Wild Goose Poetry Review has nominated the following poems for 2010 Pushcart Prizes: Joe Milford, "The Janitor Moonlighting;" Pris Campbell, "Original Sin;" Linda Annas Ferguson, "I Wanted to Hear Her Howl;" Janice Moore Fuller, "Ellipsis;" Joseph Trombatore, "Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue;" William Keener, "Refuge". Congratulations to these wonderful poets.
Read them all at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com
Showing posts with label Janice Moore-Fuller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Janice Moore-Fuller. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Review of Janice Moore-Fuller's "Seance" (Wild Goose, Summer 2008)
Review of Séance by Janice Moore Fuller (Iris Press, 2007, www.irisbooks.com)
ISBN: 9780916078874
The speaker of Janice Moore Fuller’s poem “Angled. Mosaic. Companion.” from her collection Séance says,
Youth loves puzzles, séances with missing
voices. But you and I need the steady
fullness of a carpet rolled flat.
And that is what the poems in this collection do, rolling flat the fabric of memory and perception to help the reader see what we almost certainly would have missed otherwise, the secrets of love, mourning, forgiveness, things that live in the catacombs of the human heart, but through close contact take up residence in objects and places which become channels for communication between past and present, living and dead, here and elsewhere. In “Weeding Sylvia’s Grave, Heptonstall,” it is the headstone that contains Plath’s silent wish for room and time to write. Talking of both weeds and the flowers visitors have left, the speaker says
I’ve gathered them to fall
one by one into the rubbish bin
(as she must have done
dropping failed off-rhymes,
half-closed tulips,
thorny lines that wouldn’t sing)
even these roses that don’t bear
pressing--red, her favorite--
my gift snipped from Lumb Bank,
Ted’s temporary home.
The quotidian pulled away
from a clean new page.
Ironically, in other poems it is the quotidian which serves as repository and conveyance. In “Hydrangea,” for example, the speaker, while sitting in an old porch swing, comes to understand her grandmother’s acceptance of a limited experience of the world.
. . . she seesawed there
on the porch swing,
mesmerized by the hydrangeas
circumnavigating the yard--
hyacinth to fuchsia,
all the cosmos
she hoped for.
In poem after poem, the reader is transported to the time and place of the speaker’s experience and through the speaker to the time of the emotion, thought, spirit inscribed in material things. In “Midnight in the Convent, Spoleto,” for example, the speaker conveys the reader to a place of lonely, fearful visitation from the past:
I pretend I am one of them
waking to thin
light through the cell’s
lone slit . . .
. . . The stones
know I’m alone.
When the lights shut,
. . .
. . . The timer stutters,
“sorry,” under
its breath. My heart
thumps toward a dark
something big. It wants me to pause
before I press
the flashlight, wait
before I break
the terror with my tiny beam.
While these places are sometimes as exotic as the Galapagos or Lake Annaghmakerrig, they are just as often as common as parts of the body. Such is the case in perhaps the strongest, and certainly one of the tightest and most resonant, poems in the collection. In “The Grand Cartographer Recharts the Belly,” the speaker lays clear the impact of experience on the geography of one’s own body.
All those speed bumps, gutters, detours.
It was never flat terrain.
Chicken pox left pot holes, deeper
than gall bladder swerves the surgeon tore.
Twins left speed bumps, curves, and gutters. “Detour
here,” she tells new lovers, who restrain
but always speed. Bumps. Gutters. Detours.
It was never flat terrain.
The ultimate lesson in the poems of Séance seems to be to look deeper into the things of our lives, to recognize the value of things and to know that (in the book’s most memorable phrase) “nothing / gets killed for good” (No Pasarán). To not do so is to doom ourselves to live as the frigate birds in “Ornithology” who “clack/ against the life they’ll lead . . . / waddling toward the cliff’s runway . . . / wide-winged, / lonely . . . . “ To do so, helps us more readily “lurch forward / for a mother’s chant, a father’s words” (“Séance: On the Road from Stradone”). If restricted to a one line statement about this book it would be this: In memory resides revelation. In these poems too.
ISBN: 9780916078874
The speaker of Janice Moore Fuller’s poem “Angled. Mosaic. Companion.” from her collection Séance says,
Youth loves puzzles, séances with missing
voices. But you and I need the steady
fullness of a carpet rolled flat.
And that is what the poems in this collection do, rolling flat the fabric of memory and perception to help the reader see what we almost certainly would have missed otherwise, the secrets of love, mourning, forgiveness, things that live in the catacombs of the human heart, but through close contact take up residence in objects and places which become channels for communication between past and present, living and dead, here and elsewhere. In “Weeding Sylvia’s Grave, Heptonstall,” it is the headstone that contains Plath’s silent wish for room and time to write. Talking of both weeds and the flowers visitors have left, the speaker says
I’ve gathered them to fall
one by one into the rubbish bin
(as she must have done
dropping failed off-rhymes,
half-closed tulips,
thorny lines that wouldn’t sing)
even these roses that don’t bear
pressing--red, her favorite--
my gift snipped from Lumb Bank,
Ted’s temporary home.
The quotidian pulled away
from a clean new page.
Ironically, in other poems it is the quotidian which serves as repository and conveyance. In “Hydrangea,” for example, the speaker, while sitting in an old porch swing, comes to understand her grandmother’s acceptance of a limited experience of the world.
. . . she seesawed there
on the porch swing,
mesmerized by the hydrangeas
circumnavigating the yard--
hyacinth to fuchsia,
all the cosmos
she hoped for.
In poem after poem, the reader is transported to the time and place of the speaker’s experience and through the speaker to the time of the emotion, thought, spirit inscribed in material things. In “Midnight in the Convent, Spoleto,” for example, the speaker conveys the reader to a place of lonely, fearful visitation from the past:
I pretend I am one of them
waking to thin
light through the cell’s
lone slit . . .
. . . The stones
know I’m alone.
When the lights shut,
. . .
. . . The timer stutters,
“sorry,” under
its breath. My heart
thumps toward a dark
something big. It wants me to pause
before I press
the flashlight, wait
before I break
the terror with my tiny beam.
While these places are sometimes as exotic as the Galapagos or Lake Annaghmakerrig, they are just as often as common as parts of the body. Such is the case in perhaps the strongest, and certainly one of the tightest and most resonant, poems in the collection. In “The Grand Cartographer Recharts the Belly,” the speaker lays clear the impact of experience on the geography of one’s own body.
All those speed bumps, gutters, detours.
It was never flat terrain.
Chicken pox left pot holes, deeper
than gall bladder swerves the surgeon tore.
Twins left speed bumps, curves, and gutters. “Detour
here,” she tells new lovers, who restrain
but always speed. Bumps. Gutters. Detours.
It was never flat terrain.
The ultimate lesson in the poems of Séance seems to be to look deeper into the things of our lives, to recognize the value of things and to know that (in the book’s most memorable phrase) “nothing / gets killed for good” (No Pasarán). To not do so is to doom ourselves to live as the frigate birds in “Ornithology” who “clack/ against the life they’ll lead . . . / waddling toward the cliff’s runway . . . / wide-winged, / lonely . . . . “ To do so, helps us more readily “lurch forward / for a mother’s chant, a father’s words” (“Séance: On the Road from Stradone”). If restricted to a one line statement about this book it would be this: In memory resides revelation. In these poems too.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Janice Moore Fuller & Wild Goose Poetry Journal, October 30, 2008
Once upon a time, if you wanted to experience good, contemporary poetry, you had to subscribe to a literary journal, typically published 3-4 times a year at a university or college. Those magazines still exist today and still publish the best contemporary poetry being written, and when I teach creative writing, I strongly encourage my students to subscribe to as many of them as they can afford to. Those subscriptions are what keep the journals publishing and the poets writing.
Nonetheless, thanks to the internet, poetry today is significantly more availabe, as new online journals have appeared and proliferated and as older, print journals have created online sites as well. I couldn’t possibly name even a small percentage of the online poetry journals and sites that exist today, all of which are free to visit. A search of “poetry journals” would, undoubtedly, result in thousands of relevant hits. In fact, a recent visit to one of the online poetry journal databases, duotrope.com, revealed about 1400 journals, the majority of which had websites of one sort or another.
My point is that if you’re interested in contemporary poetry there is no longer any excuse for not reading. It costs nothing but time to visit the online journals and websites. Two such sites of particular interest to me are the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature at www.deadmule.com, and Wild Goose Poetry Review at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com.
Dead Mule is the online journal which published my chapbook, Deceptively Like a Sound, last April and will publish my next chapbook, The Book of Days, in January. More importantly, they have published a vast number of local and regional authors, including most of those who have read at Poetry Hickory.
Wild Goose is a journal which I help edit, selecting poems for inclusion and writing reviews of new collections of poetry. Both websites are wonderful places to encounter good contemporary poetry and to learn about other poets and their books. To highlight the quality of the work one can encounter at these sites, I’m very pleased to reprint, from the current issue of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Janice Moore-Fuller’s poem, “Cryogenics.” Fuller is the director of the creative writing program at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC. Her latest book, which is reviewed in the current issue of Wild Goose, is called Séance.
Cryogenics
Midnight is the hour when old food
takes chances, thankful not to be eaten.
Eggs beaten into omelets shape themselves
into swans and palm trees.
Goat cheese sneaks off the saucer,
skates across the ice-box grid.
Sardines wish upon a star-shaped paté
no one remembers buying.
What is the color of decay?
Lavender? Gray? If things
don’t find peace in the Kelvinator,
how can I forget Mother’s limbs
underground near the railroad tracks
still crossing, uncrossing?
Planes circle the graves, trailing
boundless ribbons I’d like to loop
through her hair. I’d dress her
in a cowl-neck gown, loose enough
to let her breathe. On some other
planet, the oxygen is as dry
and unmarrowed as her cool, cool bones.
Nonetheless, thanks to the internet, poetry today is significantly more availabe, as new online journals have appeared and proliferated and as older, print journals have created online sites as well. I couldn’t possibly name even a small percentage of the online poetry journals and sites that exist today, all of which are free to visit. A search of “poetry journals” would, undoubtedly, result in thousands of relevant hits. In fact, a recent visit to one of the online poetry journal databases, duotrope.com, revealed about 1400 journals, the majority of which had websites of one sort or another.
My point is that if you’re interested in contemporary poetry there is no longer any excuse for not reading. It costs nothing but time to visit the online journals and websites. Two such sites of particular interest to me are the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature at www.deadmule.com, and Wild Goose Poetry Review at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com.
Dead Mule is the online journal which published my chapbook, Deceptively Like a Sound, last April and will publish my next chapbook, The Book of Days, in January. More importantly, they have published a vast number of local and regional authors, including most of those who have read at Poetry Hickory.
Wild Goose is a journal which I help edit, selecting poems for inclusion and writing reviews of new collections of poetry. Both websites are wonderful places to encounter good contemporary poetry and to learn about other poets and their books. To highlight the quality of the work one can encounter at these sites, I’m very pleased to reprint, from the current issue of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Janice Moore-Fuller’s poem, “Cryogenics.” Fuller is the director of the creative writing program at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC. Her latest book, which is reviewed in the current issue of Wild Goose, is called Séance.
Cryogenics
Midnight is the hour when old food
takes chances, thankful not to be eaten.
Eggs beaten into omelets shape themselves
into swans and palm trees.
Goat cheese sneaks off the saucer,
skates across the ice-box grid.
Sardines wish upon a star-shaped paté
no one remembers buying.
What is the color of decay?
Lavender? Gray? If things
don’t find peace in the Kelvinator,
how can I forget Mother’s limbs
underground near the railroad tracks
still crossing, uncrossing?
Planes circle the graves, trailing
boundless ribbons I’d like to loop
through her hair. I’d dress her
in a cowl-neck gown, loose enough
to let her breathe. On some other
planet, the oxygen is as dry
and unmarrowed as her cool, cool bones.
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