POETRY CHAPBOOKS

IN THE FIRST PLACE: THE MAINE POEMS by Tom Fallon (Wordrunner Chapbooks; ISBN 1-931002-38-X; 14 pgs; $3 chapbook).

LETTERS FROM THE THIRD WORLD by Ellen Taylor (Sheltering Pines Press; ISBN 0-9744971-8-5; 18 pgs; $7 chapbook).

A MOXIE AND A MOON PIE: THE BEST OF MOON PIE PRESS, VOLUME I edited by Nancy A. Henry and Alice N. Persons (Moon Pie Press; ISBN 0-9769929-1-4; 176 pgs; $10 trade paperback).

Reviewed by Patrick Shawn Bagley

Chapbooks—short and inexpensive booklets published in small print runs—have long been a vital tool enabling “unknown” poets to place their work in the hands of readers. I use the word unknown with some reservation, as a number of Maine’s poets are, in fact, well known within the rarefied environment of live readings and small press journals such as Animus, The Puckerbrush Review, Off the Coast, The Aurorean, and the fine publication you currently hold in your hands (or are scrolling down with your computer’s mouse).

The fact that the larger or commercial houses have not yet published most of these poets does not diminish the quality or importance of the work in question. In a society that no longer values poetry, there are far more poets than there are presses willing to publish them. Chapbooks are sometimes the closest a poet will come to getting a “real” book published. For readers, they are an affordable way to round out one’s poetry collection or to introduce friends and family to a literary world about which they might not have otherwise known.

Tom Fallon has been a champion of Maine poetry and small presses since the 1970s. His latest chapbook, In the First Place: The Maine Poems, collects nine new nature poems along with the previously published “On this first morning.” Fallon is a great admirer of the late Bern Porter, and, though his poems are often too experimental for my taste, it is hard not to get caught up in his delight for playing with line breaks and word spacings.

The chapbook comes with an insert, urging the slow reading of the poems while paying careful attention to the spacing because “The poems are written from a different life rhythm than that of modern urban civilization…read the silences.”

In “On this first morning,” by far the finest of this collection, Fallon repeats key words while subtly changing phrases to describe a life-defining moment beside a Maine pond. These are haunting images:

over the dark lake.

Water moving slow,
quiet, breaking
under hemlock.

Stones in clear water.

Readers will find many such phrases returning to them long after setting the chapbook down.

Ellen Taylor’s Letters from the Third World is a travelogue of place and spirit. Written during the University of Maine at Augusta professor’s yearlong stay in Uruguay, these lyric poems strive for an understanding of a people who have lived for years in the shadow of terror and violence. While relating some horrific events, the poems also reveal and celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. As Taylor writes in “Heartbeat: Montevideo”:

The city breathes its despair
from abandoned buildings, ripped sidewalks,

even the cobblestones seem to exhale
grief, and yet


the pulse beats
regardless

without commands, desire,
or even a choice.

It is that impulse to go on that Taylor admires in the Uruguayans. She spends time listening to and watching them, learning the nuances of their daily lives from children, shopkeepers, gypsies, café patrons, and demonstrations in memory of Los Desaparecidos (literally, “The Disappeared;” people abducted by government agents and never seen again). A stranger in a strange land and fully aware of how little she really knew of this life before her arrival (as in “Gypsies”), Taylor takes strength in their resolve. Children play, laborers go to their jobs, couples fall in and out of love. In Taylor’s verses the commoners’ dignity cuts through the pall of oppression. Letters from the Third World is Taylor’s second chapbook. Relative newcomer Moon Pie Press published her first, Humming to Snails.

In the two years since its founding by Nancy Henry and Alice Persons, Moon Pie Press has published thirteen chapbooks by eleven Maine poets (Ted Bookey, Jay Davis, Jay Franzel, Nancy Henry, Michael Macklin, Robin Merrill, David Moreau, Alice Persons, Edward Rielly, Darcy Shargo, and the aforementioned Ellen Taylor). A Moxie and a Moon Pie collects between a dozen and fifteen poems from each writer in a single volume. There is plenty to admire here, from Bookey’s biting wordplay to Taylor’s thoughtful, lyric verses.

Some of Bookey’s poems reflect the dark humor of everyday life. “Bad Cat,” “Torture, with Eggs” and “Frogs, Beans, Neanderthals, Frogicidal Princesses” all run headlong into punch lines that should be followed by a snare drum flourish. Still others are weighted with pain and regret. “I Took Her Hand in Mine” is dedicated to Bookey’s mother, and begins:

I took her hand in mine,
And only then became aware
A lifelong hate was spent
And I was clasping love.

Davis and Merrill appear frequently at poetry readings, and their work is better suited to such live forums than silent reading from the printed page. Yes, I know we used to be taught in grade school that all poetry should be read aloud, but some poems actually demand it. You’ll find that silent reading diminishes these poems. Davis’s “Open Reading” boils over with so much anger and frustration that you might find yourself pacing and gesticulating as you read it. To calm down a bit, move on to Merrill’s “Johnny Cash Died Today,” read it slowly, and see if you don’t find yourself talking like the original Man-in-Black.

Unfortunately, neither Merrill nor Davis stands out among the anthology’s other poets. Most of their poems are easily forgettable and a couple of them—Merrill’s “The Chevy Trucks Poem” and Davis’s “When I Die, Mrs. Earnhardt Won’t Be Able to Keep the Autopsy Photos Out of the Papers”—are downright awful. But they are clearly dedicated to the poetic craft, and this sampling of their work shows the potential for better things in the future.

Moreau’s poems, taken from his Sex, Death and Baseball chapbook cover those three topics in finely tuned lyrics. Moreau seems at first to have an unhealthy obsession with his topics, until the poem unfolds and the reader realizes he’s spent a lot of time with these very same thoughts. Therein lies Moreau’s skill, which marks him as a true poet: the ability to convey in a few words things that others want to express but cannot.

Henry and Persons share similar poetic sensibilities, as might be expected of two friends who decide to go into publishing together. Both are concerned with the full development of the self. Henry "celebrates making peace with my body; trying to grow more comfortable / with my fat" (In “Raga”). She also finds comfort and eroticism in the simple act of tidying up after her lover:

making up
their bed
she kneels
face in his pillow

breathes.

Persons’s voice has the confidence of experience. It is often weary, conscious of growing older but delighting in the journey. In “Artifice” she says, "I admire how vanity falls away / from some wise, aging women / but I don’t see it happening to me." Memory is as vital as air to Persons, as in “thunderstorm at spirit lake” and “Casco Bay, July.”

I have already reviewed Macklin’s Driftland—from which his poems in this anthology were selected—in another journal and won’t risk repeating myself here. I will say that Macklin is one of my favorite “new” poets, and I unreservedly recommend the purchase of his wonderful chapbook.

Franzel’s poems feel mournful at the first reading, but beneath the surface there is a pent-up energy that carries both poet and reader along. As he writes in “Midnight, P-Ridge”:

                                        —I’m sick
of unreachable beauty, sick
of gravity and my own fixed
broken orbit—once, if cut free
I would have panicked, now
I’d simply stretch until I reached you
floating by, one more shooting star.

Franzel rebels against poetic cliché and is clearly in this for the long haul.

Edward Rielly is a prolific poet and writer of nonfiction and book reviews. His poems are more pastoral than the others here, as befits selections from a chapbook called Ways of Looking: Poems of the Farm. Much more than simple odes to farm life, Rielly’s poems look for deeper meanings, as in “Ways of Looking”:

So I lean cautiously over the hole, as if
it were more than an entrance to the main floor
of the barn, as if something more important
than hay bales had slid down, catching briefly

Lightning strikes, dead pets, the smell of corn silage, tough-skinned hands, and children climbing trees: beneath Rielly’s pen, all these things prove the existence of something greater, something beyond the farm, beyond this world.

Shargo is a perfect example of the inherent value of chapbook publishing. I had never before encountered her work, had not even heard of her. That’s a shame, because her sharp poems are a delight to read. Here is a poet trying to live in the moment, to take what is laid before her on its own terms and discover where it fits into her life. In “Wanderlüst,” she asks if the subject of the poem is still

following that line—toward an end with some unsolvable
longing? Send word as soon as you arrive.

With its ten-dollar cover price (the original chapbooks cost eight dollars each), A Moxie and a Moon Pie, Volume I makes a fine introduction to a press that is both strongly reflecting and affecting the Maine poetry scene.

Bear in mind that chapbook publication is not only for new or relatively obscure poets. For their own reasons, both former United States Poet Laureate Louise Glück and current Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser have chosen to release new work in the chapbook format. Nor are chapbooks the exclusive domain of poets. Writers of fiction and nonfiction have also used them effectively, but the form does seem best suited to poetry. You won’t usually find them on the shelves of the big chains, but they are well worth seeking out at your nearest independent bookshop 

 

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