“Cutting Through the Fog”, “Eternal Game” and “Brokenness”
Ann Christine TabakaA spiritual passion awakens in Ann Christine Tabaka’s poetry. The titles instruct: in “Cutting Through the Fog” the brume swallows the poet whole; in “Eternal Games” the story, like uroboros, eternally chases “its own tail”; and in “Brokenness” emptiness reaches out, “searching.”
“My own key slotted in your door”, “Survival” and “On life’s meaningful pauses”
Clara BurgheleaAn unambiguous pathos permeates Clara Burghelea’s poetry in, for example, this line: “I would have grown forgetful, had I stayed” in “My Own Key Slotted in Your Door.” Then, in “Survival” “love gave its sorrow a name/and drowned it.” And “how can I breathe breathless into the air of you?” in “On Life’s Meaningful Pauses.”
“Funabulism”, “Click” and “Chrysalis”
Mart-Matteus KampusIn each of Mart-Matteus Kampus’ poems visualization is key. In “Funabulism” a cat devours a mouse, “his red/whiskers/tightrope/walked/in the clear/morning air.” In “Click” the camera eye embraces all of what it sees—“sky,” shy moon,” “gentle summer.” And then there is “Chrysalis”—a feast of imagistic verse.
“There’s Only One Dance”, “Lonely Stars and Stripes” and “Placed on Pegasus!”
Michael O'BrienThere is only the dance of poetic rhyme in O’Brien’s poetry, as embodied in the poem “Pegasus,” a moral tale unencumbered by abstraction or opaque allusions: “Rejoice and kick up/the dust/in your/every advance,” the poet commands.
“Vertigo, NC”, “Wisp” and “To my daughter, sleeping in the back seat”
Katy McAllisterThere is a subdued presence in McAllister’s poetry, as if she is whispering in your ear: feel the sensuous in “Vertigo, NC”; see the fox emerge from the trees in “Wisp”; and in “To My Daughter” know “a temple in the mountain.”
“Shipwreck”, “No Going Back” and “A Book Like Mine”
Leslie SouleWhen a poet uses figurative language like Soule in “Shipwrecked,” you feel the extended metaphor or conceit alive in the paradox that the men on board will perish, “becoming pearls, their skin coral.” Ditto “A Book Like Mine” and quicksand.
“unicorn”, “grass icon” and “Bradbury’s butterflies”
Dmitry BlizniukTranslated from Russian, Blizniuk’s poetry is imbued with concrete images that place you within their parameters, and yet the abstract moves ever so closely to a Universe of billions where “someone has torn out a wire from the cable of the humanity.”
“Prairie Summer”, “La Sabranenque” and “Leaves”
Sabrina L'HeureuxThis is not easy, this telling a story through images that don’t miss a beat in the poetic line, and to tell it so completely, as L’Heureux “La Sabtranenque” and “Leaves” do through the perspective of “I” and the consistency in voice and mood.
“The Raven and the Stone”, “Tea for the Taxman” and “Dolphin Song”
Rollin JewettTo read “thee” and “thou” and “ne’er” and “‘tis” in “The Raven and the Stone” and “Dolphin Song” is like returning to the world of poetry in the 18th century. In Jewett’s hands, this poetic composition is simultaneously playful and dramatic.
“Like Oleander”, “Navigating Silence” and “Tiresias, the Seer (a poem in 9 Tankas)”
Effie PasagiannisRead Pasagiannis poems quietly, as they offer you an opening to the ethereal and spiritual and mysterious. Each poem breathes its own poetic nuance in form and content, but they gather the difference in “Navigating Silence”: “just listen.”
“The Bats in the Willow”, “Revenant Gloam” and “I Cannot Make Permanent Things”
Melissa MulvihillBats, the revenant gloam, and impermanence are the subjects of Mulvihill’s poetry here. Yes, their commonality may not be obvious, but Mulviill’s storytelling marks her poetry—personal and unequivocally forthright. Her voice is her truth.
“The Dedekind Cut”, “Triangles Reconstructed: Dad’s Last Hospitalization, Son Caught In The Middle” and “Laundromat 1, 2, 3…9”
Gerard SarnatEver heard of the “Dedekind Cut?” Sarnat explains the second part as the “partitioning of philosophical arguments,” and goes on to reveal an ironic vulnerability in “Triangles Reconstructed: Dad’s Last Hospitalization . . . .”
“Frankenstein, I love you”, “For Shilpa” and “Ash Wednesday”
Natalia ZverevaReading Zvereva’s poetry is like entering a lush garden of words that find meaning in their juxtaposition, and the senses dominate while reason takes a back seat, if only for a little while. Feeling pulls you toward the understanding and not knowing.
“The Millenials”, “he is no surprise” and “a Boxer’s beginning, at the end”
Komal KeshranMindful of the philosophical and spiritual, Keshran gives readers an option: they can read at the surface of his poetry or they can move like “the current of the river” and choose “to seek what lies beyond this earth.” There is magic here.
“Tiger Swallowtail”, “Bulbpulse” and “Flamingo”
Henry StantonStanton’s poetry pulls beyond the words on the page. Is it a search for the “suchness” of things, the true self, the true reality? The poet refuses to be trapped in his corporeality to divine the “whatness” of self: “Tathāgata will be my next child.”
“We Are, We Were”, “Think Tragedy, Feel Comedy” and “Are we equal yet?”
Samuel GriffinMetaphysics pervades Griffin’s poetry, as the references to Newton, Heraclitus, Isaac, and Spinoza’s famous Deus sive Natura are instructive. Pay attention to the titles: “We Are, We Were,” “Think Tragedy, Feel Comedy,” and “Are We Equal Yet?”
“Dark Sun”, “confessing” and “nag, stone”
Frank HeatherAn existential fear of unknowing in Heather’s poems is made most explicit in “Dark Sun,” but it is also present in “nag, stone” and “confessing,” irrespective of the irony. Named: “this terror towards time” and “the swirling chaotic mystery of my past.”
“Drowning”, “Forms” and “Odysseus”
Theresa RyderThe transient nature of life is nowhere more keenly perceived as in Ryder’s poem “Forms.” The irony is obvious: “When I die the world will stop spinning,” and then this: “I will be a form, a shape, a number, a colour, a sound.” A transitory traveller.
“All Things Scarlet”, “From Primrose Hill” and “Untold Miles”
Carter VanceVance drapes “All Things Scarlet” in allusions—colloquial or personal—and metaphors intersect what is linear. In “From Primrose Hill,” the poet concretizes the poem in landscape imagery: “post-war tenement/brick ways, ” “many-wandered fields.” Metaphor reigns in “Untold Miles” in the first three stanzas but focuses on the “not-quite-lovers in the last.
“The New Adventures Of”, “Opa” and “When”
Chaya BhuvaneswarLike a page from a memoir in “The New Adventures of,” the poet rejects her father’s rants and repulses an arranged marriage. A similar feat is fulfilled line by poetic line in “Opa,” the poet having found a fire-opal, “no opal omen of/ruin.” And in “When,” the poet pleas for racial justice and names the names, “Book of remembrance, book of tears.”
Songs for Trying: “Losing Interest,” “Winter Blues” and “The Impermanence of Sinking”
Lacey BeamerThe metaphors of water and sun run through Beamer’s poetry, as if pool water and the smell of chlorine can “block the rest of the world,” and the sun’s sinking in the sea at night isn’t the same as drowning. So too “sunlight becomes a hard, palpable thing,” a corrective to her “winter blues.”
“You Ungrateful Girl”, “Wrong Side Out” and “Best Left Buried”
M. StoneRead the titles first and enter Stone’s undiluted poetry with eyes wide open. Significance lies in the poet’s voice and imbalance of power in “You Ungrateful Girl”; in the descriptive tone and revealed irony in “Wrong Side Out”; and in the dare to unbury a rotting corpse like a metaphor of “rages” and “barbed words.”
“The Dead Wall of Silence”, “Pieces” and “Scratching Out Earth”
Mark McCrearyIn “The Dead Wall of Silence” the poet alludes to a partition against the backdrop of “sheep/and suckled cattle” in atypical dimeter and trimeter feet. In “Pieces,” he is not done with the fracturing: “Actual actions of schisms,” “splintered spectators,” “absolute absence”—just pieces. And in “Scratching Out Earth,” the poet faithfully renders the title in imagistic verse.
“Don’t Hang Your Soul on That”, “Slant” and “Sugar Sandwiches”
Robert HillesWhen you read a Hilles poem, you are inside a lyricism that doesn’t stop at the length of the poem but continues to move as if the poet has shown you how to be with love and life and soul, even if you have to eat sugar sandwiches. Read these poems and you will see.