Archive for: Review

Bryan R. Monte
AQ35 Autumn 2022 Book Reviews

Appel, Jacob M., Shaving with Occam, Hollywood Books International, ISBN 978-1-735-360133, 2022, 260 pages.
Seman, Pat, Ariadne’s Thread, self-published, available from Amazon, IBSN 979-8-820-227653, 2022, 40 pages.

A slim, beautiful, blue poetry pamphlet (Amer. Eng. chapbook) entitled Ariadne’s Thread by Amsterdam Quarterly veteran Pat Seman arrived in my letterbox over the summer. Seman’s poetry and photography about Greece, and Crete especially, has appeared regularly in Amsterdam Quarterly over the past decade. In addition to the excellent poetry inside, her pamphlet has an eye-catching cover and internal design by her son, Alexander Klerk. The cover features the head of woman or goddess, known as Peplos Kore, in Athens’s Acropolis Museum (Greek Archaic Period), with large eyes and flowing, wavy hair, the perfect image for a Seman’s poetry collection set in a Cretan landscape of sun, wind, sea, hills, fig and pomegranate trees, goats, ancient ruins, and of course, mythology.
      The strength of Ariadne’s Thread comes through Seman’s astute observation and juxtaposition of imagery through which she finds the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her first poem, ‘Said she wanted to die’ opens her collection dramatically ‘With the dark flame under the fig tree / where the split tree offers itself to the sun’. And of course, in addition to the sun and the rocky soil, this is a land ‘where sky meets the sea in a pencilled blue line’. The sea is present in one way or another in almost all of these poems.
      It is collection of poems about an island that has been the stage for successive cultures over the millennia. From ‘a snake coiled / it held her / motionless / under a dark sun’ a symbol of power and divination in Cretan culture in ‘The Earth Held Her’, to ancient Greek culture in the poems ‘Persephone’ and ‘Labyrinth’ (with its two sections entitled ‘Ariadne’ and ‘Theseus’) to Greek Christian culture in ‘Epitathios’ and ‘Litany’, the latter which ‘…saints have retreated / into their darkened icons, / (and) long tapering candles that burn without a prayer’, and the modern era in ‘The Stranger’ where Seman’s epigraph about Dionysius precedes her poem about a male backpacker with ‘sculptured muscles, / on his bare calves, the broad / tanned feet and naked torso’ asleep on the beach. She muses whether this ‘Young traveller, (is a) vagrant, refugee // or the god himself / on the storm-wracked, shifting shores.’ Her poems reflect the great sweep of human history and cultures Crete embodies.
This thin volume’s 22 poems are also interesting because of Seman’s skilled and varied use of line. Sometimes her lines roll forward on the page like the waves breaking on the beaches surrounding Crete such as in ‘I Am Making No Money’:

                                           just riding the days from dawn till dusk, I check
                                 the weather, what the waves will bring with them, the changing
                          complexion of a sky, frayed with rain, now washed

Other times, they a thinner but more solid, such as in this excerpt of her concrete poem entitled ‘Building a Wall’

                                                   Rock white
                                                 in the shadow

                                                       silence

                                                   even the sea

                                                          still

      These lyrical poems also address contemporary concerns such as climate change and refugees. Furthermore, on the Acknowledgments page, the author also indicates that ‘All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Medical Volunteers International, an organization offering medical help to refugees worldwide.’ Ariadne’s Thread is a strong, debut collection of memorable poems that I recommend highly to AQ’s readers.
      Another book I received this summer was Jacob M. Appel’s new crime novel, Shaving with Occam. It is narrated by protagonist and crime sleuth Henrietta Brigander aka Granny Flamingo, a homeless, and frequent ‘guest’ at New York’s Mount Hebron Hospital’s walk in, night psychiatric ward. I can assure you as a former Magill-Rhoads freshman scholar to Haverford College, where I studied for only one year, due the withdrawal of my parents’ financial support, I completely understand Henrietta’s descent into madness after she had to leave Bryn Mawr due to the simultaneous sinking of her grandfather’s yacht and the loss of the family fortune, and later the tragic death of her twin brother, who fell down an elevator shaft. Since then, Henrietta has lived on the street, wearing a giant hat with a flamingo on top, which is the origin of her moniker.
      Granny Flamingo spends most of the book trying to solve a fellow patient’s (now her dead lover’s) Abraham Currier’s murder. She interviews the 15 people (patients, doctors, nurses, and a few extras) who were present on the ward at the time of the murder. In addition, she follows many leads, some which lead her in unexpected directions. She also listens to and at other times ignores her voices, which are largely self-destructive, but which sometimes provide insights. Interlaced in the book are the rich descriptions of psychiatric patient medications and assessments I assume Appel culled from his many years working in hospitals’ psychiatric wards. This makes the book’s setting very convincing, helping to maintain the story’s suspense, which is palatable. It’s real page turner, and I could only put the book down at the end of each richly described chapter.
      The title of this book refers to Occam’s razor, or the law of parsimony, a philosophy expounded by the 12th century scholastic William of Ockham. It states that the simplest explanation of an event is usually the best and stresses eliminating unnecessary information. Granny Flamingo uses Occam’s Razor to solve the murder mystery, eliminating suspects as she tries to find and interview all people present on the night of Currier’s murder. Some are them, the regulars at Hebron, are readily available for her to question. However, others are outside Manhattan in the boroughs of Staten Island and the Bronx, and some seem to have disappeared entirely, until she meets them again purely through coincidence.
      As a counterweight to Occam’s Razor’s simplicity, Appel provides a very entertaining, encyclopedic, 50-page index entitled ‘Glossary of Things You Should Know By Henrietta Florence van Duyn Brigander’, a compendium of history, filmography, and discography to explain Henrietta’s frequent references to her family tree, American history, and Newport, Rhode Island’s Gilded Age’s descendants. (Remember, this is a Bryn Mawr woman who is narrating this story, even if she was only able to attend for one year). Personally, I think Appel outdid William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha county inhabitants and genealogical nonsense with his own rich, crime novel index. If you can’t find an interesting fact on each page that makes you giggle or laugh aloud, then you should check your own pulse to make sure you’re alive.
      After following my leads and a few dead ends, including some related to a supposed NYC Albanian mafia that had a hit out on Currier, Granny Flamingo picks up a 91-year-old, limo-driving sidekick, Nënë Roza, who not only provides transportation for Henrietta’s enquiries but also extracts an unexpected confession from two attendings, frightening by Roza’s erratic driving, afraid they’ve been abducted and are about to be killed by a Granny Flamingo. True to form in his past work as a master plotter in The Mask of Sanity, (reviewed in AQ18, spring 2017), and Millard Salter’s Last Day, (reviewed in AQ21, spring 2018), all the loose ends are tied up in the end. Through a logical pursuit of the facts of the case, Granny Flamingo solves the crime and the problem of her persistent homelessness, the first, through a clue that was present at the beginning of the story, and the second, from a completely unexpected, but familiar corner.
      To sum up dear reader, I can only state (in the style of Mr Appel’s book), What a book! What a Middlemarch epilogue! What an ending! What a glossary after the ending! I sincerely hope Appel is planning a sequel with more crimes for Granny Flamingo to solve. She could certainly become the new Jessica Fletcher and Appel, the new Tom Wolfe of crime novels.       AQ

Bryan R. Monte
(AQ33) Spring 2022 Book Review

Jennifer L. Freed, When Light Shifts, A Memoir in Poems, Kelsay Books, ISBN: 978-1-63980-089-6, 99 pages.

Jennifer L. Freed is no stranger to Amsterdam Quarterly. Her poetry has appeared in seven issues depicting various subjects such as teaching, walking a dog along a road, her mother’s stroke and dementia, and her brother’s death from cancer. Her inventive poetry has caught my interest repeatedly over the last five and half years and I have marvelled at her range as a poet in various forms and subjects. Despite this, however, her new book, When Light Shifts was a pleasant surprise because it brought together many of these narrative threads.
      The book’s prologue poem, ‘Leaving’ is prescient. In the poem, the speaker keeps saying to her daughters: ‘Look! ‘Isn’t she beautiful.’ When they ask her why she keeps saying this she responds, ‘Because / I know she is going to leave’. When Light Falls details the forms of this leave taking. It includes her mother’s partial recovery despite her physical, psychological, and social rehabilitation and her temporary move with her husband to a care centre. In my opinion, it provides an overview of how stroke affects a whole family. I say this from the perspective of someone who has lost a mother to stroke. However, I have never been able to express my observations and feelings as eloquently as Freed does.
      When Light Shifts is divided into four parts. Section I is about Freed’s mother’s stroke (and her father’s accompanying anxiety) her recovery in ICU and in rehab with visits from therapists and social workers, and her mother’s and father’s decision to move into a care home. The different techniques used in this section alone show the range of Freed’s poetic expression. ‘The Border’ describes her mother’s stroke (and her father’s reaction) in sparing terms. The stroke begins as a sort of dizziness ‘while/bending over to paint an old rocking chair.’ Disorientation follows as she ‘set herself down/but found vomit there’ and then a loss of equilibrium when she ‘crawled/ to someplace clean’. Next comes her husband’s inability to understand why she’s there on the garage floor ‘the trembling / ground, the strangely shifting light.’ which gives the book it’s title. This poem is fairly traditional in form with left adjusted lines, written in free verse. However, other poems in this section are very different. For example, the next two ‘Cerebral Hemorrhage’ and ‘My Father’s Heart’ use unconventional line breaks. The former’s lines float down the page:
 
          opens her mouth
                not her eyes
 
                      A word
                          we do not hear.
 
                                Her arm rises, fingers strum air
 
                      She sinks
                into stillness.
 
In the latter, her observations about her father’s emotional concerns on the left are questioned by an italicized chorus on the right:
 
The world warps
without her
                                                                   (His heart, his heart)
At its core
and inside his head, the buzzing—
 
emphasizing the mortality of her father and his physical inability to take in or deal with what has happened to his partner through the beating of his heart.
      Other interesting typographical poems in this section include ‘Rehab Hospital’ and ‘We’re So Happy You’ll Be Joining Our Community’ in which some of the words and details seem to be erased or suppressed, mimicking her mother’s partial loss of speech and cognition. This erasure technique is especially effective in the latter which communicates much information in only six lines which I quote in toto:
 
1.
 
We’ll need
for each of your parents
 
 
 
 
 
 
for our files
 
 
2.
 
because your father
on behalf of your mother
 
 
 
 
 
sign here
 
      In Part II., the speaker discovers how much her mother has changed since she was released from hospital. For example, in ‘Thrown’, she compares her active, pre-stroke mother ‘in the garage with her electric sander/ refinishing a second-hand table, a desk, a chair’ to her mother now who ‘can’t / understand. Why she can’t / understand.’ Here again Freed uses words spread out on the page to portray her mother’s loss for words and her fragmented perception of her situation. She describes her mother’s uncoordinated motor skills in ‘Scattered’ when her mother attempts to collect marbles that she has knocked out of bowl on the windowsill, but instead ‘her hand knocks them father away.’ In ‘Mystery (A Question)’ the speaker wonders where her mother went and if she will come back. In ‘From Inside Askew’, ‘Tilt-a-World’ (not Whirl) and ‘What Then’ Freed describes her mother’s loss of equilibrium and the accompanying falls in the now treacherous up-is-down, floor-rising-and-falling ship deck world her mother must relearn to navigate. Freed’s poem ‘Broken Brain Blues’, in rhyming triplets, describes the speaker’s mother ‘struck by a train, now she weeps and mourns’. Then a little later, her mother ‘standing again, but she can’t walk home’ embracing this characteristic lyric form of despair. The last stanza starts with ‘Feels like the burden to the man in her bed’ a theme which is also echoed in poems in this and other sections of this book. In the final poem in this section, ‘He Stays’, Freed describes the toll her mother’s stroke is taking on her hard of hearing and forgetful father. He’s ‘by her side, leans closer / to hear her / repeat / the best route home.’ He’s not accustomed to being a caretaker and Freed writes ‘how he wears thin’ in the assisted living home, but he won’t tell his wife because ‘he’ll break / her heart’, the final line break anticipating or mimicking his spouse’s heart break.
      Part III continues Freed’s exploration of her father’s response to her mother’s stroke, rehabilitation, and physical and mental limitations. Its first poem, ‘The Occupational Therapist Answers My Father’, describes her mother’s encouraging progress the first three months, but offers no guarantees about the future. ‘Unsettled’ describes her father’s sense of having suddenly lost someone he knew, who knew how to manage things.
 
          His chest binds when friends ask what he’ll do
          with the house. She
          was the one
          who knew how to turn a page, make sense
          of fine print.

‘Broken Love Song’ describes how he sings his ‘weeping’ spouse back from her sensory overload after their first trip back to a supermarket with ‘its high shelves—/crowded aisles. Its colors, sizes, brands, sales, / decisions.’ with a familiar song from when they were younger. ‘She was happier in rehab,’ describes the change in her temperament after her stroke. Now instead of being happy and active, ‘she quietly seethes.’ and wants ‘Someone to curse. Someone / to kick in the teeth.’ for her loss. She’s also unable to focus, her mind darting from one thing to the next as in ‘An Hour’ and ‘Proof’.
      ‘He Can’t’ details her father’s own disabilities ‘he can’t hear / the birds the phone her / voice, … ‘can’t see words in books the nuance / of her face.’ This poem ends with her father despairing, ‘Never mind I just can’t / do anything / to please / you.’ However, in ‘There’ Freed describes how her parents are able to stay together, no matter how much they frustrate each other. After her father’s walk, her mother ‘… smiles glad to see him again. /And he smiles, glad to see her again. / And she reaches up to touch his cheek./ And he hands her dandelions /from the side of the road.…/before the bickering resumes.’
       Section IV describes the challenges the couple face after they decide after eight months to move out of a care home and to go back to their own home. In this section Freed also describes her brother’s death from cancer. Freed describes her mother’s perception of her son’s approaching death in ‘Her Strength’ and ‘Low’. In the first, her mother wants to stay with her son as he dies in hospital, but ‘Her own gray body’ and ‘Her gray husband’ both with their problems, prevent her from doing this. In the second, her mother doesn’t weep in hospital, but only ‘in the car.’ She withdraws from the world, ‘Stops going / to Group Chair Exercise, /Brain Games with Beth, / Current Events’ and instead ‘begs to sink / into the yawning dark.’ We see also the memorial service through her eyes in ‘Spirit’. She finds a field mouse in her bathroom ‘the very morning her son died’, in whose eyes ‘she imagined … he’d found his way back to her, (and) was saying / goodbye.’
      ‘I’ll Be the Safety Net Stretched Taut, Waiting’ depicts her parents’ decision to leave the care home, even though Freed knows how much they’ve both miscalculated their ability to live independently. For example, her father doesn’t realise that his spouse ‘can’t lift, or carry or clean’ or ‘how much time he would have to give / to rinsing salad greens, bringing plates to the table.’
      The effect of her brother’s death on her own life is shown in ‘Then, Somehow’ when a social worker assessing her parents’ family support, asks Freed ‘Are you an only child?’ Once again, it’s what Freed doesn’t say that has the strongest effect.:

I am       a fish
my mouth opening, closing
my eyes round
and staring.

And already she is saying
Oh! I’m sorry.        Oh
I’m so
Sorry.

In the next poem, ‘Turkish Fig’ Freed mourns her brother and parents: ‘my mother / and father—going / my brother—gone.’ All that’s real to her is ‘the fading of taste’ of a fig on her tongue in that moment. Freed’s prediction of her parents’ inability to fend for themselves is proved true in ‘Help’ where thankfully a hired ‘aide’ is able to humour or to move things for her parents out of each other’s way, ‘saving / a small square of the world.’ As with many creative works written in the last two and a half years, Freed’s book ends with a Covid scene. She speaks to her mother ‘standing outside the glass door’ via a mobile, ‘draw(ing) a heart on the glass, kiss(ing) it’. Her mother, ‘grasps her walker, pushes to stand, kisses back’. It is the closest intimacy they dare in the first months of the pandemic.
      When Light Shifts is an honest, brave book—written as a memoir of her brother and parents—by a poet placed in an unwinnable situation. Through her verse, Freed creates no artificial happy ending. Instead, she uses her poetry to capture her mother’s stroke in all its aspects including occasional acts of kindness and slight, temporary progress in a world beyond both their control. AQ

Bryan R. Monte
AQ32 Autumn 2021 Art Review
Picasso & Giacometti? You Decide

Picasso-Giacometti, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, 16 October 2021 to 13 February 2022

A must-see this winter is the Picasso-Giacometti exhibition at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, through 13 February 2022. The thesis of this exhibition is that Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti had a lifelong influence on each other’s art after their meeting in Paris in 1922. The exhibition tries to prove its point due to the direct comparison of the two men’s painting and sculptures through their realistic, cubist, surrealist and again realistic periods sometimes side by side in its seven galleries. Did they influence each other in their sculpture and painting? Yes, at least during the 1920s and ’30s. Was this influence lifelong? I’m not sure. However, I’m not an art historian, so I can only offer a layman’s opinion. You can visit the exhibition, take in its generous selection of sculptures and paintings, and form your own opinion.
      According to museum director Suzanne Swarts, the Picasso-Giacometti exhibition is organized historically and thematically into similar eras. Each gallery has work by the two artists, sometimes side-by-side, to prove the exhibition’s point of the two artists’ life-long influence on each other. It’s a formula followed in Paris and Doha, and now Wassenaar, just outside of The Hague, this travelling exhibition’s third stop.
      The exhibition begins with two self-portraits of the artists at the same age but of course from different years: Giacometti from 1920 using Cézannesque, late impressionist colour dabs (as if applied with a sponge, however, and not with Cézanne’s characteristic knifeblade-like application), and Picasso from 1902 in his famous Blue Period.
      Published photographs of these two self-portraits don’t do them justice compared to what I viewed in the Voorlinden. In the place of the rich dabs of thick chestnut, brown head of hair and red-rosy dabs of the blush of life in his face and chest, photographs depict purplish-brown hair and pinkish skin on a much too light golden background for Giacometti. In other photographs, the colours for the facing portrait of Picasso were also not completely accurate—the background is often too dark, imposing, and even a bit overwhelming for the magisterial figure of Picasso, clothed in a dark coat which is buttoned up to his light orange-brown beard which clearly stands out from its background in the Voorlinden original. These facts alone make a visit to the museum essential and worthwhile.
      However, in addition to seeing the correct colours, as a Voorlinden visitor you will be able to decide for yourself whether the two artists did have a life-long influence on each other. Every gallery contains work by the two men from the same time periods, artistic movements, with the same motifs or themes. Gallery 2 contains work from the 1910s and ’20s. As you enter this gallery, you will see sculptures by the two men in a line on a wide table. Giacometti’s begin on the left; Picasso’s begin on the right. At opposite ends, they show these men’s original figurative differences. When they meet in the middle, they show their abstract similarities.
      Another subject in this gallery is the women in their life. For Giacometti that is a portrait of his sister, Ottilia (1920) a companion in size, style, and colouration to his self-portrait in Gallery 1.For Picasso that means paintings of the women who were his models and lovers. Behind the sculpture table are three paintings of models sitting in a chair, a common pose for Picasso. These are Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918), Reading (1920) Portrait of Olga with Fur Collar (1923). These, as Giacometti’s Ottilia portrait, are all figurative. Picasso’s cubist wood sculpture Mandolin and Clarinet (1913) is prominently displayed on the gallery’s right wall. At the opposite end of the gallery on the table is Giacometti’s wood sculpture Head of a Woman, Flora Mayo (1926). However, I don’t see a similarity since the perspective of the latter is still fairly traditional if not overly simplistic. The only similarity is that both sculptures are from wood. On the far-left wall, the last two items in gallery are two large cubist Picassos: Reading Boisgeloup (1932) and Portrait of Marie-Thérèsa (1937), which also do not seem to me to have Giacometti corollaries in the same gallery and are also from a different time period.
      However, Gallery 3 does seem to have the most paintings and/or sculptures paired with common referents. Picasso’s wire and sheet metal sculpture Figure (1928) is similar with Giacometti’s Man (Apollo) 1929. Both are interested with line and the negative space between the lines, which creates the volumes for these sculptures. Giacometti’s famous painting Palace at 4 a.m. (1932) with its rectangular architectural lines does, in many ways, seem similar to Picasso’s Portrait of a Young Woman, (1928) a painting with a wiry sculpture of a woman reduced to a face, a vagina and a lower body basket on a beach, which also seems to be exploring this inside/outside structural contrast and tension. The facial shorthand Picasso’s cubist/surrealist Woman in a Red Arm Chair (1928) (with just two eyes, a mouth and teeth), is similar to Giacometti’s much more minimalistic Untitled (Head) (1926) drawn with one continuous line to represent the forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, reminding me of the early Neolithic sculptures.
      Gallery 4 was somewhat of a revelation and is worth the price of admission. It was the first time I had viewed Giacometti’s The Nose (1947). Before I had only seen it in photographs, which do not do justice to the sculpture in this gallery. The sculpture creates a dialogue about space, being, and representation. Hanging in its cage, the elongated nose (perhaps a Pinocchian reference) sticks out of the sculpture’s black frame into the room, which even for a piece of figurative art, is a representation, not the thing itself. Perhaps René Margritte would have captioned it ‘Ceci n’est pas un nez’.
      In this gallery are also paintings and sculptures by Picasso and Giacometti of death’s heads or memento mori. Giacometti’s Headskull (1934) plaster has a much more cubist interpretation compared to Picasso’s surprisingly round and more traditional sculpture Death’s Head (1943) in bronze and copper. Picasso’s paintings of death’s heads on display include Skull, Sea-Urchins and Lamp on Table (1946) oil on plywood, Goat’s Skull, Bottle and Candle (1952) oil on canvas, are drawn in greys with heavy black lines reminiscent of Guernica. However, these paintings vary from Giacometti’s Annette, (1952) which is more a realistic: a sort of frontal x-ray of a woman’s skull.
      The next gallery, Gallery 5, was somewhat of a surprise: not for the art it held, but rather because the exhibition’s chronology seemed to backtrack one or two decades. The painting and sculptures in this gallery are from 1920s to 1930s. On the centre table are bronze sculptures of Giacometti and Picasso. However, they are not organized as in Gallery 2 with Giacometti starting on the left and Picasso on the right and meeting in the middle. There are just four, paired objects at the right end of the table: Picasso’s Knelling Bather, (1931), and Giacometti’s Reclining Woman Who Dreams, (1929), Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1931) and Giocametti’s Unpleasant Object (1931).
      While the gallery guide tried to convince us of the similarity of styles of the first pair, all I could be certain of was that this table’s sculptures were made from the same material during the same period. While the first pair do describe reclining subjects, the second two certainly do not use the same perspective. Next, the Unpleasant Object is horn-like and fairly realistic, representing a curved penis. However, The Head of a Woman is from Picasso’s surrealist period when women are represented as blobby, non-realistic discombobulations. At the far left end of the table are two rather stiff cubist sculptures by Giacometti of two couples, the first Cubist 1, Couple 1926-27 is composed of two blocks leaning on each other, the taller one on the right. The next sculpture by Giacometti, The Couple, 1926, is in the style of two African masks next to each other, again with the one on the right taller than the other. There are no other sculptures from Picasso next to these two, although there is a cubist painting hanging on the wall just to the left by Picasso of The Lovers 1919 dedicated to Manet in large letters in the upper right. However, this is not one of Picasso’s African mask works which I feel would have been a much better choice.
      The centre of Gallery 6 is taken by Giacometti’s busts of women, especially Annette, from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Here Giacometti’s distinctive style of tall, thin, elongated sculptures with small heads finally comes through. On the walls, however, hang more of Picasso’s surrealistic paintings from the 1930s including Woman with a Blue Hat and Head of a Woman, (both 1939). In this gallery, I can find no common ground between the two men. In Gallery 7 are Giacometti’s striking, archetypical Tall Woman and Walking Man II (both 1960) and other hyper-elongated sculptures from his last period. Across from them in the gallery are Picasso’s six sculptures of The Bathers (1956). Although these are also tall and thin, they are considerably squarer and reminiscent to me of railway signalling apparatus compared to Giacometti’s tall, elegant, stately figures.
      Further chronological and stylistic discontinuities in this gallery are two Picasso paintings The Shadow (1930) and Jacqueline with her Hands Crossed (1953) both of which I found a stretch (pun intended) next to Giacometti’s elongated sculptures. The first painting clearly exhibits Picasso’s surrealistic traits from decades before, while the second portrait includes a long, wide, thick Pez neck not found in Giacometti’s elegantly thin work of this period.
      To strengthen the exhibition’s chronological/thematic organization, I would suggest that the first five galleries should have been arranged 1, 2, 5, 3, 4. Further, Picasso’s cubist sculpture Mandolin and Clarinet (1913) could have been hung in Gallery 5 opposite Giacometti’s Couples sculptures. In addition, Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Mar (1937), Woman with a Blue Hat, Royan, 3 October 1939 (1939), Head of a Woman (1939) and The Shadow (1930) seem out of place in across from Giacomett’s line of elongated sculptures of women from the 1950s and ’60s. These paintings should be hung in a 1930s gallery such as Gallery 3 or 4.
      All in all, despite my criticism of the placement of some of these works and the exhibitions thesis of the life-long artistic and stylistic bond between Giacometti and Picasso to which I do not subscribe, this exhibition still is well-worth a visit due to the number of Giacometti’s and Picasso’s paintings and sculptures on display. I would suggest that you see this exhibition, enjoy the art of these two masters, and make up your own mind.

Bryan R. Monte
AQ31 Summer 2021 Book Review

Robert Hazel, Praise and Threnody, Circling Rivers Press, ISBN: 978-1-939530-15-8 (trade paper), ISBN: 978-1-939530-16-5 (hardback), 210 pages.

Recently it was my pleasure to discover the work of Robert Hazel, an influential, post-WWII American poet, who, unfortunately was never mentioned during my undergraduate lit. courses at Berkeley nor in my graduate writing seminars at Brown. As I read Circling Rivers’ recent edition of Hazel’s collected poems, entitled Praise and Threnody, I became fascinated by the richness of his poetic voice, which draws on the traditions of Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas, among others. I was also amazed to discover that this poet’s students included Wendell Berry, Rita Mae Brown, and Bobbie Ann Mason, and that he was briefly The Nation’s poetry editor.
      Hazel’s poetry harkens back to Whitman’s and Crane’s in his description of America and New York, especially, warts and all. In her Foreword, editor Jean Huets quotes Robert Buttel who says that Hazel’s ‘post-symbolist, surreal poems … are the most haunting, brilliant, dramatic and resistant.’ In addition, Huets mentions Wendell Berry’s citation of a section of Hazel’s ‘Celebration Above Summer’:

            Hear dark the priestly insects of my endless summer coast down to cells
                     of wax
           and kind weeds bend my flowers to their colors’ end

which she reports ‘can be read chaotic as an overgrown vacant lot in high summer, chaotic as a disintegrating love affair, chaotic as poetry can be.’
      Hazel is also good at character studies, especially those related to poverty and social protest. However, he also records the joy and beauty he finds in city- and landscapes. In addition, his social themes and their presentation styles also remind this reviewer of Muriel Rukeyser’s attention to the working class and the underprivileged, to John Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin sometimes newsreel or police blotter narrative techniques, to report of social problems, and finally of Allen Ginsburg’s wanderlust in his loving description of America, especially the South.
      In her expanded foreword to Praise and Threnody, Huets adds important facts about Hazel’s childhood and teens including his father’s academic background as ‘at Indiana University’ and later at Kentucky University, where Hazel developed ‘his great love for writing and poetry’. Huets also notes Hazel’s three-year military service in Korea, his Bachelor’s degree from George Washington University and a Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Karl Shapiro and where he met his first publisher, Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
     In her Afterword, Huets explains her organizing principle for Hazel’s collected poems. She decided not to order them chronologically or biographically, but rather thematically: to ‘gather poems loosely based on themes that carry through Robert’s entire corpus of work. I’ll leave it at that; it seems best to allow “who touches this” to discover (or ignore) what those themes might be.’
      I think this method has worked very well. I would divide the parts of Hazel’s collected poetry into four life stages, each prefaced by a prologue or poetic ‘Ceremony” poem, I-IV, as Huets calls them. The first section is primarily about childhood, youth, family and his early explorations of the world. The second is about young love and youthful adventures. The third section is about mature love and loss including the death of his parents, wife, and child. In addition it has a national focus containing for example, poems about the funeral of US President Kennedy. Finally, the fourth is about preparing for the end and contemplating the meaning of life, with a strong dose of naturalistic nihilism.
      As mentioned above, Hazel’s poetry owes an enormous debt to Whitman, Crane, Thomas, who are sometimes mentioned directly in his poems or in the dedications. This excerpt from ‘Ceremony at Dawn’ demonstrates Hazel’s debt to Thomas:

          east where my fathers worshiped a young dying god
          a chapel of shingles settles in a stillness of bells;
          the tombs on the hill spool fine spiders and ferns;
          immaculate bones turned salt are licked by wild mares

Hazel’s Hopperesque family home and his strict upbringing is described very well in his very short ‘The Pinched Face of Virtue’ quoted here in its entirety

          A correct parlor, a correct wall-clock, a 60-watt light
                   corrected by a plastic shade
          & the sofa dustless & on a dustless end-table
                   the Standard Revised Bible

          Suddenly my father’s bloodless face, legacy of privation
                   & endless correction

His strained family relations are further defined in ‘What Do I Know’, a subsection of his ‘Sunday’ poem:

          What is my knowledge? Parents I can’t find?
          Brothers I visit once a year?     A sister who
          is a Pauline Christian?      A wife anointed by pain?
          And a child who was taken away?

However, in this section is also included Hazel’s awareness of the deleterious effects of social and racial inequality in his poem ‘Who Touches This’, one of Hazel’s finest:

          crying, “Whore of Babylon!”
          Near sleep I heard something
          perfect as a dream
          so certain that I felt
          it would survive my waking
          It was only the hoarse
          repetitions of a drunk man
          shouting, cursing, weeping
          how this nation was killing
          all his innocent children
          Yet strangely when he stood
          pounding the garbage cans
          and imploring, “America!”
          The word sounded beautiful
          as if he believed it

      This description is very close to my almost weekly experience in Haight-Ashbury in the early ‘80s, when, in the middle of the night, someone went off his/her meds, or was just fed up with his/her marginal life, until someone from the Free Clinic, across the street, brought them inside.
      The second section begins after ‘Ceremonies II’, and describes his first loves and corporeal experiences in the world, and the changing role of his parents in his life. In ‘Not by Bread’ (a section of ‘Death in Oregon’), the poet laments: ‘My father and mother have become my own / children’ It also includes poems about his East Coast exploits such as ‘To A Young Woman of Twenty I Carried On My Shoulders at Five’ which I consider to be one of his clear-voiced poems, possibly influenced by the New York School, about adults exploring roles and costumes, perhaps in the funky dress up days of the Summer of Love:

          I was glad to see you
          despite your Cowboy boots
          Western jacket and hat
          and your air of being interested
          in nothing at all

and ends with:

          I might have said, “Timothy Leary
          loves Doris Day” and you would
          have had to run me through
          with your Army Surplus bayonet

      Praise and Threnody’s third section reveals a more mature poetic voice with poems that represent his grief over the loss of his parents, a wife, a child, some friends, and a president. It is a more earnest exploration of the world, including it social and political problems. His robust travels in the American South as a vagrant poet in the back of a truck, in ‘Shenandoah’ reminds me of Allen Ginsberg’s picaresque adventures.

          In the rack of a cattle truck
          calves scratch my hands with little tongues
          I make my own music
          I catch a hatful of whispers like old rain
          that will not fall as long as I

      It also contains six poems about President Kennedy’s funeral in the subsection ‘Guard of Honor’, parallel to Whitman’s reverence for President Lincoln including Hazel’s poem from ‘Riderless Horse’ with its iconic imagery

          Above the muffled drums, the high voice
          of a young soldier
          tells the white horses how slow to go

          before your widow and children, walking
          behind the flag-anchored coffin—
          and one riderless black horse dancing!

      Huets saves the best for last in the ‘Love, Thou, At Once’ section, when Hazel is at the height of his poetic insight and technique. His lines are no longer overgrown with Thomasesque natural symbolism, but rather pruned to short and powerful lines and stanzas where he has just the right amount of greenery to get his point across.
      This section has finely crafted poems which discuss such weighty issues as President Johnson’s foreign policy in ‘Lines in Praise of Myself, a Frederic Thursz painting in ‘The Red and the Black’, the British Empire in ‘Empire’, and Dachau in ‘Star’. Hazel’s famous ‘Letter to the Kentuckian’ dedicated to his former student, Wendell Barry, is also included here along with ‘Under A Florida Palm’ with a reference to Wallace Stevens and the Sermon on the Mount in ‘Consider the Lilies’. It also comes with a strong dose of naturalistic nihilism and honesty. One such poem, ‘Death Flowers Are’, I imagine depicts a suicide.

          My flowers fan tall on wrists, their fragrance
                  welcome
          as the odor of powder from a fired gun.

      In ‘For the First Day of Benjamin’ Hazel collapses all of the history of human aggression in three short lines:

          All times are evil
          From the first stone thrown
          To the high-blown atom

Finally, this section is crowned with one Hazel’s longest poem, ‘Clock of Clay’, which I think should be considered as his consummate achievement. Here, the poet realizes he is at the end of the road:

          I have no future                  The river
                    is flowing backwards
          My past is my present
          & I retort to Charcot, Freud, Husserl
                Binswanger, Heidegger, Buber,
                You tone deaf piano tuners
He continues a few lines later with ‘I am becoming nothing’, and a few more lines after that with the observation:

          I am the man who cannot exceed himself
          Threnody is my name

He reports further that: ‘Christ isn’t there/only a dead Jew my people pray to’ and that ‘I run a treadmill / level with evil – no gain into good’. Hazel also refutes the Bible. ‘The last shall never be first’ and his imagined escape plan from end-of-life-care ‘Before my life is reinvented by tubes / in imitation of the living cord / I shall cut free’. He also mentions that he is grappling ‘in the handcuffs of language’, an appropriate image for the difficulty of the writing process and the limits of language.
      Praise and Threnody is an impressive collection that successfully recapitulates Hazel’s themes as well as his artistic journey. It adds another voice to the landscape of American poetry from the 1950s-70s, which is sorely missing. It is a book by a poet who merits renewed and further consideration. AQ

Bryan R. Monte
AQ29 Autumn 2020 Book Reviews

Hester, Diarmuid, Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, University of Iowa Press, ISBN 978-1-60938-691-7, 319 pages.
Horn, Bernard, Love’s Fingerprints,, Circling Rivers Press, ISBN 978-1-939530-09-7, 134 pages.

This summer I received two interesting books for review by authors with completely different family dynamics. The first is Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, about American enfant terrible gay author Dennis Cooper, by Diarmuid Hester, a rising star in LGBTQI literary scholarship. Cooper has long been the ‘bad boy’ of the American gay writing scene for the post-Stonewall generation. At polar opposites, is retired university professor Bernard Horn’s book Love’s Fingerprints, which describes the love and connections that held his family together through four generations and their experience of emigration, the Holocaust, family conflicts, and failing health, as well as Horn’s engagement in the natural and political worlds.
      Hester’s Wrong draws on archival materials as well as interviews with Cooper and those of his admirers. Spending ‘more than a decade’ on this project, Hester provides an excellent overview and summary of Cooper’s works from his early poetry and magazine Little Caesar, to his mid-life George Miles novel series, the deletion of his online blog by his provider due to a complaint, and ending with film collaborations with Zach Farley in the early 21st century.
      Hester’s biography includes interesting aspects of Cooper’s dysfunctional family and their lasting influence on Cooper’s writing. Hester outlines Cooper’s artistic pedigree from his painter grandmother to his alcoholic, former-concert pianist mother, and his earlier, aspiring writer and later aerospace manufacturer father. Hester documents Cooper’s education, public and private, his parents’ divorce, his circle of friends, their attendance at punk music and art venues, and their recreational drug use.
      Hester continues Cooper’s work as Beyond Baroque’s Director. Here, Cooper changed an open mike reading format to a programmed one. (I believe ‘curated’ is the word now used in British and American English). This caused lasting animosity with some of the earlier generation of poets and writers who had previously attended. This tension lead to Cooper leaving Beyond Baroque in 1983. In the meantime, he programmed punk and new wave writers and artists more closely affiliated with the LA contemporary cultural scene.
      Where Hester’s book really becomes interesting for me, however, is in Chapter 6 “If There Actually Is Such a Thing Like New Narrative…”, which describes the Small Press Traffic Bookstore workshops on 24th Street in Noe Valley, San Francisco and New Narrative Writing. I attended SPT’s gay men’s Tuesday night writing workshops from January/February 1983 until July 1984. During this time, I graduated from Berkeley, founded a gay magazine, No Apologies, and later won a fellowship to Brown University’s Graduate Writing Program. If this chapter is representative of Hester’s work in the remainder of the book, I think I should be able to estimate the overall accuracy of Wrong. In brief, the things Hester got right were due to his own scholarship versus interviewee information, sometimes obtained decades later, which almost always contains a few inaccuracies due to faulty memories.
      Hester’s description of the then competing New Narrative and Language schools of writing and their styles in San Francisco in the 1980s is spot on. His assertion that the New Narrative groups’ leaders talked a lot about gay community building as well as good writing is also correct. His description of the purpose of New Narrative writers versus the Language writers in San Francisco is also quite good. New Narrative promoted a self-critical, self-reflexive writing style, which was more like a conversation with the reader, as in the early novels. On the other hand, the Language school produced self-contained narrative entities composed of rapidly changing images from which the reader had to build his/her own narrative. New Narrative’s subject matter was the gay and lesbian community and its writing, which the mainstream press had not yet embraced. The New Narrative writers rightly saw Language writing as a privileged art form for writers who didn’t have to fight for visibility.
      Hester also correctly observes that practically the whole New Narrative movement was included in the second issue of No Apologies. I created this magazine in July 1983 after I discovered just how difficult it was for gay men and lesbians to find publishers for their work. I wanted to preserve and disseminate some of the good work I had heard in these workshops.
      However, there is one inaccuracy in Chapter 6 from information obtained from a Kevin Killian interview. On page 103, Hester quotes Killian as saying that when I went to Brown’s Graduate Writing Program, ‘he (Monte)…took No Apologies with him,’. Killian states further that ‘The materials I (Killian) had left over, gathered for No Apologies, I (Killian) used to start up a new magazine, Mirage,’.
      This is incorrect. The split between Killian and me occurred five months after I had left for Brown. Before that, Killian and I corresponded and telephoned each other regularly from August 1984 to January 1985 exchanging around 10 missives each to coordinate work on No Apologies #4’s upcoming East Coast-themed issue.
      It was Cooper, however, who unwittingly caused my break with Killian. On 8 December, after Cooper had read at my invitation with Olga Broumas for Brown University’s Gay and Lesbian Union, I walked him down College Hill to the train station. On the way, I asked Cooper if he had a piece I could add to the interview I had conducted with him in New York in October for No Apologies #4. He walked a few steps further in silence, then told me he had already sent one to Killian.
      It was for this mis- or lack of communication and other reasons mentioned in my memoir of Killian in AQ27, that I stopped working with him in January 1985 and published No Apologies on my own. However, Hester would have only known about this if he had read Killian’s correspondence with me (now at Yale’s Beinecke Library) or my Killian memoir in AQ27, which came out in March 2020, probably after he had already completed and submitted his MS.
      Overall, I found Wrong to be informative, scholarly, and accessible. It covers sixty years of Cooper’s life in just 319 pages (including a 20-page bibliography and a seven-page index). In addition, Wrong is not mired in technical or academic terminology and provides a good overview and generous excerpts of Cooper’s books so it felt as if I were reading them again. Wrong is an engaging book, which I found sometimes difficult to put down. Fortunately, the book is modular enough that it can be read one chapter at a time without losing the thread of Hester’s description and analyses. Many chapters also include conclusions with Hester’s suggestions about what each means to Cooper’s development as a writer specifically, and/or to LGBTQI writing in general. I believe any Cooper fan or scholar will certainly find Wrong essential reading.
      In contrast, Bernard Horn’s poetry collection, Love’s Fingerprints, is a work written from the right side of the tracks of family dynamics and in a more traditional thematic and stylistic approach to literature. The love and relationships between father, mother, son and siblings is tender, palpable, and binds his family down three generations despite anti-Semitism, emigration, a North American trans-continental relocation, and war. Many of these family links are reinforced thematically with Biblical and classical references, many in the poems’ epigraphs.
      Love’s Fingerprints is divided into five parts: a prologue ‘A Self-portrait with Music’, and four longer sections entitled ‘Hear!’, ‘Dreams of a Black Panther’, ‘Red Red’, and ‘The Ideal World’. In “Hear!’ Horn introduces his parents and grandparents. His father was a 1930s Polish Jewish soccer star and his grandfather was a butcher. They emigrated to Canada during the Depression. His Ukrainian mother also emigrated to Canada with her mother.
      Horn has many poems in this collection about his athletic father and his bright mother. These poems especially depict the strong bond between father and son and between his father and his grandfather. In ‘Sunday In the Park’ father and son are ‘clandestine in their complicity of watching each other,’ at sport, his father ‘showing off with a soccer ball to his European soccer buddies’…‘easily heading the ball between makeshift goal markers’ who lovingly though doesn’t say anything when his son ‘missed an easy pop up and a grounder too’ during his softball game. The Victorian rooming house, where his father played poker and rented a room to change into his swimsuit, is described in ‘The Porch’. On the beach, his son watches his athletic father swim ‘through and beyond breakers,/far beyond the rotted jetties, as the sun set, as you vanished in the distance and the darkness/ on a moonless Saturday night in July alone,/except for the eight-year-old-boy staring out to sea’.
      The bond with his mother can be seen in ‘The Work of Our Hands’ which describes how his mother rinsed gently his hair, even though ‘at ten she witnesses her father’s murder’… ‘at twenty,…brought her aging, half-willing mother/across Europe, the Atlantic, and half of Canada,’…and ‘at thirty-three, left her own beloved extended family there/and led her husband and three-year-old son/to New York…to escape a sister-in-law/bent on dismantling her marriage.’ ‘The Blue Corduroy Blazer’ describes his ‘math prodigy’ mother’s advice to ‘Save up,’ and ‘Buy one good suit,…a pair of pants, a couple of double stitched /shirts, top-of-the-line-ties, fabrics of/quality.’ This first section continues with additional family poems ‘To my Brother’, ‘Portrait of My Mother Knitting’ the long, prose poem/memoir ‘My Father, the Swimmer’, and ‘Wind Hair’ about three granddaughters, among others.
      Horn also addresses the Holocaust in ‘The Merit of Ancestors’, ‘Try to Remember”, ‘What My Father Revealed’, and ‘What My Mother Revealed’, and his own personal experience of anti-Semitism in ‘Jew Cap’.
      The second section contains more poems about Horn’s own family, friends, upbringing, and contemporary events. ‘Cinderella’ describes the reaction of two young girls watching the speaker’s daughter try on her wedding dress in Israel. They ask Horn if his daughter is Cinderella, and their mothers mouth “Say yes,”. ‘At Capo Vaticano’ he describes the rescue of his granddaughter as she fell from some rocks and was about to hit her head. However, Horn’s son-in-law, grabbed her by the ankle just in time. Later, the little girl is shown playing with her sisters oblivious to the danger she’d survived. Then follow two poems, ‘My Daughter’ and ‘Asphaltine’ also about the speaker’s daughters, as well as a remembrance of a grad school party in ‘Forty-Five Years Ago’ of a professor passed out on the living room floor and his wife weeping over the kitchen sink.
      This section also includes two strong, long poems: ‘Sappho’s Blues: Four Songs’ and ‘Dreams of a Black Panther’. The first mixes classical invocations and images with modern, musical, poetic modes The second is a pastiche of Horn’s childhood love of learning, which led him to speak out of turn for which he was punished, his college years discussing politics in a Boston coffee shop, the observation that all the metal in us is produced in stars, and the stony New England soil which still produces daffodils and homes for rabbits.
      Part 3 ‘Red, Red’ is about mankind’s engagement with the natural world. Whether swimming through it and admiring its beauty as is ‘The Snorkelers’ off a Red Sea reef, or coming eye to eye with a raccoon trashing his waste cans or with a great ape in a zoo rolling its eyes as children tap on the glass of its enclosure in ‘Raccoon’, Horn describes inter-species awareness and connectivity. ‘Above Leuk’ describes a medieval church’s walls built from human bones as expertly as ‘The master wall builders from Connecticut,…who worked /mortarless, as they tossed stone rubble/from a cleared field perfectly/into place’. ‘Sycamores’ describes Nature’s healing effect on Horn. Here he leaves ‘his perfect Cambridge apartment’ at 3 a.m. to ‘make my eight mile loop along the Charles’ to clear his head. In the title poem of this section, ‘Red, Red’, the phrase ‘Is that all there is’ is repeated twice to unite the surprise of a damaged, bleeding hand in the first stanza and ‘raspberry red stained lips and teeth in the second stanza, the first time as disappointment and the second, as a celebration of satiation.
      The book’s final section is ‘The Ideal World’, though I found this a bit misleading, because I felt much of its imagery, thoughts, and perceptions are part of the real world. Here Horn explores the topics of meditation in ‘The Silence’ and ‘Mind, Feel’; film and the human drive for sex and death in ‘Strange Love’ and ‘Death, Rothko Said’; the haunting memories some music brings in ‘Schubert’; and a selection of political poems mostly based on personal experience. ‘Hope. Heartbreak’ is about a remembered conversation with a hijab-wearing Palestinian woman in a hallway after a lecture. Here, the woman, who knew his work well, asks about the use of temporality in one of his poems. Unfortunately, Horn never heard from her again. At the poem’s end, Horn years later wonders if the woman still feels the same about his work due to the on-going conflict in Israel and Palestine. This terminal section ends with the section’s title poem. Here Horn writes that the strongest example of political/social change, is not ‘the fear filled bravery of those who face down the instrument of /tyranny’, but a child, no more than three in her mother’s arms yelling the contagious chant: ‘“The people demand social justice.”’
      Love’s Fingerprints is a varied, engaging, and accomplished poetry collection, another excellent book in Circling Rivers’ growing collection. AQ