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
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”
~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
