Blind Items
by Dina Del Bucchia
London, ON: Insomiac, 2014
$17, pp. 112
The Physics of Allowable Sway
by Marilyn Lerch
Devon Avenue Poetry Books, 2013
Everyday is, truly, International Women’s Day. In appropriate solidarity, then, we should read verse collections by Dina Del Bucchia of Vancouver, B.C., and Marilyn Lerch of Sackville, N.B. But we should read these poets, not because of their sex alone, but because they are artists of distinction.
Del Bucchia’s second book is Blind Items. Strikingly, almost every poem is dedicated to amour with a celeb, from George Clooney to Meryl Streep. Buying into these star-struck-voiced monologues is like eyeballing the cover of National Enquirer. The freaks and faults of the hyper-famous always seem glossy and airbrushed. Anyway, “buying into” is a keener act than “suspending disbelief” in approaching Del Bucchia’s poems. She applies to poetry Andy Warhol’s savvy investment in the commercial appeal of the mass-produced star, whether Marilyn or Mao. Del Bucchia advises, in her Acknowledgments, “Please don’t be weirded out by all the weird stuff in this book.” Mind that.
“Lindsay Lohan” presents the anonymous speaker loving L.L. in the back of a pickup truck. “She is so Hollywood, she doesn’t even understand how real this is….” “R. Kelly” needs one line: “I wake up salty and crusted with cocaine.” Describing her hook-up with “Daniel Radcliffe,” “a malnourished chinchilla,” the speaker feels, “Round milk teeth nip my throat…. He looks down at me, and I wriggle, arch, force a moan. Words stream out of his mouth…. One, two, bloody hell, three….” “Bill Cosby” was written before the entertainer’s alleged misdeeds became tabloid fodder. Del Bucchia’s imagery is prophetic: “I never imagined I’d be tangled in his vibrant abstract of acrylic, that I’d rise from his bed, slip the sweater over my skin, run down for a pint of ice cream.” “How easy it was to instigate…. His stilted strut and his exasperation, his scotch-cigar breath on my skin…. I’ve always been the same age as his youngest TV daughter.”
Del Bucchia’s voyeuristic prose poems startle, especially if one imagines that her “Leonard Cohen” is Leonard Cohen. Ditto for her “Angelina Jolie” and “Britney Spears,” whose “cracked manicure grabs for my belt.” Will these poems still shock once their many A-list subjects pass through rehab to become has-beens? We’ll see. For now, Del Bucchia dredges artfully the same pop-culture detritus mined so adroitly by Montreal’s David McGimpsey.
Marilyn Lerch is a thoughtful, Zen-tutored poet. Read her third collection, The Physics of Allowable Sway. She looks far beyond “now” to ponder the fate of humanity and our planet. Her book is self-published , but merits review because it is very good; its quality arises from the poet’s simple commitment to speaking her truth, in her voice, without worrying about moralists, politicos, meddlers, and preachers. Her style conjoins Walt Whitman’s big-tent humanism and Margaret Avison’s spiritual-informed, nature observation.
Lerch is a superbly quotable poet: “So much goes on without our knowing, / perhaps a new world without us / in the making….” There’s a hint of Blake in such wisdom—and just as much expansive applicability. In “Barrachois Bay,” closer to home, she writes deftly of “an unhindered sun horizon to horizon,” “how light quickens everything to more than itself,” and then of the bay, “almost asleep, / the moon up and lying on the water….” The poem ends, “All sleeping now, under the moon’s traveling light that is / older than the old Mi’kmaq word, / Takumegooch, / where two waters meet.” The observation is a meditation.
“Once I Dreamed” is a powerful poem that deserves instant anthologization: “Once I dreamed / a slow, determined climb to bedrooms where, / one by one, I slew the family, / then from the bottom of the darkened stairs, turned and saw / processing down, in single file, / all the dead to be slain again.” The poem continues: “All my life I wanted to be good, / but killed and killed and bled and bled, / for letting go the wounds was death.” Lerch is a consummate poet, really, and must not be disregarded. Hear these last lines of the book: “You / whoever finds this, / if you still can, / feel the feeling of // how much we loved / Life.”
Blue Sonoma
by Jane Munro
London, ON: Brick Books, 2015
$20, pp. 79
24 Poems
by Marco Fazzini
USA: CreateSpace, 2014
$14, pp. 58
Jane Munro’s sixth collection, Blue Sonoma , is a celebration of poetry. A B.C. poet, Munro projects a mix of Thomas Merton nature-observation-plus-spiritual-insight plus a John Thompson-style ghazal structure, though hers are not as gritty as his. Munro’s specialty is a pointillist examination of nature, then a startling juxtaposition or contrast, from which a poignant aphorism should arise—implicitly, discreetly, as in the works of classical Chinese poets.
The contrasts between lyrical detail and grisly or gruesome context can be effectively jarring: “Mullions and muntins: true divided lights. Windows / lit from inside cast rhomboids on the roof…. // A nurse probed the wound bed with a steel skewer. / Maggots cleaned out the abscess, then ate each other.” Romance and pain collide in these lines too: “Hands that bled from the thorns. My friend’s / mother’s wedding bouquet of hawthorn blossoms.” Munro’s bittersweet vision is most intense in a sequence of poems for an “old man,” a beloved spouse, now suffering dementia: He’s like “A black bear / out in the rain / on Blueberry Flats…. // Tell me, can a soul / fatten up for winter?”
Love is tests, constant tests, or so Munro attests: “If you want to come visit, / I’ll invite you. // My old man won’t know / the difference / between you and billy-be-damned…. // Roar up the drive. Spit gravel. Blow your horn. // I am gnawing through myself.” Is the poem an invitation to soothe-my-troubles adultery or is it merely the cry of angst of a loving wife brought to endure the chastity of being a caring nurse, of engaging in repetitious parley that seems to hollow out her soul?
There’s a religious sensibility here—the Taoism of the Chinese poets, the Catholicism of Merton, the Zen calm that happens as “The singing [finally heard] when we stopped to listen. I like Munro’s riposte to Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “Old woman, Eros can arise / and go now beyond bean rows / and the hive for the honey bee…. // It’s only a cabin I’ve built here.” Munro’s title poem stands out for its unflinching study of a car accident: “the slumped driver silhouetted by my lights– / only the two of us on the road.” Munro is a fine poet, elegant in diction, gracious in tone. Perhaps now she needs a more distinctive style, to stand out from the general chorus of Anglo-Canadian poets, harmonizing way too much.
Marco Fazzini’s book, 24 Poems, exhibits a love of jazz. In his 24 Poems, the Italian impresario, poet, Venetian English professor, and translator, Marco Fazzini offers two-dozen poems supported by beautiful, nature-oriented, colour photographs by Paula Sweet. The book couples the original Italian verses with English translations (on one occasion, the translation process is reversed).
Scottish poet Douglas Dunn introduces the volume with the note that Fazzini “offers a quieter and more meditative lyricism than many Anglophonic readers may be used to in a time of public declamation.” That may be, but to my ears Fazzini echoes the Rimbaud of “Le Bateau Ivre”: “That year, I started / laughing at us, at the corals / of our lives, atolls fringed / daily, with fresh scum….” The relationship between Fazzini and Rimbaud is simple: Both are voyagers. Hear Fazzini: “desire / is infatuated by horizons.”
So, Fazzini considers the Shetland coast in violent imagery: “There was a wave that never slept— / thief and assassin…. / It ground its teeth along the shoreline. / I listened as it crushed the debris / and wreckage….” Another poem offers these Final Destination lines: “I go tomorrow to another harbour / where previously I’d been, where I am already dead.” Elsewhere, the speaker allows himself to drift, carried along, “with a load of mistakes, / an urgent trembling / in my bones, tears, and a full / wineskin smiling in the hold.” I’m reminded of Rimbaud, again, but also of Otis Redding and his elegiac song, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” “Alla Poesia” tells us, one comes to poetry, “through the chanting of a goddess, / who, above the dark page, / sings, ‘good morning’ / out loud to the stars.” That’s jazz!
Small Things Left Behind
by Ella Zeltserman
Edmonton: U of A Press, 2014
$19.95, pp. 88
Rotten Perfect Mouth
by Eva H.D.
Tooronto, ON: Mansfield Press, 2015
$17, pp. 80
Time to read Ella Zeltserman’s debut book, Small Things Left Behind. These are autobiographical poems about tyranny, escape, immigration, and, nostalgia. Born Jewish in the Soviet Union, a nation which crushed Nazi Germany, but also persecuted Jews, Zeltserman voices complex feelings toward the USSR. Her lyrics speak to the joys of liberation by emigration, but also sorrowful remembrance of things past. Her elegiac elements gain pathos by being plain: “I was born after Stalin’s death. / I grew up during Brezhnev’s vegetarian times. / I was so lucky.” Thus, “I missed being shot / in blood-stained prison basements, / having my remains dumped / into an unmarked grave.” A last photo session with parents ends, “All of a sudden … my mother gets pale / —You are never coming home again— / She drops into a chair like a wounded bird.”
Zeltserman catalogues what could be carried into “Freedom”: soap, precious lengths of home-cut silk, a hundred useless rubles; then notes the wondrous discovery of watermelon—“The pink sugary heaven, sparkling like stars”—in Italy and also of “emerald green” grass “in the middle of a scorching Roman august.” Landing in Edmonton, in 1980, Zeltserman adjusts to Canadian winter, then “the hot days [coming] at once,” and to English, until one day, she realizes that, returning to the city, she is, “coming home: These words startle you. You surprise yourself.”
Upon her Canadianization, however, the poet rediscovers familial memories of The Great Patriotic War (the Russian term for WWII), and the meaningful moments of childhood. Next, her lyrics exhale the ubi-sunt tones, the notes of Psalm 137. “The military decorations glimmer / on the civilian jackets of old men and women / the wood around bursts with new life / green tender leaves unfurl / like the red flags we carry….” In “mirage,” she meditates: “House—a big open umbrella. My ambiguity / hides inside….” Perhaps “ambivalence” is a better word than “ambiguity”? No matter: Zeltserman is a poet who allows herself to feel torn, even if her new life is better than the old, Canada superior to Russia. Her Muse is Memory and the result is poignant. Anyone who has ever felt displaced, or alienated, will feel at home in these poems.
Eva H.D.’s first book of verse is Rotten Perfect Mouth. Just beginning as a poet, her style is as aggressively ironic as Zeltserman’s is wisely reflective. Eva aligns herself with a 1970s/80s punk aesthetic. Just as singer Declan McManus renamed himself for his idols, “Elvis Costello,” so does Eva give a shout out to a great precursor, for her initials “H.D.” recall the signature of 20th-century U.S. poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961).
“H.D.,” in Eva’s case, stands for Haralambidis-Doherty. Her decision to reduce her surname to the initial letters winks at literary history. How does Eva H.D. write? Playfully, gamely: She understands that poetry can be—and can do—anything. “I am piling bricks in the Sahara. / When I am done, I will step to one side and say, / What desert?” A poem referencing “Canadiana” begins, “The wind is going a hundred / miles an hour, mewling / in the chimney like a vodka-thin drunk.” “Teenage Stuff Forever”—definitely a punk title—tells us, “You can sit on the road in the perfect summer dark / and listen to a married man rail against the prison / he has built for himself.”
The constant effect of these poems is surprise bordering on surrealism: “Give the girl October, please: her / aching knees, the muscle of scrambled / mind need rest, cool bricks & alleyways, steel- / coloured air….” E.H.D. is Greek in heritage, so maybe she’s attuned to the surrealism of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909-90) as much as she is to the Hellenic imagism of the first “H.D.” Her oddity is moving: “I want to make a neat assortment of my life / like a spice store / everything in its place…. // Maybe some lost soul [would come], inquiring after mutton / or oxtail. / I would shake my head. / This is a spice store, I would tell them, / and point them down the road, to the butcher’s.”
