David Gilmour reviews David Booth

With a title that begs a telling about something mattering, David Booths’ Menippean satire, being prose and poetry, or versa vice and a request for response in the title: Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter [sic] What is the matter? What is matter? What matter? Depends, what matters to you. Playing with language is a sport of poet’s, not always intellectual conundrums, but funny sounds and changeable meanings. As with “matter,” above. The experimental flare of Booth’s collection of prose, with both coherence and syntactic order and also with word, page graphics, and all sorts of Sternean and Joycean ways to take it. The experimental variety of styles and subject matter, are a bricolage of bits and pieces made for a storytelling bricoleur. There is a feeling of a Clearing Warehouse for every prosaic and poetic motif imaginable. It is a cathartic run at times. A reduction from intellectual knowledge into babble, admitting the pull of childish play: “What’s a dun forest in Blake’s ode to an evening star, that “Fair-hair’d angel.” Venus hanging in winter branches after sunset. What’s dun itself. Why not look up dun and not let knowing guide us.” Eventually the floral poetic imagery becomes sonic: “Watercolor, forest, grayscale. dun [sic] forest NORTH for dunforst dunfoerst dun furst done forced dunne forst dunne first dumb luck done fast well done dumb furst duhn ferst dunn forest “ etc. Once given license by concrete poetry grids and every variation of sound and sense on trial for the right key, the poet is flying hands free. “Look Ma, No hands.” The miscellany, the garland, and the anthology of prose and poetry are certainly gilded with Aldine white-space patterned language blocks or spires or spears or arrowheads. The combination of styles within a page of prose, and the aesthetic play with formats and graphic effects are evidence of a deliberate shift to a novel genre. Not an obsessive “Nouveau Roman” but a return of the ancient classical “modern” styles, changing subjects and media, styluses, letter hammers, pots of Shadrack, Meshak and Indigo. This is not always fun to read, not always clear what the matter is, and if the author does want feedback, provokes it, then who is going to tell him from all of us reading his book? A reviewer who does not know the answer to What the Matter Is, or any variation of it, Tell me please, you say. OK. The great variety of styles and play with language is highly entertaining, and even kaleidoscopic at times. This mantra-like quality of dunning the reader (indeed, I could tell the fun you were having, dun fun) is a happy racing movement and carries the eye along swiftly. Say the word enough times, over and over, eventually you don’t know what the word is in meaning. “Chip Shop” was my mantra that became mushy peas before I lost consciousness. I never liked peas. Hated peas, especially the fresh, shucked peas, little crumpled bags of green algae, very squashy and can catch in the throat if you are mortally averse to their texture. We ought to thank David Booth for releasing the stuffy tried and traditional to space trash and giving another artistic reach a chance. It is quite all right to imitate the ancient genres of Menippean and Milesian satire, mixing prose and poetry with a semblance of a plot, a memoir, a picaresque adventure. The concrete poetry is an addition from a later modern date, beginning with Aldus’s experiments with patterns of words and words in shapes, not to forget geometrical page designs. Some ancient Greek poets experimented with geometric poetry: the famous double-axe (labrys) pattern. The equilateral triangle. I cannot remember what the words said, but I did remember the design of words into pyramids, triangles and bats wings. Booth plays intellectual egoist with cramming facts into his writing, which reminded me of Harper’s final page of “Findings.” No rarer facts delivered in non-sequitur juxtapositions of discontinuity. For example: “The first Canadian in space died. Physicists explained microwaves’ imaginary time delay. The mass distribution of the first stars was found to have a greater than anticipated effect on the twenty-one-centimeter signal.” (Harper’s Magazine, September, 2025, p. 54.) There is the same zany combination of words, funny connections, others non-plussing: Two Boys on a Bed with a Guitar Let’s rock. Say what? I don’t know. You said it. Said what? Do you even know what it means? My grandfather says it Why do you say it? Everyone thinks I’m uptight. What will you do? I’ll smash my instrument on the stage. [He rises.] I’ll buy a front-row ticket [He drops to the floor.] I’ll throw my pick at you. [He throws.] From the cover of David Booth’s Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter Poetry & Prose, cover art by Vivienne Legg (Wichita, KS: Blue Cedar Press, 2025). “The beautiful have come e stumbli ng in vari uds and al ght, light l de a line o and barns to . . .” The design is a great part of Booth’s presentation, concrete poetry being pictorial as shape and word-worthy in “syllables” and “sequences.” Vivienne Legg was chosen for her word-tree, language tree, root-word-tree, walking beside a line of Oaks. In perfect tune with the play of the collection. The inventiveness is everywhere and at times demands serious attention. With an ADHD friend I have experienced this racing flow of accounting, explicating, narrating and all in general motor-mouthing. Were the footnotes a nod to Thomas Sternes or just to protect from suspicion? When David Foster Wallace used footnotes heavily in some articles (the Dictionary study) and famously in Infinite Jest, I was not particularly amused at the didactic parody. The playfulness of the poetry and prose so easily contrasts with the flat factness of the footnote facts. Then again, some of those notes were attractive to read through as findings. – David Gilmour (8/27/2025)

Nancy E. Wright ------------ book review

Ultimately Unslaked

Review:  Quench,  by Amy Orazio  CW Books, 2018, 101 pp. $15.95

                                            by    Nancy E Wright

Quench, by Amy Orazio, exposes, examines, and ultimately slakes the thirst of longing at first drop by drop, then with increasingly steadier flow, though never to the point of saturation. This collection, the poet’s first, guides the reader through distinct and disparate spaces—desert, city, harbor, and headwater—from the reader’s spiritual aridity to enlightenment through recognition and acceptance of the inseparability of body and spirit. 

Following the Table of Contents but prior to the first poem is the poem, “Stone Would be Water,” by Samuel Menashe, the final five lines of which are:

                        Who makes fountains

                                Spring from flint

                                  Who dares tell

                                    One thirsting

                                  There’s a well

Quench is the well of which Orazio dares to tell us.  Four sections comprise the collection: they are “Desert,” “City,” “Harbor,” and “Headwater.”  In all sections the poems consist of relatively short lines, with the majority of the poems no more than one strophe. The effect is to suspend the reader between yearning and fulfillment, and most of all to recognize the depths and details of that yearning with each poem. “Exit Scene,” the first poem of the section “Desert,” and of the collection, speaks of a place “Where the amber sings to dark/ darkness rings,” thus initiating the reader’s pilgrimage at nightfall rather than at the more predictable sunrise.  The third poem, “By This I Mean,” echoes Menashe’s stones in the aforementioned poem with the statement “stones do right/ before seeing, asking/ help and what/are you thirsty for?”   The poems, “Early Ash” and “Miracle,” that follow refer respectively to Good Friday and Passover, the latter with the line, “I read Exodus by George Oppen.  So I was hoping to see.”   Yet another biblical reference occurs in “Past the Brook,” the second strophe of which states:

                                    The widow has her own song

                                    she is setting supper

                                    but her bread is gone

                                   can you pray for oil?

The final strophe, however, reverses the scenario with the statement, “I need oil to pray/ to unearth these desert tricks.”  As the reader nears the end of the first section, these lines evoke the words of the Old Testament prophet Elijah to the widow that the oil will not run out until God sends rain; at the same time, the desert—and metaphorically the desert of one’s yearning—replaces the prayer for oil with the need for oil as a prerequisite to prayer. Thus the poem’s speaker dares to question—indeed perhaps even to deny—the power of faith in the absence of evidence.  For the speaker, proof is the prerequisite to belief.  Yet so often proof itself is elusive, hence those who yearn for it remain thirsty.

            “Of Angels,” the opening poem of the second section, “City,” contrasts sharply with the introduction to “Desert.” Instead of nightfall, a “circle of light” carries the speaker to the aqueduct, to an artificial channel for transporting water, which the speaker needs in order to survive.  Then,

                                    I asked for this shroud

                                    for this city in me

                                   to be laid bare.

Succeeding poems-- “Is Thirsting Seeing,” in which the last line is ‘the new son sings,” “Incarnate,” and “Transfigure,”  speak of birth and renewal in process, and of hope, as expressed in “Sink:”

                                    when the sun sinks low

                                   bruising the sky

                                   beautiful

                                    can be a troubling word

                                    I still believe in it though

                                    like angels

                                   who wear faces

Seeing beauty certainly can quench our own thirst for it; yet beauty and pain are so often companions, like the sun setting on a day with so much yet unfinished, with so many still thirsty.

            “Harbor,” the shortest of the four sections, brings the reader closer to sources of actual and spiritual water with poems such as “Cargo,” “Reservoir,” “Rinse,” and “Remain,” with the last of these stating “There is a jar where I keep the sea/ when it shuts off its sounds.”  Still, the ultimate arrival at the proverbial well occurs, if it occurs at all, only in the final section, “Headwater,” and only when loss opens space, as spoken in the section’s opening poem, “Thin Places:”

                                                C-shaped section of a river

                                                for bending

                                                or laying

                                               when loss

                                               makes room for

                                              what happens at the water’s side.”

            If a headwater is a tributary portion of a river close to its source, then the beginning of quenching spiritual thirst is the space created by undoing, expressed in the section’s poems such as “Unhinge,” and “In Between,” which ends with the lines “How good does it feel / to unsee.”

Moreover, just as in the previous section the speaker needs oil in order to pray, in “There You Are,” the speaker is able to recognize that for which she thirsts only when she is able to drink.  The spiritual thirst is inextricably at one with the body, as espoused in “Water to Live Water to Die,” “Except that--/ this is not a metaphysical choice / this is gut.”  Ultimately, as the “Ripening,” the last poem in the collection states, “water is the prayer/ ready enough to be sung.”

            Throughout the collection the sparseness of lines and the near absence of punctuation give the reader simultaneous clarity and confusion. Images of “magnets in green-violet ears / hover where north and east / are unzipped as a ribcage” (“Faults Are Present”), “six wings black against a sherbet sky” (“Backlit,”), “Sunday’s head is heavy / already leathering” (“Sabbath), and “The stars are drowning too / a deep hum at midnight / thick on our tongues:” (“In Between”)  engage the senses; yet the pictures are neither clear nor situated in context.  Rather than analyze to understand, however, the structure of these poems somehow invites—indeed almost compels---the reader to release understanding and instead journey deeply into the caverns of one’s own longings and, once exploring that emptiness, find the path to filling the vacuum.  Nevertheless, unlike some poetry that seeks to satisfy, Quench dares not satiate completely, but rather leaves that task to the reader.  Yet the poet reminds us that this freedom, this autonomy the reader has to quench or not to quench, is an innate part of the inevitable continuum of longing, simply by virtue of the fact that we are human, and that we are body and spirit inextricably joined.  Thus this inevitable, inescapable thirst itself becomes the source of its own quenching.

   

               

                       

Assistant Poetry Editor Jerry Austin reviews Bethany Reid's book of poems Sparrow

A Book Review Of Sparrow By Bethany Reid (Winner of the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize)

                                                                        Review by Jerry Austin

As a general rule--and this is shockingly pervasive--academics do not write good poetry. The most powerful exception I know of, at present, is Bethany Reid. I consider her one of the best poets in North America, and having read her Master's Thesis, "Calling A Daughter," more than thirty times, I do not say this lightly.

Her newest book is immensely readable, and... enjoyable. By a timely coincidence, I met with an old friend a few days ago. When I told her I would be writing a review of Sparrow, she said, "Yes!.. I read it yesterday, cover to cover. It was so good I couldn't put it down." I smiled because Dorianne Laux writes the same, nearly verbatim, in the book's forward.

It is best to understand Bethany's poetry in the context of all her poetry. She grew up in rural western Washington, and has long written about her childhood. Before earning her doctorate in American Literature from the University of Washington, Bethany wrote: 1) "The Sorrel Mare," an epic-length narrative poem of unusual emotive quality (it reduced to tears several readers I personally know); 2) The Coyotes And My Mom (poems published by Bellowing Ark Press); and 3) her Master's Thesis (mentioned above). It is my opinion that Bethany Reid's poetry should be collected in some form and published so as to be accessible to a larger audience.

Bethany's earlier poems tend toward greater inclusiveness of narrative detail, whereas her more recent poems tend, musically, toward the lyrical (though technically most remain narrative in that they move through time). 

Her poem, "The Horse" (from Sparrow), while in free verse, reminds me of Frost (in a good mood) and conveys some of the magic of Wordsworth's Prelude, though it differs very much in essence from the English poet. There is a haunting ambiguity about the identity of the horse, which I will leave for the reader to discover in the original. In any case, direct experience is the provenance here; this is written by someone who has owned and cared for farm animals, who has observed them with empathy and awe: (lines 14-20)

       She had a way of turning when happy,

       trotting down the path to the open field,
       her powerful legs suddenly loping, rolling her

       through the high brown grass. Her brown coat
       shone in the sun. In rain

       she stood beneath the orchard trees,
       her forelock hanging in her eyes.

There is more poetry in those lines than in most books I read. It may be analyzed, but is meant first and foremost to be experienced.

A major theme in the new book is bereavement, a theme which recurs frequently in Bethany's writing, hearkening back to loved ones and the death of the Sorrel Mare. We discover honesty and grief, as well as surprising and cogent triumphs. The title poem "Sparrow" from the new book exemplifies: (lines 1-11)

       What could the Bible mean
       when it says no sparrow falls
       without God's notice?
       They do fall.
       "The Bible": that's too impersonal.
       It was some writer of the New Testament,
       some Hebrew poet turned Christian
       who chose "sparrow," a metaphor
       for the least things, the small
       and innumerable mouths
       at the breast of the world.

The poet is standing with her daughter (one of three daughters) and preparing to bury a young sparrow that has died after falling from its nest and being cared for by the daughter. Referring back to the biblical poet, we are told: (lines 12-18):

       Maybe our poet had a daughter who carried to him
       in her cupped hands a baby sparrow.
       Maybe they tried to keep it alive
       on sugar water and cat food,
       and when they failed, he wept,
       not knowing how to teach a child
       that life is worth the trouble and the grief....

This is good stuff--albeit sometimes painful. It fascinates and inspires me, how her poems take on more and more meaning within the context of her work in its entirety. I've seen this when reading poets from the past; it's magic if sometimes haunting to witness it among an artist in our own time. I am hopeful that the full range of her poetry will become available to the public.

Out of the Dust --- by Klaus Merz, Tr. Marc Vincenz, as reviewed by Koon Woon

Out of the Dust by Klaus Merz, translated by Marc Vincenz; Spuyten Duyvil, NY, NY, 2014.

Reading this volume of 80 pages by Klaus Merz, Out of the Dust, as translated by Marc Vincenz, I had to ask: why do some of the short lyrics hit with the aphoristic depths of Nietzsche, with the precise language of the lawyer/poet Jean Follain, and with the beautiful music of “Dust in the Wind,” an immensely popular song of the 70s American rock group Kansas, while some other of these poems are opaque and seem to hang as the dull moments of life itself? Is the complaint the usual complaint about translations, especially of poetry? But MarcVinzenz is a veteran translator of the German and himself has six volumes of poetry to his credit. The fault must lie with me to some extent of my complacent laziness not to really distinguish the signifier from the signified. In Zen terms, I am mistaking the moon for the finger pointing at the moon.

Let's start with Merz's “Biography (p. 31)” – “In the passing of time, / I became a pencil myself, / a pencil that also remains a pencil / when it doesn't write.” This is a very modest self-assessment considering what the publisher Spuyten Duyvil of NY, NY tells me. Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau, Switzerland, and has published twenty volumes of poetry and numerous works of fiction, has been recognized with major awards, including the Herman Hess Prize in Literature in 1997 and the Holderlin Prize in 2012.

Here is the rub; the problem may lie with me. Born just a few years later than Merz, I am a village boy transplant from China and know nothing of the German language or much European culture. I have to take the English words of the translator Marc Vincenz for its veracity and faithfulness in its rendition from German to English. Vinzenz is British-Swiss and was born in Hong Kong, a city I had briefly lived in. Although I have lived in the US since 1960, I am no less of an exile than all the immigrants and refugees whose recollections of their homeland now only exist in solipsistic memory. The world has transformed this global village, and so I should perhaps try to discover some sort of permanence that poetry can afford the soul and to find it in Merz's work.

It become quite plausible to connect with Merz, for he is an unobtrusive commentator of life. Since the Chinese are like watercress that when strewn anywhere there is mud and running water, it thrives. I personally connect with “In Command (p.19),” a poem Merz's grandmother speaks to her brood, from the couch to narrate family history, and Merz comments, “already we are all over the hills.” My maternal grandmother was such a matriarch who in fact had her feet bound and her brood is all over the world. The reader is able to fit the shoes Merz provides whether he/she is musician who “transform their / impermanence into tones / and reconcile us in time,”or be he/she simply be anyone living in a region who comes “to know themselves / as the head that doesn't / fit into their hat.”I find the word choice “hat” astonishing for when I was young, my Uncle in China told me, “Never wear a tall hat,” which variously means “do not take false compliment,” “do not be corrupt as an official,” or simply “don't be a dunce.” As an aside, the Supreme Leader of China Deng Hsiao Ping had been paraded in public wearing the dunce hat. Merz is indeed a master of the precise apercu.

This volume of poetry is divided into five sections of thematically related poems with headings like

“Residue of a Dream,” “Big Business,” and “Beyond Recall.” It is also illustrated by Heinz Egger with what resembles Sumi-e ink brush work. One possible reason why it is just making an inroad to the American poetry scene is Merz's unassuming and unannounced subtlety, of which I recall great American poets like William Carlos Williams and Donald Justice. But it reminds me also of Chinese poetry whose use of poetic devices is sparing and whose meanings are multiplicities. In “Wiepersdorf, later, (p.10),” I found this incredible imagery “the carcass of a rabbit still fleeing (my italics),”and in “Repose (p.14),” about farm life, after the labors and the harvest, “Behind the silo the farmer / leans on the farmer's wife.” Yes, we ought to give credit to where credit is due. The title of the book “Out of the Dust” almost implies that we will also “Return to the Dust,” but before all that, there is a little “waiting game,” as in Merz's poem, “Happy Days (p. 15),” where Beckett's nephew is seated / in a corner” and he is waiting “for the wrinkles / to appear in his face.” Likewise, I am waiting as Robert Creely said, “If you wander long enough, you will come to it.” I have come to the end of this review, but I will be wandering in Klaus Merz's poems some more. He has inspired me “to waste more time (Robert Bly)”, and that's because unlike much contemporary American poetry, Merz's poems are not just for himself, as a masturbatory exercise in “construction” or “employment of devices.”

Listen to a recital in German

Reviewed by Koon Woon

Five Willows Literary Review

August 1, 2014

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thank you,
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