15 December, 2022, The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.
At last, Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival on the plaza, inter-pandemic, in person! Even though October 15th, 2022 was unseasonably cool and cloudy; Joyce Jenkins, Kirk Lumpkin, and Richard Silberg hosted a stalwart audience and crew of poets, canopied publishers and bookstore tables in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park after a Strawberry Creek Walk; beginning with Aya De León reading “climate fiction,” The Barry Finnerty Trio playing marvelous jazz, rock and swing; and the We Are Nature Open Mic.
California Poets in the Schools K-12 students with poet-teachers Maureen Hurley & Fred Dodsworth were reading when I hustled over from the Community for a Cultural Civic Center info booth at the Farmers’ Market, and even got in a jitterbug or two with Jack Foley later on.
But schmoozing and the poetry was the real draw, and I hustled Three Raven Gate: Haiku & Other Poems by Brian R. Martens (Japanese brush painting illustrations by Michael Hofmann, McCaa Books, Santa Rosa), Cloudbreak by Heather Saunders Estes and Amtrak Starbucks Jazz on the Streets of Richmond by John Peterson (Poetic Matrix Press near Kernville, CA) and Old Snow, White Sun by Caroline Goodwin, first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, Jack Leg Press.org.
Three Raven Gate: Haiku and Other Poems by Brian Martens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For a first book of poetry, Three Raven Gate is wonderful. Often based in nature or seasons, imagistic rather than philosophical or narrative; with the traditional five, seven and five syllables; haiku in English help us stringently condense.
Meditative sharp focus is exactly what Martens seems to want: even his few directive or self-reflective poems have a mystery about them that springs to life as we read them and intuit their inner meaning, feeling, thought or situation.
Opportunity
Leap beyond hesitation
Opening flower
Some of his best are not even suggestive of a particular thought or even emotion, juxtaposing natural images and simple, sensory words that are nonetheless highly evocative. As poet Archibald McLeish said, “A poem should not mean but be,” and Martens has the knack.
Winter darkness hides
Within shells, water houses
Light buries deeper
I particularly admire the ease he has expressing The Big Emotions like faith, trust, joy and love without sappiness, sloganeering or falsehood; and describing the wonder of them in his long poems about observing his grandkids, reflecting on mythology and stories or in nature. Positive energies live within him that he finds signs of all around him. Lots of time spent reading good poetry and teaching California Poetry in the Schools, inspired by people like his parents, teachers and “cross-cultural anthropologist” Angeles Arrien.
Frankly, it seems difficult for some male poets nowadays to do that without self-ridicule, apology or off-the-deep-end woo-woo. We all want to go around describing Our Bad Day and the sh***y world to everybody so that others feel just as bad as we think we need to. Wendell Berry says, however, "Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." Martens concurs, attending to the miracles and smiles underfoot or under masks of various kinds that are all around us, too.
Spark within the soul
Creative in survival
Water quenches thirst
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My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In Heather Saunder Estes’ Cloudbreak, poetry is full of nature, movement, images and landscape; but is more narrative sketches and “occasional poems,” too. She has a very direct, comfortable, talky, first person style; beautifully crafted, in which she is very visible, audible and confident; even when expressing envy (“Giraffe”), “I Take the Subway to My Therapist,” atomic bomb fear in a Cold War childhood (“Cans of Baked Beans”) and a view in “San Francisco, 14th Avenue.”
The expanse of ocean
is in perpetual conversation
with the mutable sky.
Her inscription page says a lot in a little, “For Mom and Dad, Thank you for sharing your love of words, curiosity, rebellion, and justice.” And the last two lines of “Elegy for a Chief Executive Officer” after she was “37 years as a Planned Parenthood CEO,”
I was a culture warrior.
I came home alive.
Even the pensive poems are very grounded, self-assured and detailed; often going back and forth in time with the same thought, persons or place; but coming back to center between loss and curiosity to contentment, wholeness.
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Old Snow, White Sun by Caroline Goodwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Caroline Goodwin was loath to give me a copy of her book, made me swear that I would really review it, before her publicist would send me one. I’m glad she did. She was right. It is like a piece of gold.
It is a jewel box that Alaska gave her, a bloodbath, a pinnacle where v’s of geese fly in the shape of a book, where she can get away with lines like
But ah, but oh what bright lichen takes root
on my tongue. What sunbeams of muscle.
These are incantations, nightmares, poultices, daydreams of crepuscular sunrise lasting forever and twelve-line poems where she can earn saying “When I see your face,
I set foot in the street. The power of love.
The power of love.”
and she makes perfect sense. How does she do it? It’s mysterious, it’s intense, melodious and pagan-profane. Heavily botanic-biologic, she somehow seeps into the English-speaking cranium and slowly wends down the pulse-making stream. Does she chart it out? Does she dream it? Does she consult an oracle or Ouija board of her fully-lived life? I don’t know. It just works…
Horsetail makes a pleasant sound in the wind.
It is the sound of mending or of a small waterfall.
It is not the sound of the playground, or of the tetherball
chain. At the back of the house, the pallets,
the rusty nails, the place where my grandmother
sat down to rest in the rain.
Ah, poetry! Ah, LIFE!
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Poetry Flash online: https://poetryflash.org/
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