In the Woods Without a Compass

Review by Jessica Handler

           Jane Lewty’s review of Zach Savich’s Full Catastrophe Living in the summer 2009 issue of The Laurel Review made me wonder - for whom do reviewers write? (I write reviews, and include myself in this population.) Two examples of Savich’s heart-stopping prose poetry are included earlier in the issue (sans editor’s note referring the reader to the review) but Lewty’s forest of academic analysis obscures pure appreciation of Savich’s work, burying it beneath kindling like “interiorized impulse,” and “oft-oblique.” Let me be clear; she praises Savich’s poetry (I think) and she’s right to do so. I just wish I didn’t need a literary GPS and a tent stake to figure that out.

            Literary magazines aren’t necessarily directed at the popular reader, although if more casual readers subscribed, somewhere an angel would get his wings. Writers, academics, and readers who love the craft of writing read litmags.  Literary magazines are, in their way, a map to who’s writing and who should be read. Let me be your trail guide to this issue of the Laurel Review.

            This magazine, out of Northwest Missouri State University, has in the past published authors such as Howard Nemerov, Stephen Dunn, and Sharon Olds. The magazine clearly leans toward poetry. The cover art of this issue implies connectivity, colored, linked lines that appear to reference a subway map or a circuit panel. The featured authors list on the back cover echoes that color scheme, coordinates, and yet, they’re random. Bad news for map lovers; but as Buddhists say, ‘the path is the goal.’ The table of contents doesn’t provide direction; it’s not divided by genre, so there’s no way to tell what’s a poem and what’s prose, unless something actually has the word “poem” in the title, forcing the reader into the wilderness on her own. And maybe that’s intentional; The Laurel Review as wilderness hike.

            More than eighty percent of this issue is poetry, and that’s the path I suggest a reader take. The poets in this issue aren’t superstars for the common reader, but they’re a powerful showing, Among the list, Wayne Miller is the editor of Pleiades, and Sarah Vap is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize.

            That said, this issue opens with what I presume is fiction (remember, I’m working without a map.) Lisa Ohlen Harris’s Exiles is the story of an American couple in a Muslim country, she home with a new baby, he called back to the states for his father’s funeral. The parallels in the story are clearly drawn; who is an exile and what is home, written in a ruminative tone with an ambiguous ending. This is followed immediately by a comic one-act play, The Phantom Minstrel, by Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard. Playing on the old clavicle/clavichord confusion and a variety of poetic wordplay, like shut up/we are sneaking up/my dander is up, The Phantom Minstrel is laugh out loud funny, reminiscent of Monty Python’s Holy Grail (Stannard is British) and Saturday Night Live’s “Bad Theater” skits from the 1970s. 

            After this, we get back to what Laurel Review does best. Laurie Blanner’s prose poems, The Animal Who Wasn’t There and Walking the Animal have the detail and confident world building that good prose poetry can offer (I confess that I’m fond of the form.) Bruce Bond’s Constellation (not a prose poem) offers the vertiginous and dazzling lines It’s there I took the aim of your arm/at a dead star in a parking lot of stars. There’s more – somehow mythy nothingness thrives in a poem, but would die of cold in an academic review. The prose poem form continues in Rhiannon Dickerson’s A War Poem, A God Poem, a poem in three stanzas with the kind of formally absurdist language and imagery that makes me, as a reader (and reviewer) turn to the contributor’s notes to learn where else I can read this author – and then flip back to the single work here to read it again. Your beard is on backwards, war, and you must retrieve your dark gun at dusk.

            The poetry in this issue is often superb. Turn to Wayne Miller’s A Prayer (-O City) and see what would happen if Walt Whitman listened to Vampire Weekend. A triptych by Erik Anderson, each called From: The Opening of the Island (are they excerpts? Do I rely too greatly on maps?) offers the indelible image of ditches in opposition to steeples. P.K. Harmon’s What Was What Is sings in my brain with I used to be that bird that tree that path/But now I am this bird this tree this path.

            There are themes in the organization of the poems; mountains, islands, fire each appear more than once. The Grand Canyon appears in two unrelated pieces by different authors. And there is, of course, criticism. Philip Terman’s commentary on David Citino does its job by making me aware of – and interested in the work of a poet I had not heard of, whose work is compared here with the humor and eroticsm of Albert Goldbarth. Similar kudos go to Michael McLane’s engaging review of Kathy Fagan’s Lip, written in the spirit of the work under consideration.

            Let’s follow the prose, wound somewhat awkwardly among the poems. Refugium is the standout, an essay by Elizabeth Dodd that takes place on a desert hike and becomes an exploration of nature versus government, who is an immigrant, and the meaning of refuge. It’s beautifully written, with the integration of facts, observation, and dialogue that makes nonfiction memorable. Short stories including Standing Heat by Debra Brenergan, Causeway by Rachel Meier, and an essay by Paul Cockeram called Bridges Burn are sometimes clumsy, overly discursive, or feel unfinished.

            The Laurel Review summer 2009 issue is rich with poetry and intermittent prose rewards. If you’re a reader who plunges forward without a compass, you’ll enjoy the treasure hunt. If you rely on maps, forewarned is forearmed: be prepared.

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of “Invisible Sisters: A Memoir” (Public Affairs, 2009.) Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity.com, More Magazine, Southern Arts Journal, and Ars Medica . An essay derived from her memoir  was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. She has been the Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a Fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts in Rabun Gap, Georgia, and a finalist for the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize. A teacher of creative writing, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.