Some recent poetry

Dean and I had a lovely 3 wk break in sunny Mexico recently, and I was able to catch up on my reading. In addition to the latest Jo Nesbo "Harry Hole" crime thriller, The Phantom, several recent books of poetry caught my eye:

Touch, by Henri Cole.  The book has three sections, and the poems are mostly all loose sonnets (14 lines, but no rhyme scheme or strict meter). The first section's poems explore his mother's death, and are incredibly moving and poignant, without being maudlin. The second is a mishmash of poems, some regarding photographs, paintings, some regarding recent current events, wars, casualties, as well as observations of the natural world. The third section was the most memorable for me -- intense, erotic, painful, arresting, violent and sad poems about a failed relationship, with a lover who was a drug addict. Here is a taste:

Doll

Thrown on the carpet with your legs awry --
broken, scalped, microwaved -- a receptacle
of love, you make me think the soul is larger
than the body. He lay like that the last time
I saw him, inhaling powder through a straw.
Studies show monkeys prefer it to food
in their cages; this happens even when the monkeys
are starving. "You are all darkness," he used to say,
"and I am light." Though I understood this alertness
as compassion, it wasn't. // It's March now;
the light is brittle, hard, frozen.
Experience seems to come from a distance.
Waiting for spring thaw, I throw you
in a box with the others.

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Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, Patrick Donnelly.  I loved Patrick's first book, The Charge, and this book seems a fitting next step in his work. It is a mix of translations of Japanese classical poems (done with his partner/husband Stephen Miller), as well as more narrative poems that expand on themes from The Charge. These are hard-earned poems about memory, confronting mortality, living with AIDS, dealing with the body's limits, and ultimately survival:

 . . . But because a bitter powder
burns my blood sweet every day,
the weird wages of sin in my case
has been life, unprepared-for life,
a stumbling-block for the makers
of sermons because the punishment
we expected never came. Instead

some harsh mercy
(cunning, intricate) emptied
my tomb, prolongs
my days, swells
my account, wreathes
my neck, anoints
my feet, fattens me
on sweetmeats, publishes
my words, magnifies
my bed and husbands it
into outrageous flower.

(from "Sentence.")

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Gin & Bleach, Catherine Wing.  Another wonderful second book. I especially admire the poems with medical themes, titles: "Vitreous Humor," "Self Medication" "Still Murmur." As well as the funny and playful Tom and Jerry poems.

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The Middle Ages, Roger Fanning.  The author's note states that this is "an unusual book in that the poems written before the author's break with reality are markedly different from those written after . . . see if you can tell which poems are which." And certainly, there are poems that are more sedate and formal, and then, wow-- poems that really are a roller coaster ride, much looser in form and content, and, frankly, more fun. I assume the later came after the break?  Who knows.

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Rough Honey, Melissa Stein.  I especially enjoyed the poem "Galileo."

The Selvage, Linda Gregerson.  Ekphrasis seems to be trending lately. I especially enjoyed the series "From the Life of St. Peter."

Theophobia, Bruce Beasley.  Dense, word-rich, musical poems exploring scripture and language and the idea of God (or fear of God, as the case may be). Even includes a bit of science, which I like ("Genomic Vanitas").
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Happy reading!!