The Garden of Verse: Poets Bring Their 'Bests' to March Issue of Verse-Virtual

For the March issue of Verse-Virtual editor Firestone Feinberg chose "my best poem" as a voluntary theme. He reports receiving "some terrific responses."      

            Here's one: "Deer Crossing," by Penny Harter, relates the disturbingly frequent daytime appearances of a local deer population, including carcasses on the highway, to the hidden processes of human consciousness. After reporting sightings of a a dead buck and doe on the highway, the poem takes a strong psychological leap:

"I only know the boundaries are blurring:
that buck whose antlers flowered on his head
like found money,
slept in your bed last night,
that doe in mine,
while we stumbled in our nakedness,
running on all fours..." 

            I love the image of the flowering of the antlers "like found money," and the feeling the whole poem give me that, yes, this is how dreams work.
 

            Donna Hilbert's offering of 'a best' is the short poem "Gravity" that serves "as a sort of foreword" to her book of the same name. This poem has me on its first line "What binds me to this earth..." Its four appearances by the word "mother" anchor the poem to a spiritual gravity and the culminating "miracle" that is its message. If you haven't read the poem, please do.

            I'm not sure if the poem "To the Mother of a Dead Marine" by Marilyn Taylor is offered as a 'best poem,' but it certainly belongs to that discussion. A sonnet, the poet tells us, is the suitable form for distancing the self in order to "write genuinely difficult poems."

            And its context of confronting the mother of "a dead marine" surely meets that threshold. In its packed 14 lines we find such images as

"Could I have been the beast he rode to war?
The battle mounted in his sleep, the rounds
of ammunition draped like unblown blossoms
round his neck?"

            These 'unblown blossom' are not found money, or anything beautiful, but something closer to 'fleurs du mal.' Amazingly strong writing in one of those poems that, as the poet tells us, "scare" us to write.

            It can't be a complete accident, can it, that so many of these strong poems speak of death? When Scott Waters' poem "capitulation" begins with mention of soldiers, we are prepared to cross the border to that final country again, but this poem takes us elsewhere. Its formal elements -- the repetition of the line "these soldiers on the hill," and the delayed rhyme that concludes each stanza -- are highly satisfying. The poem feels like a prayer -- of thanks, or appeal.

            Poet Alan Walowitz presents what he describes as "my best recent poem about getting old. " Sometimes a good poem is a really good story told really well. Here's the money shot in the poem titled "Road Kill":

"Like when you finally--and against your better judgment--say, I love you
to one so dear you’d even be willing to bear the silence
such a proclamation might inspire.
Then the voice of the lady from Waze, seductive as a Siren,
wakes you soft and sweet, and without the heavy breathing
you’d counted on any time you used to be lashed to the mast,
and finds a new way to make you listen:
Roadkill on road ahead, she sings,
and there you are, looking for the corpse,..."

            The poem makes very good use of this magic technological moment in exploring the complexities of the aging human condition. I'm beginning to think the "lady from Waze" deserves to be acknowledged as a player in many of our stories. Her three-word title sounds like something out of a contemporary "Idylls of the King."

             Among the many other fine poems in the issues, Joan Mazza's ekphrastic poem "Blown Away" speaks eloquently to the power of a female figure:

"assembled of gears and sinuous metal scrap, windswept yet holding firm to form."

        You have to see the photo of the sculpture by Penny Hardy and read the rest of the poem to appreciate its evocation of the figure's "self-made light."

            Steve Klepetar's poems continue to put to rest any questions I may have had about the impact of winter in Berkshire County, or I suspect, in any other piece of country in the northern states outside the big cities. The answer is intense, sometimes spooky, and always metaphysical. In a poem titled "Halfway Through the Month" we encounter these aspects of the wintry mix and more.

"Night has fallen, and you have
returned through the yard,
your face pressed cold against
window glass.
In the streetlight you look
so pale and old, shrunk
to a child’s body, and then,
when I look again, no body at all..."

            Nor do I ask who the "you" is in these lines, or why "you look so pale and old," and "shrunk to a child’s body," or why that body is almost immediately transformed to "no body at all." The reference is to everything 'out there' -- and probably everything 'in here' as well.   

            Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Naming and Dividing" belongs to a discussion of anybody's best poems. It's an encyclopedia of finely wrought lines and provocative lists, from the first stanza's "Newborns need milk, love, and names"

...to its demonstration of why classification is a purely, and essentially human task:

"The droning plains and rhyming
hills, the singular salt ocean and the
immeasurable eons, these care nothing
for our dividing and naming, no more than
a pack of wolves padding across some line drawn
to fix Wyoming south of Montana..."

...to the poem's tangy lists of places and names -- "Baltimore, Bamako, Bryn Athyn, the Bronx" -- to pick just a very few.

           And its culminating sense of completion through rhyme:   

"Give us latitudes and longitudes
and we’ll make a map and scribe a border,
we’ll christen streets, name neighborhoods
to limn a reassuring order."

            More good verses surely lay ahead. Editor FF has roped the April issue into the best poem rodeo