Final Issue - Fall-Winter 2012/2013

Thank You

This is the final issue of Untitled Country Review. We are putting the project to bed now, for the same reason that we started it; because, in the words of Mary Oliver:

"…the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

it calls out to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

Thank you for reading.

-SS

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Contents

Review

Vivian Faith Prescott reviews Navigation, by Brittney Corrigan

Poems

Ruth Bavetta – “West of Reno”

Barbara March – “Liquidation Before Winter”

W.F. Lantry – “California”

Connie Post – “Long Haul”

Nancy Carol Moody – “Merwin On Thyme”

Ellen Roberts Young – “Atomic Power”

Lucia Galloway – “Remembering the Carousel Rooster: Epistle #4”

Frederick Pollack – “Target Acquired”

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Review

Brittney Corrigan. 2012. Navigation. 103 pages. Portland, OR: The Habit of Rainy Nights Press.

ISBN #978-0-9746683-6-9

Reviewed by Vivian Faith Prescott

“We are left in this hemisphere/tilted toward the sky/holding our bodies with both hands/both hands reaching—” Brittney Corrigan’s poetry collection Navigation is a cartography of internal and external landscapes; ancestors with stars behind their eyes, a silver mixing bowl at a mother’s brown feet, tumbleweed in the backyard, a place where birds leave in winter.

The collection is separated by four sections: “Mapmakers,” “Sighting the Land,” “Uncharted Worlds,” and “Journeys and Returns.” The poems are written in a variety of forms from couplets to prose poems and poems such as “Wind River,” whose shape, as if following the curve of earth and sky, moves with the words on the page.

Navigation routes the reader through the first section of “Mapmakers” with poems that consider how people make us who we are. About a grandmother, the speaker says, “She grew to make our syllables/like sucking on cloves…”  And in poems moved by grief and illness: “…in your own private/earthquake…” and “…each touch a small ghost/walking through walls…”

In the section “Sighting the Land,” the poems slip into the landscape with images of loons and thunderstorms, lighthouses, nests, and islands. In “Uncharted Worlds,” the speaker marvels at the joy and wonder and grief of motherhood: “she caught this week's full moon to keep inside/of her until it warms to shining,” along with the heartache and passion in loving an autistic child: “that’s not how/we started is it, little one?” 

In ‘Journeys and Returns’ the poems return to a sense of home again, but not in the sense that all is right with the world, but with “how the center of things/surprise us.” Indeed, the poems in Navigation are centered, yet surprising and sometimes aching, conveying longing and wonder, like bright objects fixed on a star chart ready to be explored.

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West of Reno

1

Driving up old Gold Lake Road

we dodged lumber trucks

careening unpaved curves at heedless speed.

Sometimes they carried but a single log,

one arboreal body so huge

it could not share its coffin,

a trunk that had survived winter storms,

August thirst, September fire,

only to have its majesty laid out,

carried in a breakneck funeral procession

to the lumber mill at Sattley.

Whatever we can learn

from the now-abandoned mill,

the rusted cone which once burned

the dust of trees like these, is offset

by our tendency to prefer roads clear

and paved, wherever they may lead.

2

Last year we drove to Johnsville, set up

the telescope, stared at whirling galaxies

where no point is fixed,

where stars roam untethered

by charts and expectations.

Something forces us to search

for what attaches us to earth,

to the keening needles of the pines,

water-eaten cliffs abandoned

by hydraulic miners, sound

distilled to tumbled fragments.

We cling to tender surfaces,

the ever-present wind against us.

Riffles cross the lake

broken, mended, broken.

--Ruth Bavetta

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Liquidation Before Winter

her arms folded, a sideways tightening

outside gold leaves free-

fall onward

to liquidation, no

we call it a retirement sale

for change is rich

in its measure of gold,

ounces of fullness written on

a cashier's check once a week,

until the store and her breath

are bare to the walls

--Barbara March

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California

Streetlights outshine the moon, and all is well:

eucalyptus weave the western wind

but the small rain lingers in its clouds.

She reclines within, a silken form

investigating Heidegger and Kant

for which I have no patience.

                                                 I'm outside

harvesting the last fruits of fall

and clipping cattleyas, which bloom at night

like moonflowers or jasmine: what's it to her,   

whose thought is deeper than habitual?

I'm musing on the harvest or the moon

which, like a rose in wreaths of cumulus,

comes rising from the deserts of the east.

I bear the fruit and flowers to the house:

disturbed, she rises and throws on a dress,

strolls out past bougainvillea, trumpet vines

and ferns I mixed to please her wanton eye,

to her Mercedes Benz: Vivaldi roams

through all the seasons as she drives away

without a word of explanation or

even a glance to say she noticed these

strange birds and blossoms I have gathered here.

Macaws scream overhead, monk parakeets

pillage the avocado, but I close

the front door as the empty rain comes on.

--W.F. Lantry

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Long Haul

When your sleep

is the heaviest thing

you’ve carried all day

you must remember

how to position it

how to tuck it under your chin

When everything is lost

in the gravity of dark

you must act normal

when the doorman offers

to help carry your bags

When large sacks of insomnia

balance

like groceries on your hip

you must learn

where the benches are,

how to settle in

between old ladies

and homeless men

who rest with the pigeons

until dusk

you must step over

the sand man who is now

a war veteran, holding a tin cup

you must find places

to set the dark down

before the bag breaks,

before your nocturne

is scattered across a wide street

and you are left

on your muddied knees,

with no way to sort through

the dark figs, split oranges

rolling down a side alley

where you once prayed

--Connie Post

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Merwin on Thyme

            

At this altitude

four hundred feet

it will not grow

not even

in this pot I have

chosen for it

though

further up the mountainside

eight hundred feet

one can see the thyme

such an intricate weaver

of itself

as it steals through

every crag and sinew

the plumes

of its breath rising

no one

not herbalist

nor horticulturist

can explain it

in this advancing hour

one more question

without answer

--Nancy Carol Moody

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Atomic Power

Curanderas have no use for smallest particles,

know plants’ properties vary by the earth,

water, wind in which they grow.  Chemists

diagram atoms linked in hexagons,

isolating compounds from plants that heal,

won’t replicate environments.  It’s enough

to synthesize the complex molecule,

as if its host were irrelevant, as if bodies

were only stacks of atoms, not

columns of energy in constant interplay.

--Ellen Roberts Young

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Remembering the Carousel Rooster:

Epistle to the Despondent Urbanites, #4

Salutations from one who remembers the carousel rooster in Tilden Park circling in jocund docility.  From one who knows not whether that fellow, when the late afternoon fog touched in from San Francisco Bay, noticed the medicinal tang of eucalyptus or thought about hens.  Blessings from one who thought (as well one might) that an egg mobile was something bright and existential above an infant’s crib.  Learned since that privileged hens now travel in wheeled cages, rolled each day to a new spot where they waddle down their little ramps onto new plots of grass (my thanks for this to Michael Pollan).  They peck for new grubs to give their eggs that robust golden yolk.  (Did Mr. Pollan ever meet the carousel rooster—that jolly dinosaur?)  Earthlings all, some of us have known backyard roosters marshaling hens in their enclosures, giving their wake-up calls.  Are we blessed that roosters thrive in their estate?

                        Ruffling loud feathers

                        letting loose muscled vowels

                        he says nothing at all

--Lucia Galloway

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Target Acquired

Remember how, during the Gulf War,

General Schwarzkopf displayed

to an appreciative press corps

“the luckiest guy in Baghdad” –

a driver exiting

a bridge the instant before

a missile hit it?

So many years without élan,

without victory –

I can almost creep out

on the pedestrian walkway,

dust off my jacket, cross. 

But this city

is neither poor, dry,

terrorized, ugly, nor armed. 

Windowboxes and fountains flourish.

Bikes lean against walls.

The statues in the parks have gone

beyond even poets.  Sheets

are white, diagnostic machinery

gleams in the clinics.

It is the city of defeat.

Which is why no one’s here –

I don’t love them, no one loves it.

Thus at least the distant

watchers watching me believe.

It’s fall.  The raptor high above

will fire soon an air-to-ground.

I sit beneath a tree,

its leaves as dense and red

as petals of a generous rose.

--Frederick Pollack