Firewood and Ashes: New and Selected Poems
Ben Howard
Salmon Poetry / DuFour Editions ($24)

Geis
Caitríona O'Reilly
Wake Forest University Press ($13.95)

by M. G. Stephens

Ben Howard writes a flawless blank verse, which he often hinges onto a narrative structure in an almost novelistic way. His iambics are as thorough and stately as anyone’s on the planet. His 1997 book Midcentury, represented in this new and selected collection, typifies both his measure and his gift for telling a story. Though from Iowa, Howard is obsessed with Ireland; his connection to that land is through his sensibility as much as his scholarship. Howard is also author of the essay collection The Pressed Melodeon: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (1996), which contains some of the most insightful writings on such authors as John Montague, John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh, and Derek Mahon.

Midcentury is not a corny, sentimental Irish tale; the sequence begins with a poem entitled “The Word from Dublin, 1944,” a poem set during World War II, when Ireland had declared its neutrality throughout the worldwide conflict. Here is how it starts:

I can’t begin to say what brought me here,
Unless it be the Irish predilections
For whiskey and horses, both of which entail
A certain risk and a less-than-certain gain.
To be a middle-aged American
In Dublin in the middle of a war,
Of which we’re hearing more or less than nothing,
And that in fragments, bits of veracity—
A mutilated bulletin, a headline—
Is to see one’s lot reflected in the stories
That come to us distorted, if at all:
Stories of heroism, sacrifice,
Or, more often, utter devastation.

Howard goes on to write that he knows “next to nothing” about Irish horses, and regarding Irish whiskey, he says that it “soothes the brains it hastens to dismantle.” This persona has a voice freighted with mystery akin to a narrator in a novel by John Le Carre or Graham Greene. The voice is soft and quiet, sophisticated but full of subtle judgments, which the narrator calls moralysis, and he admits being inclined to it:

Which causes Iowans to see the world
As more coherent than it really is
And gamely to construct a moral dream
Where black is black, and a promise is a promise?

Whereas Ben Howard is an American poet and scholar with a deep interest in Ireland, Caitríona O’Reilly is an Irish poet and scholar with a deep interest in America. Her doctorate from Trinity College in Dublin assessed such poets as Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Sylvia Path, all of whose rhythms and images inhabit shadow worlds throughout these excellent poems. Consider her poem “An Idea of Iowa”:

Who in their bleakest hour has not considered Iowa?
We live in a place where everything leans in

as if to confide in us, and learn, too late, it is a trick:
the frieze, the whole entablature must topple,

as the drunk on the bus, in the course of his life story,
anoints us with cidery spittle, as the ash

from a thousand fag-end sunsets settles on us.
But Iowa.

Iowa is different, according to O’Reilly; it is yellow for as far as the eye can see, yellow “as the cere of the bald eagle / hanging with locked wings on thermals. / Iowa is rising.” But Geis shows more than a poet pining for a place she’s never been. This is a collection of lyrical sensibility, an intellectual and emotional exploration, an archeology (a field the poet studied as an undergraduate at Trinity) into the various layers of Irish culture and civilization. Like Seamus Heaney’s early poems, O’Reilly’s work mines not just the possibilities but the philosophical underpinnings of a people and their place in the world. These are smart poems, and yet they wear their smartness as one might wear a loose garment, making their utterances elegant and even charming, but always full of probing questions—the scholar’s pursuits. Certainly Caitríona O’Reilly is a smart poet, a well-educated one, but more importantly, a lyrical intelligence informs her erudition.

These are beautiful poems, full of imagery and intention that makes a reader pause and think. From the first poem, “Ovum,” we are introduced to an almost classic Irish sensibility in which words and their origins are not just background, but also the foreground to the poem: “the meat / of the word made orotund and Latinate.” She writes: “It’s like putting your mouth to the smooth / breast of the ocarina, from oca, the goose, / hooting out its fledgling notes.” I am reminded of the opening beat of Dubliners in which the words “paralysis,” “gnomon,” and “simony” become important to the young narrator of “The Sisters.” The Irish are nothing if not great caressers of words—stroking them, lingering over their surfaces, but also going back to the ninth-century scholarly monks, lovers of etymologies. Caitríona O’Reilly is just such a poet.

Geis is an Irish word, meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behavior. It is a word that resonates throughout this collection. It is suggestive of the forbidden, and yet these poems are austere, even regal, so that it is not the light of these poems, but rather the shadows they cast which are ultimately most intriguing. It is that afterglow of the geis, its residue, which lingers, not so much a song as the last echo of a song. These poems, especially the title poem, are about the rupture of the bifurcated self, of the poles of the human spirit in dramatic tension with each other. There is even a poem entitled “Blue Poles,” named after a famous Jackson Pollock painting, in which O’Reilly writes that “there was nothing left to do”

but plant blue poles among the spindrift and iron filings
and step, clutching your brass chronometer,
clean off the deck and into the sky
where a lens rose to meet you like a terrifying eye.

Irish poetry had a Renaissance forty years ago, mainly with male poets from the North (Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon, to name a few). But what is happening today is something different entirely. Ireland has come up with a congress of women poets who represent the collective consciousness of the Irish people (Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Sinéad Morrissey, among others). Caitríona O’Reilly is one of the most important voices in that new Irish renaissance. Hers is a complex, lyrical, archeological, resonating, probing voice, one that is as intellectually restless as any wandering Celt in the Irish past, either mythical or historical. This is a most important book whose urgency is confidently erudite, quietly fierce, and lyrically determined.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Corinna Vallianatos
University of Massachusetts Press ($24.95)

by Shane Joaquin Jimenez

Is escape possible? This is the central question in Corinna Vallianatos’s debut collection, My Escapee, a winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. These are stories constellated around women: elderly, young, married, widowed, sick, alienated. While these women appear on the surface to be considerably different, they are bound together by a common desire for escape—from the world of men, from personal limitations, from life itself. Thoreau famously said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” but Vallianatos asks whether escape is something that women can genuinely accomplish, or whether it merely numbers in a long list of thwarted desires.

We cannot discuss escape without first talking about the other side. Negative freedom, freedom from, means liberation from the various systems of control that bind us—from state power to the cultural forces that hold sway over our social lives. In these stories, the most pervasive system of control is the male gaze, which, in feminist film theory, is the tendency for the camera to assume a male perspective in framing women, reducing them to visually appealing objects. In My Escapee, this perspective becomes an active, living force, smothering the interior lives of our protagonists.

We discover this at maximum effect in the inspired story “Sink Home,” whose main character, Mira, is unhappily married to an aloof doctor who has long since lost interest in her. Frustrated, she escapes into an affair with Hugh, a civil rights lawyer who hates injustice in the abstract but can’t register the emotions of those around him. By arranging Mira between these two men, Vallianatos shows how she sees her life purely in relation to them, how she has become a void to be filled:

She struggles past a growing frustration, a white feeling that threatens to eclipse what she’s trying to say. She’s not a doctor-in-training, not a lawyer, not pleased with herself, not confident, not full of verve and vigor, not on fire, not at peace. She’s not sure of what she is, and this uncertainty feels to her like possibility, like space.

Mira fills this space with men, particularly Hugh. She senses distasteful controlling tendencies in him—he prefers to drive her around so he can be in “control of comings and goings”—but her resistances are overcome by the aggressive confidence with which he applies his gaze to her. She wants him to drive, she finds, “because she likes the feeling of him shepherding her places, as if she’s an arrangement of flowers that he’s delivering.” This kind of escape is not a pathway to freedom: when Mira internalizes the paradigms of the phallocracy instead of escaping their pressures, she becomes simply a passenger through her own life. When she discovers, with no great displeasure, that “she likes being corrected by him because he puts his arm around her when he does so,” the male gaze has become her own gaze, directed upon herself. James Brown may be famous for singing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” but it was a woman, after all, who wrote the lyrics.

At a crucial moment in the story, though, Mira gathers her two lovers together and declares, “I have something both of you want.” Is she accepting her position as a sexual object or using it as leverage to reclaim control? Is she embracing the male gaze or subverting it? The circularity of these questions betrays our desire for the forward momentum of a traditional narrative, where characters learn lessons from their actions and are forever changed by them. Vallianatos acknowledges our desire, but, in the end, stifles it, as if to say that our journeys are ultimately determined by such defeated hopes.

Elsewhere, Vallianatos shows that the system we seek to escape from is sometimes life itself. “Living a long time solves only one of life’s mysteries,” muses Ginny, the octogenarian narrator of the book’s title story, “and that is what it is like to be very old.” Stuck in assisted-living hell, she is haunted by the memory of her lifelong lover, Margaret:

When we were young, Margaret and I flew in a small airplane over the red mountains of Afghanistan. She had red hair then, too. It sprang rowdily from her leather helmet. We didn’t need men, we had our permeable selves. The humped mountains were as intimate as a tangled blanket on a bed. I knew that if the plane were to sputter and sink I would accept it, the softness below us made it possible, even tempting.

The inverse of negative freedom is the freedom to, the state where one is empowered to engage freely in the world and choose one’s own life path. Ginny and Margaret centered their lives not on approval from men but on the wild form of escape called wanderlust; Ginny has successfully escaped social systems of control, but is now struck down by age, senility, mortality. So she chooses further flight into the void: she chooses self-destruction. Positive freedom is not necessarily the power to choose life; it’s simply the power to choose one way or the other. It is to be one’s own master, unrestrained both socially and internally, and be able to live free or to die.

In Ginny, Vallianatos shows us a character whose desire for flight is so strong she is willing to accept destruction, the softness below, as a means of escape. This is a kind of freedom that’s impossible for many of the characters in My Escapee, who have to content themselves with the simple freedom to not be enslaved. But Ginny finds a way toward true independence, where one possesses the free will to choose fully for oneself, be it life or death, the stars or the void.

Vallianatos hopscotches between narrative devices—in “Shelter” she transforms a new bride into a colorful, deflating balloon—but she’s most poetic when she works with disconnection as a theme and not a structural device. For the most part, her stories have a light touch. At just 165 pages, including acknowledgments, My Escapee is a spare, precise book, vividly imagined with sparkly language, and it leaves us asking questions of both the world and ourselves long after turning the last page. Let us return to our central question: Is escape possible? Perhaps the beginnings of an answer can be found in the title of the book, considering the intimacy of the possessive pronoun “my” and the word choice of “escapee,” with all its connotations of captivity and disappearance, pursuit and longing, but also the most desirable of all things: freedom.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Mike Edison
Sterling Publishing ($17.95)

by Bridget Simpson

The title of Mike Edison's newest memoir, You Are A Complete Disappointment: A Triumphant Memoir of Failed Expectations, is taken from some of the last words his father ever said to him; the very last, moments later, being "I can't believe someone as smart as you likes professional wrestling!" Because it is framed as a comedic memoir, at first glance a reader might expect You Are A Complete Disappointment to be little more than a roast of a mean, old, Jewish father. However, Edison's book unfolds into a heart-wrenching narrative of the author’s journey to make peace with his childhood, forgive his father, and find worth within himself.

Edison's resume includes a stint as a porn novelist, a European tour with his punk-rock band, and an earlier memoir entitled I Have Fun Everywhere I Go—all jobs which further fueled his father's ire. This eclectic history bolsters Edison’s humor, while simultaneously adding to his credibility. In frank prose, he admits to those details of his first memoir which were edited or embellished in one of many attempts to win his father's approval. With Edison now uninhibited by the paternal pressure that defined much of his existence up until this point, his readers become privy to the intimate details of the therapy sessions that helped him come to terms with the contents of this book.

Edison admits that in many ways, You Are a Complete Disappointment was created for personal catharsis, but the result extends beyond himself. As he noted when the book began to take form, "The more I tell the story, the more I realize that there are a lot of fathers out there who somehow along the way were stripped of their kindness and their compassion for their children . . . I remember hearing about one guy who started a war in Iraq to impress his old man." Though Edison may be sure that his own father would not be happy with his latest endeavor, his candor and honesty will no doubt connect with many readers who also feel doomed to fail their fathers. Edison's own demonstration of the long, difficult, but sometimes humorous road toward compassion will pave the way for others to follow in his footsteps.

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Sara Benincasa
William Morrow ($14.99)

by Christian Corpora

Sara Benincasa is the eccentric, fearlessly honest aunt you didn’t know you needed. She has published three books, including a coming-of-age story about a middle school trip to Washington, DC, a comedic retelling of The Great Gatsby, and a painfully funny memoir detailing life with mental illness, Agorafabulous!. Her newest book, Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You in School) will appeal to readers seeking humor, advice, companionship, or all of the above. She fills fifty-two chapters—“one for each week in the year, if you so desire”—with life advice as told through deeply personal narratives.

Benincasa has amassed an eclectic hodgepodge of life experiences. From teaching high school math to developing and pitching television shows to coping with depression and anxiety, she never shies away from revealing both broad and intimate details about herself. Benincasa makes herself bare for the benefit of others learning the freedom of self-acceptance. She describes her project as “a book of advice and ideas inspired by my thirty-five years of flaws, fuckups, failures, and occasional good choices.” Her self-deprecating humor is a delight to read as she draws the reader into a deeper place of self-reflection.

The title of the book also serves as that of the opening chapter, which Benincasa uses to encourage creators of all types—writers, painters, designers, musicians—to embrace their creative identity. While the title positions this collection as aimed at fellow artists, Benincasa’s advice applies to readers who pursue creativity on any scale; almost any type of reader will benefit from the challenge it provokes to own one’s identity.

What makes Real Artists Have Day Jobs such a welcome addition to the humor/memoir/lifestyle genre—a genre dominated by household names such as Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Mindy Kaling—is Benincasa’s relative obscurity. The reader doesn’t associate glitz and glamor with her name, and neither does she. Benincasa is truly someone who lives her own advice and wants us to as well, and she provides enjoyment and heartfelt encouragement with every turn of the page.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Athena Kildegaard
Tinderbox Editions ($15)

by Heidi Czerwiec

Ventriloquy unites the expansive outlook of poet Athena Kildegaard with the recent expansion of Minnesota’s Tinderbox Poetry Journal into a new press, Tinderbox Editions. The five sections of this rich collection expand from the garden to saints, divination, and ultimately to the universe. By engaging with the garden and metaphysical concerns, Kildegaard evokes Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, in which the poet-gardener-speaker also throws her voice. But where Glück’s project, while powerful, feels tightly controlled and more intellectual, Kildegaard’s is more surreally messy—her saints are “Contrary and Futile” and her divinations start and end by pointing to the things of this world.

In the eight-line portraits of the first section, “Garden of Tongues, Garden of Eyes,” Kildegaard’s speaker takes a close look at various flowers, as in “The Clematis”:

Hush, hush, they whisper at dusk
then furl themselves tight as virgins.
The summer nights are too short
for turpitude, but the clematis
take no chance.

“The Saint of Whimsy” snatches at things—“nutcracker with a sky-blue cape and a bear head, / . . . / gingko leaves forceps two piano keys white and black”—and laughs at the collectors who follow her around, while “The Grass Saint” is depressed “because she knew bison / reduced to bar décor.”

The poems of the “Divination” section list various means by which the speaker tries and fails to explain her world. “It’s the sky . . . ceiling of the world,” the speaker of “By Fable” says: “Her throat tickles with failure. The sky / is falling. She’s hoarse as shucked corn.” But while concerned with intrusions of the numinous, this Cassandra’s divinations are linked to the female body’s experiences: the desires and fears of puberty, motherhood, and age. In “By Ice” she holds her dying mother’s hand, tries “to keep her mother tethered/ to this world” by reminding her of

the fur-lined glove her mother
dropped and, the next morning, found,
the sky clear, the glove frozen to gravel.

In the last section, “Still Life with Universe,” ekphrastic prose poems telescope between the micro- and macrocosmic to interrogate the nature of still-lifes themselves—their tension between stasis and story, their illusion of permanence. “Still Life with Passenger Pigeons” asserts “There’s a story here: cracked pepper spilled across the table . . . a galaxy, a startled flock, a Braille riddle.” And the ending of “Still Life with Giorgio Morandi’s Easel” could be a portrait of this entire poetry collection: “A silent arsenal of everyday objects, bristling and flat-bottomed.”

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016