Lawrence Barrett Review of I Am South by Donna Snyder, Virgoray Press, 2010; Available at www. virgoraypress.blogspot.com.

Donna Snyder, an accomplished, well-known and published El Paso poet and writer has delivered her first book, or rather chapbook, with a style that can be characterized as uniquely her own. Not one to obfuscate meanings, Snyder writes with searing clarity and in-your-face commentary that is refreshing because, thank God, one does not have to sit and agelessly ponder a puzzle-work of abstractions.

I can’t write subtleties by nature

I articulate experience in blatant terms

I name the emotion

Snyder also employs hugely scenic, dramatic and emotive imagery which sort of shimmers and moves her work along, at times, embryonic and dreamlike. Snyder begins her work with an ekphrastic piece, “A Pastel Study in Shadow.”  Snyder writes in “Part Three” of her “Pastel Study”:

She sits alone with her guest

In the non-light of dusk

Her feet firm on the floor

Calls it by name without distress

Hands warm on sloped thighs

When the light fades

The shade will eat

The lilac dust

Snyder reaches a crescendo of haiku simplicity that undulates like most of her work with a premise of sadness akin to the ancient sorrow of mystic Irish Bards. Her craftsmanship as a poet really shines through with the brevity and jazzy rhythms of her shorter pieces. “him all Jack Kerouac and shit” slides off the tongue like scat singing:

her all this is only just for now you know

An ephemeral spring so drink up fast

When it ended she hardly noticed lost

So was she in grief for pretty words

Mirror shards piled like minnowy regrets

All caught up in the moment she almost knew

 

 Snyder effortlessly captures a music in her work which is certainly the mark of any good poet. “Brother” falls like a short waltz across the page and “Blame it on Neruda”  twists with wit and nice turn of phrase. “Dreaming in Cards” ripples with smooth transitions of potent imagery measured alongside a slow beat.  “I Am South,” Snyder’s title piece, bristles like a poetic manifesto in that Snyder sums up not only what dimensions of north and south make her the artist she is today but also what very visceral and gut sense her experience of poetry is like:  “South is where I learned to swallow Pablo Neruda like rum.” Truly, at moments, Snyder’s poems intoxicate.  

John B. Sansone Review of Opus Crush by Lawrence Barrett, Create Space: Charleston SC, 2012; Available at Amazon.com.

Scribbled in my opening notes is that Lawrence Barrett’s poetry describes scenes with imagery that have not been tried before. Secondly, while admitting, and at times lamenting, his need to write, he also knows that his words are but instruments doomed to failure; unable to capture the ineffable; unable to convey full measure. Take the line from “7” of his title poem“Opus Crush:”

“…I realize

that before I reach
paradise comes
purgatory; that
this is the burden
we live
writing songs.”

 

Truly, writing poetry is more than suffering for Barrett, it is purgatorial duty and dark irony as he celebrates his 50^th and states in the same poem:”

 

“…no more hands

to hold in the
broken bird cages
of broken hearts; only
lovers gone running
from this slaughter
house of cold poems…”

Barrett’s Opus is truly a work of crushing poems; poetry crushing dreams; crushing love; crushing hope; crushing disillusionment; crushing the sound of the average and the usual with a rushing waterfall of words. Barrett, a former soldier who served in Iraq speaks of “the slaughter of the innocent:”

 “across the blood-

soaked street of
purple intestines she
runs pissing herself;
skin burning the sul-
fer stench of car-bomb…”

 and of the “nightmare conspiracy incinerating the dream song in each one of us.” Searching for answers he plays devil’s advocate questioning whether it is in “…divine cruelty, sweet pain” that “Yahweh speaks in wrath-fire and commands the smiting of heathens.” Barrett questions himself: “Why have I walked the streets of Baghdad?” He wants to know: “is this the work I leave behind me?”

 Barrett also seeks the mountains where there are:

“no war fortunes,

no political deities,
no poetic institutions,
only native dominion,
herdsmen, foothills,
piles of dust.”

 Barrett finds the mountains not only a place where “the ascetic pines are dying out,” but more importantly a place for sacred contemplation; a place for ascent: “The mountain is a living prayer I cannot yet speak. I do not have the authority.” In a world at war Barrett speaks for a disabled generation and shows us that ascent is still possible; perhaps even necessary.

Lawrence Barrett, review  of  China Girl by John Sansone Charleston, SC;  Createspace, 2010. Available at WWW.Amazon.com.

John Sansone, El Paso poet, writer and dramatist, has crafted a highly volatile tome of poetry, China Girl. The work is divided into a complex array of sections and takes the reader on a variegated ride through the peaks and valleys of his imagined and very real love for a woman only identified as “China Girl.” Though the title hints at objectification, perhaps that is the logical point of his entire obsession. In the first section Sansone identifies one of the many ironies of his obsession, the obsession of every new love:

 

 

She makes bread flawlessly,

even when she burns it, it is perfect.

And this realization is coupled with the realization of every middle-aged man who has ever loved a younger woman:

“…only now I don't

have to go to the desert but the desert has

come to me, toward the end of my life cycle,

with bodily sighs and automotive parts

that have outlived their warranty…”

Sansone crescendos the first section with “Ocean of Love.” The poem’s stark verbalization marks Sansone’s relaxed philosophical cit-chatty style with an edge of blood and guts, spicing up, of course, his musings on love.  The whole effect is quite wonderful, like watching the first round of a boxing match that ends with a near knock-out. Love is not a metaphor for Sansone, though he employs them, it is an obsession that never quits. And like a good boxer, Sansone stands up for the next round.

The book is by no means a hodge-podge collection of obsession poetry but more a story about an obsession that ends with a diabolical twist, when Sansone is called by China Girl for help. Sansone realizes as his obsession wanes that he is not looking for sexual love so much anymore as he discovers the love for a daughter he never had. Ouch!  Politically incorrect? The sadness is profound in his poem “winter solstice:”

I am borne of a million

complaints, a winter foliage

pretending to be a sprig.