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By Simmons Buntin, February 16, 2010 4:07 pm

The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2009

By Claudia Broman

Death eventually comes knocking, but before it does, a person might as well pass the time writing poetry. Bill Holm implies as much in “Ars Poetica,” one of his many until-now-unpublished poems included in The Chain Letter of the Soul, printed and posthumously distributed by Milkweed Editions in October 2009 after Holm passed away unexpectedly earlier that year from pneumonia.

Along with new work by Holm, The Chain Letter of the Soul recounts treasures from some of his previous works, The Dead Get By With Everything, Boxelder Bug Variations, and Playing the Black Piano. The book itself is named after a phrase in an application Holm made to the McKnight Foundation to support the time he spent crafting his final batch of new poems: “I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.”

Serendipitous and poignant, many of the poems track Holm’s own emotional negotiation of life, death, and infinity. Through images steeped in landscape, people, wildlife, technology, and music, he questions why death is difficult to accept, what mundane day-to-day moments can teach, and what it means to be human. Take the outset of one of the last poems he wrote, “I Began the Day in My Sixty-Fifth Year,” in which Holm says he asks “himself questions that nobody else has bothered to ask.” By sharing these intimate exchanges with readers, Holm seems to have understood – even if intuitively – how his creativity would continue to resonate much farther than his own abruptly ended life.

The Chain Letter of the Soul is an appropriate entry point for those unfamiliar with Holm, and it offers touching closure for readers already acquainted with his work. The book holds nearly 100 previously unreleased poems, well worth the investment, even though the end of the “Storm Coming to Seattle” section seemed a bit rushed. Please consider The Chain Letter of the Soul as highly recommended and especially so while enjoyed aloud with Mozart or Beethoven, preferably performed on piano, playing in the background.

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Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 2, 2010 8:54 pm

Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008
Edited by Peter Anderson
Pilgrimage Press, 2009

In the world of environmental literature, there are only a handful of steadfast publications — those you know you can turn to for excellent literary work in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, as well as enticing artwork. They work in part because of the strength of the editing team, in part because of the array of contributors, and in part because they speak to place. Pilgrimage Magazine, a small journal located in Colorado, is one such journal.

“I believe in the power of stories,” says former Pilgrimage editor Peter Anderson, “stories from the world’s great wisdom traditions; stories that help us to know home and place; stories that speak to the social justice issues of our time; stories that invite reflection; stories that can open, heal, and empower us; the kinds of stories that once led poet Robert Bly to describe Pilgrimage as ‘one of the finest journals in America.’”

Anderson’s last move before stepping back from his editing role at Pilgrimage was to assemble Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008, and as you might imagine the collection sings. (Disclaimer: Terrain.org editor Simmons B. Buntin has an essay in the collection, “Ben’s Bells,” so he’s biased — but if you spend any time at all with this collection, you’ll acknowledge his bias is right on.)

Telling it Real is introduced by Peter Anderson and then divided into four sections: Story, Place, Spirit, and Witness. At first, you might think: Well, where are all the leading environmental writers? There’s no Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, or Alison Hawthorne Deming, for example. The writers mostly represent the American Southwest, and they represent it beautifully. They are, perhaps, lesser-known, and yet their work — like the anthology itself — is strong and image-filled and built on a passion for and sturdy relationship with the natural world. They include Kim Stafford, Rick Kempa, Pamela Uschuk, William Pitt Root, Reyes Garcia, Maria Melendez, William Stimson, and others.

Telling it Real can be difficult to locate — it’s not on Amazon.com, for example. But you can get it right here:

http://www.pilgrimagepress.org/telling-it-real.html

And we recommend you do.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 18, 2010 6:48 pm

Animal Logic, by Richard Barnes

Animal Logic
by Richard Barnes
with contributions by Susan Yelavich, Jonathan Rosen, and Mark Strand
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

A buffalo stands horns to head with a man who is calmly vacuuming the snow-covered plains beneath its feet. A herd of plastic-wrapped zebras surrounds a giraffe, while a man on scaffolding above them paints a lovely trompe l’oeil sky. Photographer Richard Barnes has spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. His behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum.

Animal Logic, Barnes’s first monograph, collects four related species of his photographic work that touch on themes relevant to science, history, archaeology, and architecture. Through his lens sights and objects normally hidden from public view — half-installed dioramas, partially wrapped specimens, anatomical models, exploded skulls, and taxidermied animals in shipping crates — take on a strange beauty. Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case. Animal Logic investigates both the human desire to construct artificial worlds for “the wild” and the haunting and poignant worlds the real wild constructs. Barnes’s camera freezes migrating starlings to reveal the visual poetry hidden inside their dense formations. His extraordinary photographs of birds’ nests constructed from detritus — string, plastic, milkweed, tinsel, hair, dental floss, pine needles — sculpturally embody our often complicated relationship with nature.

Animal Logic presents more than 120 of Barnes’s photographs and features texts by Jonathan Rosen of the New York Times, former poet laureate Mark Strand, and curator Susan Yelavich that explore the themes that emerge from Barnes’s unique body of work.

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Animal Logic will be fully reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org, “Virtually There,” publishing in mid-March.

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By Simmons Buntin, November 25, 2009 7:58 pm

Rope
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Penguin Poets (Penguin Books), 2009

From the publisher:

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, an experimental forest, and the search for extraterrestrial life. These disparate interests are linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity — virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem, “The Flight,” inspired by the inclusive poems of A.R. Ammons, is a 21st century epic poised on the verge or our discovering life beyond Earth.

Quoth Christopher Cokinos, editor of Isotope and writer of poetry and prose:

“Alison Deming seems in this book like a poetic delta in which run the rivers of Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, and Frank O’Hara. This book pitches into chant, slides into talk, candles the self and finds the solitary paths we’re all on. ‘Mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn,’ she says — and poetry this fine is a form of mercy too, I think, an act of compassion, a gift.”

Sample poems (with audio):

Read (and listen to Alison Deming read) three poems from Rope also in the current issue of Terrain.org:

“Pandora on Prozac”
“Specimens Collected at the Clearcut”
“Glooscap in Wolfville”

Terrain.org micro review:

As the old adage goes, we live in interesting times — we always do, of course, and yet doesn’t it seem that with technology’s exponential growth, global climate change, globalization in general, and the profusion of literature and art that in fact we do live in the most interesting of times?  Literature and art, in fact, may be the best indicators, and if so, then Alison Deming’s newest collection of poems, Rope, is a bellwether.

Rope not only brings together an amazing array of topics — the publisher’s summary above points those out — but weaves those topics into politics, passion, and perspective wholly uniqe and yet universal. Folks who have read Deming’s poetry (or prose) know of her curiosity for and allegiance to the workings of our natural world, and beyond. What makes Rope so delightful, and so important, is how Deming crafts that curiosity: there’s both caution and candor, verve and nuance — always elegant, often pointed.

I think this is particularly true with Deming’s longer poems — “Definition of Disaster,” which takes a sort of artist/scientist systems approach to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina; “The Andrews Forest Quintet,” a series of five poems written while at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest; and perhaps most surprisingly (and stunningly) “Works and Days,” a 45-part prose poem that ranges as only a true artist’s mind can.

The worry with such a far-ranging collection is that it could come across as scattershot — too much of everything, not enough of anything. But that’s not the case with Rope, because even the shorter poems fit like a cog into the larger system of the book. And the longer poems help bound the overall set, so that reading Rope is like following a pathway that meanders but maintains direction. The direction is not just forward but up — the mountains, the sky, the stars.

If we live in interesting times — and we certainly do — then Rope is a worthy and essential guide.

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By Simmons Buntin, October 6, 2009 6:38 am

Evidence: Poems, by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press, 2009

From the book jacket:

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of 47 new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts.

Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”

A Note from Terrain.org’s Editor

I’ve long been a fan of Mary Oliver, beginning with the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, which I consider one of the most influential volumes of American poetry, and one of the best. I picked it up while perusing poetry collections at the Boulder Bookstore, early in my own writing career. Since then, Oliver — along with A.R. Ammons — is the poet I’ve turned to the most for the pure joy of reading her poetry, for inspiring my own, and for sharing.

But I admit I received her newest collection with some apprehension, because I’ve been mostly  disappointed in her newest work. While many of the poems are still wonderful, I’ve sensed a decline in her work — as well as a reliance on a formula that worked so well in her first several books but now feels, well, formulaic.

My take, then, on Evidence? I think it is her strongest book in quite some time. No doubt several of the poems work even as they fall into that predictable formula. But I find the most pleasure in the longer poems of the collection, most notably “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass,” the title poem, and “At the River Clarion.” Oliver seems to be expanding her notable repertoire here, and doing so in new, skillful, and exciting ways. To that I say: bravo — Mary Oliver is back!

Evidence is a must-have for any Oliver fan, of course. But I think it is also an essential book for any lover of poetry. It is wide-ranging in form, relentless in its questioning: searing, aspiring, lovely.

About Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was recently awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Tufts University. Her 18 previous books of poetry include The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Red Bird, and New and Selected Poems, Volume One and Volume Two. She lives in Privincetown, Massachusetts.

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By Simmons Buntin, September 29, 2009 5:26 am

By Jennifer McStotts

When the draft for Vietnam was in full swing, my father volunteered not because he believed in the war or lusted for battle, but because he couldn’t avoid the draft. He knew if he volunteered, he would get a better assignment, and if he survived, his life afterward would be more stable. A risky reason to enlist, but it is also common thinking among women who serve: the desire for training, for education, for opportunity and stability. Much like many women who serve today, his enlistment launched three decades of silence in his family. The first time I remember him mentioning Vietnam was in my late teens. We were in twining lines waiting for flu shots, staying together until we were divided, men to the left, women to the right. He stood just off my shoulder, and as we neared the split, he asked, “Are you squeamish about needles?”

I chuckled. “No, are you?”

To my surprise he gave the smallest shudder and said, as our lines split apart, “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person, but for some reason needles still give me the creeps.”

He didn’t speak of his service even as I considered joining myself, except to say that a commission was better than enlistment and that serving as a woman was not easy. Choosing to remain a civilian isn’t something I regret; in fact, it is a luxury for which I am thankful, but it was pressing on my mind as I sat down, Saturday evening in Tucson, Ariz., for the performance of Coming in Hot.

The stageplay is an adaptation of selections from the Kore Press anthology, Powder: Writing by Women in the Military, from Vietnam to Iraq, which collects the work of nineteen women who served in the U.S. military in a variety of roles. Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain, the co-editors, admit that they “went into the project with the idea that this work would contribute to the chorus of opposition to the war in Iraq . . . We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any bias and agenda.” It was, nonetheless, this agenda, bias, and perspective that made me wonder if the adapted work would be solely anti-war, primarily a piece of activism, especially given that the work was produced by Kore Press and directed by Bowden.

What the audience witnessed was a well-balanced collection of monologues composed into a one-woman show featuring Jeanmarie Simpson (original score by accompanist Vicki Brown on strings and pedals, with recorded voice talents of Donald Paul Stockton and Kaylene Torregrossa). Before I go any further, I would like to applaud Simpson. While her performance wasn’t flawless, she was also presented with a nearly impossible task in portraying 14 distinct characters in 80 minutes, without costume change; she did so successfully — laudably — using her voice, her mannerisms, and her versatility as an actress, but at times the variety of accents necessary to distinguish so many women became less convincing.

It is troubling that the adaption and direction called for Simpson to do so in the first place. The message or point of the play could have been narrowed, refined, or, in the alternative, the number of monologues could have been reduced (19 contributions became 14 characters, and an even greater number of segments given the recurring appearance of Charlotte Brock’s character in Mortuary Affairs). Characters could have been conflated without much loss of narrative effect and without forcing Simpson to stretch to distinguish them; as one audience member said immediately after the performance, “There were too many stories. It was too much, and it didn’t say enough.”

That said, despite missed light cues, despite a few stuttered lines and awkward moments involving her blocking, Simpson brought life to characters within the simplicity of an otherwise stark production. The set consisted only of one chair and one table — more of an operating table, clinical and spare — which was primarily used for the Mortuary Affairs scenes in which Brock’s character stood over it as if looking down on a body. The lighting consisted of only a few overhead fixtures at various angles with the exception of one water effect and one flashlight held by a crew member. What felt strange, to me, was the balance the director struck between the one-woman show format — meant to emphasize character and message — and the use of recorded voice segments to supplement Simpson’s work. In addition, it was confusing that at first the recorded voices were only used for the male voice of a boot camp instructor, then a female voice for the character Simpson was portraying silently on stage, and finally that same female voice switched to a male role. While I don’t agree with one audience member’s assessment that it would have been better to focus on a very small number of stories — four being the number she mentioned — it did feel inconsistent to rely on the one-actor model while supplementing and distracting from her performance in a variety of ways.

The original score by Vicki Brown was a perfect accompaniment to the monologues. Brown used the same themes and structure each time Simpson returned to the recurring character of Charlotte Brock in the mortuary. At other times, her music set the heartbeat of the scene, calling its pace; at every moment, she took the pain and the challenge of Brock’s writing (and Simpson’s portrayal) to a higher level.

These recurring scenes pulled me in the most and made me think — again, as I often have before — of my father’s offhand comment. “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person.” Brock says something very similar about “the contents of the bags” that Mortuary Affairs handled, especially in one harrowing scene in which the deceased is little more than “a head, a hand, and an arm.”

What Simpson, Bowden, and Cain attempted to do in the adaptation and performance was no easy task — to tell these stories and to grant these women their individual voices when their silence has been so pervasive. What perhaps made the sections by Brock so powerful was that she, too, was trying to give someone a voice, both herself in the world in which she found herself surrounded, but also the dead who lay upon that table.

About the Blogger

Jennifer McStotts is the daughter, niece, and ex-wife of United States Marines, as well as a second-year MFA student in creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in Future Anterior, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, and by Preservation Books.

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By Simmons Buntin, July 22, 2009 7:22 pm

Terrain.org recently received:

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By Simmons Buntin, June 26, 2009 2:56 pm

New Anthology Offers Personal Stories and Reflections on Global Warming from New and Established Writers and Photographers

Unique collaboration between nonprofit and publisher will make interactive book accessible to millions of Americans for free.

NEW YORK – A new generation of writers and photographers with a personal connection to global warming are taking inspiration from Henry David Thoreau and other legendary environmental authors by publishing their works in a special anthology from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Penguin Classics.

The nonprofit science group and Penguin Classics selected essays and photos by 67 Americans for the new book Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. The contributors include scientists, students, grandparents, activists, veterans, journalists, evangelical Christians, artists, and businesspeople who live in 32 states stretching from Alaska to Florida. A foreword on global warming by award-winning novelist, poet and nonfiction author Barbara Kingsolver helps to set the context.

UCS and Penguin Classics will offer the anthology for free online as an interactive book at www.ucsusa.org/americanstories and a forthcoming eBook. A limited edition hardcover also will be available for purchase. The online interactive book will allow the anthology to be instantly shared with friends through emails and on social media sites.

“This partnership was unique in so many ways, but no more so in the reversal of roles we each played,” said Kevin Knobloch, UCS’s president. “Penguin Classics spearheaded efforts to inform the public about the need to speak out about global warming, while we took the editorial and publishing lead.”

“I have great respect for the work of the Union of Concerned Scientists,” said Elda Rotor, editorial director at Penguin Classics, “and it’s been very satisfying for us to have been able to help generate public participation in this project, and we hope their voices will be heard; particularly as Congress debates legislation to reduce the pollution that contributes to global warming.”

Personal Perspectives from Across the Nation

As Ms. Kingsolver writes in her foreword, to find hope in our future “we must radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat.” The contributors to Thoreau’s Legacy do just that. We see the changes in New England’s natural beauty through the eyes of an observant ninth-grader. We learn how pollution and a warming climate are affecting the Yakama Indians’ way of life. We follow a family whose faith has led them on a journey to protect the planet. We look into the fearsome eyes of an old polar bear crossing the Alaskan ice. And we get a useful, if painful, lesson from a New Orleans native who can never go home again and who worries for other American cities. These are just a few of the many personal accounts about climate change in this collection.

The Genesis of this Anthology

UCS and Penguin Classics teamed up in September 2008 to encourage writers and photographers to submit their personal impressions of global warming — in words or images — for publication in a new book.

Hundreds of bookstores across the country joined the effort by displaying easels and distributing free bookmarks about the project. Both Penguin Classics and UCS featured the project prominently on their Web sites.

The partners received nearly 1,000 submissions from established and aspiring writers and photographers from across the country. They submitted 200- to 500-word personal accounts or photographs that focused on the places they love and want to protect; the animals, plants, people and activities they fear are at risk from a changing climate; and the steps they are taking in their own lives to stem the tide of global warming.

A team of reviewers from Penguin Classics and UCS selected 67 contributions for the anthology. Working with Mixit Productions, they produced an innovative interactive book. In July a limited edition hardcover coffee table book and a downloadable eBook will also be available.

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The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices.

Penguin Classics is the largest and most comprehensive publisher of classic literature in English in the world, and as a publisher is committed to using paper products from manufacturers that are committed to sustainable paper production techniques, and to in-house conservation and recycling in our daily business practice.

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By Simmons Buntin, June 23, 2009 6:56 pm

Terrain.org recently received:

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By Simmons Buntin, June 15, 2009 6:35 am

Terrain.org recently received:

From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, edited by Camille T. Dungy, Matt O’Donnell, and Jeffrey Thomson, with a foreword by Gerald Stern

Persea Books, 2009

From the publisher:

From the Fishouse (http://www.fishousepoems.org/) is a one-of-a-kind on-line archive devoted to teh oral and aural aspects of contemporary American poetry. Based in a converted codfish-drying shack in Pittston, Maine, it showcases emerging poets performign their own work and responding to questions about poetry and the writing process.

Derived from the Fishouse Web site, the From the Fishouse print anthology is a jamboree of contemporary poetry at its acoustic best. It collects more than 175 poems by nearly 100 poets from the archive, dividing them into ten playful thematic sections. Each poem is a striking example of why poetry is meant not just to be read, but to be read aloud. To complement the poems, the book includes illuminating excerpts from the Web site’s Q&As with the poets and, in the Fishouse tradition of poetry as an oral/aural form, it comes with a compact disc that features dynamic recitations of 38 of the poems in the book. Indespensable for all poetry lovers, From the Fishouse is the most exciting, portable way to experience the array of poetry being written and performed in the United States in teh first decade fo the twenty-first century.

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We here at Terrain.org pretty much agree. Both the Fishouse website and book are really grand. Check them out!