From American Book Review, v 28 #5, July 2007

Why another poetry anthology? The question hangs over the inaugural issue of Zoland Poetry, a new annual from New Hampshire independent house Steerforth Press, like a tacit rebuke. Bookstore poetry sections are clotted with anthologies of every stripe, and the market for poetry being presumably a zero-sum game, the advent of another entry into the tightly-packed shelves bears the weight of self-justification. Any modestly attentive and industrious reader of poetry, a rare enough creature to begin with, must sometimes feel the urge to throw her hands in the air and flee to the relative safety of the thrillers.

Happily, Zoland Poetry stands a much better than average chance of luring her back. What the inaugural issue lacks in focus and consistency it more than makes up for with a determined catholicity of taste and a quirky, cheerfully inclusive sensibility. Editor Roland Pease has assembled a roster of poets whose provenances range from Iceland to Persia and whose prosodies run from austere haiku-like meditations to feral free-verse explosions. If Pease’s selections indicate a lack of a strongly coherent vision, it is in the service of experimentation and openness, qualities lacking in many contemporary anthologies.

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“He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.”

– Thomas Mann

I dreamed about you last night
It was your wedding day:
and it made me feel as bitter blue
as I have ever felt.
The dream was startling, an unexpected shaft
of fractured light
The door was open, though I thought that I
had closed it years before.
You were absent; but your essence
seemed to linger in the crowded air
while I, proscribed in exile,
supped full with my despair.
Foolishness to say, yet it seemed so real;
so true it scared me white. So vivid
it installed itself, unseating reason plain.
It made me want to hold the feeling in all
its pain and glory, yet desiring all the while
to never think of you again.
The nightmare stayed with me all morning,
an aftertaste of fear,
a muddy incantation in a language all it own;
Why would my secret mind betray me, ambush
me this way, come raging back to haunt me
when I least expect it so?
This splinter wedged into my mind
Waits patiently for years;
Inching slowly, downward,
to where all my thought unbend;
to awake like this is what it is to dread
to sleep again.

It calls, of course: a deep whisper
asking for the slender trickle,
to dim the corners and elevate.
To spread warmth, dissipate, cajole, enjoin.
Answer the call. Thin air, cold snow, speak
plainly about promises made. Dangerous rooms,
ticking clock — peace lies beyond here.
Life a tangled mesh, brick, sky, faces, concrete.
Very far away, and yet close at hand.
Submit.
Submit.

Solitary drive through blue dawn, and
don’t look back; on long year
fraught with hard choices that were
no choices at all. Right
now, this morning, it is enough
to sit quietly,
watching the steam rise
from the cup.

Silence between us like crystal
As March flaunts its tomblike cruelty.
The wind whistles. The sky darkens.
We, you and I, look, look away. Quietly
we sit. Words unspoken
hang in the heavy air.
Another day stretches its sore limbs.

Narrow finger of an island spirals out
its enchanting siren call,
dark and seductive as jazz;
sea of faces, each to each
her own story,
all waiting, crowded with possibility,
cocked with tension, hanging on
the trigger that squeezed will bring release,
or for the chance contact, intersection of lives
overlaying the scarlet-garlanded grid.
Never have I felt such a palpable ache
directed for once at a place not a name
New York, I want you to be my lover
To hear you call my name,
sweep me away on your fractured tide:
to be away, outside of this glitter and thrill
is to be in anxious exile, lost among dreams,
empty and waiting for the dawn.

Through sleep among shadowed signs
Haunted by strangers
Kept static, awaiting
dawn’s silent hush;
Restless, unbidden,
a tremor still vibrates
under angles and planes, of
hidden surface, now banished,
buried sight, crown unseen
below hardening eyes
and masked by indifferent rays.
A summons: who calls?
What bright chiming figure
alights among rubble
glistening silver, shard-like
and slivered
mirrored by unblinking rays?
Only thoughts, restless, spanning
the mind, clicking on schedule
awaiting this discordant fray
upon the bower, still pensive,
endlessly patient,
crystalline with balanced dismay.
______________________________

Woke
at what felt
deepest night
only found
dawn’s silent kingdom
stealing ’round
blue sky
silent town
prayers sent
heaven-bound
unlistened?

Midtown before dusk, the setting sun shining
cheerfully down, glinting gloriously off two distant skyscrapers.
Ramshackle shed where I stand patiently, waiting for
my homeward bus
Pleasantly tired from work, sea breeze ruffles my tie,
my uncouth hair. Uncork a bottle and drink. Yo,
brother. That’s bad shit. I can tell you a drinkin’
man. Take another swig and laugh. Had a tough day,
sir. Laugh returned. Can you spare me a little.
Gesture with bottle. No, I don’t drink that shit . . .
you know? . . . Slap a handful of change into a brown
palm. Take another swig.
People hustle by, dressed in diversity. Businessmen
returning home, skateboarders doing rackety jumps and
failing, acting cool,
Pretty girls in skirts and blouses. Another swig. I
feel happy. Long day behind, longer days to come, but
no more on that. Another swig. It will feel good to be
barefoot and comfortable. It feels right t be among
multitudes, going home from work. It feels right to
look at the skyline, the two tall towers framed
against blue sky.

Here comes the bus.

__________________________

Thunk, thunk, goes the machine.
Thunk, thwack, it goes.
It beats, it breaks down, it goes again.
How to figure? It’s a mystery even to itself.
42 degrees, 51 inches. xxx?!@. . .
Thunk. Go again, machine.
Stop, look, listen, run. Hair and thistle.
How to know? It seems to be acting
funny. Thunk. Hard to say when it’s raining.
Although,
(thunk) it might not be 42 degrees. Love’s
deep circles can be confounding. Flesh
can be erratic. Go, machine. Make thwack.

Vacuuming the shop, end of workday, bent
over, across from this golden dream of a girl,
stirred in me something
Ancient, unbidden, that I’d almost forgotten.
I thought idly about hitting on her: but she’s too
young. Nineteen, perhaps. This has
nothing to do with you. Homeward bound,
gin and beer greet me.
But to look back upon that moment, almost
forgotten, has a taint of spiced romance to it,
when lust seemed like a possibility, perhaps,
foregone. Foreclosed. So,
today you are thirty, bitch. I bet
you thought I’d forgotten. I hope
that you are thoroughly unhappy. Looking
at that girl, so real and creamy, reminded
me, tangentially somehow, of you. There’s
nothing in common there. Nothing at all.

Teetering, ten years apart
parallel, fixed
your venture following
the slow footprints of
where I once went,
out there, poised to fall
into the crucible of young womanhood
badly equipped, save for callow indifference
my years, receding behind me,
a vista of overlapping ranges;
your future
spread out before you
like a great plain.