Birds of Poetry

...And throughout, the author arranges and rearranges the metaphor of leaves to sometimes startling effect...

...Sleeping with you after weeks apart how normal yet after midnight to turn and slide my arm along your thigh drawn up in sleep what delicate amaze...

...Several deal with seemingly trivial occurrences, like riding a bus when someone stinks up the toilet, or hearing a soundman boast of a date gone wrong...

...Exposed…" Feld mixes these musings with self-deprecating soul searchings and a reverence for language, as in the closing line of the redemptive last poem: "back to life clothed in new sounds new words...

...It just so happens I am sick/of being Black," Seibles writes, adding a few lines later: "I am sick of being measured/by the nappiness of my head...

...One who should be hung is made emperor...

...And then she delivers the boom: spanish was the secret language used by adults to talk about the war where my father was...

...Restand the fallen look at the ground beneath they are savage that dance to their tune...

...Walk in the woods of poetry...

...Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winner, offers in American Smooth an astonishing collection that covers race, music, dance, the quality of contentedness in a good marriage, practice at a shooting range, and, like Rich, the power of the word: "We put our thoughts out there on the cosmos express/and they hurtle on, tired and frightened...

...and all the women silently cheered her on red dress and all while all the men wondered what their funerals would be like...

...In "Personal History," she identifies herself as a "norteno" who was New Mexico born: bloodlines here long before pilgrim's pride manifest destiny families escaping with their lives from torquemada's questioning...

...In a series of poems entitled "Not Welcome Here," Dove writes about black soldiers in World War I and World War II and the treatment they received from their "impertinent nation" upon returning home: You didn't want us when we left but we went...

...77 pages...

...132 pages...

...In "Brown," she writes: For once I was not the only black person in the room (two others, both male...

...Here, for instance, is from "Wait": sand screams against your government issued tent hell's noise in your nostrils crawl into your ear-shell wrap yourself in no-thought wait no place for the little lyric...

...He in turn licks them...

...113 pages...

...Albuquerque," the opening poem, contains this little joke: "How now brown town...

...As a result, the will to protest atrophied: Sometime between civil rights and Oprah somewhere between Vietnam and Desert Storm Remember how Baghdad lit up that first timeall the "sorties," and here, the yellow ribbonsWeren't you almost feeling kind of glad...

...The verses Rich dedicates to June Jordan, the poet, essayist, activist, and teacher, who used to write for The Progressive, especially moved me...

...But Torrez's energy and punch ("blood of Christ is sold by the spoonful") make up for that...

...During migration, when there's a storm over the Gulf of Mexico, songbirds gather in astonishing bunches after making landfall...

...This sampling is from "Remuda": In the afterlife the cattle lick my father's hand...

...The Shadow's Horse, by Diane Glancy The narrator's father worked in the stockyards of Chicago, and many of the most powerful poems in this book relate to that experience...

...58 pages...

...Buffalo Head Solos By Tim Seibles Cleveland State University...

...Pissed off at racism, fed up with "dumbfuckery," Seibles lets loose here...

...15.95...

...But also to love, lesbian love, which she evokes in subtle, beautiful ways...

...Rich gives her gift of words to us, not knowing ultimately what will become of them or us ("words of the poets tumble/into the shuddering stream"), but hopeful that someone will be on the receiving end to revive this "moribund democracy...

...Madness and Retribution, by Juliette Torrez With a breezy, slangy, playful voice that bespeaks her poetry slam background, Torrez packs a wallop in many of these poems...

...In "Best and Only," he surveys the twentieth century, with a particular focus on Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo, including a scene with both men urinating off the stern of the Sequoia: "… the president pissing/on the Republic, over which he stands...

...Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive...

...See what you can identify...

...The School Among the Ruins By Adrienne Rich W. W. Norton...

...Seibles troubles the waters...

...You didn't want us coming back but here we are...

...This poem foreshadows a later one, "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove," in which the first African American Oscar winner makes a grand entrance of her own...

...You can find six scarlet tanagersina single bush, a dozen indigo buntings, and warblers of every stripe...

...I'm attracted to it all, but especially to engaged poetry, work that tangles with America or soars above us and spots the glaring error as well as the beauty...

...I thought a few other things, too, unmentionable here...

...The poems on race have a particular urgency...

...Dove can swoop down on one page to capture the common spoken English ("Gee, that sucks") and on the next ascend with an image of a "manicured spider...

...In Rich's latest work, The School Among the Ruins, Bush's Iraq War repeatedly intrudes...

...Or, in another: ". . . God is the name/we give to all the things that scare us most:/how we live, and what happens when we don't...

...No matter the pitch, she pulls it off...

...Fortunately, we have two magnificent frigate birds among us, Adrienne Rich and Rita Dove, who are masters at this...

...Don't get me wrong: I've always loved my skin, the way it glows against citron and fuchsia, the difficult hues but the difference I cause whenever I walk into a polite space is why I prefer grand entrances...

...All this we've come to expect from Rich, who over a lifetime has devoted herself to laying it on the line...

...Madness and Retribution By Juliette Torrez Manic Press...

...Here in its entirety is "The leaves crushed under rake of their moving": History (American) shoots a pellet to the head covers war trails massacres land allotments now re-pile the piled leaves the leaf piles (of them...

...This book is an ode to solidarity and defiance, and the power of the word: "word and body/are all we have to lay on the line...

...The Shadow's Horse By Diane Glancy University of Arizona Press...

...By Matthew Rothschild Over the holidays, I took a week's vacation in poetry, enjoying the condensed form, the spun phrase, the out-of-nowhere image...

...In "Red Dress," Torrez writes about a battered wife who attends her husband's funeral in that gaudy attire and throws her wedding ring into the grave, announcing, i hope you're happy now because I certainly am...

...Buffalo Head Solos, by Tim Seibles In an "Open Letter" prologue, Seibles champions what he calls a "sublimely reckless poetry," which rebels against "a poetry that doesn't want to be too conspicous, a poetry that knows its place, that doesn't mean to trouble the water, that is always decorous and never stomps in with bad breath and plaid boots...

...Citizen, by Andrew Feld "The one who writes my history will be the one who wears a wire," writes Andrew Feld, in a great opening line to "Zealot...

...Here there is further resurrection...

...Among his targets is TV...

...In the body of this poem, Seibles registers his futility: When it comes to my country I'm like a chipmunk snarling at an avalanche, like a dragonfly slamming its sharp beak into the wilding steel of an eighteen-wheeler...

...Here's a few more from 2004 that I identified on holiday...

...and somewhere the Holy Ghost pulling tongues off the old meat carts that were first to open the gate...

...I thought of Sambo...

...Other poems touch on the treatment of Native Americans...

...Feld brings a philosophical mind to the page, and he grounds it in world events, like the Atom bomb, which appears on the very first page and returns in a poem about an uncle who worked on the Manhattan Project...

...Many of these poems, though, are not nearly so heavy...

...In "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," he writes: "When the televisions came on/you were ready to sit down and watch...

...People stand and clap...

...And he gives it to the President in a poem called "For Handsome George," which starts with an epigram from Rumi: "Things are reversed...

...The world's quiver and shine/I'd clasp for you forever," Rich writes...

...As I took up these and many other works of poetry published in 2004, I was struck by the richness, variety, and vibrancy all around me...