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Book recommendations ARE continuing ... over on my author blog, https://bethkanell.blogspot.com. Come read today's material.

Diversion: Northeast Kingdom Poetry from Judith Janoo, January 2019

I just got word that Judith Janoo's very place-based poetry collection AFTER EFFECTS will be published in January, by Finishing Line Press. I wish I had it already, since there's an amazing poem on stacking wood in there, and this brisk weather has me thinking fondly of woodpiles past.

But more than the seasons and scents of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, Janoo's collection tenderly pulls open the sheathing around our family intimacies: how we live with each other and manage to still like and love, despite winter's incursions that shorten tempers, limit tolerance for "one more hard thing," keep us enclosed together more often than we may wish to be. Piling details in neat stacks, this poet paints a world -- one that is hers, but that we also may recognize is closely related to ours. Say, first cousins. Or step-siblings. Or neighbors.

I'll put just a taste of the woodpile poem here -- and you can already pre-order the book, in case you don't trust your memory to hold onto this all the way to January's deep snows.

From "Stacking Wood":

The first row on pallets for airflow,

coarse, split, no two wedges

the same, but fitted

between two rock maples,

bookends against the drop of light

and months ahead when

it feels like it’s all

coming down.

Smell of moss,

pepper, feel of leather,

splinters of sand.

Alone stacking bones

to last out the cold.

See the entire poem on this poet's website: http://judithjanoowriter.com

Diversion: Poetry Worth Reading More Than Once, from Jennifer Franklin

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Whether it’s God or fate or karma or randomness, how should we respond when life skewers us with loss and cruel reshaping of dreams into walking nightmares? Jennifer Franklin, whose award-winning poetry has appeared in an earlier full-length collection and in many literary magazines and who teaches this art, rips us out of complacency and away from the simple (if unjust) answers of Job, biblical deity, and bumper-sticker wisdom, to confront more than her daughter’s autism spectrum disorder—instead, she turns the blunt mirror onto her own emotions and choices, until the force of each poem ejects the mirror from the page, into the reader’s hands.

Under a title taken from a line of T. S. Eliot’s, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” Franklin recalls that Daisy in The Great Gatsby hoped her child would grow up to be “a beautiful little fool.” Watching her own daughter unable to take part in birthday rituals, Franklin declares:

All you read are songbooks and sing to yourself

out of tune. At least you’ll never believe in fairy tales
or blame me for walking out after each of us was betrayed.
. . .
It’s your birthday again. The few people who love you

celebrate but only the two of us know we have no cause.

It’s not enough for life to have given Franklin a speechless daughter. She’s also taken the price of loss of speech herself, in treatment for major illnesses that she never quite specifies (but can be perceived from her Facebook posts, if needed). Her wheel of challenges never ceases, and in “Waiting again for biopsy results in the second-floor exercise room,” she declares:

. . . I wish

I hadn’t been too self-conscious to learn
the basics of the Argentine tango in

the three lessons before the wedding
in Thessaloniki. Ever since I read

Brontë, I refuse to use an umbrella
and pretend I’m walking the moors even

in the city. I am never where I am.
If I told you what I look forward to,

I couldn’t bear your pity.

Torn between speechless times (one poem mentions a “trach scar”) and quandaries too intense to turn into word of mouth, Franklin carries the mythological along with the myth makers. She asks her mostly wordless daughter questions that won’t be answered: “Like if you feel sick // or if our ancestors invented cave painting / or song first. You never lie to me // because you do not speak.”
And what is the “no small gift” of the title? Hints arrive with the poem “Philomela considers forgiveness” (reminder: rape victim who in her revenge is transformed into a nightingale). Franklin offers, “He’ll / never admit what he has done, but / in the blue afternoon of regret, // I realize this is no small gift. / I need not wrestle with absolution / since he will never repent.”

With her layered images interspersed with near-playful admissions (“Still life with tongue cancer”—there’s a second way to read that), Franklin turns her journey of devastations into a multidimensional transit of human depth. If joy is to rise out of chaos and pain, there must be a composting process first, an effort of adding air and time. In “Amor Fati,” she marvels, “I didn’t / know these cuts would save // more than my body. / I wouldn’t negate any of it / now if I could.”
Far from the traditional confessional poetry of, say, Ann Sexton or John Berryman, Jennifer Franklin insists that the material of life, even the darkest, sharpest moments, be valued and named. Don’t give this poetry collection to someone in the midst of terrifying treatment for a deadly disease. Instead, purchase the copy for afterward, for the endless loop of recovery, fear, hope, and self-knowledge. In that sense: Recovery lasts a lifetime.

PS:  Looking for more reviews? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. Only interested in poetry? Try this link instead.

Diversion: Poetry to Stretch the Mind, with a Smile ... Adrienne Raphel, WHAT WAS IT FOR

One of the delights of living in a rural place for a long, long time is seeing people make themselves into their dreams. When Adrienne Raphel left St. Johnsbury, Vermont, for all kinds of education in the big, mostly urban world out there, I wondered which of her dreams she would pick for the long haul. "We" all knew she'd be writing fine material -- but in what genre?

The question's now happily answered, as Raphel's first published book is a collection of poems, WHAT WAS IT FOR, via Rescue Press and the Black Box Poetry Prize.

The cover art, suggestive of an old-fashioned book of natural science, speaks to the sense in her poems that life-as-we-know-it has long-lasting themes and puzzles. But in her voice, these take fresh new form. I particularly enjoyed a surprising take on "vacationing" in the poem "Agar Agar," where the second stanza offers, "The sky is pink gelatin / Welcome to Vacation Island / the doorbell rings and I go / Close and leave my body behind." By the end of the poem, the hot sunshine's effect on that gelatin -- oh yes, I recall gelled "agar agar" in a Petri dish, ready to be inoculated with germplasm of life -- has transformed it:

I've never been so translucent never so runny
The white-hot sand makes my feet pinker
What part of me will I tattoo
I can go so far and farther

Many of the poems hint at a story line, then back away from it, leaving the conclusion and its emotional freight wide open. Questions initiate inquiry, like "But What Will We Do," which begins by asking"But what will we do when the rain doesn't come" -- a poem that entwines the I, we, and you of the moment into longer term questions.

It's a joy to have a copy of the book (a big thank-you to Raphel and her parents for the gift!) because I can return to it day after day and discover that other surprise of strong poems -- that in each day there's a different poem that seems to speak most directly. Today I listen particularly to the hints in "On Monday the Moon Sank Into the Sea," which includes "quixotic geese" and "slack-jaw old clams" as well as a "phantom leg left at a ball." It's playtime on Raphel's pages, and I'm happy to be invited.

Available from Rescue Press online, and also from the usual online sources -- and of course by order at independent booksellers. Tell them to get it into their shelf list, in case you hunger to go pick up another copy for a good friend.

Diversion: Eighth Collection of Poems from Leland Kinsey, GALVANIZED

Poetry month will arrive in a few more days, and with it, on April 8, the publication of the eighth collection of poems from Vermont writer Leland Kinsey. Nearly 400 pages thick, the volume is a treasure of rural life -- of place, and of family, as well as the traditional trades of farming and "going to the woods" for trees, lumber, solitude, and consolation. GALVANIZED speaks to the energy and nearly alchemical process of refining experience into story, and story into poem, as Lee continues to do.

The collection is a "New and Selected Poems," fronted with a baker's dozen of poems that haven't seen the press before. They are not all "just hatched" ... but maybe they have lain on the desk long enough to detach their sharp edges from this poet's heart, so that he can allow us to enter his grief for his sister Helen, for instance, in "Transit of Venus." These newly revealed tales-in-lines are also a bit looser in form and sound, a bit more clearly the stories themselves that press toward the light. Kinsey's kneading, pressing, and forming of the narratives engage us in the sharp turning points, the sudden awareness of a son who echoes one's own childhood, a longing for long-passed times and family members, a connection between what was then and what stands strongly now: as "Work and Song" announces, "substrate, intrusions, and bedrock / redolant with song."

Of equal and lasting delight are Kinsey's selections from his seven earlier books, and I felt as though I were milling in a crowd of old friends, marveling at how their early appearances had lingered in their lined faces full of character and choice. From the Barton, Vermont, poet's first book, Northern Almanac, I found the memorable and still shocking (in the sense that a young man is shocked by his first exposure to the grit and glory of sexuality) long poem "Fair Days." From Not One Man's Work is the poem "Galvanized," with an ending that satisfies me all over again, describing the "niter," the unpalatable residue from boiling maple sap for a season:

When young we tried it ourselves
dared each other to like it.
It had the sour and bitter taste
of the metals that make the world,
and, if attention was paid,
left for a second on the tongue
a thin sweet coating.

Here is also one of my favorites, "Fireflies," one of the many poems drenched heart-deep with Kinsey's emotions and connections to his father and his upbringing. (This is unquestionably a man's world for this poet, in a good sense, the way that Maxine Kumin's poems were and are always a woman's.) "My father's face glistens / in the milk house doorway / the first hot night in June."

I paged eagerly into the section from In the Rain Shadow, poems that follow this quintessential rural Vermont poet on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to a cousin working in Tanzania, where people call out "Kinsey!" and don't expect Leland to reply! I love the ties of one working landscape to another, half a world away, as with "In the Rain Shadow of Mount Meru," where the first stanza opens with "Young camels' groaning calls / carry to their mothers" and then nips toward "The least of the camels produce more milk / than an average cross-bred cow." Each new experience is lapped over the earlier ones, building a fresh sense of both the distant location and the meaning of home.

Three-quarters through, the collection crescendoes into poems from The Immigrant's Contract, a book I share with people who find poetry confusing in general -- but who may find themselves deeply connected to Kinsey's portrait of the landscape of the Nullhegan River's surroundings, where "the immigrant" logger proclaims: "Took years to cut this region over once. / This river drove us both ways, / into and out of life, and, shining dark-like, / just kept coming." And at last there are poems from the sweet and intense exploration of the wildlands remaining among us, Winter Ready, which Kinsey gave to us in 2014, spilling out "bottle gentian, asters, nettles" as well as "Moose paths, vole and lemming runs" -- the varied and specific abundance of the places best explored alone, a little bit lost, aching with both grief and beauty.

GALVANIZED captures why we live in the vulnerable places of the world, tasting and savoring and exploring. It captures the root word "love" in "loveliness," without speaking those names, but instead showing us through story, memory, and vivid complexity. Let this book simmer and thus perfume the days and evenings ahead. With Leland Kinsey, Green Writers Press of Brattleboro, Vermont, has brought us this fine and treasured gift.

THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH by Katherine Towler

When I asked for a review copy of this book by Katherine (Katie) Towler, I had in mind her lovely literary novels placed on an island between and during world wars. Somehow I thought THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH would be an old-fashioned tale of a long-ago poet who made rhymes and stood on the street corner to sell them.

Nope. If I had looked more closely at the book's subtitle -- A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship -- I might have made a better guess. But all's well, because I found myself blissfully engaged, page after page, chapter after chapter, in one of the most wonderful surprises of my literary year.

Katherine Towler's life focused on writing from an early age; she was writing poems at 10, and as a young adult she craved both solitude (for writing) and diversion, the kind that comes from moving often. To her own surprise, after years of learning to spend time alone in pursuit of her best writing, she married Jim when the two of them were 35, in a midlife marriage with a great deal of gentleness and ample space to be herself. The couple settled into a rented space in an older home at the edge of the tidal waters of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a neighborhood where their cat, at least, felt immediately at home.

And it was through a neighbor's cat that she first exchanged word with Robert Dunn, a poet himself, living nearby in far less comfort than she had. Katie's slow dance of becoming acquainted with her coastal town and its residents needed to balance with her urge to withdraw, to create for herself the solitude she felt her writing demanded. Her early perceptions of Robert gave her an ideal to look toward: a man who walked slowly around the town keeping to himself, not making conversation, not even meeting anyone's gaze, living the life Katie believed that her craft -- and his -- demanded.

I admired the nimble grace with which Robert navigated this territory, his ability to maintain a guarded privacy while, in a limited fashion, letting people in. He appeared to have mastered something fundamental I wasn't sure I ever would, though I was feeling my way toward my own kind of balance. For the first time, I appeared to have found a place to live where my warring impulses could coexist, and in my marriage a relationship that could accommodate, although not always easily, my need to disappear.

To Katie's surprise, a connection she formed with Robert through Portsmouth choosing to select him as the town's second Poet Laureate -- she was in the selection group -- tugged her into Robert's circle of friends. It wasn't just the surprise of being chosen for this, but even more so, the discovery of  how many people considered themselves Robert's friends that startled her. Then came the biggest surprise of all: Robert's decision, step by prickly step, to involve Katie in his efforts to stay alive and keep writing while struggling with the diseases that poverty and aging (and cigarettes) put into place.

The struggles that ensue will seem achingly familiar to any creative person agonizing over how to manage enough privacy while also contributing to a family or community. In Towler's book, the frictions of two writers in need of inner solitude -- she with her novels and Robert with his poems -- also come laden with New England revelations about how difficult poverty can be, and how embarrassing and humiliating the lack of power in a personal life becomes.

The slow pace of discovery of Robert's life and secrets mingles with Towler's own slow movement into strength as a published author, a tide of rising and falling parallel to the nearby ocean's. The two poets also intermingle their life lessons in terms of spirituality and religion. Although none of Tower's own poems appear here, those of Robert's often call upon familiar texts while simplifying the language to paint the New England town life accurately, like this one:

Vesper sparrows, turnable of bellbirds,
the small owls have called from tree to tree.
No need to comfort or be comforted.
Pitched high or low, grief is a kind of love
and so must be. Or no one else will know
when the sparrow falls, least of all the sparrow.
       --- Robert Dunn

I ached with Towler in both the beautiful unpeeling of her own life here -- that of Katie the writer adapting to settling in one place -- and the slow realization of Robert's life through his requests to her and her own discomfort in filling his needs. Suspense builds in the telling, as we readers realize, with Katie, the inevitability of Robert's illness and oncoming death, and the enormous efforts of personal sacrifice that both he and Katie choose to make in the long and unpredictable process.

Make time for this one. Pick up a copy or two now (if you've read this far in the review, it's likely there will be people you love, to whom you will want to give this book), but set it on the shelf or table for a quiet rainy afternoon when you can relinquish Ordinary Time and settle into the deep, long sweeps of the narrative.

I will never face writing in the same way again. And the next time I visit Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I expect to be haunted by the ghosts of Robert Dunn and the younger, struggling writer who was Katherine Towler before she stepped forward into her own strong ability to evoke such a portrait as THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH.

[From Counterpoint Press, and available through bookstores and online.]

Diversion, Poetry, FELICITY by Mary Oliver

[Did you notice that the New York Times filled most of its book review section yesterday with poetry??]

Life in New England collides with Robert Frost's poems so often. Stone walls, woods roads that fork, apple picking, running errands while talking to one's horse -- well, okay, not that last one so much. But almost. At any rate, it's intriguing to see which poets pin down the threads of life here in Vermont in ways that can't be forgotten. And I'm glad to extend that investigation to other parts of New England. (Beyond those borders, I'm no expert on the quality of match between terrain and poem.)

So I keep an eye on the works of Mary Oliver, Cape Cod poet par excellence (in recent years residing in Florida) and also poet of the heart, and of dog lovers everywhere. Turtle and frog lovers may also indulge.

Oliver's 2015 collection FELICITY -- oddly marked 2016 on the front of the title page -- is a sparse and thin volume with 81 numbered pages, many of which are blank or only bear a few lines. This may be helpful in absorbing the more philosophical poems, which tend to be also very short, verging on koan. One I enjoyed, called "Don't Worry," is four lines long, so this is half of the poem: "How many roads did St. Augustine follow / before he became St. Augustine?"

The first half of the collection has some of the nature/spirit conjunctions that make Oliver's work enthralling -- trees, swans, a storm --  but also rambles through light mystical observations, and I thought, "I've found more substance than this in her earlier collections."

But when I reached the last two sections of the collection, "Love" and "Felicity," I could hear the teasing and passion of this poet's voice much more clearly. And it was well worth the reading.

Vermont Diversion: Everyone's Mortal in WHAT'S THE STORY, Sydney Lea

Vermont sprouts poets even in the winter -- there is no closed season for their interactions with the landscape. But Sydney Lea, with a Pulitzer finalist among his list of collected poetry and essays, turns instead to interaction with neighbors and community, and WHAT'S THE STORY, his release this month via Green Writers Press, elevates the poetic reflection to astounding levels of love and awareness.

It's a risky direction: Sometimes the friends and relatives of writers aren't wild about being brought onto public pages. Lea dodges a bit of that risk by writing mostly here about people who've already died. This choice allows him to reflect and grieve, as he confronts his own aging -- not just a waning physical ability to climb mountains and loosen boulders, but the near-daily loss of friends and neighbors his age and older. Reflecting on the passing of a chair-building craftsman, Irv, dead at 82 while tilling the vegetable garden, Lea writes, "Irv's gone, and the earth keeps healing, not to be healed for now, maybe never. Probably never."

But he presses beyond the wound of loss to say, "How fine, that almost shy way the man would greet anyone he cared for, his smile barely perceptible, his ice-blue eyes cast down, his words hard to discern at first. Not that Irv was cold, only modest. He was what he was, irreplaceable among other things."

In WHAT'S THE STORY, Lea grapples to portray why each friend matters so much; he does it with precise yet rich descriptions of people and even of hunting dogs, as well as shared terrain. And that terrain is not just the ridges of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire; it's also the passionate country of jazz, so that these "reflections on a life grown long" involve Charlie Mingus, Muddy Waters, and more. When he writes in memory of Jack Myers, a poet friend, by first replaying his own college experience of Mingus's music, he then tastes the state of "Jack's not with us" like this:

His absence may account for the sound, which has nothing, really, to do with the intricate magic of that Mingus sextet I listened to, nor with any line or stanza from Jack's mournful, witty, brilliant poems, nor is it the cry of sea birds. If Wagner didn't drive me almost mad, or maybe because he does, I'd say that the chord was a dark Wagnerian one. It washes over me the way the surf does a rocky shore.

After nearly seventy of these short reflections -- most just two or three pages long, and each one threaded so precisely that it's half memoir, half prose poem, and three-quarters jazz improv in words -- I wanted to shout at the author: Stop worrying! We are all getting older! Enjoying your grandchildren, your remembered childhood, picking a cemetery plot -- what's so terrible about all that?

But that's exactly the point in what Syd Lea's done with these short, bladed, budding items: taken the terror of aging and proved its tender beauty. So I return to the first page, in the reflection titled "Whatever I May Say," and re-read: "Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle's low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends."

Read this one to savor the way friends matter, and love abides. Thanks, Syd, and Green Writers Pres.

Diversion: Poetry from Donald Revell, Tom Thompson

In the days of old, when I was in college, there was a profession called Computer Programmer -- which now is most commonly called Coder. At that same time, there was a mantra of how programming works, with the acronym GIGO: "garbage in, garbage out." The idea was, apply this in reverse and discover that if you want to have good output, you must write good code for it, and so on.

The same may apply to writing well: Read good work before trying to write good work. The rhythms and complexity build up in the ear and the soul. (Thinking about what I'm reading, of course, makes it work even better when I then think about what I'm writing.)

So I appreciated a diversion today into two engaging collections of poetry from Alice James Books. The first, the 2015 title from master poet Donald Revell, is DROUGHT-ADAPTED VINE. The old-fashioned blossom on the lovely cover misleads -- this is a collection that faces the power and terror of both life and death, in wonderfully tuned lines rich with imagery and narrative. Revell proves yet again that the heart of a good poem is the story it's telling ... framed in a well-chosen form and made vivid with haunted phrases that linger in the mind's ear. Revell even invites the reader to indulge:
 ... If I could turn

My head, I would see the heavy mourners
Holding coffee, stranded on the median,
In traffic. Lost to me now. Care to try?
One Chinese daughter. One imaginary boyfriend.
In the unfinished story, they live
Above a toy shop, one consummate lovely smile.

Tom Thompson's 2001 collection LIVE FEED, blurbed by Revell, catches some of Revell's forms, whether as a scaffold toward potency or as an homage to the leader. Thomson's storytelling also excels, with fresh new ground in a vibrant cityscape.

I will take the infant down
past the park to the sea -- where wakes dissolve
into moon's lead cage. That's our face,
love, buried in night's thighs.

Glad I picked these up today. Glad to share such good news, too.

"The mother of poetry is ..." : Patrick Donnelly

Launching the St. Johnsbury, Vermont, version of National Poetry Month today, Patrick Donnelly came from western Massachusetts to read from his three books and work in progress at St. Johnsbury Academy in the Fireside area at the library -- and the only empty seats were in the front row, with extra listeners

even leaning against walls and columns to absorb the conversation.

And conversation indeed it was, as the Smith College professor and director of the Poetry Conference at The Frost Place (in Franconia, NH) opened his life, his writing process, and the translated poetry that he and his spouse Stephen D. Miller continue to bring forth from the Japanese. Students and teachers asked questions that led deep into both writing and love of narrative, which this highly accessible poet shared generously.

One particular phrase that will stay with me, I know, was Donnelly's comment about the presence of opposing reactions within a single poem: "I tell my students," he said with a smile, "that ambivalence is the mother of poetry."

Looking for a signed book by this poet? We have one (click here; when it's gone, it's gone), or reward yourself by traveling to one of his readings or lectures and picking up the one that calls to you most vividly.

No Fooling: 35% Off Our ABE Listings, To April 28

It's not quite lilac blossom time here, but we salute April as the month of spring anyway, with a major sale for all our books (they are ALL listed on ABE, already discounted by 35% from their usual prices -- click here to search them).


We have signed mysteries in lovely condition ... unsigned classic mysteries at bargain prices ... still some poetry and literature and a bit of fine press work ... Browse the listings, or ask us about something in particular (kingdombks@gmail.com).

Diversion: Poetry by David Kirby, A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS

It's National Poetry Month, and one of my theories is that a good poem can lift an author past any tedious touch of "writer's block" to a fresh outlook. Even for mysteries.

Floridian David Kirby makes this very clear in his new book via Hanging Loose Press, A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS. In long-lined swinging stanzas the narrative almost scoots past the presence of meter and line -- and then, swinging back the other way, Kirby's merriment restores the form and its rhythm, with a gurgle of delight.

I'll just give a quick sample from the poem "Fat Dope Dealers," third stanza down (in between two segments about Jefferson Davis, leader of the South in the Civil War!):

What makes dope dealers so fat? I know, it's because they
    can make thousands of dollars each week by making a few
phone calls rather than hundreds delivering stuff and throwing
       their backs out or mowing people's lawns only to have
them say "you missed a patch over there" and not tip you.

Think it's easy to pull this off for almost 90 pages? It's not easy at all. But it's wonderful, and funny, and fun, and thoughtful. I'm so glad this book arrived in the mail. It was a great surprise. And it's available now.

Diversion: Poets Discussed with Insight and Barbed Tongue

Tuesday April 1, in addition to being a guaranteed "weather" day here in Vermont (we have SO many "April Fools" snowstorms and rain items and more), is the start of National Poetry Month. I promise not to overdo this, but a little poetry is good for the soul and I think can enrich the life and words of mystery writers ... maybe even a few readers.

At any rate, if there were suddenly a murder case in the poetry world to solve, it could well involve Peter Stitt, whose collection of critical essays in THE PERFECT LIFE emerged last fall in a solid little book (166 pages) from Tupelo Press. I think I've read the first essay three times now -- called "In Love Begins Responsibility," it starts with poet James Wright and Professor Stitt (who is the founding and ongoing editor of The Gettyburg Review), moves on to John Berryman, and provides the ground for Stitt to talk about what it means for him to be a survivor of his own (long-ago) suicidal longing. The images and ideas are so strong that -- truly -- I used them a few days ago in a set of high school presentations. Know how highly the praise is, when a work of literary criticism engages a 16-year-old, or several peers of said teen? Yes, the essay is that good.

But there's more to come in this startling packet of tight and intriguing critiques. Whether it's disclosing the (probably immoral) editorial "making pretty" done to Emily Dickinson's poems, the similar messing around with Robert Frost's lines, or the justification -- or not! -- for fictionalizing fact and playing with dialogue instead of reporting it, Stitt keeps piling up edgy insights, remarks, and questions. I would love to have been a student in his classrooms -- and would also hate it, because you can't tell, at least from his printed pages, which parts are his opinions, which are meant as barbed dinner-table conversation, and which are "truths" that could be kept and nurtured.

As I read and re-read, I felt as though I was part of the table gathering on one of those edgy late-night shows, scrambling for something possibly witty to add to the discussion ... and although that's not necessarily comfy, it's exhilarating, exciting, and memorable. If you've wondered how to convince someone that poetry and poets are far from boring, giving them a copy of THE PERFECT LIFE would be a great start.

And it sets up a wry, delightful way to enter National Poetry Month: skeptical, eager, and hungry for more. And oh yes, suspicious that some literary bloodletting might follow!

Diversion: Leland Kinsey, WINTER READY (Vermont Poet)

Every now and then, I review some poetry -- and as we race toward April, which is National Poetry Month, I'm reading and thinking about poems in between crime novels. (I'll write about those this evening, too, but separately.)

You know about the "localvore" movement in food, yes? Green Writers Press in Brattleboro, Vermont, is applying the same ideas to books: gathering regional authors, "giving voice to writers who will make the world a better place," and designing, printing, and marketing their books "at home" -- in Vermont. Dede Cummings, designer and publisher, sent me an advance copy of her newest offering, being released on March 20, and it's a gem: WINTER READY, a 96-page book of poems from Vermont poet Leland Kinsey.

I grew into my Vermont boots just up the road from Lee, and his retired-teacher mom hosted a playgroup where my children learned to love Rice Krispie bars, and to take turns with other kids. But I didn't really know Lee, other than to say hello, and even though we cross paths in the poetry world, I still don't know him well -- he's a private person, and I'm not one to push.

Which makes it especially pleasing that in WINTER READY, Leland Kinsey opens both the natural world and an interior landscape of exploring, testing, and sometimes grieving. He presents forms that have the wind-urged "give" of barn walls: lined up straight along the beams, but slowly swaying a bit, and with spaces where a board's been pulled for a view, now that the cows don't need care. Swallows fly past your face; owls speak; oldtimers give half a story, expecting you to work out the rest.

There are rhythms in here, the quiet rhythms of spoken speech, of narrative -- the lines break the light into emphasis on small details, but there's nothing forced. I found in here a sense of empty nesting: of examining who we are once the kids are grown and gone, once the barn is empty, once the older relatives who needed us have slipped away. I clipped the obituary from the local paper when Lee's father passed on, last year, but that's not at the heart of this book -- in spite of a clever poem at the end that salutes him. Instead, there are gardens -- the ones at the end of a harvest season -- and trees that outlive their time, and woods that overtake open spaces, teasing you into thinking you've remembered the wrong place, when actually the foundation or cabin is in front of you, just overgrown.

"Double Digging the Garden" catches a lot of this, contemplating the process of putting the garden to bed by digging in nutrients and turning the soil, where so much has grown:

My wife and I now have way too much
of all of this. Our children are gone.
Pets, large and small, which used to consume the extra
have long since died.

But the work remains, and the seasons pull the work into place again, again. The poet comments at the end,

Each summer I bring friends out
to note and share the display and produce.
Here is life's habit on grand exhibit
and the hard work hidden.

Many of the poems name birds or plants in exquisite detail, and I felt the urge to read the lines aloud to a group of grade-school kids who might not know the species but would hang on the sounds of the species. "Naming without revealing," I jotted down for myself, thinking about the way Lee allows the creatures to pass by, whether on the page or in the cranberry bog.

Some phrases caught my inner ear and lodged there, ringing: "ended his lovely trouble," "when I glass them," "I damp soil for" -- and as I grew into the phrasing, I found some marvelous endings, to "Horseshoeing" ("But any path to or through / the past is an icy road, / whatever the pace, / distorted by speed") and to "Quebec City Boardwalk" ("the unmeasured plainchant / of these ordinary wonders / plays on").

The poem I know I'll be most looking forward to re-reading each time I pick up this collection again will be "Deer Camp," a war poem of sorts that begins, "The drive in is long / over bad logging roads gone worse." I hope to read this one aloud to a friend soon -- and I shall let my "older self" keep reading it, for the layers hidden in a long story of family and change.

Leland Kinsey's WINTER READY is available on March 20 directly from Green Writers Press (click here), but also ready for preorder online at the big online distributor, if that's how you roll. If you give yourself a copy, you'll be better fitted to make the most of April.

Diversion: Poetry and Middle Grades Fiction -- Robin Herrera, HOPE IS A FERRIS WHEEL

Middle-grade readers and the people who choose books for them -- librarians, parents, teachers -- have a new treat with Robin Herrera's first book, HOPE IS A FERRIS WHEEL. For 10-year-old Star Mackie, struggling in school in a new town where she's the only kid who comes to class from a trailer park, life is jammed with confusing mysteries. Why does her teacher hate her? How can she find a friend in this group of kids who range from weird to mean? And when is her father going to start sending her things, like the birthday card her older sister Winter received, or the old truck Winter now has?

This isn't a mystery, but it's a darned good novel, and Star is heart-warming and courageous. She won my applause over and over for how she handles ordinary but painful crises. And I'm particularly mentioning it today because we're just five weeks away from National Poetry Month -- and what eventually turns Star's life around is poetry, from reading Emily Dickinson to grappling with a Shel Silverstein poem to grasping what metaphor brings to her situation. I'd recommend this for middle grades as an encouraging and enjoyable novel, but also to high school classrooms where the story and the clear, smart writing can carry skeptical teens into realizing how poetry works and why it's worth their time.

Our First Online Sale: 35% Off All Listings (Mysteries, Poetry, More)

We're honored that ABE Books selected Kingdom Books for its new program in allowing some small (boutique!) booksellers to offer a discount through its online listings of our books. From now through July 27, 2013, all our yummy mysteries, poetry (yes, we re-listed hundreds of poetry books, many signed, because we knew this was coming), and quirky eccentric delights that we couldn't resist -- they are ALL 35% off.

Hope you're ready to browse. Here's an easy link: http://www.abebooks.com/kingdom-books-waterford-vt-u.s.a/1498832/sf

I've saved up boxes for shipping, and Dave is ready to answer any questions about condition, authors, and more.

Reviews coming ASAP—on Carsten Stroud's amazing new thriller; plus a book in the new genre of "Thuglit"; and more.

Diversion: Poet Martín Espada on Moyers and Company

photo by Bryce Richter

Although the snow and ice outside the window dare me to say "April" again, it really is still National Poetry Month -- and a cluster of stubborn daffodil stems are protesting the weather. It's great to keep hearing and reading good poetry all month ... Every month, of course, should be poetry month (and is better when poetry is added).

One of our favorite poets, especially for his powerful performances, is Martín Espada. Most of his upcoming readings -- schedule HERE -- are in upstate New York and New England. If you can't be there, check out this interview with him on Moyers and Company. FYI, his newest collection is THE TROUBLE BALL. More on the book, HERE.

Next post ... back to mysteries. Although, come to think of it, one of the best mysteries is the way a good poem can slice apart the cloudy sky over the soul.

Spring Diversion: Poetry for Those Who Rise (Kevin Goodan, Kimberly Burwick, Martín Espada)

"Well, there’s always the search for things beyond the world. Often times I feel that maybe God is here, he’s just put down in shorthand and we have to capture little pieces of him or his language, which is the natural world." Kevin Goodan to Kimberly Burwick, in an interview in Rain Taxi, 2008

If neither Easter nor Passover can drive us at this time of year to the big questions -- life, love, loss, justice, grief, heaven, hell -- the season for us northerners (Global North, or American North) should do so: Green blades of grass sneak forward under the brown thatch of last year's winter-dulled fields, old crusts of snow glitter with ice crystals and are speckled with "snow fleas" hopping, and the miracle of daffodils is something that's already old in New Jersey but still uncertain here in the mountains.

When I want to remember that G-d is much stranger and larger than a worship service, I can walk the ridges of land -- or I can pick up any work of poetry by Kevin Goodan. His latest collection, UPPER LEVEL DISTURBANCES, reached publication long after he'd left New England and found a new home in Idaho. Within driving distance of the Montana of his birth and childhood, and nestled within the landscape where he fought forest fires for a decade, he writes in these poems of fire, barrenness, and the greasy, strenuous effort of work in a slaughterhouse, as well as the sheep farm he tended while in New England. He opens these darknesses to reveal the songs of lightning and of prairie fires, of aching muscles and of grief.

Yet Goodan is our Gerald Manley Hopkins, bound in a call-and-response with the higher power and the rituals, traditions, and passions of the Church. In my favorite sequence in this collection, "Showings," Goodan begins with, "I open my eyes and taste God. / A sky blue through bare trees / Then birds. The spirit moves /Surely but not upwards. / I make a fire but no words come --" and resolves this passage with, "As I am my own offering / When the unsayable is lodged in the throat."

Much later in the collection, in "Sacerdotes Domini," he couples fire, barn, and hawk, building toward "The black earth without mercy. / I wipe ash from my mouth, squint as if / I know exactly where I'm going." Within the lines, and under the impact of the poems accumulating, the disciplined questioning by this powerful poet draws me into his vision of "the redemptive dark."

I marvel at the interview of Goodan that Kimberly Burwick provided in Rain Taxi, as excerpted at the head of this post. Not only is Burwick an award-winning poet herself -- she, like Goodan, has drawn strength and illumination for her writing while living in vastly different parts of America: Wisconsin, Los Angeles, New England, and now Idaho. She is married to Goodan, which makes the hunt for multiple meanings in her poems -- and his -- especially fascinating in terms of pronouns. When Goodan writes "you," about 85 percent of the time I think he's talking to that Higher Power, and maybe 5 percent of the time he's overlapping or pointing toward Burwick within the "you." In Burwick's work, I read the "you" as being often directed toward Goodan, or toward the body of attentiveness that he carries.

Yet this is only a result of the knowledge that the two are connected -- clearly, Burwick's poems speak an investigative voice far different from his, and with less obvious losses and darknesses. In HORSES IN THE CATHEDRAL she enfolds the quintessential Western partner to human life, the horse, within her identification of a separate pathway into the quest, the search, the long walk where flowers and cardinals splash bright, aggressive hope. In "The Anxious Ones," she confesses, "I want to be alone, and not." As she moves the short yet rich poem through the question of one's "place in the world," she weaves back to her own core: "I breath for a long time / with pasture in my breath, / my voice weeds and undergrowth, / I am not for vineyards." And in "Desire for Collapse," where the juniper of the opening could be either in New England or in Montana, I find the necessary contrast of breaking and bending, followed by, "I touch birds mid-breath to know the motion / of the instant as deer know sighting. / Dusty roots and the law of falling bodies / appear suddenly as flesh without path."

For a more story-driven and justice-demanding read, I recommend highly the collection THE TROUBLE BALL by Martín Espada. (Apologies to the poet and publisher; I meant to review this in early September, when it was released, but life got in the way.) "The Trouble Ball" is a reference to a baseball pitch by Satchel Paige, who'd already demonstrated fantastic action and theory while playing in Puerto Rico. Espada's father Frank as a child went to a ball game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, expecting to see this magnificent player, and after waiting and waiting for Satchel Page, says the poem: "Dónde están los negros? asked the boy. Where are the Negro players? / No los dejan, his father softly said. They don't let them play here." Although Frank Espada would himself become a ballplayer, this piercing awareness of the color line threw a "trouble ball" into the American life of the family. Martín Espada, a father himself, takes the material as more of the rich clay from which he shapes his challenges to America today.

The collection is elegiac in the most exhilarating of ways, probing the lives of "truth-tellers" who make a difference; in the poem "Blessed Be the Truth-Tellers," for Jack Agüeros, Espada recounts being a child headed for a tonsillectomy, bragging about all the ice cream he's be given, like that provided by "Johnny the ice-cream man, / who allegedly sold heroin the color of vanilla / from the same window" of his truck. But when "Jack the Truth-Teller" (which is, indeed, a kind of Giant Killer) visits the projects, herding real camels and writing "sonnets of the jail cell / and the racetrack and the boxing ring," and pushing change into place, Jack tells the small boy what will really happen: "Ay bendito cachifrito Puerto Rico. / That's gonna hurt." And of course -- it does. "Blessed be the Truth-Tellers," Espada concludes, "for they shall have all the ice cream they want."

Another of my favorites in this collection is "The Day We Buried You in the Park," for Sandy Taylor. A conspiracy of family and friends to deposit Taylor's remains in the Poets' Park becomes a tangle of grief and risk, concluded with three remaining scoops of ashes that, the poem asserts, the poet took home in "a coffee can: Chock full o' Nuts, the Heavenly Coffee," on the container. "At your desk there was bad coffee and good poetry, / but no heaven, so I will look for you under my bootsoles, / walking through the world, soaking up the ghosts wherever I may go."

For more insight into this complex and articulate story-teller poet, there's a well-appointed website here: http://www.martinespada.net. Most of all, though, as before, I recommend attending one of Espada's readings -- he brings with him a vigor, music, and assertion on the part of both goodness and justice that makes our losses and pain worth remembering and honoring.

Calendar Alert: Eliot Pattison Tonight; Karin Slaughter August 13; Martín Espada Sept. 4

There's still time to toss out your usual Sunday evening schedule and get to Kingdom Books today for our 7 p.m. visit from Eliot Pattison, author of three mystery series, whose book THE SKULL MANTRA won an Edgar Award. You won't see this author touring -- working as an attorney and committed to writing, he stays mostly private. So if you're in or near Vermont today, come on over. Direction in the right-hand column.

Karin Slaughter's new book CRIMINAL is a stunning two-generation mystery, one of the best I've read with such a wide scope of time and effect, set in Atlanta, GA. The author is giving a questions-and-answers session right here on the Kingdom Books review blog, on Monday August 13. You may be startled by some of her responses! And you'll get to know her work from a fresh direction.

If you're a mystery reader/collector and you know the name Martín Espada, you're riding a second horse -- because this outstanding Massachusetts (and Puerto Rican) author is 100% poet. From time to time, I can't resist reviewing a notable collection. And THE TROUBLE BALL makes me long for a chance to hear Espada read the poems aloud, as I already know what a fierce and wonderful reading he can provide. A quick look at his website suggests I'll be able to catch up on his schedule, after the September 4 release of the book. If you want to savor what rebellion, passion, and well-combed memory can do in the hands of a gifted wordsmith, here's the event link: http://www.martinespada.net/Readings.html