by Daniel Lusk.
Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, 2011,
96 pages, softcover, $14.95,
ISBN: 978-0-9641856-8-5.
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From the preface of Daniel Lusk’s Lake Studies, we learn that its poems are the result of “two years of research, of the underwater character and human and natural history of Lake Champlain.” For some of us, this carries the enticement of works bathed in natural history, sprinkled with science.  Not quite.  These are “works of imagination,” not to be confused with “history, archaeology, journalism or other science.”  They’re poems.  And yet, how do two years of research into a big lake manifest as poetry?

By going under.  There, Lusk has us peer into darkness and hear sounds muffled.  There is less clarity and more mystery; all is otherworldly.  But before the poems actually dive, we wet our feet at or above the surface.  There, Lusk often draws our attention to sound, as in “Story”: “Whisht! Listen.”  In this case, the soundscape is an ancient one of thunderous, shrugging glaciers. Whispers, voices and cries, populate another early piece, “People,” and in a sequence of poems about nautical disasters, the sounds at the surface are wild and cacophonous, mostly human, soon stifled forever.

Lusk gives us bearings before the dive.  A map is a logical tool for this, and a graceful 18th century one accompanies “Drowned Lands,” our first bird’s-eye view of the “winding, riverine road” along the southern half of the lake (the only map or aerial photo in this collection of images and text, regrettably).  We encounter familiar animals — egrets, mallards, otter, and mink.  Here, as elsewhere, though, Lusk inventories so much in the way of species or cargo that he often distracts from the narrative.

The lake setting established, Lusk takes us down with the piece “Nocturne”: “When we go below, / we almost expect to see the stars / . . . fixed in their places along the bottom.”  The poet applies philosophical ideas with a deft and wry touch, as in “Salon Noir,” in which he re-imagines the light and shadows from Plato’s Allegory submerged.  In “Lake Apparition,” he merges monster, silence, and shadow: “The lake, like our dreaming selves / redolent of secrets / wondrous and perilous.”  His descriptions of fish (sculpin — “Full-lipped / as tulips in their turbans”) led me to imagine a new breed of field guides in which species descriptions would be penned by poets, not scientists.

Most of this succeeds as a multidisciplinary work “of imagination,” in which facts and myths are woven together.  And, I was pleased, as a student of biology, to see ecological and evolutionary concepts referenced in the poems.  For instance, the introduction of the invasive zebra mussel to the lake ecosystem and the irony of the resulting clearer lake water is addressed in “Seeing the Bottom off Thompson’s Point.”  However, this phenomenon, one of the greatest ecological tragedies of many lake ecosystems in North America (“mistakes we made / in our youth”) is too briefly explored in only one poem, the shortest in the collection.  Elsewhere, a line like “When evolution was yet to come,” which concludes an otherwise lovely elegy to ancient, fossilized life, is puzzling, as it suggests that this process began only when larger multicellular organisms appeared on land.  The attempt to merge science and poetry is appreciated but sometimes falls short.

It is the more comprehensible human history of vessels and people that is conveyed most effectively, and then fixed in the lake mud.  This long, relatively narrow lake has been crossed countless times; not all attempts succeeded.  Lusk reminds us that when we cross water, we cross over a place to which we do not belong: a tomb, so easy to overlook.  These poems take us there, from riotous squalls on the surface to the dark, muted lakebed of unseen wrecks and forgotten history.

— Christopher Hoffmann

by Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel.
Moon Pie Press, 2012,
paper, 89 pages, $12,
ISBN: 978-1-4507-8777-2.
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History slips by us like exits on an expressway — fleeting signs for towns and streets that we will never see since the accelerator is pressed to the floor and we are bent on arrival, getting where we want to be.  As a history teacher and poet, Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel knows that too often we drive past what we need to remember. To counter our forgetting, she asks us to go where we do not want to go, and to see what we have conveniently forgotten.

Wrobel tells us of a world that holds the “unholy egg / conceived in Auschwitz,” where “legal minds / split . . . hairs over a definition of genocide.”  She writes of a “crushed and ailing humanity” desperately trying to repair itself.  We are asked to stop our headlong rush to be something or someone and to instead pay attention to what is happening to us.  That is no easy task, since, often, our busyness is a way to avoid the horror surrounding us. And that is the question: How can any of us go on with our mundane activities when, if we pay attention at all to the news — to the violation of our land, of our fellow men and women, and of our children — we might as well throw up our hands?

Rather than throw up her hands, Wrobel embraces the world.  In the poem “Rosh HaShana, 1992,” she contrasts fears for the new year with a lovely recounting of a day’s pleasures:

You know when you want that

hot morning shower to never end.

Or the baby to sleep on one

Evermore peaceful dreaming hour.

Times alone in clean rushing water,

Early morning solitude . . .

Soft whistling of

Little loved one breathing sleep.

She then contrasts such solace with the agony of knowing that:

We stand in hot morning showers

gathering splintering bones together.

Inhaling courage with the steam. . . .

And finally, she unites the two emotions: “Wearing anger as an amulet / and mercy as a glove.”

Living with a sense of history requires us to let the “ungloved hand / reach down inside,” to “see [one’s] open heart . . . in the strong slanting rays of / the sun we nevertheless share.”  It requires knowing the essential in our lives.  In “These Things First,” she captures such moments:

The first thing I have to do is make my bed

so when I return home

it may be unmade

in a ritual . . .

of closing what is open

and opening what is closed. . . .

That is the poet’s task, and it is the charge that Wrobel fulfills in this masterful collection: to let us see what is hidden and to make it fresh, so we can find acceptance — but never resignation — in what is wrong, as we strive to make it right.

— Bruce Spang

by Sandra M. Gilbert.
W.W. Norton & Company, 2011,
160 pages, hardcover, $24.95,
ISBN: 978-0-393-08112-1.
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I have to admit, when I picked up poet Sandra M. Gilbert’s ninth volume of verse at first I found it slow going, not because the verse was too difficult or poorly conveyed, but because the first section, “Old Recipes,” struck me as downright dour.  I’m very pleased, however, that I admired this writer’s talents enough to stick with it, because as the book unfolds, it reveals territory that could perhaps only have been written by a female poet in her mid-70s.  And a rich landscape it turns out to be — elegiac, certainly, but also mesmerizingly blunt, insightful, and humorous.

Gilbert is most popularly known for her academic feminist work, in particular The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth –Century Literary Imagination, written with Susan Gubar.  Her poetic output may have been somewhat eclipsed by her literary criticism, but I have been a fan of her poetry since my encounter with her third book of poems, Blood Pressure.  The years have not diminished her talents but have deepened them.  Her poetry is not obscure, but neither is it plain; under the well-wrought surfaces, one finds deeply considered meditations on loss, departure, nature, religion, time, aging, and beauty — rather what one might expect from an academic feminist.  What is not expected are the masterful rhymes wrapped into stunning little sonnets.  What is not expected are poems about cataracts, a colonoscopy, dental surgery, and an old cardigan.  These poems are not merely funny and wise — they are alive.  They bring to mind Donald Hall’s late-career books Without and Painted Bed, written after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and which embody some of the finest work of his career.

Much of the material is centered around the death of Gilbert’s 15-year partner, the game theorist David Gale, to whom the volume is dedicated.  However, Gilbert’s grief is expansive and sly, not merely an emotion, but a portal, as in “Grief: A History,” which arcs from a grief that moves from comparisons to a “dull pot at the back of the stove,” “a hurricane with your face,” and “a fog over the harbor,” to a troupe of musicians who “stomped on my glitter / of grief my shards of / rage,” ultimately leading to a “solitude of grief.”  Gilbert’s imagery is often startling, and this serves her well, as in the couplet that ends the sonnet “Crochet Hook,” a poem about a life lived in isolation, crocheting in front of the TV, as the world ironically flickers past:

until at last she drowsed in her solitude

and the fallen yarn pooled at her feet liked blood.

In “Question and Answer,” a poem about the Holocaust that takes the deep unthinkable nature of loss to a historical, global level, Gilbert demonstrates her honed ability to depict strong emotion within tightly crafted verse:

And the ghosts

Of bullets disappear in dirty mists,

Of kids in puffs of dust, demented lists.

Not all the work is cohesive — “Scouring” and “Edge of Winter Sonnet” come to mind — but the occasional unevenness is vanquished by the brilliance exemplified in “Variations on an Old Issue of Woman’s Day,” a wryly fanciful commentary on the tragicomic nature of women’s advertising.  Where we might expect to find a feminist diatribe, we find something more artful:

Light the oven.  Fast.

Note this minute’s

recession of darkness.

Avoid money mistakes.

Hurry up.  Unfold

Your flat pale leaves

like the skirts of a dancer.

The final section, “Lei Soup,” is ostensibly a celebration of life, containing remarkable considerations of parasailing, mice, sheep, seals, hearing aids, and other topics.  Though they are the most sensual, joyous poems here, I found their cheeriness to be somewhat forced, a distraction from the preceding, more somber themes, although the final two pieces, “Lei Soup” and “Knowing,” return us to an appropriate ending point for this particular journey.

Some might be tempted to classify this book as “women’s poetry,” especially given Gilbert’s background, but it is not.  It is a book that does not shy away from the grim aspects of loss, grief or aging, but shapes these realities into a deeply resonant collection. Loss may be devastating, but ultimately it is not antithetical to life.

— Annie Seikonia