Never Night: Poems by Derick Burleson

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

 

 

·         Paperback: 64 pages

·         Publisher: Marick Press (May 2, 2008)

·         Price: $14.95

·         ISBN-10: 0971267650

·         ISBN-13: 978-0971267657

I’m not sure anymore, I can’t quite remember: have I read poetry before? Have I? This feels like a first love, after all, a discovery, a loss of guarded chastity, to wade deep into something as yet unseen and unknown and even now, somehow, unknowable. And yet I recognize this voice as almost my own, that is, not the words, but the voice that we all keep inside, deep inside, and allow others to hear perhaps only once in a lifetime. Derick Burleson stands like a dot on the satellite screen, nearly too tiny to see, but the satellite lens zooms in, and we see, we see, for the first time, we see what we have been trying to see all along.

Such strange juxtapositions, Burleson writes. His poetry is all contrast and light against shadow, miniscule against gargantuan, silence against thunderous noise. So much of the effect is like looking through an immense telescope, from either end—at one moment spotting that tiny dot of a man, standing on a cliff, and then moving to the other end of the telescope, to gaze out into the infinite, the eternal, the ever and ever. It is almost dizzying, yet we recognize it as the gaze of an open-eyed man. Burleson sees what we all see, or are willingly blind to, or cannot bear to see: that we are here for only a moment, that we are meaningless in the very same instant that we are nearly godlike with meaning.

Remembering the wild beauty of Alaska when I was too long ago there, I wonder if it is this kind of wild beauty that can produce such a poet, such poetry. Even the title poem, "Never Night," captures what can’t be held:

You’d like it here where

it’s never night, where the sun

circles, rather, until it ends

up where it started from,

east or west, rises, sinks

but doesn’t ever set,

where in the summer

you never need to sleep

and all day and all night

the sky is a series of blues

you’ve seen only once before,

blues van Gogh painted

at the end.

 

Burleson’s poems dig into loam and earth, beginning as a child just learning to separate from his mother, on all fours in the garden, even as he sinks into earth and joins his other mother—Mother Earth. He notes nature—“sand glittering alive with flecks of mica” and “the sun wanted to eat us all with joy”—but he also observes the daily grit of construction crews and Main Street as it floats away in a surreal flood, his father still seated at the floating kitchen table and watching the weather on the television set. He notes that “glass is a slow liquid” and how our own nature calls us to often break things down in order to see them built up again, or at least to see what’s inside, to understand a core value, even if it means destruction, or death, in the process. How precarious is life, yes, but how intense is our ability to love and live and survive and go on yet again.

In the poem “Late Valentines,” Burleson writes of such a profound and yet everyday love (and I dare anyone to find a woman who would not lay down all to receive such a Valentine):

If this were the last rhyme I ever write,

what should my hands choose to fabricate?

They’d spin straw into gold to bribe the fates,

stitch a bright charm against the sprain of night,

 

and weave one last tapestry of our tears,

so we can ache another ten thousand years.

 

And more:

…heaven is whatever we dream

when we sleep in the house, which has and will

continue to settle into what we become.

 

With uncanny ability, Burleson orders everyday words that in that particular order become an intoxicant. To pick it apart, we find only letter, alphabet, a grocery list, a car, a television set, a tree, a house, a blue window seen from space, a life, a death, yet when put just so, it becomes:

And when our talk fades, when music

 

is only music again, we will slowly dim,

just our eyes and the teeth of our shy smiles

still showing. We’ll go back

 

to our own places and finally sleep,

smug with the fierce pleasure

of knowing that soul is the particular

 

song we learn to sing, that our lovers

will always be gardens beside us,

blooming the colors we dream best,

 

graceful as the glittering waves,

bursting on a moonlit beach

beyond the foot of our beds.

 

Yes, I’m sure I have read poetry before this, and even written it, but after a time spent reading the poetry of Never Night, and I’m not sure if that was a morning or a week or half my lifetime, or read in a dream half-waking, I somehow think I have never quite read poetry, not like this, so simple and complex and true, so tiny and so big, and I want to go out into the street, or topple off my particular cliff, and stop the first person walking by to press this slender, pretty book into their hands. Or yours. Read this. This, see, is poetry.

 

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Mice Verses Man: Poetry by R. Jay Slais (chapbook)

 

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

 

Paperback: 39 pages

Publisher: Big Table Publishing Company Chapbook Series

Price: $12.00

ISBN: 978-0-9842473-2-5

 

 

I winced when I saw the title, trying hard not to let it throw me into editorial bias against the chapbook’s content. Verses? Did our poet really mean verses, the plural of verse, or was this intended to mean versus, the mouse pitted against the man in battle? It could, after all, be an interesting play on words, but in reading the title poem, “Mice Verses Man in This Time of War,” I suspect the worst—this is an error.

 

I told myself this is the hazard of my occupation—that I stumble on misspellings and typos and misuses and grammar gaffs, even as I, being human and being more writer at heart than editor, take an occasional fall into grammar abyss myself. Blatant error in publication gives me the twitches. Still, I open the chapbook determined to leave bias (and twitches) at the door, or at the cover, as the case may be. After all, I have published one of the poet’s poems in The Smoking Poet, and in general, I like his work.

 

In general, after reading the chapbook, I still like Slais’ work. It's earthy, topical to today (single fatherhood, broken hearts, new hope), honest. Yet I can’t help feeling that a careful next draft might have done it some good. A good editor, perhaps, reading it for accuracy, catching such errors as “I did it as a favor for his mother/whom had begged me to let him stay”) and the poet himself might have pushed his own comfort zone a bit beyond. Too many of the poems begin well, but whimper out on a weak note. Systematically going through this collection and punching up the last lines would have done wonders. “A Two-Star Night,” for instance, is an interlude of intimacy, building the flame, but finishes so:

 

I stayed very calm, still as a windless night,

then she spoke my name. I never said I loved her,

but as she fell throughout the night,

I caught her in my arms.

 

Instead of a climactic ending, this is just a petering out into a night not worth remembering. It smacks of laziness, because other poems show the poet does have the skill to muster, can indeed turn the fine phrase, and is perfectly capable of leaving the reader catching her breath:

 

As I drank, my body poured

out of me slowly, like syrup,

a naked glistening jelly,

sweet on his tongue.

I shook, terrified to feel thrilled.

 

Or here, a tender and poignant poem in memory of the poet’s mother:

 

Each half day alive,

the other half died.

Morning would wake

with a wish

to go backward,

to search for the place

I let go of her hand

and took my first step.

 

Reason to keep writing. Unfortunately, such lines and verses are too few in this collection, only pointing to a talent not yet fully accessed and honed, but surely waiting for the poet to do so. I hope this poet will.

 

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