No Failed Poets Here

Ibbetson Street is a modestly produced poetry journal with poems that vary widely in quality. Some of them feel like early drafts, but a handful of them are impressive enough to warrant scrutiny. Let's look at five of the better pieces, in order of appearance.

Ron Houchin's excellent "Abandon" manages to convey both the delicacy and emotional impact of Japanese haiku. In a single sentence, using "the way" three times to make comparisons, Houchin moves from the flight of dandelions in wind to the forest elk running between trees to, finally,

the way the fine hair of your wrist
just begins to rise
as your watch
falls from bed to motel floor.

The transition from the natural world to a motel room is startling and, in the precise detail the observer notes regarding "the fine hair of your wrist," deeply emotional. This is an erotic love poem of the highest order.

Lyn Lifshin's poetry has probably appeared in every magazine except Popular Mechanics. She is truly prolific and at the same time supremely gifted. Three of her poems appear in this issue of Ibbetson Street, and to be fair to the other poets, I'll just examine my favorite of the three.

In "The Young Girl Dreams of Escape," the means of flight is a horse,

the horse lover,
almost a part
of the harp of her
body.

Lifshin's balancing act here is to convey the girl's love of the horse as a means of escape from her ordinary life without ever suggesting bestiality, even as she flirts with

a wild mane her
own hair tangles
with, her thighs
opening for the
horse's warmth.

Her dream of departure is seen as an elopement, the flight of two and not just one:

She will elope
when the rest of
the house is sleeping,
carrots and apples
for her love.

In the end, Lifshin assures us that this is no

love
pressed up against
high school
lockers

but rather an entire "world suspended / in blue moon light." As a poem about longing, this is a supreme achievement.

Tracy Strauss's "Acceptance" is, like "Abandon," a short (10 lines), one-sentence poem of short lines that build to a striking conclusion. It's the opposite of "Abandon" in that it moves from the manmade world ("I heard my footsteps / on the stairs") into the natural one ("like lightning / from a thundercloud"). The poem begins by defining ("The day I stopped defying / gravity") what follows in the next eight lines, what happened when the speaker stopped defying gravity. My one quibble with the poem, because I admire it so much, is with the central verse "as my heart broke / through the cage." I want to change "the" to "its," especially since "the stairs" has just preceded it. It only stands out because the poem is so brief. But this is an accomplished work.

In "Town Diner, Watertown," Wendy Drexler gives us a portrait of every American diner. In fact, we know from the first line ("It's the refuge of the American dream") that this is her intent. As uncertain as I was about that first line, what follows is a series of acute observations that invite a knowing "Yes!" from the reader. Such details--

Gulden's spicy brown on Hebrew National,
the yellow honey bear, a bottle of red
Tabasco, cartels of white napkins
dispensed from steely towers

--seem obvious at first glance, but the accumulation of rich details creates a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Patrons sit "[d]eep in our duct-taped / Naugahyde booths," and we think, yes, the older the diner, the more duct tape. Only a good poet would find the poetic in such a thing. The poem ends on a happy note, and we, like the patrons, are sated:

Behind the counter,
the Mexican cook sloshes raw eggs
onto the hot grill--they slide on their own melting,
like what Robert Frost says of any good poem.
All the yolks rise, sunny-side.

Linda M. Fischer's elegiac "The Anatomy of Dying" deserves high praise indeed. This eight-part poem chronicles the final days and passing of the speaker's mother in a voice that avoids sentimentality at every turn, even beginning with "her ashes