catholic and sensitive tastes would provide much enjoyment beyond those shores. | ||
| reviewer: Will Daunt | ||
| Möbius Vol.18 #2 | ||
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A nicely edited and nicely produced A4 book containing 68 pages of poetry. The tone is one of jocularity. I still find the format of sectioning the poems under headings such as NATURE AS METAPHOR a little off-putting. There is a picture on the cover depicting the ever intriguing Moebius strip I. Published since 1982, the magazine has now been running successful for a long time. This issue features poets from a variety of areas, mostly in America, but also including (in this issue) Russia and Italy. It is a magazine to cheer up a gloomy day. Many poems have some sort of end rhyme scheme, as expected for fun poems. Some poems have a more serious note with eloquent rhyme. Catherine Moller employs repetition skilfully in AN OLD MAN WAITING: He watches his quiet family, scattered across his living room table, till their eyes shift and soften towards him, so he can walk back into those pictures. Scattered across his farmhouse in Glambaer his family waits for him to walk through those pictures into the Great Fog.Moller's poem is tight and well handled. The subject matter is death and this is dealt with without falling into the pit of sentimentality. There is a wide range of subjects in this issue, including boat races Ruth Holzer's poem is called DRAGON BOAT RACES and finishes with: as slipping in second, the Snapdragons wave. Miarsis Dragons drop out of the race, leaving Tub Warriors and Nothin' Dragon tied for third place. Nearing the end, drums quicken the pace and beat spirit into numb muscles still stroking like fury.A light-hearted, enjoyable coffee-time read. | ||
| reviewer: Doreen King | ||
| Möbius Vol.19 #1 | ||
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A möbius strip is an object with one edge and one side. Put your finger on it and trace it all round and you always get back to where you started: there are no loose ends. It's much the same with this magazine. All neat and tidy, but not leading anywhere new. Quantitatively Möbius is a substantial magazine, with 72 almost A4-sized pages containing 196 poems by 135 authors (whether this allows for the fact that a poem by Vladimir Orlov from Russia is printed twice, on pages 7 and 19, I have not checked). Most of the poets are from the USA, with a few from other parts of the world. The prosody is pretty free, though there are some attempts at sonnets and villanelles. A few of the poets are well known in small magazines or on the web. Some of the poets have memorable names like Vappu Eerola Labbaci from the United Arab Emirates or Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal from California. The style ranges from the serious examination of important issues to the trivial limerick. However, there is a welcome amount of humour in even the non-trivial poems. The magazine is divided into titled sections, though I could not see much connection between the titles and their respective poems. Apart from this, the magazine is excellently produced, with a solid organisation behind it which has successfully published it since 1982. Not many poetry magazines have a life as long as this. Unfortunately I found it difficult to be as enthusiastic about the poems. Not one struck me as particularly arresting. There was a lack of the profound insight or the hair-raising image. To me the magazine read like the class anthology at the end of a creative writing course. In evidence I exhibit the opening lines of eight poems: Poem's like a coot, lobed toes, globed fruit. Spite of MacLeish, kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk, not mute. Made to eat our words with weak apologies on waste paper plates. Bumped from their resting state, light fancies whirl in wilder curves, strain from the pull of a stable core. Crackpot instances of mindless fun used to be pursuant only to our imaginations — the diction of our lives painted with a colored hand. I hated to go down to fetch fruit from the basement, the rough cave dug under the house I grew up in. Cupid, why did you not heed my warning to let me be? Your arrow has stung me stupid again. All day mist hangs low like a clothesline you have to duck under . . . A part of the body leaves you In that surgery of the lungs that is voice, Array of spit-word, pain fleeing.I could quote more, but these eight openings were not chosen at random. They are in fact rather more quotable than the average. Of course, if any reader responds to them with more excitement than I can muster, I shall be delighted. I am always open to persuasion, though not easily, I fear, when it comes to HONOR THE NAMES by Donald Tuthill of Florida. This is a jingoistic ballad bemoaning the fact that the young of America know nothing of "the Bulge, the Blitz, Corregidor, and Bataan," and have forgotten the names of the American heroes who won World War II. Yes, they were ordinary men, the heroes of our day. The Bataan Death March was only one of the stops along the way. Our friends the Brits survived the Blitz, and we won the war at sea. We won at the Bulge and our troops went on to win ultimate victory.Now I am all for remembering those who gave their lives in the fight against fascism. But Mr Tuthill ought to be aware that when his friends "the Brits survived the Blitz," the USA was not in the war. Surviving the Blitz is the only role he gives "the Brits" in the whole war, which seems a bit unfair (I could add an essay here on the role of the cavity magnetron, a British invention, in the Battle of Britain and in the war at sea against the U-boats). And in claiming that it was the USA that defeated Germany and Japan, Mr Tuthill should be more careful. True, the USA played the major role is stopping and reversing the Japanese expansion, but the Chinese, the Indian and the Australian forces all played a part. As for the war in Europe, there was a good deal more to it than the Battle of the Bulge. Mr Tuthill should be reminded that it was the Red (Soviet) Army that withstood the greatest thrust of the Nazi war machine, and the Red Army would have eventually cleared the Germans out of Europe unaided if there had been no second front. Such unthinking glorification of the USA in the context of historical ignorance isn't good for poetry — or anything else. It explains something of the European suspicion of its trans-Atlantic neighbour. But back to the poetry. Editor looks for poetic diction. Editor has a sense of humor. Editor expects correct spelling and punctuation,say the guidelines for submission, cryptically but emphatically. Excellent (though does anyone agree what the correct punctuation for poetry is?) I hope Editor keeps up the good work. But I also hope contributors provide Editor with poetry that displays more sparkle and scintillation than is evident in this issue of Möbius. | ||
| reviewer: Andrew Belsey |