Luna Park Cider Press Review

The Memory of Gills by Catherine Carter (2006, Louisiana State University Press / $16.95, paper / ISBN: 978-0-8071-3176-3)
Reviewed by Caron Andregg

To dive into Catherine Carter , The Memory of Gills, is to dive headlong into an embryonic sea teaming with strange, desperate, yet also familiar creatures. Her poems are intensely alive in the way a swamp is alive: humid, fecund, raw, and dazzling. Most of them you can smell.

The book begins appropriately with tableau of life-from-death. In Sunken Tanks, Bloodsworth Island, derelict army tanks once used for offshore target practice decay to become a breeding ground: ussels and the spat / of oysters set there, where the wash / of tide runs fast and high; / incurious eels scroll / past numb controls, a water-shattered gauge.

A tank evolving into a hatchery is just the first of many metamorphoses. Throughout, creatures of all kingdoms transform from and to more elemental states. In The Last Good Water, a human must first kneel and then crawl to drink: you must be an animal here, / prostrate yourself. This spring will bear / no hand, no cup. With every line, Carter reminds us that to be human is to be alive, and to be alive is to be intrinsically bound to all living things, crawling, swimming, slinking, soaring, or oozing. She will tolerate no illusions of special superiority from anyone or anything. In he Ants and the Double Helix, a minute flake of dead skin becomes the bridge between human and insect:

I scatter myself out,
becoming permeable to the world
that has a use for everything.
Ants nibble me cell by cell,
hoist me over antennae,
hurry me away underground.
They have me.
In synecdoche I am theirs
To feed upon, to curse, to bless.

She dismisses the notion of humans exclusive divinity when buzzards become black angels with the power to ee souls, going out on the wind / squirrel-souls jerking their ethereal tails / deer-souls bounding the fields of air / watching the oily, hairy souls pull free, ( evidence of Angels .

Life demands its corollary, death, and death is ever-present in these poems. That being said, Carter presents some of the most energetic dead on r under he earth. They make phone calls on Thanksgiving day, ride the metro through the underground, fumble through cabinets in darkened bathrooms, and beat their desperate heads in vain against the black basements of misplaced buildings. Semele is lash-fried like a sweet potato by Zeus when love and death became one, but the same could happen to you ( emele Story. Persephone clarifies what it is to be married to death, and reminds the reader of what she really known all along, ou e promised to him too, / and all at once, tonight the wedding night, ( ersephone Underground .

And Carter empathy seems universal. No one goes quiety. Even vegetable kitchen scraps raise their voices in supplication:

Don throw us away, they beg.
Don embalm us in the landfill
where everything stinks and seeps
together; we want
to be leaves again, and breathing
threads of roots. We want it all,
everything.
( earing Things

In the evocative elegy, History of the Lost Colony, mold pooling under the refrigerator laments its oisoned children gone in the swipe of cloth, and the cold indifference of the universe:

We do not know
why it happened
Now when we think
of our new colony, on a tender island of potato
fallen between the wall and the toaster,
we are afraid. No one
is safe. The world is a desperate place.

The Memory of Gills is an astonishing first book from a writer of great craftsmanship and profound depth.

Galvanized by W. Joe Hoppe (2007, Dalton Publishing / $12.95, paper / ISBN 0-9740703-5-1)
Reviewed by Robert Wynne

Patriotism is a very personal thing. W. Joe Hoppe’s first full-length collection of poems is an excellent example of this fact. From the red, white and blue cover which includes the eagle that was the symbol of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (part of FDR’s New Deal), to the clipart hammer & wrench which appear at the end of every poem, this is a book which is uniquely American. And very consciously so: nearly half of the copyright page is dedicated to an explanation of the cover art, and its significance, for the majority of readers who might not recognize the eagle gripping lightning bolts and a gear in its wide talons. Even before the first poem, it’s clear that this work comes from the school of Walt Whitman, and the expansive, varied and unapologetic American poets who have come after him.

Hoppe is rare amalgam, as Lyman Grant notes in his foreword, calling the author a “Mid-Western, Buddhist mechanic with a graduate degree in English.” All these influences are evident in the writing, but it is the mechanic who wins the day. The first 55 pages are dedicated primarily to poems about cars, and these pieces are rich with the kind of details which only a passion for automobiles makes possible. “In America” features childhood memories of all the amazing cars that never came to the neighborhood. “Driving a ’66 Barracuda I Bought on Ebay Back Home to Austin from Sioux Falls, SD” is a 9-page opus which chronicles a repair-laden trip with a beauty from the past, and culminates beautifully with a couplet that reminds the reader what’s important: “The Barracuda shines in the driveway / while I go inside to wake my wife.” Two poems ruminate on the near church-like experience of visiting Texas’ famous Cadillac Ranch. But it’s “Song of the Slant Six” that presents the wondrous, mechanical nirvana of the internal combustion engine in its most radiant glory, from “the moat of an intake manifold / curving like a candelabra” to where “tappets and rocker arms / click like a cockroach on its back / pivot like oil wells” under the valve cover. The poem ends with the deceptively simple summation that the engine is “comforting in its constancy / a sweet distraction / where solutions follow design.” This is the utopia of the American car, and clearly worthy of at least a little flag-waving.

The remaining 30 pages of the book are split into 3 short sections: poems about the homeless in Minneapolis, poems about the author’s son, and 3 poems in a Coda to wrap-up the collection. The first 3 Minneapolis poems are well-wrought but lack the emotional impact of the car-centric poems from the first section; however, the final poem in the homeless quartet, “Inhospitable”, turns its gaze back on the narrator with haunting effectiveness. The 7 poems for the author’s son tap into the surprise, fear and joy of parenting, and include some deft car/baby metaphors. The final 3 poems eschew the characters from the prior 2 sections in favor of gadgets, tools, and, of course, the ever-present engine. Hoppe brings the collection together well by ending with another extended engine metaphor in “The Sky Has Fallen and the Night has Broke”, in which desire spins the narrator skyward “at five-thousand rpm” until he must decide whether to “rein it in and head home” or to again “attempt to crack the dome” and “become a comet across the firmament / hoping someone is there to see it.” I’m betting he chooses the latter.