 The Spoon River Poetry Review 4240 English Dept. Illinois State University Normal IL 61790-4240 UK ISSN 0738-8993 $10 [$13.50 Canada] Subscription: 2 issues $15 [individuals; $18 institutions] visit The Spoon River Poetry Review's 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: 25th May 2005. |
Spoon River Poetry Review Vol. XXIX #2 | |
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Well-produced, classy-looking magazine with masses of poetry, including a number of prose poems. Despite this issue having a fair dose of competent and effective poems, there is also a smattering of obtuse and chant-like pieces, replete with lists and truncated syntax, that have an irritating mix of artful simplicity of tone and clever obscurity of meaning, like poetry is a code you have to break. Here is an example from a prose poem, OVERLOOKING THE RIVER, by Brigitte Byrd: What is really important she thinks when she walks through a crossroad and her hipbone sets her on the edge like a door. If there is chocolate powder why do they not eat oatmeal. She calls an old friend when the future scares them stiff from a desk.Another example is BENEDICTION by Kris Christensen: My husband whose arms are bridges of rescue His shoulders stones for borrowed tombs His back the chimney I lean against His back of lodgepole pine His back the crow's rusted voice and its nest in the black rock cliff My husband whose navel is the center of an orbit His hips the heart of a broken saint My husband whose thighs are bows for a fiddlePoems become a rhythmic chant, with a series of refrains and repetitions and half-sentences that never rise to any crescendo, basically a never-ending accumulation of lists, in this case of her husband's attributes, that presumably is supposed to echo some type of oral traditional poetry that has effect through intonation and rhythm. There are a few political pieces which seem slightly askew, speaking of obsessions that mean little to a non-American audience, for example two poems revealing still the deep imprint on the American pysche of Richard Milhous Nixon. On the other hand, Barbara Barg in a prose piece, NOVEMBER 2001, raves sympathetically against fundamentalism of all kinds: All these fundamentalist nuts, in Washington, in Europe, in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq. All these castrating crazed, completely irresponsible fanatics stoking the fires for World War III, and I'm the one in therapy. That's the world I live in.The smaller-scale poems work the best of all, as in JUST A MOMENT by Anita Boyle where the act of washing the dishes holds as much personal truth as any faith: The suds rinse down the drain like spiraling rainbows, creating in her kitchen an insignificant nebula. She believes she loves this even more than God.There is a piece from Gerald England, WHAT FATHER DID, with its memory of childhood and the confusion it was prone to in its exclusion from the adult world: I wasn't to know I cried but it was their laughter that hurtAnother evocatively recalled childhood scene (also with dad included) is from SUCKERS by Janet Goldberg: Out of film, my father drove off to the drugstore, always with me in tow. I remember my feet dangling, white lace socks, black shoes.Father-son relationships recur throughout; an effective prose piece by Bill Morgan, entitled MY FATHER'S CIGARETTES, recalls his father's death in 1963 at the age of fifty from cancer and later he himself stubbing out his last cigarette in 1991: when i had lived 3 days longer than his stump of life...a primitive animal such as a starfish he once taught me will grow a new identical limb if it loses one...its body just reaches out and inhabits the precise space left empty by the lossThe featured poet is Haki R. Madhubuti whose poems are accompanied by an interview. His work is gentle and approachable, and also rather political. All in all, a mass of poetry of varying quality, but which can throw up beautiful gems like this splendid piece, GREY HAIRS, by Luis Miguel Aguilar (translated by Kathleen Snodgrass): From the mirror A dust of years Has leapt onto my temples. |