In the "throw-things house" where the speaker of Patricia Colleen Murphy's debut collection Hemming Flames grows to adulthood, a father asks of his wife, "could you / try not to murder yourself / in front of the children." Murphy opens with Bolsheviks; her mother, a Stanford graduate, communist, a woman with mental illness; and the speaker finding her mother after another suicide attempt. This entry into the family is casual, the implication that it's a commonplace occurrence, that at the dinner table, peas passed in irritation, we come to that query and enter into a family with more to show than can fit in a dining room window peek, so the pane (pain) is thrown wide open.
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In Like Company: The Salt River Review & Porch Anthology, edited by James Cervantes, is equal parts reminiscent and refreshing measured over the course of thirty plus years of poetry and fiction.
For longtime readers of the former print journal Porch (1977-1981), and its later online counterpart the Salt River Review (1997-2010), this collection serves as a spring well of memories, eliciting fond recollections of such things as “The shared silence / in the land of ants. / The sleep of lizards / that never hear the bell. / Talk of fish / about things liquid. / Stories of the spider / at war with the mosquitoes” (9).
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Ruth Baumann’s chapbook, wildcold, opens with Rilke’s instruction, “Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow”. Here, I must admit my hesitance to dive into any work that prefaces itself with an oft-quoted (and often misquoted) poet. And here is where I am glad to say my literary-prejudice had its teeth kicked in.
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John Williams’s Stoner — which this month is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a tastefully geometric hardback edition from New York Review Books — is a quiet novel; a portrait painted in sober tones of the life of a somber, unremarkable man, a story that unfolds softly and with grace. The book treads along with William Stoner, from his birth and childhood on a small family farm in rural Missouri, to university where he is awakened to his inner life, on through World War I and the Great Depression, his years as an instructor, his marriage, the birth of his family, the destruction of it, and finally, inevitably, his death. It’s the stuff of Russian literature, and a novel that has become more necessary today than ever before.
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Tina Barr begins her latest collection of poems, Kaleidoscope (from Iris Press), with a perfect sonnet, “In the Kaleidoscope’s Chamber,” which ushers the reader into her colorfully patterned world. But, rather than using the kaleidoscope as a mere toy or object of whimsy, Barr’s speaker sees it as a truth device:
“The chamber fills with purple,
blue bruises, the open jaw of a dead father,
multiplies the tight eyes of liars, orange tubes
of trumpet vine, pink-tipped brushes of mimosa,
filaments sweet as what I concocted in bottles
from a perfume kit as a kid.”
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