Poetry

“Poetry” November 2008. “Poetry” is published monthly by the Poetry Foundation, and it comes pretty cheap at $5.00 per issue. In fact, each issue is published as a soft-cover book, so you’re really getting your money’s worth. The journal comes with very little in the way of a mission statement, so initially the reader senses a very open-ended approach. That is, there is a feeling that anything might be included. In this edition, you’ll find poems printed on the inside front and back covers, in addition to the poems, artwork, and reviews included in the journal. Both poems are written by authors who have died this year. This edition starts with several poems from Robert Balano, who tackles (homo)sexuality and spirituality with images suggestive of sexual acts. His interest lies in the darker side of the human psyche, and his poems reflect on the parts of society, like prostitutes, sex fiends, death and helpless elderly, that we generally try to suppress from mainstream consciousness. One poem by Philip Levine and two by Mary Szybist follow Balano, and these poems are written with a very different subject matter in the forefront. These authors focus on aspects of nature. Levine discusses the majesty and divinity of mountains overlooking an ocean, as the speaker is trying so desperately to understand his place in the vastness of the world. Szybist’s works also deal with humankind’s place in nature. She questions our role, trying to get at what it means to have so much control over the natural world the majority of the time, yet be subject to nature’s whim on some occasions. Fiona Sampson’s “Zeus to Juno” follows, and the reader is returned to sexual world of the first several poems. This poem describes the Zeus’s sexual relationship with a woman who is sacrificed as a result of their encounter. The poem is full of vivid imagery of the woman’s discarded body with “body agape/like a question.” Two poems by Billy Collins follow, and the reader is again finding himself reading about nature. His poem “Her” describes the sounds of suburban life, and it seems like the author is contrasting this to a more tranquil rural life. The poem ends with a description of two men discussing a women one had presumably slept with the night before, only to forget her name. Elaine Equi has two poems included in this book, and she is the only author included that is writing with a non-conventional stanza based form. In “A Start” she takes the same characters and changes the order of who is performing the action on whom. There are three short, three to six line sections that take on very different meanings because of the way she reworks the order of the lines. “Antiquity Calling” is a prose poem that again gets right at issues of homosexuality. She writes a description of a man who would most likely be thought strange by any mainstream human, due to his weird obsessions and odd behavior. This journal also includes twelve visual poems, edited by Geof Huth. Huth also spends a page explaining the modern movement of visual poetry, and he annotates each piece that is included. All of these visual poems are a mixture of artwork and words, in varying degrees. This section might be interesting to someone who is finding an interest in alternative forms of poetry. The final section of the journal is titled “Comments,” and entries in this section range from general commentary on various aspects of human life to reviews of recently published books of poetry. In this edition, five books that have come out of Ireland are reviewed, amongst others. Robert Archambeau’s entry in this section examines David Orr’s reflection on poetry and politics, which appeared in a previous issue of this magazine. The journal closes with letters to the editors and announcement of prizes handed out by the publication to authors of poems and prose, who have been published in the past year in this magazine. At the back of the journal are several pages of advertisements for the Poetry Foundation, this journal, and some authors. Overall, this journal included works that were both conventional and innovative. It is a very well-rounded publication that may offer something to any reader. If you’d like to know more about this publication, visit www.poetrymagazine.org.