Off the Shelf – May 20

On May 20, 2015, in Latest News, by The Somerville Times

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State Rep. Denise Provost is a Somerville Bagel Bard,  an excellent poet and reviewer. She has also been involved in the effort to create a Massachusetts Poet Laureate position.  Here is a review she sent to Off the Shelf:

 Airstream_Releaseheader_1
Airstream, by Audrey Henderson
Homebound Press, 2014 $16.95

Review by Denise Provost

The cover of Audrey Henderson’s first published collection of poetry, Airstream, speaks of motion – the bulbous aluminum trailer halfway passed; metallic surface of a distant lake, clouds and light moving into sunset formation. The poems within take the reader on as fine a set of journeys as can be fitted between an opening and final line. Airstream seems to defy the laws of physics – like Dr. Who’s Tardis, the poems in this book are bigger on the inside than one would guess from their modest physical proportions. The book is divided into three sections – with, tellingly, geographic names. The first, “Finisterre,” is filled primarily with poems about quests. These are propelled by the varied personal motivations or exigencies that send individuals out to visit – or settle upon – various lands’ ends. We meet Mr. Peterson, of Field Guide fame, for whom, “there’d be too many/ questions for an old man/ with a suitcase full of flowers….” The Lichen Lovers, we learn, 
 
…met with blank stares mostly 
as we crisscrossed America 
looking for clean air. 
You corrected book text on your 
sick bed as we reminisced 
about tundra—how I shot the lichen 
through a cloud of mosquitoes 
while you beat the air with a glove— St. Kilda Sunday makes reference to a Scottish island so remote that, when it was ultimately evacuated in 1930, its inhabitants reportedly did not know that Queen Victoria had died. Its narrator muses that Jesus “seems kind/ although he forbids us/ to tend our animals/ on Sunday….” It’s a poem that measures the distance between the pre-Christian past and its transition to the age following it. Similarly, The Elders Lament describes a world “[a]fter the monks arrived,” where [t]he elders grew silent, fearing in their hearts that no-one 
would carve the stones that tether the sky to the land, 
or burnish mirrors where people see their faces in the stars. 

One truly breathtaking poem is Lammermore, with its dazzling compression of time and distance. It tells a three-generation family story between lines of conversation with a neighborhood grocer who happens to be an opera fan: 
Tony’s butcher shop is pristine—jars of tomato paste 
Along a shelf, jaunty cans of Pastene, the whole place 
Painted red and white to go with the meat. A sign in magic 
Marker on the cash register says bacalao $8.99 a pound. 
I ask him how to cook it.  When it comes out I’m from 
Scotland he hands me a CD of Lucia de Lammermoor, 
A picture of Italian men in kilts on stage at La Scala…. 

For me to reveal any more of this tale’s details and digressions would require a spoiler alert. 

The second section, “The Continent and the Levant,” offers a mixed assortment of meditations: on paintings and artists; on art historians (like the one in The Tempest, “listing to one side 
like a monument about/to topple, his expression blissful,”); poets, and other characters; some of whom have perhaps stepped out of paintings. The Baptist, the eponymous John, roasts locusts “on a makeshift hearth/ and hastily/ getting wings in his teeth—“The Shepherds,” one realizes, are those drawn to the nativity of Jesus, seen from Mary’s point of view: “crude and toothless. They stank/ and hoarded cheese in their pockets….” 

Behind these schemes, there are also places, so full of personality that they asset themselves off the page, and into timelessness. In Hacksilber, one such location reveals its magic, both hidden and revealed: 

She brought all her suitors there 
to see if they went with the scenery – the castle, 
a river, the valley where the swan sleeps… 

They ran on it as children in their cable sweaters 
and once a man looked out from a tower 
to which there was no staircase…. 

There is also National Library of Scotland, a poem so rich in detail and side observations that its perfect arc of narrative seems to encompass an entire world: 

We could have guessed the size of it because 
George IV Bridge is actually a bridge, and you can peek 
over the edge beside Baumeisters, where Escher-like 
eighteenth century facades recede down to the Canongate 
and you can gauge the fathoms of the NLS…. 

“Eastern Seaboard,” the third and last section, might seem to bring us to more familiar territory. We find it, too, however, to be riddled with mystery and surprise. Simply getting ice cream at the Dari-Joy becomes a rather gothic adventure, where there are “many, many enormous black flies, mutant neon-eating flies, all over the plate glass window which/ reflects our mint chocolate chip with rainbow sprinkles….” 

In Creatures and Beasts, we watch vicariously with the narrator, who observes that: 

It was a lean time, month of the hunger moon 
the world run out of food, only a carcass from 
beneath the snow to be picked clean. The grass 
was flat and brown, wobbly with water, the hill 
a jelly, turned out from the mold too soon. First 
a turkey vulture came unfurling the black curtain 
of its wings like a Victorian photographer…. 

Even in the settled places here, there is constant movement: in Indigo Bunting, where an old man is distracted from his woes and injury: “He came into the house full of wonder and asked/could it be that he had seen an all-over blue bird.” In Fireflies, a hospital patient sees these insects for the first time: 

Flashing semaphore in the last light. 
You’re transfixed, can’t make sense of 
what you’re seeing, having no experience…. 

Girls.Birds  presents us with an unpromising scenario: 

I tell the delinquent girls anyway, about the warblers…. 
They listen to me and talk through tongue studs, 
their lycra abdomens bulge…. 

Yet the description of long migrations, nests In spruce forests, and “damp leaves, yellow and pointed and tropical” pierces the feigned boredom of even this audience: “The girls smoke/ hastily, for they are defenseless against this information/ and they never suspected the world was surrounded by wings.” 

If your world could use some wings, pick up a copy of Airstream, and glide away on revelations and delight.

 

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