The Garden of Verse: Ordinary Surprises, Metaphysical Stickers, and a Dream-Time Meeting in September's Verse-Virtual

These are some of the poems I enjoyed reading this month on September's Verse-Virtual.

            Robert Wexelblatt's affecting "Father and Daughter," a description presented with dreamlike clarity of a generational encounter that never took place. The details of the setting for the imagined meeting include
"...a wrought-iron bench that looks French,
dazzlingly white in a summer afternoon
saturated with sun.  It could be a scene
from a technicolor film of a
Henry James garden party.  The emerald
grass is smooth as a new pool table, not
one bald spot or weed."

            The scene is kind of paradise of lost possibilities. A visionary, moving poem.

            This poem also appears in the final story of Wexeblatt's new book of short fiction entitled "Petites Suites," just out from Blaze VOX. (Here's a link:  https://www.amazon.com/Petites-Suites-Robert-Wexelblatt/dp/160964302X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505848487&sr=1-4&keywords=Petites+Suites )

           

            The world of fathers and families also provides the material for Paul Brookes' "This Dad Never Only Considers," an account of a father's scrupulously systematic turn of mind that, we learn, is bequeathed to his son. The poet reveals, in a tonal mixture of confession and modest pride,

"My dad and I bring the whole going on
to a brief stop as others
who wish to get on, hoot, cringe,
whistle and toot their dismay."

I particularly like the fine run of edgy, cinematic of verbs "hoot, cringe, whistle and toot" in this stanza. I also admire the poem's long sentences, dotted with serial commas and subordinate modifiers, suggestive of the prose style of an earlier day.

            Some writers like names. Some are phrase makers. An element of making and finding the comic and telling absurdities of our own days on the planet runs through Jefferson Carter's three September poems. In a poem about finding a wise "EAR" to tell your problems too, we read

"So what if your third wife bought
a bottle of perfume called Shake It,
Shake It, Señora?" 

            This piece of listening to the universe stops me short. Where can I find a bottle of perfume called "Shake it, Shake it, Senora"? I live too quiet a life.

            The poem titled "Sticker" begins by asking us how we imagine our prehistoric ancestors sitting around the campfire, and then to perform a similar hypothetical act of seeing our similarly reduced future selves. The poem concludes with the killer line:

"Or did you imagine a sticker
on your war club, exhorting you
& your sleepy tribesmen to be kind?"

            John Morgan's "November Surprise" depicts the emergence of a butterfly at what seems to be the wrong time of year in Fairbanks, Alaska, "ten below and ice-mist on the river."

            A butterfly in such circumstances inevitably assumes a large burden of meaning for a creature made almost of nothing. "Its wings," the poem tells,

"like paisley, red and brown, quiver
as it paws the pane, embodiment of
summer in late fall."

            A beautiful piece of description.

            I leave the fine last line of this "November Surprise" unspoiled.

           

            Wings and weather take flight also in Kate Sontag's poem "Made of bee wings and the breath of sun” (the title attributed to V-V poet Michael Minassian). The poem conflates the "return" of a mother, two years departed, with the unseasonable presence of a wasp "appearing/
out of what winter crack in the world lightheaded?"

            Written in the high style of extended comparison, this poem reminds me (at least) of the poems of the Metaphysical school, elegant in tone and diction. Once again I'll leave the lovely concluding phrases for the reader to discover.

        

             I took considerable pleasure in reading Joan Colby's generous handful of "Ordinary Saints." What a great idea for a series of poems! For instance, "SAINT POSTAL CLERK," whose habits as enumerated by the poet are entirely familiar and yet have never struck me, the impatient customer-to-be, as anything but tedious -- one of those poor fellows evoked here:

"Lines stamping with irritation as you calmly display
A catalog of offerings to the undecided."

            In "SAINT BARTENDER," the poet discover an embarrassment of verbal riches, similar to the bartender's own "forty eight kinds of Craft Beer." These oft-repeated acts of mixing and dispensing point to comparisons skillfully evoked in lines such as:

"Saint of closing time
Stacking the glassware, standing like a priest
In the ornate mirrored altar... "

            These are inspiring poems, these gifts of September, along with so many others. Here's a link to the issue: http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html