A seasoned poet working at the peak of her craft.
A veteran poet ruminates on solitude, insanity, deviance, and health in this collection.
Roughly 140 years ago, Peter Taft—half brother to a future U.S. president—was shut away in the Cincinnati Sanitarium. The exact reason for his institutionalization remains unclear to this day, but readers do know that his time in the asylum was intensely stressful. His sense of isolation was acute, and whatever treatments he received did little to assuage his pain. Readers know all this from Taft’s letters, which are lovingly reproduced by his great-granddaughter as found poems and which serve as the core of this moving, masterful tour de force. Taft is a poet in spite of himself—or perhaps in spite of his circumstances—and his missives read like poignant verse. The most affecting is, aptly, the title poem, which opens: “Dear Father, / I am alone this evening as every, / alone. An artist of imperfect / mind is endeavoring to extract / harmonious discords out of a cracked / piano just at my left. Life here / is of the plainest, I might say, / of the hardest kind.” Stever (The Lunatic Ball, 2015, etc.) is mainly reproducing the work of her ancestor here, but it’s a wonder what a few deftly placed line breaks can do for emphasis. Taft’s letters are the foundation of this elegantly rendered book, but Stever angles away from them in a variety of dazzling and unexpected ways. Some tropes repeat: human cruelty, the distance between madness and genius, motherhood, the uniqueness of Ohio. Several poems seem to be one-offs, though no less valuable because their concerns are tangential to those of the other pieces. “Raven’s Rock,” about three ghosts that haunt the countryside near Sleepy Hollow, New York, features the following: “What is a raven but a bird, a ghost / but a raven bird, and the ghosts of three women / ravenous, waiting at Raven’s Rock / for a single man to pass by.” Stever’s kneading of the single word “raven”—which morphs from noun to adjective to proper noun while hiding in “ravenous”—is an act of faith and skill few rookie poets could pull off. But Stever is anything but a novice; she is a virtuoso, and it’s a joy to see her perform.
A seasoned poet working at the peak of her craft.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 96
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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