The CSPS Poetry Letter No. 2 of 2024 presented featured Poets Sharmagne Leland-St. John and Mary Torregrossa (published last week on this blog) as well as four book reviews reproduced below. The issue is illustrated with paintings by Polish composer, Hanna Kulenty (www.hannakulenty.com). More information is in the previous part of the Poetry Letter.
https://www.californiastatepoetrysociety.com/2024/07/poetry-letter-no-2-of-2024-summer-part.html
MICHAEL ESCOUBAS REVIEWS
ALIGNED WITH THE SKY BY KATHY LOHRUM COTTON
Aligned with the Sky: Poems by Kathy Lohrum Cotton. 77 Poems ~ 4 Illustrations ~ 99 pages poetry.deepwellbooks@gmail.com | ISBN 9798866560677
Recently, I called a plumber to the house to inspect a clogged basement drain. The technician explained to me that my basement drainage system was broken due to age. The couplings holding the pipes together had broken, and consequently, the pipes were out of alignment. After extensive excavation and great expense, I was assured that all the pipes were back in alignment, and henceforth, would be “clog-free.” This incident came to mind, as if on cue, the moment I retrieved Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s latest project from the mailbox. Your reviewer, like the clogged drain, finds himself in occasional need of a “life-inspection.” A revisiting of priorities, a spiritual “sit-down” to take stock of life and life’s priorities. Aligned with the Sky, arrived at just such a moment.
The work is organized into four interrelated sections: “Aligned with the Sky” (20 poems), “Aligned with Each Other” (18 poems), “Aligned Within” (18 poems),” and “Aligned with Nature” (21 poems). Cotton’s original collage art, which introduces each major division, exercised my mind as I entered each new phase. By “interrelated” I mean that Cotton is not a slave to categories. There is an ease about her work. Subjects and emphases overlap, integrate, touch and go, then return.
Cotton’s cover art depicts, in miniature, the collection’s theme. A girl about 6 years of age is perched on the top step of a ladder. She wears a pilot’s leather headgear, holds a toy airplane as she embraces the vast blue sky. The girl (perhaps the poet herself) isn’t looking for some deep theological or scientific explanation about why things are the way they are. She inhabits a world, her world. She IS the sky. She IS the wind. She IS the billowing clouds and swaying grass.
Titles such as “Where Will You Take Me Now?” “The Heavens,” “Eclipse,” “Night Song,” and “Leaving Like a Star,” spoke to my inner-child:
Hands flung wide, I whirl and twirl,
a six-year-old toppling into
the green margin between
our Lithuanian neighbor’s fence
and Audubon Avenue. Dizzy drunk
on school vacation freedom,
I like sprawled face-up in wild grass,aligned with a wide blue expanse
crowded with cumulus clouds.
I don’t yet know cumulus
from cirrus or stratus,
but find shifting face-shapes
in the billowy clouds,
give them sky-people names,
and compose little rhymes
metered like Sunday School songs.
Such is the beginning
of my life as a poet
The best poets retain vestiges of childlike wonder. “The Heavens” reflects upon Sunday School lessons which depicted heaven in terms of “its mansions and gold-paved streets, / an ever-listening ear to every prayer, / the reunion of departed loved ones.” With that said, an adult Cotton avers, “a poet can still fall speechless / at the sight of / sunrise, sunset, starlight.”
In other poems such as “Rainclouds Over the City,” she shifts from “Today’s leaden sky is heavy / as Monday-morning traffic— / snarled and clogged” . . . to the rain beckoning “peach blossoms, open petals / of forsythia and blue violets.”
She prays:
So bless this weighted-blanketto the music of falling rain,
the percussion of thunder.
“Aligned with Each Other,” flows seamlessly into more complex personal relationships. “Connected” is Cotton’s welcoming poem:
to galaxies
Sky hinged
to Earth
Rivers looped
Sunlight braided
with clouds and windThe thread of you
in the fabric of me
Everything
connected.
Emotional and spiritual maturity are hallmarks for this poet. To write poetry, poets must protect their quiet time. They must love solitude. Some poets take this too far. For Cotton, however, I sense an down-to-earth life-balance. In “Frayed Edges,” Cotton touches on the complexities of marriage: “No page-turn / heralds a thirty-first night / of one month passing into / the first morning of the next.// And no gap / lies between my frayed seams / and yours. Our edges / are forever tangled together, / beyond unraveling.”
She is sensitive to moments spent with good friends. Such moments are indispensable, as attested to by the sonnet “Fragrant Day”:
From scent to heady scent, we three friends walk
together through a little candle shop,
inhaling tiny samples as we talk
of soy and beeswax, drip and jar. We stop
to breathe-in deeply old familiar scents.
Patchouli, cedar, lilac. Lemongrass,
verbena, lavender. Each represents
a time, a place: the stories we will pass
along
while strolling to another store.
We
breathe each other in—the fragrant blends
that
we had barely recognized before:
bouquet
of sisters, confidants, close friends.
The
mingled scent of us now fills each room
and
turns our simple day to sweet perfume.
Your reviewer has only superficially touched upon the treasures contained in Aligned with the Sky. The other sections: “Aligned Within” and “Aligned with Nature,” produced within me equal portions of inspirational wisdom and delight at Kathy Cotton’s mastery of poetic-craft. “Just Because” reveals the spirit of the whole:
Just because it’s today.
Just because a sun
I never touched
touched me
and a sky I couldn’t hold
held me
and a love I didn’t understand
understood me.
Just because
the sunand sky
and love
are free
I rejoice
~ Michael Escoubas
THE SHAPE OF WIND ON WATER BY ANN FOX CHANDONNET
The Shape of Wind on Water: New and Selected Poems by Ann Fox Chandonnet.73 Poems ~ 1 Essay ~ 204 pages | Loom Press | ISBN 978-0-931507-52-6
I remember with great fondness going on fishing trips with my Dad and brothers to Minnesota. (We flatlanders from Illinois have nowhere near the lake selections offered by our neighbor to the north.) Much to the consternation of my Dad, I was less concerned with catching fish than with the remarkable acrobatics of the natural world . . . the way the wind did magical things with water. I was enchanted by waves and whitecaps, swirls and curls, dips and dives that captured my fancy more than landing a three-pound walleye ever could.
I thought about such things as I wrapped my mind around Ann Fox Chandonnet’s The Shape of Wind on Water: New and Selected Poems. An intriguing question began to form as I sat and as I thought: “Is the shape of wind on water to be taken literally or spiritually? Or perhaps a little of both? More on this later.
Structure: “New” poems are gathered under four headings: People, Places, Correspondence and Harvest. “Selected Poems,” are drawn from six of Chandonnet’s previous collections: The Wife & Other Poems (1976), The Wife: Part 2 (1979), Ptarmigan Valley: Poems of Alaska (1980), At the Fruit-Tree’s Mossy Root (1980), Auras, Tendrils (1984), and Canoeing in the Rain (1990).
A Word about The Octopus, An Essay. Reviewers seldom advise their readers about how to read the books they review. Notwithstanding this cardinal rule, I offer a rare recommendation: Begin at the back of the book. In this captivating essay Chandonnet describes the people, places and experiences that, in her words, “made me, me.” You won’t want to miss the very last entry which explains the octopus.
At the risk of seeming to “run the poet into a corner,” I perceive Chandonnet’s work as being born out of the crucible of the natural world, maturing and evolving into the world of the human spirit. She looks for and finds correspondence between the visible outer world and the inner, invisible world of human experiences. One of her poems, “The Poet as the Letter P: Stevens Requests More Prunes,” sounds like the man himself, writing in tedious detail about prunes: the time of year for them, how much they weigh, how they should look, their numerous uses, and how Elsie, in her peignoir, will enjoy them on Sunday morning. Wallace Stevens excelled at writing poems which merge Nature and Spirit. So does Ann Fox Chandonnet.
Chandonnet is a poet of “people, as well as a poet of “place.” Her fascinating life with roots in Massachusetts (on a dairy farm), Alaska’s rich landscape (34 years), and Wisconsin (where she published her first book), provide a deep well from which she draws her lyrics.
Her lead poem, “Snow Water Under Culverts,” is perfect given the foundation laid above. “Snow Water,” is about her father and begins:
but in his country snow water
trickles in culverts,
caching bits of bone swept from
fields,
nutrients hard won—
the first scent of spring (wet
dirt),
and the tooth-numbing,
palm-tingling ditch draught,
spicules of ice in it still,
refreshing as a McIntosh.
It is as if Chandonnet devotes her opening octave to contours which shape the fascinating man she loves. But he is something of a mystery to the young girl who marvels at what she sees. This poem of 109 lines never flags as the poet merges elements of “her world,” into a profile of devoted love. In poignant lines she pays tribute to a man of few words:
his sixteen hours of sweat a day,
the trim body he weighed every morning,
A workman and his tools—
a diligent cathedral mason.
Get a Kleenex ready for Chandonnet’s gentle closure on this one. Moving into “Selected Poems,” a different tone greets me. Drawing from works going back to 1976, we experience the poet as a young wife and mother. These poems resonate in memories of where my wife and I were in the mid-70s. For example, from, “The Wife”:
which throbbed like an alarm clock,
the wife tried to concentrate on Time.
Or standing on it,
a white square in a ring of black ones
dappling the supermarket produce sale,
artichokes and Muzak tugging at her panties,
she tried to decipher a suddenly meaningless list:
squash,
ammonia,
tuna fish,
nutmeg.
Throughout “Selected Poems,” Ann Chandonnet weaves a fascinating web of life, “as it is,” when Nature and Spirit merge and converge. In “Peas” I hear the pings as they hit the bottom of the bucket:
Sitting on the screened porch,
cane seat cool against the backsof hot knees,
the crisp crack of green dorsal linesIs The Shape of Wind on Water to be taken literally or spiritually, or perhaps a little of both? This reviewer trusts his readers to decide. As for your reviewer, his life will never be quite the same again.
~ Michael Escoubas
ZBIGNIEW MIROSŁAWSKI REVIEWS
SHADES OF EARTH BY ANNA MARIA MICKIEWICZ
Shades of Earth by Anna Maria Mickiewicz, Great Britain 2024, ISBN:1915819830, 48 pp.
The review of Anna Maria Mickiewicz’s collection of poems is above all, a great pleasure. Shades of Earth contain very delicate poems. As if we entered a shady garden, a garden enchanted by the words of poetry. Dedicating the entire book to the memory of Staś Stan Mickiewicz (the author’s son, who died last year) deepens the mood of silence and careful observation of the existing world, which is difficult to understand and even harder to describe.
A mother struck by this death is always accompanied by reflection. Her world gains another dimension. Desert rain in London, evokes associations not so much with crying but with longing for the rain of salvation, washing the spruces with the wet morning light. It is a reference to the rhythm of nature. Rain is disorienting. So, the question is asked “is it spring or summer?” the answer is simple – “…the desert air blurs my vision.”
Admiring the manuscript from Oxford, we are in old courtyards, among fountains with lavender roses. We see blue mosaics. We read that she stumbles over the voices of angelic Gothic creators, opens deafened spaces, and rises dressed in clouds. The blooming of forsythia is the essence of elasticity, sparkling purple, rustling, and gentle fragrance. The scent of lilac will appear in another text. Camellias are lost in thought... The growth of flowers from bulbs is their birth.
In addition to the changes in nature, the mystery of time is also a motif. There is “alliance with eternity.” A lid is “framed with spider’s threads” and secrets are enchanted in the songs of the blackbird.
Does crying Socrates symbolize the lack of philosophical explanation? In the next poem he is “buried in anxiety.” Are his thoughts hiding in the clouds? Was he afraid of his own investigations? He was in hospital and returned after his heart rhythm was restored. And he has “...a time of sunny space” ahead of him. A reference to the theme of passing of time comes back in the poem entitled The Cedar of Lebanon. The tree provides shelter as it has been spreading out its branches for 250 years. We don’t know who brought and planted it, maybe it was motivated by love and memory?
The idea of shading recurs in several poems in this collection. For example, the barely visible clouds over Regent’s Park, and in Summer in Seaford. Twilight is the trembling of darkness and loneliness of dreams, the gravity of the night causing Icarus to fall.
Fragments of poetic prose about the London rainbow, about the purring of a cat, and a story of the broken heart of the Little Prince offer a different proposition. Likewise, the text entitled “Low pressure in the land of rain lovers.” The themes already familiar return in a new configuration, bringing out the practical matter-of-factness of the English, and confronting it with the belief in rampaging witches and creatures with huge mouths. The cherry story shows a parallel between the nature and the human emotions. The street of old trees is the subject of granddaughter’s admiration and of grandmother’s anxiety. Cutting down the cherry tree threatens destruction of the beginning of summer.
Poems about Cornwall are pure lyric. Penzance is a port seen at night, drowning in pirate songs and waves of trembling sparks. The Ballad of Penzance describes fringes of the waves that search for survivors and for Tristan and Isolde. Similarly, a poem inspired by a stay in Devon. The waves reflect the silver sky and open the lids of old trunks.
“Still in love with the sun...” reflects author’s own state of mind. There are contrasts between being sealed in the London fog and getting used to breakups. It ends with a doubt, “...do you still love the sun?” The poem “In English Rhythm” has a similar atmosphere. In it, lazy clouds are looking over a rainy country. This is England letting it rain. It is a country of returns, farewells, and of freedom.
Finally, there are two poems, about thistle and London jasmine. In the thistle “...We rise, immersed in dew and light...” As the thorn is yesterday’s moan, we run into the abyss of oblivion. Jasmine’s kisses are rough, its flowers are drops of forgotten letters.
P.S. Some poems were translated by Tom Wachtel. The author is also grateful to two British poets, Steve Rushton and David Clark…
~ Zbigniew Mirosławski
DEBORAH FIEDLER APRAKU REVIEWS
VITAL SIGNS BY DEBORAH P KOLODJI
Vital Signs by Deborah P Kolodji (Cuttlefish Books, 2024), 85 pages.
Vital Signs, by Deborah P Kolodji is a profound and exquisite collection of haiku that chronicles her recent experience with cancer and cancer’s medical treatments. “Profound” seems a big concept that goes against the haiku zeitgeist. An elemental feature of haiku is the way it preserves a fleeting moment in time. I think it is the arc of the series of poems that at its closure leaves the reader with a profound sense of intimacy. Kolodji is a master at capturing the moment. She opens with this tender scrim that welcomes the reader to enter the portal of the haiku zone and signals the start of her journey, and so too our journey herein:
the blush of dawn
through a hospital window
vital signs
The juxtaposition of the beauty of life, which is the essence of the word vital, contrasted with the technology and sometimes poisonous treatment of the disease is at the heart of this book. Each vignette, each look through the window, provides us hope through the pain. As for many cancer patients, this journey is not solitary, though it is lonely. The poems are peopled with doctors and nurses and family members. The hearing loss expressed in one haiku, “my daughter’s voice/turns into ocean” is juxtaposed with another family poem:
wildflowers in bloom
when your children
take care of you
These images of people, being themselves vital, alive with their humanity and vital to the care of the patient, are beautiful miniature portraits. The constant thread in this peregrination are the references to the natural world because, haiku, of course! Kolodji has made it her mission to name the tree, name the flower, name the bird, name the insect, and takes inventory of the medical technologies that are required to test her vital signs. She writes:
rapid growth
of bougainvillea
thorns in my life
I will leave the reader to discover her humorous poems that made me laugh out loud. Like Matsuo Basho, a 17th century Japanese haiku master known for his travel essays, Kolodji documents this long cancer journey, however short the poems are. It’s not just the images but the minimalist wording that gives the whole of the book, and the whole of the poet, strength for the journey. If you can believe that “unresolved issues are the black hole in the center of our galaxy,” you can believe that all these finely crafted haiku are vital signs to all of us. We, like the Condor on the cover of the book, are “not yet extinct.” `
~ Deborah Fiedler Apraku
MONTHLY CONTEST SUBMISSONS GUIDELINES
California State Poetry Society encourages poetic creativity by organizing monthly poetry contests. The contests are open to all poets, whether or not they are members of the CSPS. Reading fees are $1.50 per poem with a $3.00 minimum for members and $3.00 per poem with a $6.00 minimum for non-members. Entries must be postmarked during the month of the contest in which they are entered. They must consist of a cover page with all contact information (name, address, phone number & email address) as well as the month and THEME on cover page, and the titles of the poems being submitted. For pools of $100 or more, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners receive $50, $10 and $5, respectively. If there are insufficient fees submitted, the minimum prize is $10.
Starting in January 2023, we are accepting previously published poems for our Monthly Contest. Please note the publication where it first appeared on any such poem. There are two ways to submit fees, by regular mail (enclosing check) or email (using Paypal): 1) by mail to CSPS Monthly Contest – (specify month), Post Office Box 4288 Sunland, California 91041, with a check made to CSPS; and 2) by email to: CSPSMonthlyContests@gmail.com (specify month), with fees paid by Paypal to the following account – CaliforniaStatePoetrySociety@gmail.com.
The monthly contest winners are notified the month after they are awarded. All of the winners for the year are listed in the first CSPS Newsbriefs and published in the first Poetry Letter of the following year. Prize-winning poems are also posted on the blog, CaliforniaStatePoetrySociety.com. The 1st prize winner receives half of the prize pool for pools less than $100. Please note: Do not send SAEs. We do not return poems. If you win, we will let you know. Otherwise, there are no notifications.
CSPS Monthly Contest Themes (Revised):
① January: Nature, Landscape;
② February: Love;
③ March: Open, Free Subject;
④ April: Mythology, Dreams, Other Universes;
⑤ May: Personification, Characters, Portraits;
⑥ June: The Supernatural;
⑦ July: Childhood, Memoirs;
⑧ August: Places, Poems of Location;
⑨ September: Colors, Music, Dance;
⑩ October: Humor, Satire;
⑪ November: Family, Friendship, Relationships;
⑫ December: Back Down to Earth (Time, Seasons).
