LETTERS WITH TALONED CLAWS
by Eileen Malone
These words about how
my son
stopped being my son
and made me his enemy
are too sad; they will
cause you
to shy away, so I will
draw you in
view from the wrong end
of the telescope
a skimming bird,
swallow of shadow
that drops feathers on
the late day sea
beyond this marsh where
wind laps up
all the indigo
thistledown, I’m there, writing
what I say can be found
in other letters
from an unloved mother
to a beloved son
usually found years
later, smoke-moss soft
stashed in the backs of
drawers, never sent
I had no choice, no
matter how you believe
I sinned, seized or
stilted, believe me, I loved you
always every minute, I
loved you
like the heathery bird
who dies
for the sake of its
hatchling, dripping blood
from its broken beak
and crying out
I write these words on
vellum with taloned claws
with feathered quill,
dipped in ink from sac of squid
then rip them into bits
of wet text of pulp, submit
as weedy shadows
dropped on watery marshes
to be picked up,
salvaged by other beaks, other mothers
to hang out to dry in
order to use later as lining
as softening, as warm
intuitive comforting
in other damaged
and abandoned nests.
Poem
sample:
Contact Catherine to order copies at sacto1954@yahoo.com
"The poems in
Catherine Fraga’s new collection have
but one goal: to “begin again/ the story of my life”
(“Dream Log”). They are polished gems that shine
beyond a single life to illuminate all our lives. Their
subject is, as always, love and human capacity, and the
poet extracts these from her story and the stories of
others. She speaks of “These voices/…always rattling
in my throat/ chanting in my ears. I am all of them,
even those/ I cannot yet hear” (The Nature Of Longing’).
We are grateful for her listening."
—Quinton Duval
HOLY ART by Catherine Fraga
In
1949 my parents were in love
living
on East 14th in a cramped
stucco
walkup, above Manuel Lopez
an
artist who painted holy cards on
stiff,
pale blue paper,
using
dimestore watercolors.
I
can guess why he did it.
My
mother’s hair was the color of chestnuts.
Soft,
spongy, virgin curls that had not endured
the
roughness of a bristle brush.
I
was not born yet. I was as remote as
starlight.
It’s
hard for me to believe that
my
parents made love
above
an eccentric saint-painter
in
a roomful of angels,
and
I wasn’t there.
But
now I am. My mother is blushing.
This
is the lovely thing about art.
It
can bring back the dead.
It
can wake the sleeping,
as
it might have late that night
when
my father and mother made love above Manuel,
who
lay in the dark thinking holy, holy, holy.
Sample
Poem He Sweeps the Kitchen Floor
Review by U. K. journal Sphinx Issue #3
contact Norbert Hirschhorn to order copies of The Empress of Certain
bertzpoet@yahoo.com
Norbert lives in London and Connecticut
The Empress
of Certain is beautiful and, in
my opinion, major. It resembles, in its internationalism,
nothing so much as T.S. Eliot's THE WASTE LAND, but with one
significant difference: Hirschhorn
is a physician, a healer. I admire all of these poems, but
have favorites. Wasn't it Pound who said, famously, "The
natural fact is always the adequate symbol?" If Pound was right,
and he was, then Hirschhorn's "He sweeps the kitchen floor" is
visionary
and beautiful, about reverence for being.” All the reader can do is
sigh.
—Jonathan Holden, Poet
Laureate, Kansas
“We can be grateful for the wisdom and
invention of Norbert Hirschhorn’s poems, which strike precisely the
right balance between feeling and intellect; their combination of
learnedness and urgency is a rare thing indeed.”—–David Wojahn, Professor,
Virginia
Commonwealth University
This is a strange and moving book. A
soul confronts the implacability of irresistible death, the evanescence
and necessity of love, the ineffectuality of knowledge. There are
exemplars of balance and wisdom (Master Wu Shei; The Empress of
Certain) but they cannot wholly transform our life as hungry
predator. The eloquence here cuts deep: “No happiness so wide
despair cannot cross.” Each poem in this book is a dream, the
dream in which we rehearse each night whatever we’ve learned by day
that we need to survive.
—Frank Bidart, Chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets
|
He Sweeps The
Kitchen Floor,
bristles of broom far
removed from
the brilliant yellow flowers cascading
down three hills that enfold the monastery,
each sturdy whisker picking debris from
cracks between the tiles – with a
sucking
sound
like noise
made by his Master after
a bowl of congee – as he removes
runaway sesame seeds, embalmed insects,
cook's errant black hairs, but leaves rice grains
behind the door to feed the young mouse
(he thinks: of the eight grades of charity
the highest – to provide honest work),
strokes the debris into piles, one
per quadrant of floor, stoops like a woman
poking seedling rice one-by-one into
black sucking mud, sweeps them to the dustpan,
leaving finer lines to be regathered,
reswept (he thinks: if he could shrink in size
along with each thinner line of dust, would
there not always be dust?), and laves the tiles
on hands and knees with a modestly wetted
moonwort cloth, rinsing and wringing into
the bamboo bucket, its soapy water
growing darker with
each rinse like winter
evenings (he studies each tile: here the piece
that resembles his birth-house whose sodded
roof inclined to the ground and fed Father's
four pigs), and his knees begin to ache
their familiar ache: one snowy winter,
he'd returned to his village and found all
things silent, smoking, a charred corpse leaning
out the window of his house like Mother
calling down, a single chicken picking
among two black, bodiless heads resting
on pillows of ash – he had only just
learned from his Master how not to wail,
fell instead to his knees and walked this way
through cinders and trash, past the still-smoking
timbers of the market stalls (not even a
cabbage remained), kneed his way along
the icy pebbled road, each facet of
stone exquisitely slicing his skin, kneed
out of the village, over the three hills,
and into the glade of his now only
home (and
now he rises slowly, ponders
the quiet glow of the kitchen floor, and
now prepares for
morning meditation).
“Ithaca is a travel book of the best
sort. It takes the reader on a voyage of self- discovery told by
an engaging story teller.”
“This is the best of Gil Schedler’s
books. The poems are spare, carefully crafted, full of joy and
laughter, but they
also suggest a loneliness, a quest for ever deeper, more
satisfying experiences, like those associated with family life.”
“His travels, like those of Odysseus, take him to
faraway, exotic places. But they also serve to uncover the beauty of
home.
California’s Central Valley comes alive in brilliant images as
“The flamingoes of my imagination dance/Among the secret petals
of the dogwood...Among the translucent crystals of fire.” In the
course of this well-crafted poetic odyssey the poet is often tempted by
the siren songs of young, beautiful, and seductive women. He answers
their calls in reality, in fantasy, and in memory, taking us into a
world of lust, humor, and occasionally, love.”
“As he travels from youth to old age, he recalls
Odysseus, smiles “at the old dreamer, the voyager,/who wondered whether
he was/a butterfly, or whether he had to call/again to his friends and
sail
out/between the legs of Hercules.”
“Has he been transformed by his travels, like a
butterfly emerging from its cocoon, or must he sail out once more in
order to discover the island of his dreams? This collection leaves the
question
unanswered. But we can hope for more explorations of the sea within
from this talented poet.”
Dr. Roger
Mueller University of the Pacific
“We know Odysseus, but do we know Gilbert
Schedler? An American Adam throwing forbidden fruit
at Luther's God? A born-again Toaist swimming naked
in Nirvana ? Gil Schedler is his poetry: a bright
metaphoric eye, an earthy, playful mind falling upward and wandering
far east of Eden. Slouching towards orgasm, he notices
everything, He is writing a wrong and these
poems are his flesh made word. With melancholy, memory and amazing
grace, he invites us to an
Ithaca that can never be reached. Except, of course,
if you like having, a serious conversation
with a curious person.”
Dr. Lawrence Meredith
University of the Pacific
Very Special Thanks to the College of
the Pacific
University of the
Pacific
for providing funds for this publication
|
Svea Barrett of Hawthorne New
Jersey has just won
our 1st annual chapbook contest for her
manuscript
"Why I Collect
Moose" She teaches English in Hawthorne
Order copies directly from "Svea
Barrett"<wildgees@optonline.net>
Sample
Poem
Cover
Praise
Eisenhower
There was this doll in my grandmother’s house
we all feared--a baby doll no one ever cradled.
Mom called it Eisenhower, its old man baby face
frozen into a screwed-up scream, tiny bowed mouth
wide-open, eyes squinting blind.
Eisenhower hid in the smallest back bedroom,
the one with the most severe slant of ceiling,
dark dressers with marble tops like tombstones,
grapevines creeping up the wallpaper.
His squashed cloth body stalked my nightmares--
hard rubber limbs dangling, partially severed.
Deadly weapons.
When my sons were babies, their cries drove terror
through sleepless nights. I never turned the light on when
I came into their room. I knew that in their cribs I’d find
my own baby boys wearing Eisenhower’s eyes.
Why I Collect Moose is an
incredibly rich collection of powerful,
moving poems. It is a book that needed to be written, its voice leading
us out of the dark and into the light of a hard-won wisdom.
In Barrett's poetic universe, there is no room for artifice
or lies.
Instead, she presents her observations with clarity and
specificity,
creating poems we won't easily forget. This poet is one to watch
with
her unique, risk-taking voice.
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Svea Barrett’s poetry fills the quiet intervals between disaster and
response, the steaming car wreck prior to the arrival of the police,
the protruding bone prior to the ambulance siren. “All the shit on the
side of the road,” along with the personal traumas of divorce and the
early death of a child, are rendered with unadorned eloquence. And when
she writes a love poem, it’s like the one girl in school who can throw
like a boy falling in love: her unsentimentality, in other words, will
stir you.—Douglas Goetsch
The voice in Svea Barrett’s poems is anguished but clear, the lyricism
restrained—which makes it even more urgent. These poems detail the
deepest sorrows of a lover and parent—the hospital death of a child
(the image of the proposed autopsy could apply to the marriage as
well), divorce, consequent isolation. She is terrific with list poems
or poems of permutation where a figurative pattern builds
overwhelmingly. The poem “Divorce”, a definition poem, its story-line
illustrating the concept, is ultimately about a catharsis of liberation
and healing as is the book itself.—Dennis Schmitz, Contest Judge 2005
Svea Barrett has written a bold book. The poems are unflinchingly
honest. A narrative of her life––her own life and no one
else’s––unfolds poem by poem, yet each poem is lyrical and discrete,
with its own surprises. There is tragedy, anguish and anger in these
poems. They tell the story of a woman coming into herself through the
travails of a troubled marriage and divorce and the motherhood of sons,
but she lightens the darkness with humor and wit. The poems are
wonderfully grounded by a sense of place. The poems heal the poet, and
they invite the reader into her life to share in the possibility of
that healing.—Jane Blue |
Tom Goff works as an instructional assistant at the American River College
Reading Center, where he's written instructional materials on how to
read poetry without fear (in this poetry-fearful country). He's studied
poetry writing with Dennis Schmitz, Jane Blue, and Harold Schneider,
among others. Publication credits include The Sacramento Anthology: 100
Poems, Poetry Now (he's a editorial staffer of that magazine),
Rattlesnake
Review, the Sacramento News and
Review, Perihelion,
24th Street Irregular
Press,
Poetry Depth Quarterly, Tule Review, and
Poets
Against the War (online).
Work is forthcoming in Flowers of Love,
Volume
4, from the Vietnamese
International Poetry Society, where Nora Staklis
is
also represented,
along with such familiar names as Sinh Le, Be Davison
Herrera and Jason Cudahy. Tom is also an associate editor for Poet's
Corner Press.
order copies of The Miracle Shirker directly from
Brad at buchanan@saclink.csus.edu
"There is a dynamic new voice in
the Central Valley singing powerful
verse delightfully sardonic and totally fresh. What a treat!" ——Jose
Montoya, Sacramento Poet Laureate, Emeritus
In "The Miracle Shirker" Brad Buchanan offers us beautifully crafted
poems whose lyrical simplicity conceal enormous complexity. "All
speech," he suggests in the title poem, is "a way not to touch the
forbidden"; yet it is precisely the forbidden, half-perceived, and
subtle essence of the human experience that Buchanan captures so
adeptly in this remarkable collection.——Mary Mackey
"The stammer of wings is still on our tongues," says Brad Buchanan in
articulating the transcendent intent of poetry, and its struggle. So
these poems live in the equivocal, between worlds——that is their beauty
and their strength."——Dennis Schmitz, Sacramento Poet Laureate,
Emeritus
"Escaping childhood into unknown futures, the speakers in these poems
present a complex humanity, one where the poet takes us into his
confidence, revealing doubts, fears, joys—the things that charge and
change his life. Buchanan’s poems are acute, made acute by acute
thought. And his work displays a linguistic sense and an ear resonating
with the traditional music of English verse. What we experience in The
Miracle Shirker is the continuing arc of a life, where language is at
once vehicle, mirror, and anchor."——Joshua McKinney
Brad Buchanan’s The Miracle Shirker is a hybrid: poetry and
bildungsroman; the product is a fascinating examination of the
continuum of innocence to experience. While addressing how age, time,
and discovery alter us, this collection takes readers on a flight from
disbelief to faith in the beauty of the world. Buchanan’s control
of images, his clever word choices, and his willingness to take risks
work to magnify his speaker’s longing, embarrassment, confusion,
wonder, and wisdom. Further, Buchanan’s exploration of these
conflicts elicits griefs and joys most of us have known. What a
talent: to evoke incidents, estrangements, and remote points from
memory--and to remind us that "innocence lasts until we die."
——Heather Hutcheson
|
“This collection of deliciously textured words appeals to all the
senses. Nora Laila Staklis offers images
that we can taste and feel. We smell the dirt of river banks, compost
heaps and gravesite coverings.
We internalize the lonely yearning of those displaced by war, illness,
aging, or shyness. We are there
with the poet as she watches the slow lifting flight of the egret, as
her skin warms from the watching sun.
We grow quiet so as not to startle the deer at dusk or the lovers
sinking into the duff at forest’s edge.
The rich vocabulary of these poems emerges paganly from rivers and
fields, tugs at memories and experience
and arrives at the reader as a carefully crafted gift, strong as iron,
delicate as carved ivory.” —–JoAnn Anglin
Sample Poem: Every
Child Is Poetry
Order
copies of Nora book at CrystalGoblet@aol.com
An invigorating
mind-ride—Sullivan’s poems are headlong but nimble.
They startle,
they enthrall with word-play, they go deep.
—Dennis Schmitz, former Poet Laureate of Sacramento
Sample Poem: Peace Pilgrim
Wall Calender 2002
Order copies of Islands of Earshot from A.P. Sullivan at
Apmpsullivan@aol.com
To
me, Dianna Henning is, above all, the luminous
Poet of What’s Near. ‘Only ripe memory of
falling apples endures - the way we once bit into each other,’ she
writes, revealing her appetite for tasting life to the
fullest. Whether it's the stones in her Japanese fountain or the
birds decorating a dinnerware set, everything becomes alive in
Henning's powerful, image-driven poems. She en-souls the world, a
sacred task that has always been the liturgy of anything we dare call
poetry.—Ioanna ("Ivy") Warwick, poet and poetry teacher published in
Poetry, Best American Poetry 1992, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, etc .
I love to submerge
myself in Dianna Henning's work. Lyricism,
sensuality and a
sharp
eye for detail and metaphor combine to produce
startling insights which sneak up on the unsuspecting reader. This is a
mature woman's journey.— Nancy Shiffrin PhD author of The Holy
Letters. |
Thompson
Peak Retreat: Breathtaking mountains near cabin in Northeastern
California. Ideal for solitude. Looks out over pond and ponderosa pines.
Charming cabin with loft, yard, porch, flower garden at: $190.00 per
week or
$650.00 per month. Utilities, amenities included. No pets. Non-smoking.
Owner/Writer. Deposit $125.00 two weeks before arrival. E-mail:
dmackinnon@citlink.net Go to this website to view
cabin:
www.thompsonpeakretreat.com
Dianna was
recently published in the online journal Swink
IN THE SEASON OF
RIPE
Dianna Henning
The bottom of night is a potato bin,
a place to snag what falls down the galaxy’s tin chute.
Is that where you caught me?
Did you lift me off an impression?
I would like to think that I was the real thing.
A Siren with white wings.
When you poured me into the mold of marriage,
did I jell, and yes, family says we both jelled quite well,
that we were in the thick of it
until I dug my way out.
When a man touches a woman’s cheek with a rose
it’s called getting the full Fresno.
Seduction such as ours
was no brash happenstance.
Attraction pulls its bell and lays you out.
This bite on my cheek is no tattoo either.
It’s where the tickle-feather took root,
so don’t make small potatoes of it.
We were one rib on that bed.
Now the bell in the voice is only a signal,
a right or left turn. I first turned right, then left.
|
Dianna
Henning’s
book, The
Tenderness House, was published in 2004; it can
be purchased at www.poetscornerpress.com.
Her work has appeared in numerous national magazines, including Crazyhorse, Asheville
Poetry Review, and The Louisville Review.
She has taught in many California
prisons, and for three years she held a California Arts Council
residency
funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. More of her
poems can be
found at www.thompsonpeakretreat.com.
|
Sample
poem: hummimgbird
“There are quite a few poets (of the 500 + we have published) whose
work appears regularly in our pages,
but probably none whose words grace our journal as consistently as Mrs.
Helsing’s. The reason: Joy’s work
is always inspiring, always fresh, always imaginative. There is never
one unnecessary word in a Helsing poem.
In short, a joy! The Aurorean wouldn’t be quite the Aurorean
without her voice.”
—Cynthia Brackett-Vincent
Publisher, the
Aurorean
"There are many ways
to praise this book’s
range. Complex and
many-minded,
the poems
prickle with unsettling insights. I have a
half-dozen favorites I won’t trade,
but all the
poems see slant in the
Dickinson way. Jane Blue is in the throes of her
poems,
audacious but unassuming.”
—Dennis Schmitz, former Poet Laureate of Sacramento CA.
"I
seek out Jane Blue's poems because they search every
smidgeon
of a one-of-a-kind world that we eventually can see has been
spying on us,
showing us our
own strangeness. Blue wrestles with the
entanglement of the enigmatic,
the
threatening, and her own aspiration
to fully visionary understanding."
—Sandra
McPherson, Swan Scythe Press
Sample Poem:
Blue
Window, New Mexico
Order copies of The Persistence of Vision directly from Jane at
janeblue@macnexus.org
"These poems
are penetrating and mysterious. Goff's lyricism, though complex,
resolves internally -- a distinctive and passionate voice full
of uncommon metaphorical surprise." -- Laverne and Carol Frith, Editors
of Ekphrasis.
"Where will the poet Tom Goff go next? Into the "Dizzywheel"
of love and through a stand of bold Canna lilies embodied in
Field-of-the-Cloth-of Gold. This is only the beginning of the
majesty he has written. In this deck of cloud-built cards, the reader
will consult with Rubens' Clara, a hawk circling the Malakoff Diggins,
many egrets and his natural friend at Tor House, Robinson Jeffers. Only
Rilke could end this fine crossing; only Tom Goff could have written
it."--Viola Weinberg former Poet Laureate of Sacramento, CA
Pearl Stein Selinsky allows--- "A faultless collection..."
|
Contact Tom directly to order copies of Field of the Cloth of Gold at
Goffica@aol.com
Sample Poem:
Prince Edward Island
"Rich in visual texture and place these poems move with a plainspoken
grace.”—Albert Garcia
"The poems in "Generation" are like
a mystical journey with unexpected turns, and Radaikin, skilled at
balancing just the right amount of reality with sibylline imagery,
offers the reader a compass, as
in the poem, "Joshua's Journey to the Home of His Parents".
The book is a kaleidoscope of memories."—Nancy Wahl
"Norine Radaikin’s poetry is a wonderful celebratory dance to the music
of 'harp and a seashell lyre' as she draws us into the circular world
of her ancestors to show us how we are
our own ferocious, inescapable past" —Professor Olivia Castellano
|
Order copies directly from
Norine at Radaikin@aol.com
Sample
Poem: Girl
Caught In A Path Of Blue Light
"Green Tango" is an
incandescent collection of dance poems with an attitude - Joyce Odam's
signature note of melancholy weaving through
the choreography of the text. "They want to dance together/" writes
Odam in the title poem, "but the music is stiff and awkward/and they
don't know how/...". Couples dance, but not together. Solitary dancers
take
solipsistic turns in fragmented mirrors. "In the glass distance/I dance
miles . . ./timed to the shadows. . . looking back/..." writes Odam in
"Having Danced." "Only the mirrors watch/" she writes in " The
Choreography," "so what/if you dance for mirrors/" Odam, timing her
lyric voice to the "shadows," dancing "for mirrors," leaves
us spinning in a world where dance is a metaphor for life and life
a metaphor for dance."—Carol Frith, co-Editor,
"Ekphrasis"
"It is difficult to
escape the felt intimacy of the poems in this collection.
Joyce Odam dares to cover the broad range of dancing - the
dancing of closeness as well as the dancing of distance, and she
plays music here that you are compelled to follow from beginning to
end."—Laverne Frith, co-Editor,
"Ekphrasis" |
Order a copy of Green Tango directly from Joyce
at
choiceofwrds@aol.com
Pony Fish by Nancy Wahl
Sample Poem: The Idea
of Art
Cover Praise
order a copy of Pony Fish directly from Nancy at
Lomarishi@aol.com
Just unearthed from the
gigabyte archive: a
review of
Nancy's June 2 2003 SPC reading
by Joyce Odam
|
Nancy Wahl read at
SPC last Monday evening, June 2, 2003. Reading new work as
well as
selections from her recently released chapbook, "Pony Fish"
(published by Poet's Corner Press in Stockton, California) Wahl focused
on
"reiterations," introducing her theme with a challenging ekphrastic
response to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." From "Pony
Fish," she then read "Mythos," a tranformative self-meditation
inspired by the Book of Job. "Even as she sleeps/she humanizes
everything,/" read Wahl, subsuming myth and literature in the
reiterative
process. In "Woman, Gathering," Wahl described a Maidu woman
"scrambling that quantum instant/between us/" converting a
pre-Columbian moment into a reiteration of Wahl's relationship with the
fictionalized
woman, as well as a contemplative survey of both women's relationship
to the
landscape in which at this point only Wahl could have been standing,
all of
which convolutes beautifully into "The Idea of Art," a kind of ars
poetica from which Wahl read the following: "...Aristotelian
stars/before
Galileo or Copernicus./Such a simple grace,/hung there by students/for
the idea
of art--" From "Livia Drusilla," Wahl read of
"...errant ghosts/who often as not/leave semiotic shadows..." obscure
semioses that seem to afflict the present with dark and iterative
"desires" from the past. "...a crosswalk over
uncertainty/Something signals/," read Wahl from "Logic,"
"and maybe it is only the angled moment.../," a moment that "shines
downward through the viscera/" she read from "Pony Fish," the
title piece in her chapbook. All of Wahl's moments shine with a
visceral
delight. I highly recommend her work
|
Apple Blossoms at
Eye Level
Sample Poem:
Apple Blossoms at Eye Level
by Patricia Wellingham-Jones
Cover
Praise
Order copies of Apple Blossoms at
Eye Level directly from Patricia at pwj@tco.net
Visit Patricia's website at
http://www.wellinghamjones.com/
new chapbook series
Egrets Along
the
Yolo Causeway audio poem
opens with 
Susan's New Website
as of August 2007
Poem Sample:
Lord's Candle
To A Small Moth
Cover
Praise
Associate
Editor: Jane Blue
by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
Managing Editor: David Humphreys
ISBN #0-9705931-2-0
price/copy: $10.00 The Book of Insects
Other chapbooks
by Susan can be found at Frith Press
and Swan
Scythe Press of
Sandra McPhearson
Verse Daily
see Archives for 10/27/2002
Verse Daily
2/21/04
Geatest Hits by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Pudding House
Press
Invitational Publication .
Contact Susan directly to order copies at
susan@susankelly-dewitt.com Susan
at Putah Creek
Days Between Dancing
Poem
Sample: Orchard Man
by Lara Gularte ISBN # 0-9705931-3-9
Cover Praise
Calder Lowe
The Montserrat Review
Renato Rosaldo winner
Andar Prize for 2000
Order copies directly from Lara at
LaraLG@aol.com
Circle Of
Light
by David Holman
Cover Praise
Sample Poem: Belota
Farms, The Old Hotel
Order a copy of Circle of Light directly from David
at WordRich@aol.com
x-ing the acheron
love poem excerpted 2nd stanza
by Julia Connor
for jim
"burst
of green
to take husband
on stone "
photograph
Cover Praise
"
It There is willed, where that is willed shall be,
That ye shall pass him to the further side,
Nor question more." Virgil
to Charon ferry steersman
on the river Acheron:
Canto III Inferno
Sample Poem: shelter
Order copies directly from Julia at
HEYJUDE769@sbcglobal.net
www.JuliaConnor.com
Cover
Praise
Red
Harvest by Muriel Zeller
Order copies directly from Muriel at
murielz@goldrush.com
Sample Poem:
Fly Fishing on the Calaveras
Little Ship of
Blessing
Sample Poem: The Cat and I, Glenn
Gould and Bach
by
Mary Zeppa
Cover Praise
Order copies directly from Mary at
galee@csus.edu
Four
poems at Putah Creek
Praise for "Honest Talk" by Gilbert Schedler ISBN# 0-9728470-0-6
Sample Poem:
Visiting Berkeley With My Daughter
"I have seldom read a book more fittingly titled.With original
tangible images,
gentle craft, and a clear strong voice--and often with a touch of wry--
Gilbert
Schedler
covers most of the important human experiences. He writes of love and
its absence, families and their generations, travel in this country and
others, a
teacher's viewof his students, the enduring impressions of childhood,
the
consciousness of life contrasting with inevitable death. Who else
has written about a
stripper-lap dancer with references to Plato's allegory of the cave and
to
Kierkegaard? That's Schedler, making us think, feel, reflect,
laugh--often with
that twist of quiet surprise."---John Smith, Professpr Emeritus,
English, University of the Pacific
"Gil Schedler packs a
lifetime of experience into this slender volume where the everyday
points beyond itself to the trans-cendent, but so playfully so as to
engage even the least
philosophical reader. He is particularly adept at showing how memories
are made and what
they are made of as the everyday is transformed by our emotional
responses into symbols
that stay with us forever." —–Robert Benedetti, University of the
Pacific
Order a copy of Honest Talk directly from Gil
at
gschedler@pacific.edu
"The
muse whispers into her ear and we hear Nancy whisper back." --Frank
Taber
"Nancy Wahl's poems combine, in a magical way, the intellectual,
sensual, spiritual
and
psychological experience." ---Norine Radaikin
"Masterful in her command of figurative language,
both fresh and unflinching."--- Heather Hutcheson
"Nancy Wahl's narratives are speculative and rich with
allusions---lit from within
like
the title poem's "pony fish." ---Dennis Schmitz
Sample Poem: trinity
times-ate
"Paula Sheil's
poetry is sharp, edgy, elliptical, abrupt ("shudder.
settle. dust. another page. white. waits")--qualities which prevent
us from relaxing into what Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls "the lyrical
escape."
Though this poet's work is devotional, her poems hardly suggest the
self-congratulatory stance of the "believer": rather, they are a
constant process of sudden, reluctant awakenings. Sheil's intense,
angry, strange
poems "frail / carriers of myself" wander the endless
dark alleys of enlightenment."
Jack Foley, Oakland poet and regular contributor to "Poetry
Flash"
and host of "Cover to Cover" on KPFA.
ISBN# 0-9728470-1-4 chapbook
ISBN# 0-9728470-2-2 perfect binding design by Rick
Cusick
Order copies directly from Paula at
psheil@excite.com
I am dazzled by Mary Zeppa's symphony of poems! They will fasten
to you like a discovery of
language. Sheer grace and style, from the beginning
dedication to the ending "Blessing," the words refuse to be tame or
easy--so,
"catch the fire and shine."
Ann
Menebroker
Author of 17 books of poetry, including "Biting Through The Spine,"
"To
Get It Right," "Trying
For The Ten Ring," and "Surviving Bukowski."
Mary Zeppa's years of work as a vocalist shine through
every poem in
"Little Ship of Blessing".
Reading these poems is like hearing Gershwin's
music, like listening to Billie Holiday sing. Each poem flows like a
melody, and when read aloud, Mary Zeppa's poems dance off your tongue,
reminding us all of how beautiful language can be.
James Lee Jobe, Publisher
One
(Dog) Press
Wash-Dry-And-Press
Although their settings are mainly rural, these poems are not
simple pastorals or easy idylls. That’s
because they are essent-
ially portraits, and like good portrait
paintings, they expose the
life below the surface of the face—the
compassion, joy, turmoil,
grief or terror, for example—that
drives each
individual, includ-
ing herself. In this book, Muriel
Zeller, working in “language…
learned from the scissors,” paints us
some powerful and well-
crafted poems that are both earthy and
edgy portraits to revisit
again and again…..Gary Thompson
MFA
author of "On John Muir's Trail"
The power in Muriel
Zeller’s collection of poems, “Red Harvest”
comes from her need to discover her own
essential accurate voice.
While the poems seek an authentic
language that confirms Zeller’s
sense of wonderment, the images in her
poetry also free us up
enough to feel that we have been
touched for the first time by some
new sense of perception…..Catherine
Webster MFA
author of "Thicket
Daybreak"
winner of the Colorado
Prize 1997
"Julia Connor's poems are spare
and
elliptical but straight to the heart of
things. I admire -- in the words of one of the poems -- their stark
elegance."
Dennis Schmitz, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Sacramento
"Julia Connor's range of light glows in this collection--from sweet,
early
illumination to late night shadow of moon and man. Connor is nimble, her
writing rich and nubby. I wish there were more of these beautifully cut
poems
in the world to shimmer in the hand of readers everywhere."
Viola Weinberg, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Sacramento
Lara Gularte is a fearless poet.
In
Days Between Dancing, she transports
us through a landscape that is by turns haunting, lyrical,
and
terrifying. Her poems are meticulously crafted and
informed by a
provocative, ironic intelligence, and a passionate
urgency. Whether she
is describing an intergenerational connection, a Vietnam
veteran's
tortured dreamscape, the sinister specter of childhood
molestation, or
the threatening forces that hover in the shadows of a
loveless marriage,
her work is characterized by a ferocity, purposefulness,
and consistency
of voice that is remarkable. There is no substitute for
relentless
honesty and compelling imagery, and when these occur in
combination as
they do in Gularte's Days Between Dancing, the genre of
poetry is
revitalized. ---Calder Lowe, Executive Editor, The
Montserrat Review
(http://www.themontserratreview.com)
"luminous with violence and
love"
Lara Gularte's poems are luminous with
violence and
love, death and vitality.
After seeing horror, she says, "I can't stop blinking." As
her great grandmother says,
in broken English, "life is no sugar." Read these poems!
----- Renato Rosaldo,
winner of the Andar Prize for
2000 the el andar prize
for literary excellence 2000
" In her poem " The View ",
Susan Kelly-DeWitt writes of a 90-
year old neighbor just out of the hospital pruning his roses,
kneeling as if in hard prayer. This spirit, this act of
affirmation,
grace and human grit, permeates these marvelous poems. Kelly-
DeWitt's poems remind us, as we must be reminded, that no
matter what, a beautiful and timeless world surrounds us; we
must take the time to peer into it, but if we have Kelly-DeWitt's
wisdom and willingness, her hard-earned grace and vision, we
may be priveleged enough to participate in ancient and sacred
ways. How fortunate we are to have these poems."
Walter Pavlich
Order a copy of To a Small Moth directly from
Susan
at sekd@aol.com
Review of The Book of
Insects, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Spruce Street Press, 1543 Spruce
St., Berkeley, CA 94709, 2003. Order directly from Spruce Street
Press at this address or email jkellydewitt@earthlink.net.
by Carol
Frith of Frith Press, Sacramento CA.
This remarkable
hand-bound book of poems is a limited edition production of Spruce
Street Press, Berkeley, California, Jennifer Kelly DeWitt,
proprietor. The book's visuals are stunning: it is typeset
in blue ink from polymer plates on a Golding Pearl press, bound with
hard-board covers and hand-stitched. The cover jacket is a
strikingly effective collage of international stamps featuring insects
and spiders. The poems are printed on Wyndstone Medley, a paper
of gorgeous texture you will absolutely love to run your hands over.
These careful
production
details complement Susan Kelly-DeWitt's fastidious poetry. "The
Book of Insects," as you might well imagine, is a careful focusing on
the small, those careful, jewel-like miniaturizations at which
Kelly-DeWitt excels. In "White Azalea," she writes, "Call it/a
mercy./A respite/like the sun/on the tip of one/Indica
petal." Not only does she focus on small things, but on
hidden things, as well. "Water Signs" discusses the death of
Shelley: "...A few plain words/across one page, and he is gone./The
great, icy lid slams shut/over his troubled shining./". There is
history here, of course - and implied narrative - but always a
foregrounding of the careful artist's meticulous investigative probity
- magnifying what is very small, penetrating what is secret, folded in,
hidden.
In Kelly-DeWitt's
entomology, "Flies" "...act like tiny morticians/probing things with
instruments/hobbling on walking-stick legs,/" and "Blue Hydrangeas"
"...are a harem to the gold sultan/who nips the powdered/sugars from
their lips/with a satisfied buzz./". In "Butterfly," the
poet stops to observe a western tiger swallowtail, "how his wings were
like homemade kite/paper,...", a scrupulously precise (and, therefore,
unforgettable) metaphor. Still on the diaphanous subject of
insect wings, Kelly-Dewitt closes her observations of the river-diving
"Snout Moth" with "Her slender wings drape/like nylon shawls, just/the
tiniest eye drops/of axle grease spotting/her drenched
fringes." In "After Reading Lao Tzu I Open 'The Book of
Insects,'" she writes of four soldier beetles "...drunk with heat/and
the redolent fumes of saffron powders dusting their feet;..."
This exquisitely apt, gem-like troping is characteristic of
Kelly-Dewitt's work.
Lines from
"Orchard
Spider Under the Microscope" serve as a stunningly compressed ars
poetica: "down/into/the visible:/One/grows
so/slowly/into/dispassion!/" Here is the consummate observer
struggling to locate a stable locus of observation - a stasis if you
will - between the artist's paradoxically opposed needs to probe and
dissect each experience for understanding while at the same time
maintaining it whole.
"Put simply,"
writes the
poet in "Van Gogh at Auvers," "I want to bleed/stillness from the
center of this wild/breeze,...". No one comes closer to achieving
this goal than Susan Kelly-DeWitt. You have to get this book.
|
Packed with synesthesia, David Lee
Holman's
poetry stimulates the imagination.
Both straightforward and sophisticated, Holman's work appeals to broad
audiences.
His poems are exquisite necklaces, artfully constructed -- each word is
like a bright bead,
carefully selected for its ability to reflect light or shadow, for the
beauty it will contribute
to the whole. Long before I heard Holman read, I admired
his gentle voice, the rich
emotional quality of his work, and the music of the words.
Heather Hutcheson, Managing Editor, POETRY NOW
The books below are not a part
of the chapbook series of The Poet's Corner Press
They have perfect binding spines and are longer than chapbooks being 60
to 70 pages
compared to the 24 page chapbooks listed above.. A chapbook has a
stapled spine.
The online booksellers below that are offering "My Shepherd" and "Our
Father Who"
do not offer chapbooks for sale, a policy that I think should be
changed to their benefit.
My Shepherd
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble.com 2000 revised
edition
Our Father Who
Amazon.com
Barnes&Noble.com 2000
A Developing Book Series
by David Humphreys
In Apple Blossoms At Eye Level
Patricia Wellingham-Jones' poems ask
us to pay attention, and they satisfy our hunger for close knowledge of
what we
are losing. Sensual, sensuous, witty, wonderstruck, and immediate,
these poems
re/place us in the Great Central Valley of California and put us in
relationship
to a cast of characters ranging from wildflowers to tame and not-so-tame
creatures and and people---a dying coyote , for example, is "engraved
in the
civilized curl of her mind," and ours. Wellingham-Jones casts a cold
eye on
development while her contemplative and lyrical voice makes us
intimates with
the warmth of living things. We can be very grateful for these poems.
--Sally Allen McNall, Ph.D., winner of the State Steet Press
Competition 1998 and the Backwaters Press Prize 2000 for her books
How to Behave at the Zoo and Other Lessons, and Rescue
Order a
copy of Apple Blossoms
at Eye Level directly from Patricia at pwj@tco.net
In
Harmonics, Taylor Graham maps the precarious.
She reminds us: " A plate shifts under ocean, not intending much…" but
"a wall
falls down." Roads vanish
in winter storms, friends disappear.
Someone takes "a mis-step/ on the South Fork Trail/ and it’s for-
Sample
Poem:
ever." We’re warned by a
voice that knows from experience:
October
Spirits
"Don’t step on broken branches,/ you never know whose
bones."
Taylor's website
The poems’ response to such a world is dire attentiveness—an
essential listening so acute it
registers when a spider’s web
"resonates like highrise steel/
inside its concrete." Though
pervaded with a sense of elegy,
the poems also celebrate the
redemptive moment: A cloud of butterflies "balanced on the tips
of nameless/ pale pink flowers." They usher us into the minds of
Fox , Bear and Dog, from whom we learn: "A dog writes his own
history/ without monuments.
These are deceptively humble poems. Graham speaks to us casually,
at times with quiet good humor;
like a good neighbor chatting across
the back fence. But Graham’s crafting is deft, her sense of the line
edgy,
architectural and sure. These poems sing with the music of the
inevitable.
--Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Harmonics ISBN# 0-9728470-3-0
Order a copy of Harmonics directly from Taylor at
piper@innercite.com
Before
our NPR radio broadcast in 1997 the station required us to find funds to pay for
production costs of the program and we took
that as our NPR
fund raising paradigm to our first book "To a Small
Moth" by Susan Kelly-DeWitt and we've made the same agreement
between poets
and press ever since. An
independent sponsor is found between
the poet's mentors, teachers and supporters and the press's
contacts, benefactors etc., the best of
which are Arts Councils such as the El Dorado Arts Council in the case
of Taylor Graham and the
Lassen Arts Council in the case of Dianna
Henning who provide funding to produce a 28 page chapbook or an 80 or
more page
perfect
binding
paperback.
Poet's Corner Press will soon be
developing new types of books
of Prose Fiction and
Non-fiction with Poet's Corner Publishing
and Special
Editions such as The Golden Earrings by Dora McDonald