The Wave-Maker: Poems

admin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

If Elizabeth Spires' poetry collection, The Wave-Maker, presents a single image, it is something deceptively simple, like the flick of a blouse hanging on a clothesline. Difficult subject matter such as death, aging, and the meaning of life are examined by peering in to closely examine the minutiae. Here, life is made up of the smallest of things: the snowy hill, the snail's shell of a home, and how everyone needs a "a place to be quiet in."

Spires's poems are spare and airy. In "Story of a Soul," light enters a room where the "journal is deliberately cryptic." Like the windows the speaker wipes clean, this collection's poems are streamlined until they "everything is immaculate." The smallest of details are made mystical: the courage of a snail teaches something the speaker is not quite sure of, a white room suggests existence or lack thereof, and the tenacious bamboo in the midst of a thirsty backyard is in need of the speaker's hand. The Wave-Maker is bold because it asks what will happen once we leave. It is brave because it heeds to the present as much as it hints or recounts the past.

One of the best poems in the book focuses on the popular computer game The Sims. Spires retells the game as "explained by a child." Deceivingly simple statements make for a sharp poem full of meaning. Spires writes how "you design the people" and "adults don't have to have jobs they can cheat: / push the rosebud & money appears." Clear cut definitions of concepts like 'family' and 'love' shake readers into considering what is real or true. Spires writes, "a family is anyone who lives in the house with you," and "If you have Free Will you can starve or drown yourself / then you wander around as a ghost." Such details are chilling when considering the realities we form for ourselves.

Sadly, some of the lean lines seem brittle, as if the marrow has been sucked clean along with the flesh. All of the watching and observation sometimes results in a stagnant feeling. A line like "Foolish or true, the rose blooms only for you" seems too basic and loud for such a smart poet, and the poems' questions seem too obvious for such a subtle collection.

The Wave-Maker shows there is no beginning or end to the world. Instead, the wind comes or it does not. Meaning is brief and subjective. Spires's poems are careful waves that will wash over the reader, carrying him or her into poetry-centered meditation. We are all pallbearers, and we are all heroes. We can understand that we are all "a shell / a monument / a memory."

Written by: Lisa Bower, April 15th 2010

Trailer Girl: And Other Stories

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Terese Svoboda

University of Nebraska Press

One of my favorite short story collections of all time is Black Tickets, a masterpiece written by Jayne Anne Phillips in the 1970s. So hauntingly poetic and impressive were these stories written about rootless misfits by a young and relatively unknown writer that a giant of the short story genre, Raymond Carver, contributed a blurb to the book’s back cover. He wrote: “These stories of America’s disenfranchised are unlike any in our literature. She is an original, and this book of hers is a crooked beauty.”

A ‘crooked beauty’ is also what the sixteen mostly short-short stories in Svoboda’s Trailer Girl conjure up in word pictures. Written in the style of dreamy prose poems about the alienated and edgy lives of the walking wounded, these stories shimmer and dazzle with an intensity that sometimes creates the feeling of the world as a floating, melting cloud of illusion.

In the title novella, a woman is obsessed with the idea there’s a wild child living in the gully near the trailer park where she lives but nobody believes her. Is the wild child a figment of her imagination to help her deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child? The other trailer residents ignore her—until there is a murder.

In “Psychic” a clairvoyant suddenly discovers her client is a murderer and then proceeds to exploit him. In “Lost the Baby,” an alcoholic couple black out and can’t remember where they dropped off their child. In “Sundress” two kicked out foster children move into a house while the owners are away on vacation and pose as house-sitting relatives. For a little while, they pretend they have a home to call their own and are blissfully happy.

Models of compression, these short stories are each skillful dramas about the lives of those on the dark side of the American dream. The style is a searing and cutting edge exploration of the long lasting effects of abuse and loss. For those who like elegantly poetic stories, Svoboda’s the real deal: a writer’s writer who unflinchingly makes us see with an almost hallucinogenic double-quick timing. Her brilliance will leave you breathless.

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, February 8th 2010