Review of Our Lady of the Hunger: Poems

Our Lady of the Hunger: Poems

by Kat Georges

Three Rooms Press $15.00 (paper)

Kat Georges, among other creative efforts, is the co-founder and editor of Three Rooms Press, based in New York City. Her poems are urban and contemporary with humor in the mix. In “Text Me if You Can” she points out what we may know “So much was done before the age of the text message: / Pyramids and cathedrals, empires’ rise and fall / Small wars, civil wars, world wars, atomic wars / And art galore – enough to fill galleries and crypts.” But then turns it to humorous insight. “And it was all so much fun back in the days when / Children did not ignore parents by texting at dinner / And emotions were not aligned pharmaceutically and / Even the brokenhearted found a way to laugh / When the fat lady slipped on a banana peel.” The poems are snapshots of life in the city including a man wearing a papier-mache white rabbit’s head, young girls on the way to school telling the rain to stop, and the anonymous members of “Women’s Group”. “they went around the circle / each woman baring her soul / with their life’s current / unbearable problem.” The poet, who was there with a friend, blurted out she could not find time for herself. Among the unsigned index card responses she got suggestions for getting a massage, getting more exercise, and quitting caffeine. “only one card / made any real sense // it read ‘stop thinking / so much about / yourself’ // a revelation indeed”.

Review of True Affections: Poems from a Small Town

True Affections: Poems from a Small Town

by Elizabeth W. Garber

Illuminated Sea Press $15.00 (paper)

Elizabeth Garber, the former Belfast (Maine) poet laureate and Stonecoast MFA graduate, writes with the accuracy of the acupuncture she also practices. She portrays people living their lives at home in Maine, although sometimes in and around visitors, with a sense of the day to day elevated to the more universal. Her poem “The Tow Truck Driver’s Story” comes to us in the voice of the tow truck driver himself who tells of the time he got up after only one hour’s sleep to answer an emergency call. He endures three hours of dangerous driving to an address described as Appleton Ridge “Then a man in, I kid you not, a red / satin smoking jacket comes out and waves. / I think he is waving at me, and wave back, but it’s a garage door opener and out of the dark / a door rises, lit like a museum, / a car, glittering white and chrome beauty, / it was a 1954 Mercedes.” The driver asks if the man in the smoking jacket is going to take it out. “Oh, no, we just got back from Jamaica / I want a jump to make sure it’s ok.” The book includes local tastes, too, with “Ode to Cider” and “Ode to Rhubarb”. “Oh rhubarb, Spring’s tart sourpuss, too often / insulted . . . .” Garber’s colloquial style makes the poems easy to read, and yet, they all convey a greater insight into the value of the seemingly mundane.

Lifesaving Poems

Lifesaving Poems

Edited by Anthony Wilson

Bloodaxe Books $28.00 (paper)

Poet Anthony Wilson's anthology grew out of his love for poetry and his fear of losing it during his cancer treatment in 2006. He has published four books of poetry and a memoir, but this is his only anthology consisting of poems originally posted on his blog (AnthonyWilsonpoetry.com) and before that copied into a moleskin notebook. He quotes Bart Simpson “C’mon people, this poetry ain’t gonna appreciate itself.” Wilson wondered, after hearing Seamus Heaney in an interview wonder out loud, how many poems would affect a person across a lifetime. He set out to find those poems in his own life. His choices, collected in eight sections, include ninety-one poems by ninety-one poets who are as well-known as Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, and Mary Oliver but also include Wislawa Szymborska and Anonymous. The poems are the ones that Wilson found inspiring, not necessarily the most famous or known as the best of an individual poet’s work. Yet, they have the capacity to speak to anyone who appreciates poetry because of the universality of the poems as well as the individuality of the selection. Each poem is presented in its entirety with publication notes as well an explanation of how Wilson came across the poem and what it meant to him. In the presentation of  “Tides” by Hugo Williams, Wilson says he remembers exactly where he was when he first read the poem.  That’s often the case with the ones that move us, as it is for me and I suspect for many of us with Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”, included in the final section: “We’re still here”.  We are “determined to do/ the only thing you could do/ determined to save/ the only life you could save.”