[Terese Coe]

One more review, published in The Evansville Review, 2007.

The Powow River Anthology
Published 2006 by Ocean Publishing, Flagler Beach, FL
ISBN Number 978-0967291-5-0

“Art makes singularly unglamorous demands: integrity, sacrifice, discipline.”

—Joan Acocella, New York Times Feb. 18, 2007

These “unglamorous demands” are clearly familiar to the Powow River Poets of Newburyport, Massachusetts, founded by Rhina Espaillat. The Powow River Anthology is edited by Alfred Nicol with an Introduction by X.J. Kennedy, and its poets have written more award-winning books and poems than one finds in most other workshops’ most delirious fantasies.

The work in The Powow River Anthology explores contradiction and affirmation, anomaly and economy, the thrift shop and the ledger, lacunae and clutter, love and the mordantly electric. The treatment may be sly or elegiac, erudite or colloquial, ironic or whimsical, historical or geographical. The poems are free verse and formalist, though formalist work is clearly prevalent.

Attempting to see through the lines to the workings and influence of the Powow workshop did not, I am not surprised to say, turn up much in the way of dramatic insight. These poets are too subtle for that. They’re from New England, where winters are tough, women are tougher, men are singularly uncompliant, and compliance is sometimes seen as an admission of defeat.

Rhina Espaillat’s “Vignette” is haunted by images of Andromache on the ramparts of Troy in the moments or hours before the Greek fleet approaches the shore. Espaillat is a consummate verse storyteller whose final lines sometimes create in the reader a sense of emotional ambush due to their understated power, as in the final stanza of “Vignette”:

The mist has cleared; far off and pale,
the cry she heard takes form at last:
only a gull, circling a sail
approaching neither slow nor fast.

The ambush, indiscernible in advance, is a matter of delicious irony in “If You Ask Me,” Espaillat’s rendering of a monologue by the snake in the Garden of Eden. “Highway Apple Trees” is metaphysical and life-affirming, a flight of lyricism and lushness. A slyer ambush occurs in the final lines of “My Cluttered House Accuses Me of Greed,” a leap of wit at once devil-may-care and Dickinsonesque. Espaillat sets up many oppositions in her work: the impulse to collect and the impulse to give away, the desire to forget ourselves and the desire to become ourselves, the desire to let go and the need to hold on. Confidence, earthiness, and acute discernment are the staples in her poems.

Among the most appealing poems in the collections are also those of Merrill Kaitz and Len Krisak. Kaitz’s “Blue Antelope Elegy” takes childlike (but philosophical) delight in inspired internal rhyme and giddy near-nonsense, for example in this stanza:

Too ethereal for the earthly veldt
the skittish blaubok ducked into the bush
and never grazed again. No benefit accrued
to the blaubok just for being blue.

Fauna are well represented in this anthology. “Goat Song” by James Najarian is a charming blank verse memoir of his childhood among comical goats with “names that seem to be for strippers.” Animal-based irony is evident in A. M. Juster’s “Los Periquitos” (about a colony of breeding parakeets in Brooklyn), Deborah Warren’s “Gibbon Motion” (“less animal than oil”) and “What the Dolphins Know.” Zoological pieces by Midge Goldberg, Alfred Nicol and others are swift-paced, and musical Deborah Warren adds to what is evidently a fertile and wry Powow tradition. Here is Len Krisak’s “Birds from Afar”:

Against what’s left of one day’s light,
They rise, cleaving the cold white air
As if in leaving on this flight
They thought they might not get somewhere.
As dozens wheel back, swoop, and swerve,
Like chaff that’s changed its mind,
Or love that’s lost its nerve.

Krisak’s peculiarly original perspectives betray an outré sense of humor. His mastery of opening lines is clearly evident in “Mrs. Henley,” a glimpse of a teacher who presided over both the studious and the stultifyingly bored in her classroom “Way back when Dinah Shore still roamed the earth.” The heterometrical “Plumbing Emergency” seems to have taken a page from Espaillat’s Book of Emotional Ambushes as well, and powerfully so, but in Krisak’s case the sly wit meanders around to a sudden and soul-wrenching revelation of plausible infidelity. Krisak characteristically alternates the madcap with the meditative.

Michael Juster’s “Letter to Auden” in rime royal (homage to W.H. Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron”) and “Visions of the Serengeti” too are schooled in the deadpan revelation, the undercutting of solemnity (though faux in this case) with irony or horror. The first begins:

Uh, Wystan?
Please forgive my arrogance;
You know how most Americans impose.
Your chat with Byron gave me confidence
That your Platonic ghost would not oppose
Some verse disturbing you from your repose.
Besides, there’s time to kill now that the Lord
Has silenced Merrill and his Ouija board.

“The God of this World to his Prophet” is monkish in comparison, monkish and cautionary, but Bill Coyle’s austerity of voice in trimeter couplets is paradigmatically spiritual and crowned with a fine epiphany. In Deborah Warren’s “Aelfgyva,” the permutations of letters and rhetorical abruptness approach the magical, as does her couplet. Warren’s work is often fast-paced, musical, and highly visual, and her “Thrift Shop” could be a disquisition on mortality despite the fact it is an indubitably authentic memoir of some flannel nightgowns she got for a song (in more ways than one).

There are some poems in the anthology that do not say much of anything nor in any memorable way, but harping on the unsatisfying few in such an absorbing collection would be mean-spirited. Perhaps, as a colleague has suggested, there could be more geographical adventure, more of the seamy side. Michael Cantor’s “The Wind Rides a Harley” is written in High Slang, the most contemporary gear in the book. It is a tour de force of which Hunter Thompson would have approved, and yet, unbelievably…it’s a sonnet.

David Berman’s nod to The Ambush appears not at the end of “After a Family Reunion” but in the middle of it (what follows is the middle of three sections):

What happened? Early marriage took its toll;
The lure of money quick and green enthralled;
One staggered bright-eyed into alcohol;
Our handsome would-be minister was called
To “PR” work, and when his soul was pledged
Beyond redemption, started preaching to
The sexually underprivileged
A gospel of libido, neither new

Nor true. And when they asked me what I did
“Up there in Boston,” I was vague. “I write,”
I said, and straightway stood alone amid
My relatives. At almost but not quite
Forty, I had no wife, no house, scant pride,
Nothing to show and even less to hide.

Perhaps not an ambush. Perhaps a powow with oneself, a reorientation adapted after having discovered one’s family of artists. The Powow River may have had some influence here after all. It meanders romantically, tumbles down from heights over rocks, slips under the Pivot Bridge, and ices over when it needs to, and every nanosecond brings a different river.

Terese Coe