Wit, Faith, Fatherhood: Three Recent D.C. Area Poetry Collections
Reviews by Gregory Luce
The overriding theme of Mike Maggio’s latest collection, Let’s Call It Paradise, is the tsunami of verbiage, images, information that we receive on a daily basis. It’s a difficult book to review because a number of the poems are random assortments of words, while others deconstruct words themselves into letters scattered fractally across the page. This is not a negative judgment, but it’s impossible to quote these pieces; one must encounter them visually and find what meaning—or decided non-meaning—they present. Near the end of the volume, one even finds a poem entitled “Into the Wilderness We Came” that comprises a (fake) QR code presumably symbolizing the wilderness, followed by the single line “and off to Grandma’s house we went.”
The book does contain many poems of a more conventional, though often grammatically challenging, nature. For example, “Siren Song” opens:
“Let us go now to a place beyond dreams.
Let us arise and go now through the fond,
murmuring streets, through the blind, stuttering
boulevards where siren song stills the air…. “
The echoes of “Prufrock” and perhaps Yeats are lovely and haunting.
Yet others of the poems are more directly topical poems. “In Vogue” wittily skewers celebrity culture and the vulturous appetite for gossip that pervades our culture:
“Her scandalous past was
revealed: cheating at last again
just weeks after completing sex
rehab.”
The poem takes a more serious turn near the end as it advocates for what we really require, though even the closing lines contain a touch of satire:
“We don’t need more bakeries. We don’t
need more bread and pastry. We
don’t need more mini-burgers and galas
galore
We need soup. We need organ
ic seasonal foods. We need bowls
of raisins seasoned with recycled
honey.
We need a vogue moment
in which to advocate
a word for evaluating
treatment.”
Let’s Call It Paradise, in short, is a mixed bag. No one will like everything in it, but everyone is likely to find some things to enjoy, savor, think about.
[You can find a copy of Mike Maggio’s Let’s Call it Paradise directly from the small publisher, San Francisco Bay Press, here.]
Ordinary Time by Sarah deCorla-Souza is quite a different matter. On first glance of the cover, one might take it for a religious tract or a book of meditations. However, the book contains no preaching or proselytizing. Rather, it is the work of a poet of religious faith whose daily life is informed by and undergirded by that faith. Take for example the title poem.
“Today [Sunday] is a day like all other days.
Today, like every day,
I worry about time.”
For this reader, the most touching and indeed the central poem in the collection is “Holy Thursday.” (The Thursday before Easter, sometimes known as Maundy Thursday, commemorates the Last Supper.) The poem begins with the poet washing her toddler daughter's feet and moves to the service that recalls Holy Thursday and its ritual washing of feet as Jesus washed those of his followers:
“One by one, the priest begins to wash
each pair of feet, as he does every year on this day
in imitation of Christ.”
But the girl, as small children will, breaks the spell.
“You [the daughter] climb up on the pew and pad along barefoot, your footsteps/
echoing and hollow….
I…grab you,
just before you fall, as the priest dries each foot with a towel,
leans forward, kisses them.”
This blending of the mundane with the sacred is typical of this collection. As the poet herself told me in an interview, “One aspect of Catholicism that especially influences my poetry is the idea of sacramentality, which means that God and the sacred can be experienced through the senses and through ordinary experience. To me, the idea that the sacred can be experienced through something tangible is similar to poetry, where words have both a literal meaning and a deeper meaning.” Despite its title, this collection is anything but ordinary.
[You can find a copy of Sarah deCorla-Souza’s Ordinary Time directly from the small publisher, Plan B Press, here.]
If it can be difficult to write about one’s faith without slipping into dogma, it is equally challenging to write about one’s children without falling into sentimentality. CL Bledsoe’s Having a Baby to Save a Marriage manages this feat beautifully. Beginning with the daughter’s difficult birth, he relates the simple daily activities and interactions between father and small child. By turns humorous, poignant, and wistful, the poems take us on the journey from baby to toddler, to little girl.
“They cut you out of your mother, blue/and silent and so, so breakable, handed
you off, and shoved us into a room full/
of curtains and quiet murmurs.”
(“April 26, 2011”)
The constant fear and staggering love for a fragile infant is depicted movingly in “Little”:
“Thin skin revealing the bluest
veins, cries that pass from desperate
to forced; little thing, you, growing, remind me
so much of my mother, dying ... I thought: life is so much bigger
than this. How will you ever grow?”
Humor and joy pervade these poems as well. In “Lucifer,” the poet recounts how his daughter’s teachers feared she was being exposed to devil worship because she wanted a dog named Lucifer. The poet explains that the name was taken from Disney’s Cinderella. Mystery solved to everyone’s relief:
“I corralled my daughter, making sure to have
her say goodbye to the teachers. She ran ahead to the tiny bench
by the school door, sat, and asked me to sit beside her.
I’m too big,’ I said. ‘But I’ll watch you.’ And she turned
her face to the sun and smiled out at the world.”
You’ll want to join CL and daughter on this adventure.
[You can find a copy of CL Bledsoe’s Having a Baby to Save a Marriage directly from the small publisher, Kelsay Books, here.]
Mike Maggio has published fiction, poetry, reviews, and Arabic translations in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. He serves on the board of the Poetry Society of Virginia and as an associate editor of Potomac Review. He is the author of several books of poetry and fiction, most recently a story collection, Letters from Inside, and Let’s Call It Paradise. Find him online at www.MikeMaggio.net.
Sarah DeCorla-Souza is a poet living in the Washington, D.C. metro area with her husband and four children, where she also works as a graphic designer. Her poetry has appeared in Pensive, Innisfree, Bourgeon, JMWW, Conte, Imitation Fruit, Epiphany, Visions International, Dappled Things, Angel Face, and Fairfax County Poetry Review. She is also an Associate Editor for Dappled Things magazine.
Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Driving Around, Looking in Other People’s Windows, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and The Saviors. Bledsoe lives in Northern Virginia with his daughter.
Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) and Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press), and the collection Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications). He lives in Washington, D.C. where he works for the National Geographic Society. He is the 2014 winner of the Larry Neal Writers Award, awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.