Bonnie Jacobson brings us In Joanna's House (Cleveland State, 1998), a compelling collection of forty-six wildly inventive poems about the fictional Joanna, whose agile mind ponders everything in her own unique way. (added 8/05)
Michael Jennings is the author of Silky Thefts (Orchises Press, 2007), one of the loveliest books to appear in 2007. Superbly crafted, especially the sequence of sonnets for his mother, these lyrical poems travel through both time and space, mining the memories of childhood and youth, of Paris and New Orleans, the exotic scents of an earlier Iran. Metaphor and imagery are outstanding and the diction, its surreally-swirled language, delight the ear. The genuine and intense emotion that permeates each poem gives the reader the experience of recollected love and loss: altogether stunning! There is also an earlier collection, Totems (Basfal,1994), a visually exciting book of wildlife photographs by Scott Ian Barry with poems by Jennings to illustrate each animal. Timber wolves to crocodiles and the great horned owl, they are all here in thirty-five fine poems and photos. (updated 12/07).
Gwendolyn Jenson's Birthright (Birch Book Press, 2011) This collection of poems begs to be read again and again. And then you will say, thank you for rich, metrical pieces, full and clear, breathtaking. Gwendolyn Jensen’s masterful use of rhythm and form, of repetition astounds us. She speaks of what’s lost in childhood in “Expulsion,”
When I was a girl I had a golden place,
a creek with over-hanging foliage
that dappled me as if it were a white
and private wall, it sheltered me from hurt
I did not understand.
or found in “Swagger,”
I am a schooner’s figurehead,
I cut the ocean rim,
The shuddering seas they part for me.
And so I go to school.
or felt at “Recess”:
For the slight, the silent child, recess
Means pretending that she does not mind
That all around her arm in arm are friends
Absorbed in each other.
In the series “At Home With Children,” she takes us into motherhood, exposes a woman’s loneliness amid the fray, a writer’s wish for solitude and time “to bloom again, “the need
for quietude.
In “The Whistler,” she shares the melody of Largo from the New World Symphony
and she leans toward the sound,
enlarged by hope or something harder.
She remembers when she’s heard the sound. And we stop there, in this book, and remember our own connections to the music.
Life has places for that tune,
a father’s whistle, a mother’s sigh,
a passing song, identified,
unknown,
someone late coming home.
Or a group of poems begging to be reread, too lovely to forget. Haunting as the song, a wanting to go home. (Review by Ellen McNeal, 2012)
