Marc J. Sheehan

Having published a book of poetry in 2009, I was amazed by the number of other Michigan poets who also released books in ’09. This struck me most strongly recently when I went to move books I’ve been reading from their temporary place next to my retro turntable to more permanent places on my bookshelf.

So in celebration of bumper crop of Michigan poetry books, here are a few of the highlights of books that came out last year, considered in the order they were in next to my vinyl copy of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street.

Kurosawa’s Dog, Dennis Hinrichsen
Oberlin College Press

Among contemporary Michigan poets, Hinrichsen is perhaps the most open to the pure allure of language. The father-haunted poems in Kurosawa’s Dog, winner of the 2008 Field Poetry Prize, are sensual explorations, emotion wrapped in a “sheath of intelligence.” In the title poem – part elegy, part exorcism – he writes, “My father was not a letter addressed to God./​/​More like the top book in a stack of books next to God’s unmade/​bed. Something from his to-read list./​Some ash fiction.”

To my mind, the many staggered lines and the associative progression of images recall Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams - the latter especially in the several poems composed in tercets. These are deeply textured poems that keep unfolding on subsequent readings – one of the truest signs of well crafted poetry.

She Dances Like Mussolini, David James
March Street Press

If there was one poet I would recommend to readers who think they don’t like poetry because it’s written by a bunch of pretentious SOB’s, that poet would be David James.

She Dances Like Mussolini takes no prisoners. There are poems here entitled “Trash Talk for Sigmund Freud,” “I Do Whatever My Rice Krispies Tell Me To,” “How To Fall In Love With Country Music,” “Dear Penis” and “A View of a Pair,” which is a paean to breasts.

In addition to the abundant humor, there runs through She Dances Like Mussolini the poet’s obsession with such big themes as sex, death and religion. In “Dear Death” James writes, “And let me stare at the writing/​on the wall/​and say/​ its poetry/​its beautiful/​ I wish I had written that.” And he has.

The Theory of Everything, Josie Kearns
Mayapple Press, 2009

In Josie Kearn’s The Theory of Everything the poet plays on grand, cosmic strings to accompany her very human voice. In trying to reconcile the intellect with emotion, Kearns creates the kind of poetry the Australian poet Les Murray calls, “the only whole thinking.”

Reading this collection, what comes into focus is that the clarity which science promises holds only tenuous sway. It needs another, more human element, to make it whole. In “Satellite Father,” that father leaves the poet’s older sister, dressed in “her party/​dress of pink gingham and bows” in the family Dodge while he drinks at a tavern. And in “Father Ghost” Kearns confesses, “I carry your hair and eyes, tendency/​toward liquor, name, and this milky/​way of reaching toward a universe/​where we might talk and listen.”

As in her earlier, wildly inventive collection, New Numbers, Kearns revels in her interest in things scientific, as well as the dangers the heart presents.

Losing Season, Jack Ridl
CavanKerry Press

Losing Season takes as its subject matter the travails of a losing high-school basketball team. Just in that arena, these are poems of great empathy which detail some of the ways in which sports become a quest, a metaphor for our longings and aspirations. More broadly, Losing Season is a meditation on loss in its widest sense. What does it mean to strive and fall short?

Stylistically, Ridl achieves an extraordinary unity of voice in these poems without homogenizing the various characters (Coach, Scrub, Ref, Cheerleader, etc.). This requires a deft touch, which Ridl possesses. In one of the Coach poems “Insomnia,” for example, “It’s four a.m. He thinks/​of his wife, imagines/​somewhere in her sleep/​there floats a dream/​that gets him out of last place.”

These are deeply human poems, poems that dare to wear their big, sweaty hearts on their warm-ups’ sleeves.

If the World Becomes So Bright, Keith Taylor
Wayne State University Press

Like Jim Harrison, one of the forms Keith Taylor employs to great effect is the poetic sequence. Some of the strongest works here are extended mediations: “Conditions,” “What’s Needed Now” and (although segmented more as individual poems) “Dream of the Black Wolf: Notes from Isle Royale.” At the beginning of “What’s Needed Now” he writes: “I am willing/​to let the impressions come/​with their various degrees/​of intensity, sometimes/​vague, sometimes as sharp and as/​multilayered as Basho’s/​haiku.”

What these longer pieces allow Taylor to do is to most completely integrate his restlessly inquisitive intellect with his deep attachments to place, family and culture, as well as to explore those various layers.

Taylor is one of those rare poets who have equal facility in celebrating the joys of domestic, suburban life as he is rejoicing in the wild. This career-spanning collection displays the poet’s range of facility in ways that earlier, shorter works couldn’t quite capture.

Talking Diamonds, Linda Nemec Foster
New Issues Poetry & Prose

Many of the poems in Talking Diamonds are concerned either with religion or art – mediating between those poles of divine and secular modes of worship is the belief in language as a way to comprehend some fundamental reality. As she writes in “Body Temple: The Teacher Addresses the Student,” her poems are concerned with “the rhetoric of what keeps us/​from ourselves and what locks us in.”

The images in Talking Diamonds are lush and celebratory, as is the presentation of the book as an object as published by New Issues Poetry and Prose. As Foster’s work suggests, poetry has a great affinity with visual art. Done right, a book of poetry is a unique object whose meaning is most fully realized in its physical manifestation. Talking Diamonds makes great use of that difficult to capture synthesis.

Coda
It is mid-January, 2010 as I finish this up, and I had meant to post this before the turn of the year. With that in mind, there are more books I have not yet had time to read and consider enough to review here, including Patricia Clark’s She Walks into the Sea, and Conrad and Jane Hilberry’s This Awkward Art. The fact that there are others I am sure I have overlooked (mea culpa!) only proves further the remarkable state of poetry in Michigan.