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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
....a book that should be used in a writing class., January 10, 2004
Review by Hugh FoxThis is a knock-you-down-book that gets to the heart of contemporary reality like no other book I've seen for years. It's an anthology of poets and fictioneers involved with the Out of the Blue Art Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one the great art centers on the east coast.
A strong sense of New England landscape here, forests and moonlight and rivers and sea. Even in the context of love-making, turning the woman into landscape too: I encounter her, a forest lush/ with growth in wooded brown and leafy green....Her topography flows, rumbles, undulating under my stride. Soundings soft birds and animals, insects and reptiles purring.... (Daniel Gaynor, The Encounter, p. 78).
A tremendous sense of age/aging too. These are, for the most part, not youngsters, but aging geniuses who powerfully get across all the feelings that course through the aging. Like aloneness: There is an emptiness in the night/see the lovers back to back in sleep/as the scent of lilac devours the bedroom....oh yes, I do believe we came from the trees,/and I am but a leaf trembling and bleeding/by day and by night, I am solitude. (Deborah M. Priestley, Night, p. 135) Loneliness...and all the medical routines that the aging are too, too familiar with: We develop new routines. Mornings I shoot myself in the abdomen with Leuprolide, evenings I take Provera and baby aspirin...my ultrasound results are good, my suppression has been a success, my endometrium is at ten millimeters. I begin twice weekly Estradiol injections.... (Michelle Chalfoun, Baby Sitting p. 183) And if It's not being old, then how about observing the old: You see them on sunday/parked over the nursing home porch/the old sunk in wheelchairs/a styrofoam cup filled with diet coke in one hand...//you see wrinkled skin shadows/left alone dry/shrinking under the late summer light. (Aldo Tambellini, You See Them, p. 144) Even more suprising is the way religion is dealt with. No soft padding here. But right between the eyes: I'm trying to understand this, I tell him, You actually believe that when ou swallow the-Host, that you're swallowing the body of Christ? .... "Yes," Greg hisses. "That's disgusting." (Patricia Wild, Apples and Oranges,p. 174) Ouch! It's hard to find fiction and poetry anywhere else that has this sort of evocative impact, at the same time manages to be daringly innovative: The sun projects your dual aura/tears fall/when he tells you/they bury you/the day you took the plane/going far away from your country....Argentina/leaving smells, shapes, music of you know: orangey aroma in your grandmother's patio/Callao Street you adore to walk/as flying in a blue balloon....(Beatriz Alba Del Rio, To be, p. 28). It's funny, the poets get so involved with aging, death, religion and Nature with a capital N, and all the other big (capital) Issues, that there's very little portraying of the greater Boston scene. Except in the work of Mr. Boston-Sommerville, Doug Holder: A rainy night/With the sudden wasted light of the store's neon sign-I saw him/first his head/his crown topped with a manicured puff of cream colored curls/swirling into each other..../He inhaled on his cigarette/Captured in a fresco/Of smoke, wet mist/Floating in a menthol cloud. (Fallen Cherub Outside the Liquor Store, p.92). And for feeling weird, on the edge of the abyss, there's no one who beats Jack Powers, kind of a Claude Lelouch of the written word: Sittin' on the edge of the bed,/as usual, telephone in hand.../How many feet do I have?/There's at least a dozen pairs there, waiting, empty....(Shoes and Sneaks at 7 am, p. 130). This is a book not to browse through, but to immerse yourself in. Sophisticated stylistically, more future than past, profoundly involved with the issues that surround us but that too often we just treat superficially. It's a book that ought to be used in writing classes. Just goes to show you where the greater Boston area is in terms of cultural power.
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