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Spring 2005 - English Department
In This Issue: David Haynes Barton Sutter Bart Schneider Bill Meissner Thomas Sparrow ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ It would be easy to say Pete Hautman’s Godless is a banned book waiting to happen. After all, any young-adult novel written with the central purpose of challenging what readers think about faith and the Almighty seems destined to stir trouble for librarians and school boards far and wide. It would have been equally easy for Hautman to write a book that settles for tired potshots without paying attention to the importance religion plays in many people’s lives and the good it stirs in many hearts. But, mercifully, Hautman hasn’t done that. Godless does the nearly impossible. In an era when the public discourse on religion and values is often limited to sneering self-righteousness, Godless uses humor and empathy to explore important ideas and allows for complexity and disagreement with a minimum of histrionics. Jason Bock, the narrator of Godless, is a normal high-school student who, one sunny afternoon, gets an unusual idea. Flat on his back after being socked by the town bully, Jason stares up at his town’s water tower, and in his haze, he considers for the first time the importance of that structure. “It was the biggest thing in town. Water from that tower was piped to every home and business for miles around. The water connected all of us. It kept us alive,” Hautman’s young narrator thinks. “That was when I came up with the idea of the water tower being God.” Jason shares his idea with some friends, and just for fun, they speculate on its implications. A ○ ○ ○ Review by Nick Healy ○ ○ ○ Godless By Pete Hautman Simon & Schuster, 2004 Price (Hardcover) $15.95 ○ ○ Spring 2005 Mary Sharratt Philip Dacey Dominick Argento Mark Nowak Bruce Rubenstein Louis Jenkins Steve Healey George Roberts Sarah Stonich Ed Moses Jonathan Odell Valerie Miner Patricia Hampl Dave Page and more! new religion is born. They call it The Church of the Ten-Legged God and dub themselves the Chutengodians. They concoct a false history and a set of rules for believers. Others, including the very bully who decked Jason, are let in on the joke and “converted” into the church. From there the satire takes off. Desperate for reassurance and meaning in his life, one kid begins to take the whole idea seriously. Another grows disenchanted. And still another seizes the chance to gain power for himself by pretending to believe. He forms a splinter group, and tension boils amongst the Chutengodians. These tensions only aggravate those between the Chutengodians and their families. The way that Hautman handles those tensions—especially the ones between Jason and his devoutly Catholic father and friends—is what makes his story surprising compelling. Sure, he allows for a few cheap jokes. (For example, during an argument about abortion with a Catholic classmate, Jason says he can think of someone who wouldn’t have been missed.) But mostly, Hautman allows his characters to talk to each other, to listen, and to be empathetic. He allows readers to think, to draw their own conclusions, and to retain respect for people who don’t share their beliefs. Godless has gained a lot of attention for Hautman, Minnesota’s prolific author of suspense novels and young-adult books. In November 2004, he was awarded the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Godless belongs in the hands of young readers because it treats them with respect, the same as it does for its characters and their beliefs. This is not to say the book is short on satire and bite. It has plenty. But Hautman gives readers a book that asks them to think without telling them what to think. And that’s something everyone can believe in. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 1 Page 2 Corresponder Spring 2005 St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald By Patricia Hampl and Dave Page Borealis Books, 2004 Price (Softcover) $19.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ “no strange animal to him but/ just a different version of himself, (82)” that we can come to understand both Eakins’ and Dacey’s perspective on science, the arts, and sport. Poetry, painting, medicine, geometry, and boxing are all reaching for similar goals. What Dacey has written is a biography more detailed, more developed, more intimate than any biographer could have ever wished for, but more than anything else, The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins, is a peek into the heart of an artist and the heart of a man. It is not to be overlooked. Review by Benjamin K. Drevlow ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Philip Dacey’s Turning Point Poetry Prize collection of poems, The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins, is a successful dissection of the achievements of 19th century painter and teacher Thomas Eakins. While on the surface the book may appear as just a poetic biography of the man who studied athletes, doctors, priests, and poets, and portrayed them all on canvas, if you look closely you will find that, between the lines, Dacey has managed to write himself into the page, and reveal what appears to be his own personal philosophy on the science of poetry and its relation to all other arts. Dacey, a former long-time resident of Minnesota and professor at the state university in Marshall, is the author of seven full-length books of poetry, including The Deathbed Playboy, and has been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright fellowship to Yugoslavia, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, just to name a few. He is a St. Louis native, a Peace Corps volunteer, and father of three, who moved to Manhattan at the end of 2004. While the subject of Dacey’s award-winning book, the life and work of Thomas Eakins, remains consistent throughout its 93 pages, what varies is the style and form of the poems in the book, and the individual voices that tell the reader about this man who was, at one time, labeled by art committees as a “butcher” and snubbed by critics until his death in 1916. With the exception of a few poems, such as sections of “The Swimming Hole,” “The Students,” and “Eakins Up-to-Date,” as well as “Seven Hands: From the Paintings of Thomas Eakins”, a poem reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, most of the poems in Dacey’s book are spoken in the voices of the people who knew Thomas Eakins best—his students, his subjects, his wife, as well as Thomas Eakins and his paintings themselves. It is through these voices that we are able to look into the life of Thomas Eakins with surgical precision. And it is through the relationships that Eakins had with his friends and subjects, revealed in Dacey’s poems, like “In Camden” for example, where we read about Eakins’ friendship with an aging Walt Whitman “The Good Grey Poet down/ to his last disguise, (26),” the subject for a painting that was never finished, and in “Elegiac,” the first section in the voice of Billy Smith, a boxer, who is ○ ○ ○ Review by Josh Olsen ○ ○ ○ The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins By Philip Dacey Turning Point, 2004 Price (Softcover) $17.00 One of the great ironies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brief but vibrant life was his tenuous relationship with the city in which he was born, the city from which he would find inspiration for great literary works and characters, the city from which—it seemed—Fitzgerald was always attempting to disassociate himself. Patricia Hampl and Dave Page’s collection, The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a testament to some of the most memorable, most lucrative short stories Fitzgerald wrote, but it is also a testament to the paradoxical and often dubious relationship between the city and its native son. For years, literary scholars have pointed to Fitzgerald’s embattled childhood on Laurel and Summit Avenues in St. Paul as feeding the fire that would eventually grow into Fitzgerald’s obsession with social class. This bitter social acuity stamped virtually all of Fitzgerald’s writing. Indeed, aside from setting a number of his stories in St. Paul, Fitzgerald also wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise, there and pitched what would eventually be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, while living in St. Paul. The St. Paul-Fitzgerald ties are innumerable. In the introduction to The St. Paul Stories, Hampl lays the framework for a fresh envisioning of Fitzgerald: one in which St. Paul is more than just a setting or backdrop—one in which St. Paul rises to the front as the conflict, character, and driving force behind each short story that is to come. At the heart of her introduction, Hampl plays psychologist and historian to reexamine Fitzgerald’s life and writing in context of St. Paul during the late 1800s and early 1900s. As Charles Baxter puts it, “Fitzgerald loved, hated, and was obsessed by St. Paul and in her ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ vehicle in which readers witness both the growth of the Contags and the weight of their story. In this passage, Ernest writes to his deceased wife before he repatriates their children to Germany where they must deny their Ecuadorian heritage: “Ernest remembered lifting his hand instinctively to touch, ever so gently, the pocket of his suit jacket where he carried a small photograph of Elizabeth, whom he called, adoringly, Isabel. Just then profound sadness came over him unexpectedly, and he had continued defiantly, ‘I never believed I would take myself and the children from this valley, Isabel…I take you with me in my heart, and I will come back to be near you.’” Through extensive historical research and compassionate storytelling, the pains, hopes and triumphs of one ordinary family bring to light the extraordinary untold tales of the German Ecuadorian survivors. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Review by Thomas Maltman ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Mary Sharrat’s second novel, The Real Minerva, evokes the slow, familiar rhythms of a small town in Minnesota in 1923. Against these lulling rhythms, there is a darker undercurrent of myth and family strife pulses through the narrative. Picture Penelope, our central character, amid steaming irons, plucked chickens, and sweltering kitchens. Now picture her grandfather trying to drown her in a rain barrel when she was only a child. Her mother Barbara—an acid-tongued character who conceived Penelope after she was raped by her own father—tends house for a man who recently lost his beloved wife. On summer afternoons, he sneaks into Barbara’s bedroom, seeking healing through touch. Penelope finally gets fed up with cleaning the stains they leave behind on the sheets and runs away to live with the Van Den Maagendenberg woman on a farm outside of town. Leaving behind the town, with its dust and gossip-ridden cafe, will change her. The Maagendenberg woman, as we first know her, is an archetypal character. She is woman that lives on the edge of society, an unconventional figure who leaves her husband to have her baby at home. The period details—matinees with Rudolf Valentino, moonlit sonatas playing on the phonograph, washtubs and searing laundry soap—ring true. All of this is interwoven with the mythic. We recognize Penelope’s name from The Odyssey, a ○ During the Second World War, a diplomatic exchange took place between the United States, the Axis countries, and cooperative Latin American countries. “The consulate insists that the Americans want to exchange Latin American Germans, Austrians, and Italians for Americans caught in the Axis countries.” Families caught in this exchange were blacklisted as aliens in their homeland. Fifty years after the war, we now have the stories of the men, women, and their children removed from their homes, shipped to the Axis countries, and forced to become soldiers and laborers. Authors Kimberly E. Contag and James A. Grabowska, share the story of German Ecuadorian Ernest Contag, Kimberly’s father, a widower and father of four forced to move his family from their home in the South American Andes to Nazi Germany. The authors gathered research including interviews, personal documents, photos, and official documents in libraries and archives in Ecuador, Germany, France, the United States, Spain, and Portugal. This research is woven throughout the narrative and works to enhance the potency of the Contag’s historical journey. The heart of this story is told through the eyes of the Contag family, each member struggling to come to terms with their identities, fears, and commitments to one another. With honesty and compassion, the authors create a strong intimacy between the family and the reader that provides a ○ ○ ○ ○ Review by Kristina Lilleberg The Real Minerva By Mary Sharratt Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004 Price (Hardcover) $24 ○ ○ Where the Clouds Meet the Water By Kimberly E. Contag and James A. Grabowska Inkwater Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $25.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ brilliant introduction to these stories, Patricia Hampl shows us why.” With her incisive examination of the volatile relationship between St. Paul—past and present— and Fitzgerald—both the legend and the writer— Hampl, in effect, creates another character, one not mentioned directly in any of the selected pieces but constant in the reader’s mind throughout, the character of Fitzgerald himself. Hampl’s Fitzgerald is not only the iconic playboy of the Roaring Twenties, but also the often unappreciated, often critically dismissed writer during his own times who died believing himself a failure, describing himself in his own words as “F. Scott Fitzgerald; Hack Writer and Plagiarist; Saint Paul, Minnesota.” It is this character, this conception of Fitzgerald and his story laid out in Hampl’s introduction that leads to a new and deeper reading of The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 3 Page 4 Corresponder Spring 2005 Greed, Rage, and Love Gone Wrong By Bruce Rubenstein Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2004 Price (Hardcover) $22.95 Review by Nicole Lea Helget ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ lines of discussion from becoming incoherent. He mingles ideas from a strange, right-wing grammar text with details of Reagan’s dealings with the U.S. labor movement to explore power relations and government’s involvement in commerce. Throughout Shut Up Shut Down, Nowak uses testimonial and straight reportage to tell his story. At times, he alternates borrowed text laid out in the form of a prose poem with his own sparse, associative lines, melding disparate ideas in a final mash of despair and confusion. Nowak’s own language and line breaks are full of surprises. The fourth section, entitled “Francine Michalek Drives Bread,” is a haunting narrative poem split into fifteen acts. The fifth section incorporates more borrowed language, as well as some photographs, deployed skillfully for the purpose of juxtaposing the coldness of corporate decisionmaking with the hard realities of those affected by the closing of the Hoyt Lakes taconite plant on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Nowak’s work sometimes strays from what might fit a strict definition of “poetry,” but if this isn’t poetry maybe that distinction is unimportant, a word that doesn’t apply to Nowak’s work. This book is full of passion and allows the sad absurdities of post-industrial American life to expose themselves for what they are. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down is an unusual book of poetry. Divided into five eclectic sections, it deals with the human side of the deindustrialization of America. The poems involve conflicts between the haves and the have-nots over the course of the last century. Ronald Reagan becomes a prominent target, both for his anticommunist activities of the 1950s and for his treatment of striking air traffic controllers in the 1980s. These poems contain music, but ideas dominate, and their tone is as hard and cold as their subject. Nowak’s family history explains his interest in those left behind when factories close. The plants where his grandfathers and his father worked have all closed during Nowak’s adulthood. Now active in labor in Minnesota, he teaches in St. Paul, at the College of St. Catherine. The poems in Shut Up Shut Down are clearly literary activism, putting poverty and insecurity on display in a sometimes bewildering mix of materials. In these poems, Nowak uses passages culled from a variety of sources, each section includes its own works cited page, one might not normally associate with poetry. Many of the lines resemble poetry only in their line breaks, such as the following, from “Capitalization,” part 12: “Capitalize Devil, the Evil One, the Adversary / President Reagan has said there would be / “no amnesty” allowing a controller / to retain his job if, without a valid reason / such as sickness, he had missed / the deadline for returning to work.” Such lines owe their impact more to ideas and the associations between them than to sound. Nowak weaves several sources into his poems, and his use of boldface and italics keep the different ○ ○ Review by Jason Benesh ○ ○ ○ Shut Up Shut Down By Mark Nowak Coffee House Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $15 ○ ○ ○ ○ text mentioned in the story. Her mother Barbara is named for St. Barbara, a woman tortured by her own father for converting to Christianity. And then there is the Maagendenberg woman, who holds secrets of her own. Along with these mythic undercurrents there are familiar themes: maternal love, coming-of-age, the individual against society. It is a mark of Sharrat’s writing skill that the complicated plot and conflict never overwhelms the story. By the end, each one of these characters becomes real and vivid in the reader’s mind. And because we care so much, we keep reading, hoping that even if this narrative has the darkness of a fairy tale, that there will also be light. Bruce Rubenstein exposes some dirty little secrets about a few infamous Minnesotans in his book, Greed, Rage, and Love Gone Wrong. Rubenstein, an investigative reporter, compiles 10 true crime stories that stirred local communities in the past century and delivers them with vivid detail, sharp images, and tough language. The trials, misdeeds, and private lives of mobsters, millionaires, hoodlums, and celebrities draw the reader into the dark side of “Minnesota nice.” Rubenstein spares no one. His research, reportage, and authority hit hard and make for a rousing read. This excerpt from “Portrait of an Heiress,” a chapter that unravels the intricacies of the 1977 Glensheen Mansion murders in which the killer and accomplice were the victim’s own daughter and son-in-law, proves Rubenstein’s unabashed style: “By that afternoon the news had gone out that one of Minnesota’s most prominent citizens and her nurse had been brutally murdered. A media frenzy the likes of which Duluth had never seen ensued. Marge and [Roger] Caldwell came to town and set up headquarters at the Duluth Radisson Hotel, where Marge quickly found herself at the center of the furor…Marge confronted the accusations publicly. She bitched to reporters about the way the police were treating her and Caldwell, about their dire economic circumstances. She said it was a scandal that an heiress such as herself was virtually penniless.” Rubenstein goes on to account other crimes and possible murders committed by the Glensheen heiress. He follows her life to and from Arizona, in and out of courtrooms, and in and out of prisons. Rubenstein describes the defense used by the heiress’ lawyer, Ron Meshbesher, to get the heiress acquitted of her mother’s murder. And while the jury may have found Marge Caldwell not guilty, it is clear that Rubenstein does not wish to leave the reader with that impression. He uses a combination of sarcasm and irony to plant a seed of proverbial doubt. The chapter ends, “No one who is privy to her [Marge’s] affairs was willing to discuss her financial situation, but she will probably be just fine. She’s an heiress.” True crime books often run the risk of being confusing and convoluted. Murders, arsons, insurance claims, and disappearances can be complicated matters. Rubenstein does a fair job of managing the wealth of background information that makes these stories tick. The only failing Rubenstein exhibits is managing names. He often interchanges last names, nick names, and first names when referring to the same person. Rubenstein seems to forget that although he’s been studying and researching these people for years, readers have not and aren’t as familiar with his studies as he is. But despite this shortcoming, the book works. And for all those interested in true crime, Minnesota history, reportage writing, or nail-biting, this book is for you. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Since the 1970s, the sex industry has received resistance from many feminist groups who see pornography and prostitution as damaging tools to women’s rights in our society. This fight continues ○ ○ ○ ○ Review by Marissa Hansen ○ ○ Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography Edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant Spinifex Press, 2004 Price (Paperback) $24.95 today. Books such as Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography exist as a call to action and an investigation of the sexual exploitation of women. Edited by Rebecca Whisnant and Christine Stark (a recent graduate from Minnesota State University’s MFA program), this collection acts as a symbol of strength against the practice of trading in sex. Featuring 28 written works, this book spares no detail and says exactly what is on every feminist’s mind. The selected articles are categorized into three sections. The first section, “Understanding Systems of Prostitution,” contains articles that explain how the practice of sexual exploitation works, and how it affects people of different races. An interview between Stark and a former sex worker and an article by Whisnant offer a basic understanding of what pornography really is. Part two, “Resisting the Sexual New World Order,” explores a more personal and resistant point of view. Similarities between capitalism and prostitution are called to attention, as well as this stop-and-pause observation: “. . . the Upper Midwest is also tied to trafficking in children (313)”— the Upper Midwest, in this example, meaning places as close as Bemidji and Moorehead. An article written by Stark appears in this section as well. Entitled “Girls to Boyz: Sex Radical Women Promoting Pornography and Prostitution,” Stark points out the difference between the view of the feminist, who opposes the sex trade but chooses not to blame the women involved in it, and the view of the sex radical, who declares prostitution as just another form of sexuality. The sex radical, as Stark explains, uses the words lesbian and feminist interchangeably with sexuality and freedom, while simultaneously pandering to the mainstream ideals of what makes sex sell. “Sex radical women do the pornographer’s dirty work by promoting pornography and prostitution as work, freedom, fun, and choice in both lesbian/bisexual communities and mainstream society . . . . Sex radicalism turns away from feminism, embracing a captor/captive mentality as revolutionary.” The final part of the book, “Surviving, Conceiving, Confronting,” explains the roles people play in encouraging the continuation of prostitution and pornography. In recognizing how women are treated, portrayed, and viewed, society has the responsibility of either hindering or promoting this practice. Scrutinizing an industry run by sexism and corporate power, Not For Sale reveals the brutality suffered by victims of the trade, but also the courage and strength of those who stand up and search for a better way for women everywhere. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 5 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Page 6 Corresponder Spring 2005 Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey By Barton Sutter BOA Editions, Ltd. 2004 Review by Hans Hetrick ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ a brother and sister reunite in San Francisco and lose a car but discover new roles as adult siblings. This is a very hopeful story. “Veranda” follows love, or the possibility of it, through the perspective of an American woman teaching in India. Miner’s characters hope to find and share happiness. However, hope, as in life, is often imbedded in fear and sadness in Abundant Light. Miner’s compelling treatment of this injured hope keeps the reader turning the page. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Valerie Miner’s most recent book, Abundant Light, contains seventeen hopeful stories. Hope, in this case, has much to do with broadening friendships, family, partnerships, and brief meetings. These stories explore reason, impulse, and natural tendencies that are often overlooked or ignored in life. Set in places ranging from India to Canada, Miner’s stories confidently deal with culture and humanity through characterization. Her characters are often newcomers, visitors, or travelers. Bella, an aging woman of Scottish descent, in “Greyhound,” rides a bus from Vancouver to San Francisco. En route, Bella meets strangers, talks to them and contemplates her family and past: “They were a different family now; it reminded her of reknitting a sweater, adding room here and there to accommodate the expansiveness of life lived.” In each of these stories, character’s lives expand through travel or intellectual introspection. Miner takes simplistic plots and adds elements such as discovery, sadness, love, kinship, and rekindling. “The House with Nobody in It” unfolds the story of Minnesotan neighbors and their noise disagreement. “Back Home at The Driftwood Lodge” follows adult sisters vacationing by the Pacific Ocean in a place they used to frequent with their family. Through vivid details, the narrator, like many other characters in this book, revisits childhood. “Mist and rain are so thick that I imagine we’re at sea, headed to that mythical island we conjured as children, deep under the earth’s crust, between here and China.” Miner’s memory-laden characters in the everyday and simplistic situations (a bus ride, for example) make these stories worthwhile and complicated. In the title story, “Abundant Light,” a divorced couple reunites after a number of years. Old boundaries widen and expand as these oncesweethearts meet again and ponder rekindling their relationship, a brief hopefulness. Yet they choose not to engage in that one last romp, and instead select friendship as a matter of fact and “resolve of getting on with things.” This notion of moving forward with pain is a resoundingly curious personality trait that Miner enjoys tapping into and conveying. Miner’s controlled rendering of smart and conflicted characters is precise and truthful. They are the sort of people a stranger might enjoy talking to on a bus ride. Miner allows these characters plenty of desires and hopes. In “Playing Catch” ○ ○ ○ Reviewed by Kassie Duthie ○ ○ ○ Abundant Light By Valerie Miner Michigan State University Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $16.95 Have you ever had a friend who can’t help but be genuine? Each poem in Barton Sutter’s Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey is an afternoon of fishing with that friend. Mr. Sutter writes simple and lucid sentences. Their musical beauty sneaks up on you, and you’re hearing flowers before you know it. Consider these lines from “Buddha’s Fool:” “Read the horizon. Look sharp. See / How the raggedy treeline sinks? / The portage is probably back in the bay.” Sutter’s accessible language lets his metaphors and poetic devices ring loud. His comfort with his own poetic language and song give him a vast freedom to take risks. “The Daughter of the Mother of Invention” consists only of questions. “Inverse Letter to John Engram” is a powerful elegy in the form of a letter written backwards. Sutter writes a bitter indictment of the Bush administration in the form of a prayer with “The President’s Prayer.” There are lyrics, narratives, sonnets, villanelles, poems with choruses; Sutter is always inventing and surprising the reader. He is not afraid of anything. “Chickadee” is a poem full of hard end rhymes which, amazingly, doesn’t come off as corny. A lot of the poems sound hokey when described, but Sutter’s conviction and acumen for language and surprise overwhelm the reader before the end of the first line. Pulitzer Prize winner, Stephen Dunn, calls Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey, “a healthy sampling of what we see little of these days: the affirmative poem.” Most poems in this collection end in calm affirmation, but there is a rumbling of trouble in their past. Whether it’s his fondness for alcohol in the title poem, the loving struggles of family life, the futility of standing up against the government, Sutter is a man at peace with the turbulence the world haphazardly throws his way. May all our lives come to such an understanding. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ An interview with Barton Sutter The past of a lot of poems in Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey seem to be brewing with trouble, and there is an air of calm and authority in the present. I’m thinking of “The Necklace” (Ten tough years and you are still / the one I want) and “Sunflowers” (All my life I was lonely) and the last three sentences of the last poem of the collection “Pike Lake Lullaby” (Hush now. Quiet. / Nothing is wrong.). There is a distance between the two and they are both recognized in these poems. How do you preserve the visceral impact of a poem when writing at such a distance? Could a poem be written inside the brewing trouble? A What an interesting observation. Starlight is a midlife book. At forty I fell in love, saw therapists, went through a divorce, quit drinking, headed toward a new marriage with stepkids—the full catastrophe, as Zorba would say. Everything looked different after that. If there’s an air of calm in the “present” of the poems, believe me, it was hardwon. But you’d expect a “retrospective” attitude in many poems by someone over forty, wouldn’t you? “Could a poem be written inside the brewing trouble?” Of course, of course. “Consider the Lilies,” for example, arrived as a kind of vision in the early delirium of a love affair. That poem was a gamble, a wish, a prophecy, and I felt half nuts while writing it, but, lucky for me, life imitated art, the poem came true, the relationship held, my beloved turned out to be an excellent paddler, we’ve taken many canoe trips, and we often drift among lilies, though we hadn’t yet when I wrote the poem. “How the True Work of True Love Truly Begins” was written just a day or two after an awful fight with my wife. So, yes, it’s possible to write “inside the trouble.” In fact, it’s possible to write yourself out of trouble, to clarify things, to make things right; that’s a major motive for writing poems, in my view. But these poems written at white heat, in the midst of psychic storm, are not to be trusted. Often they turn out to be “merely” personal, their meaning too private, their linguistic interest too low. The cycle of love poems in Starlight ○ Q ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ was distilled from a manuscript three times as long; two thirds of them weren’t strong enough to make the cut. Wordsworth, of course, made the classic statement on this topic: “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Some subjects take years, even decades, to emerge; or maybe it takes you that long to be able to handle them. I recently finished a poem called “The Plaster” about two boys I played with when we were five and six years old, two little brothers and their dad. They lived on a hardscrabble farm up on the Canadian border, and their poverty has haunted me all of my life. I’m older, now, than their father was when this incident took place. These lines occur near the end of the poem: ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Fifty years have shown me how A gentleness can sometimes linger: I see his trembling, farm-thick fingers Plastering his young son’s brow With a dripping lump of cool blue clay To take the hornet’s sting away. Q There are many poems written in form: sonnets, villanelles, hard rhyme, and poems with recurring choruses. Do the forms come about naturally or do you set out to write in a form? A In order to write a sonnet, you first have to be WILLING to write a sonnet, to be INTERESTED in writing a sonnet. I grew up ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ You asked how to preserve the visceral impact when writing at such a distance. The answer, I think, is in specific, imagistic language. That picture had stayed with me for half a century; it seemed safe to bet the image might touch others also. So I’ll reach way back to childhood sometimes, in which case you tend to get a lot of “now-and-then” tension in the poem. Or I’ll write a few years after the fact. Or a few months or days. The distance varies. For me, the most “present tense” writing tends to occur when I’m out in the woods alone. I might be paddling along, and the language starts to come “as it happens,” whatever “it” might be. That’s very exciting. A lot of nature poems come that way. “Blowdown” would be one example. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 7 ○ ○ ○ Over time, you develop a sense of what form would likely work best for which impulse. If you’ve got something short— three clusters of images and a parting shot, for example—a sonnet might be right. If you’ve got characters, dialogue, and a story, you’re aware that ballad forms have worked well with that sort of thing for centuries. If you’ve got someone trying to talk herself into doing something awful, a villanelle, with those repeating lines, could be perfect. I picked up the use of refrains— especially refrains that keep changing a bit as they repeat—from the old Scottish border ballads. My brother Ross is a professional singer, and those are some of his favorite songs. That music has gone bone-deep with me and colored my poetry. I’ll never give up free verse, but I’m more and more fascinated with the old forms. Page 8 Corresponder Spring 2005 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ How has poetry changed since you began writing, and where can poetry find a place in our multi-media, information storm culture? A It’s no longer a crime to write in fixed forms, for one thing. In the seventies, you might be accused of being a fascist—a preposterous claim, since the ballad, for example, has always been the natural form for “folk” poetry, the poetry of “the people.” The influence of the modernists has waned; Eliot was still pope when I was in college. Contemporary poetry is all over the map; anything is possible—from verse novels to one-word concrete poems. The range is remarkable and good for the art, though rather baffling for readers, I’m afraid. When I was a kid, poets were exotic creatures. Most of them, it seemed to me, were either dead or living in New York. In high school, I could claim to be the best poet in all of Worth County, Iowa, because I was the ONLY poet in Worth County, Iowa. Louis Jenkins and I joke about this—how we took up poetry when we were young because no one else was doing it. That’s changed. Every little town seems to have a couple poets scribbling away. I have never been so optimistic about American poetry. Pound and Eliot, terrible snobs, gave the finger to the common reader. Their revolution may have been necessary, but it nearly destroyed the audience for poetry. With the success of The Waste Land, William Carlos Williams ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Q ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ on the Beats; free verse was the atmosphere I breathed. My interest in traditional forms was near zero. I associated meter and rhyme with Hallmark cards, occasional verse, stuffy old English poems crammed with references to Roman gods. My affection for Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, however, saved me from dismissing traditional forms altogether. And, to make a long story short, I got a good education and discovered contemporary Irish and English poets, steeped in their traditions, who stayed in touch with the old forms and proved you could use them to write new poems with plenty of zing. After grad school, I was living in Minneapolis, working as a swing-shift typesetter and writing mornings. I noticed my poems were picking up more and more sound effects—lots of alliteration, loads of internal rhyme. I looked at all that internal rhyme and said to myself, “What’s the matter? You chicken? Afraid they’ll think you’re old-fashioned?” So I tried, I DARED moving those rhymes out to the ends of the lines. I did a small tribute to Meridel LeSueur that came out as a rough kind of sonnet. I did a couple of memory poems out of my early boyhood in quatrains. And then—I’ll never forget it—one morning I wrote a poem in couplets with a four-beat line and heavy alliteration. I was completely absorbed by this poem, and when I was done, I sat back and said, “You know what? That’s better than you know how to write.” After that, of course, I was hooked. I’d had the great experience, I’d lived the secret known to all those who employ the old forms: The form is no strait-jacket. You don’t stuff language in the form like ground meat in a sausage casing. Not at all. After some practice, the form helps you write the poem; meter and rhyme engage your unconscious; they trigger diction your pea-brain, conscious efforts could never call to mind. So you read and study and slowly waken to the possibilities, and one day you draft a poem that’s thirteen lines long, and it’s got several rhymes and a kind of loop-de-loop halfway through. And you read this whatchemcallit over and say, “It looks like this thing wants to be a sonnet!” So you give it a nudge, try this and that, and lo and behold. Next time maybe the sonnet comes more naturally. So that’s it. It’s a kind of listening. Above all, you stay alive to the possibilities and keep asking, What does this poem want to be? How does it want to say itself? ○ ○ Interview cont’d. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ sub-sub specialties is a disaster and disgusting, but there are some good souls in universities; we need to coax them out into the public sphere and encourage them. We need inspired amateurs. We need everything: newspaper reviews that go beyond one-paragraph puffs; newspaper reviews of readings; more reviews and articles in literary magazines; lively books about contemporary poets; poetry talk radio with heated arguments; TV shows where critics lay it on the line; conferences including movies, music, and critical catfights; festivals that honor our poetic pioneers. These things need to happen nationwide, but let’s look at Minnesota. Studies have shown we’re one of the best-read states in the nation. So where is our monthly magazine of general culture with a northern sensibility? Every several years someone tries and flops. Our literary magazines are practically invisible. I was stunned to notice that The Corresponder has been around for thirty years. We never see it in Duluth. Why is that? It’s gotten really good, and I’m glad you’ve gone online, but why don’t you appear in every bookstore in the state? Why doesn’t it come out four times a year? With a boost in circulation, I’m sure that publishers would be pleased to advertise. Hell, you might even make money! And when are you going to drop that “fan letter” subhead? Thirty years ago, that made sense, but Minnesota literature has come of age since then, and it’s way past time to go beyond boosterism; most of your reviews already do. Poetry in Minnesota is in very good shape. This past year saw the publication of full-length books by Philip Dacey, Leo Dangel, Bill Holm, Louis Jenkins, and Joyce Sutphen—just to name a few that I admire. But there is very much, too much, to do. Poets tend to be big babies by nature, terribly self-absorbed, whining about our precious little careers, which usually don’t amount to much anyway. My father was a country preacher who raised eight kids on diddly-squat, and yet he gave ten percent of his desperately needed income to the church each year every year of his life. If all the poets in Minnesota kept a vow to transform 10% of our sulking into service to the public life of poetry, amazing things would happen here. ○ moaned that it would take American poetry a hundred years to recover. He had it just about right. But good poets have been writing accessible poems for many decades now, and I think we’re on the verge of winning back our readers. Poets-in-the-Schools programs have helped. Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac has been a wonderful gift. MFA programs have helped. National Poetry Month has been a boon. Many of the Poets Laureate have made smart moves; Ted Kooser has a fabulous project underway to get poetry back in the nation’s newspapers. The amount of activity in Duluth alone right now is just amazing. The Spirit Lake Poetry Series has been running for nearly ten years, and we often draw 200 people. Lake Superior College started a Minnesota Writers’ Series this year. The twenty-somethings are running the Foghorn Poetry Series at the Norshor Theatre. There’s a Lunch Poems series at St. Scholastica. There are readings in libraries, bookstores, coffeehouses, bars. Mara Hart started the Lake Superior Writers group with four people, and they zoomed to 200 members inside four years. Joe Maiolo runs a summer workshop at University of Minnesota Duluth. Poets have collaborated with the Duluth Symphony, with the Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra, with jazz combos and folk singers, with printmakers and photographers. Holy Cow! Press publishes here, and Jim Johnson is starting a new imprint. Young people publish their own chapbooks and sell out, actually make money! Though I love to whine and grumble, when I take stock I have to admit there’s one hell of a lot of poetry going on for a city of under 100,000. Am I wrong to assume this sort of thing is happening elsewhere? I don’t think so. Quantity, of course, is not to be confused with quality, and here is the area where we’ve failed, where the most work remains to be done. More poetry is being published and read aloud than ever before, but most of it, naturally, is bad to mediocre. This alienates many readers who otherwise might be enthusiastic. If poetry is ever going to win the audience that it deserves, distinctions must be made; attention must be drawn to the good, the better, and the best. We’re in desperate need of honest, intelligent, plain-spoken criticism that can reach the common reader. Review space in newspapers has contracted radically in the past twenty years; we need to fight for it. The retreat of literature profs into theory and sub- ○ ○ Interview cont’d. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 9 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ In Bart Schneider’s 2001 novel Secret Love, Jake Roseman mourns the death of his wife, symphony violinist Inez Roseman. His new novel, Beautiful Inez, focuses on Inez before her suicide. Like Secret Love, Beautiful Inez is set in 1960s San Francisco. In Beautiful Inez, Schneider once again lures readers into a complex network of relationships. A young woman named Sylvia Bran becomes obsessed with Inez, pretends to be a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and arranges to interview the violinist. Within weeks, the two women are involved in a sexual relationship. The affair enlivens Inez in a way her 20-year relationship with her husband has never done, but it is also the last pleasure she will ever know. Inez suffers from severe post-partum depression that she is unable to transcend. One of Schneider’s greatest strengths in this novel is his ability to create strong, believable characters. Inez’s lover, “voyant” Sylvia Bran, is a liar, pseudo-journalist, waitress, music store musician and habitual etymologist. In addition, she is still working through complex emotions that remain as the result of her mother’s suicide. Inez, a Swedish beauty, is a victim of both her upbringing and her failed marriage. The child of a picture framer, she spent her early years practicing the violin, to the exclusion of everything else. After sacrificing her childhood in pursuit of her art, she fails to become a solo performer and joins the San Francisco Symphony. She is a remote, complicated woman, and the affair with Sylvia Bran is a last ditch effort to find meaning in her otherwise unhappy existence. Secondary characters (especially Hyman Myerson, Sylvia’s boss, and Bibi, Inez’s older sister) are vividly drawn and add depth and texture to the novel. Schneider draws readers into the lives of his characters and into the very soul of music and musical performance with lyrical, stunning detail. “Sylvia is amazed at how slowly Inez can draw the bow across her violin and still achieve force, how the shift from up bow to down is not a shift at all but as even and immaculate a gesture as a single breath.” Passages such as this—and there are many more that are equally lovely—make the book well worth reading. Schneider edited the Hungry Mind Review from 1986 through 2000. He currently edits Speakeasy, the publication of The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His first novel was Blue Bossa. Page 10 Corresponder Spring 2005 Reviewed by Ryan Havely ○ ○ ○ Review by Cheryl Massé American Compass By Bill Meissner University of Notre Dame Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $15 ○ ○ ○ Beautiful Inez By Bart Schneider Shaye Areheart Books, 2005 Price (Hardcover) $24 Bill Meissner’s most recently published collection of poetry, American Compass, is a guided tour through not only the writer’s childhood—specifically his relationship to his father, who receives the dedication, “…Leonard Meissner, who followed his dashboard compass.” Divided into four sections: “First Corners,” “Braking Dreams,” “Taking the Curve,” and “Soul Highway,” American Compass takes the reader on a circular journey. Meissner begins in the home of a young man learning to tie a tie from his father. He moves through adolescence and high school, addresses becoming, however reluctantly, an adult, and ends with a father teaching a son to fish. Readers wind up not far from where they began. The poems “First Ties: The Father in the Mirror” and “Kiwi” are written in conversational, prosy free-verse. A young man idolizes his father, learning about life in the process. In being taught to knot a tie, the speaker learns, “being an adult meant/ you looked a little older, but you couldn’t breathe.” “Kiwi” is a series of memories involving family vacations and a father’s pungent shoe polish. The young man feels safe in situations in which the father is in control and gains comfort knowing, at least while his father is driving, danger lies outside of the car. Subsequent sections fall away from the confessional poems about growing up in the void of central Iowa and fly off into the land of the free. “Braking Dreams” is, for the most part, a series of elegies or letters written about and to a few key American names. Thomas Edison earns first mention, followed by Joe DiMaggio. James Dean is awarded double duty, seen both walking the New York streets and rising from the ashes of the crash that took his life. A weakness of the section, unfortunately, is that these specific poems immortalizing American heroes are surrounded by generality. A poem about a ventriloquist, another about a man “Who Wrestled the Lawn,” and odes to both cows and Chevy Novas, although strongly American, are out of place and nearly stop the forward momentum of this collection altogether. By far the most unified section, “Taking Curves” is made up of thirteen poems all somehow centered around baseball. From a child catching fly balls with his father in the wake of a lost job to a couple saving their marriage by relieving stress in a batting cage, this section branches out to cover nearly all of America’s bases before heading back to Iowa for the father’s funeral. Marked by a Elfrieda’s Cat: Notes of a High School Literature Teacher By George Roberts Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2003 Price (Softcover) $16.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ them as the Chinese poet Li Po sent his down the Yangtze. The chances of them being read this way are greater than by publication he says. We are lucky recipients of Jenkins’ Sea Smoke, not having had to wait for his poems to arrive by water. They arrive in their present form just as mysteriously. Reviewed by Melody Gersonde ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Louis Jenkins’ prose poems build an intimate kinship between poet and reader. These are poems that welcome us. There is genuine modesty here, and Jenkins prefers it that way. His humor is wrought naturally and skillfully. A lucid elegance and a refined spirit belies his modesty and makes Sea Smoke a work of true craftsmanship. The first poem, “Imaginary Reader” asks, “And who is the reader for whom you write?” Jenkins conjures up a beautiful woman reading in bed, never setting the book down, the poet’s dream audience. Even so, the poet, he says, must write faster to keep the book from slipping from the tired woman’s hands. This isn’t a task to take lightly. Relationship with some familiar corner of the world is at stake. In these prose poems, we are not tricked through line breaks. The reader does not require them since intimacy is achieved immediately. The combined looseness of prose and the tight structure of poetry make the prose poem one of the most accessible forms to general readers. For Jenkins, this form allows the most authentic voice. The opening section is full of youthful desire, naïve fantasy, and loneliness. Throughout youth, middle age, and old age, Jenkins rewards us with humble wisdom, anecdote, and surprise. In “Canadian Wilderness,” he captures the horrific realization of one’s domestication by the discovery alone in the wilderness of a mattress label attached to his back. In “Body and Soul,” he finds the temple to be an inadequate metaphor for the body and sets out to bravely compare the soul to a bad driver in a motor home. In “Where Go the Boats,” Jenkins advises the young poet to make new poems into boats and sail ○ ○ ○ Review by Anna Larson ○ ○ ○ Sea Smoke By Louis Jenkins Holy Cow! Press, 2004 Price (Hardcover) $13.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ heartening tone and caring, lamenting language, the last section forces us to face the inevitability of life while enjoying the benefits of becoming a fully functional, family-oriented adult. As a continuous journey, American Compass points readers in the right directions and does a good job leading them through the lives of a few classic American characters. Though the collection lacks in unity at times, and some of the poems are hard to follow. These are small setbacks to an overall uplifting and level-headed collection of American poems. This book belongs in the hands of anyone interested in the heart of this country, or anyone wanting to learn a little bit more about the lives of those who live there. “Each morning before the bells begin rattle through the halls, I unlock my classroom door and enter, / An ancient shopkeeper whose rituals have become the currency of neighborhood conversation.” From the first line of George Robert’s first poem “Opening Up,” Elfriede’s Cat gives us insight into the classroom unlike anything else short of being a teacher yourself. He reveals the inner working of teaching that go beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. George Roberts taught literature and writing for thirty-two years in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Each morning, he rose early and wrote poetry for a couple of hours before beginning his day. He retired from teaching in 2001 and now looks after Homespace Studios, a corner store in their neighborhood he and his wife remolded. It has five artist’s studios and a small gallery where local artists can show their work. Robert’s poetry is a clear look into the hearts and thoughts of those who have taught us, our parents, and our children. In the poem “Two Unbearable Lists,” “A teacher begins listing reasons her students cannot learn, speaking them quietly into the air like prayers…” Roberts then implicates both students and parents for poor educations “… They have forgotten their manners … What is wrong with their families? Don’t they know first things learned are the hardest to forget?” Roberts, throughout this collection, is honest about triumphs and insecurities of teaching and the difficulties of being a student. Elfriede’s Cat is a refreshing look at the teacher. The author describes the necessity and rewards of teaching in “Correspondents:” “And no matter how heavily we burden them, our children continue to believe they can fly, America remains to be discovered and the earth turns and turns, eager for the ravishing light of the imagination.” George Roberts poetry is alive and vivid and worth the read. Through extensive historical research and compassionate storytelling, the pains, hopes and triumphs of one ordinary family bring to light the extraordinary untold tales of the German Ecuadorian survivors. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 11 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Page 12 Corresponder Spring 2005 Earthling By Steve Healey Coffee House Press, 2005 Price (Softcover) $14 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ up-and-comers from the ritzy side of the pond. It is here that he meets Dana McGuire, a startling beauty, ringleader and temptress of this depraved underworld. He instantly falls head over heels for her and is determined to do anything to keep Dana all to himself. The drugs, booze, and raunchy sex flow freely for a while, and Keith feels confident that Dana loves him and soon they will leave and start their own life together. When Dana turns on him (think orgy and blindfolds and videotape), he snaps and sees red. The following day when Keith comes to, Dana is dead and Milwaukee’s elite are hunting for his head. This is when things start to get crazy. Sparrow is a writer who isn’t afraid to take chances with his story. There are no good guys or bad guys here, and Keith is certainly not the average tortured hero. Sparrow lets his characters run wild and take the reader on a fast paced ride. Northwoods Standoff feels like classic crime noir with the insanity of a mental ward tossed in for extra kick. Review by Eric Hoffheiser ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Thomas Sparrow’s, Northwoods Standoff, centers around Keith Waverly, a con-man and drug fiend on the run from gangsters he robbed in his old home state of Florida. Waking up in a posh hotel in downtown Milwaukee with $500,000 of stolen money crammed in a gym bag by his feet, Keith decides to do the most logical thing; he finds the most despicable people the city has to offer and blends right in with them. He doesn’t have to look very far. His first night out on the town, he slithers his way into a private party that ends up as an orgy for blue-bloods and ○ ○ ○ Review by Philip N. MacKenzie ○ ○ ○ Northwoods Standoff By Thomas Sparrow Blue Stone Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $12.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ In The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors, a collection of stories with unique views of country life, Iowan author Tricia Currans-Sheehan successfully gives voice to several new female voices from the Midwest. Her life with nine siblings on a 280-acre farm near the Des Moines River provided more than enough experiences to inspire the stories found in The Egg Lady. Farming communities are the setting for several pieces, like “The Raffle, “And Now’s He’s Gone and Now You’re Back,” and “The Secrets that Men Have.” Sheehan avoids the rural landscape and forces readers to focus on more immediate environments—a church, a kitchen, a basement—as characters discover new strengths or flaws within themselves. The influences of the rural life and the church provide an extra layer of intrigue. What does the girl in “Margaret” witness her father doing to their hogs? Why does the woman in “Called for Action” stay devoted to Catholicism if women are so restricted? The author succeeds with her creations of several unique narrators. Eight of the eleven pieces in the collection are told in first person, but each is distinguishable from the next. A child narrates “The Last Trapshoot,” a convict in “The Many Stages of Their Making,” and a housewife in “The Men with the Leopard Wallpaper.” These and the other stories in The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors entertain, delight, and disturb. ○ ○ Review by Sara Hein ○ ○ The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors By Tricia Currans-Sheehan New Rivers Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $14.95 Earthling, Steve Healey’s collection of poems, at first, seems dissonant. Healey doesn’t often make direct statements. Images seem detached, but this adds to the sensation that parts of our world hang like crooked pictures. What may first seem like an abstraction in a poem turns out to be Healey’s unique sense of awareness of the world around him and the complex interplay between the people in it. “Why We Continue” depicts a suburbia wilder than the surrounding wilderness toward which it crawls, a place where “years inhale property tax / attics fill with bat excrement till homeowners sell it as fertilizer.” Comic cynicisms such as these shine throughout the book. “I Live Two Doors Down from the Powerball Winner” takes a humorous, off-kilter look at what it means to have money and media exposure in America. Healey’s world is one where we are all tuned in, all part of the same mass media circulatory system, but where meaningful human contact is becoming a thing of the past century. He writes that “waking is where all the best roads / meet the water on my face, and lying there / feels so new it’s not possible to talk.” Perhaps, as earthlings, we all need to wake up. These are poems many readers will struggle with, only to be rewarded in the end. His work stays dissonant still, but it is also a poignant reflection of our time. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ The View from Delphi By Jonathon Odell MacAdam/Cage, 2004 Price (Hardcover) $24.00 Review by Trisha Shaskan ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Jonathan Odell’s first novel, The View From Delphi, gives readers an equitable view of preCivil Rights Delphi, Mississippi. The story contains suffering and loss, redemption and hope. Delphi’s corrupt sheriff pays his dues by getting caught up in a scandal. Slaves pick cotton at the plantations in the day, but socialize and drink at One Wing Hannah’s at night. Members of The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Trois Arts League gossip about, wave handkerchiefs at, and snub those of lower social rank but get duped by them. In the midst of it all, a wealthy, white woman, Hazel, and a poor, black maid, Vida, gain each other’s a friendship. Their friendship crosses the racial divide and brings equilibrium to their lives despite their segregated community. When Vida becomes Hazel’s maid they loathe each other until they discover they have both lost a son. Vida’s social status has plummeted from Reverend’s daughter to maid, and Hazel has become an alcoholic. With no one else to turn to, the two women turn to each other. Odell writes, “With no place to go, Vida laid her head on Hazel’s lap and at last began to cry. As she gently stroked Vida’s hair, Hazel wept also. Loss filled the roomæfathers and mothers and husbands and sons, dead and forfeited and snatched away. Vida looked up to see the other woman’s tears. She rubbed her cheek against Hazel’s hand. In their private grieving, each tried to comfort the other.” Although Jonathan Odell resides in Minnesota, he was born and raised in Mississippi. Odell takes his readers to his home state through his ability to capture southern dialects, interesting characters, and social critique. Vida’s father, Reverend Levi Snow imparts words of wisdom such as, “I reckon that’s got to be the hardest thing about loving…Calling out in the dark. Pleading with love to show its face again.” When Vida meets a woman called Sweat Pea, Sweat Pea introduces her to the concept of sleeping with white men for pay by giving this advice: “You tell me which sounds smarter. Pickin the white man’s cotton for two dollars a day or layin on im for five? I didn’t pass through eighth grade for nothin. I got that deal figgered.” Some readers might find Odell’s view of the segregated south to be improbable: the senator has run the KKK out of Delphi, lynching can be avoided, and a white woman drives around with three black maids delivering pamphlets on how to vote under the guise of charity. But all the while, ○ “That sandbar, the first time we fished the Blue, was the Promised Land. Maybe we’d met somebody who told us that was where the fish were, maybe we even saw a fisherman—a native— carrying a big stringer of catfish back across; anyway that was where I, at seven or eight, had to go or die.” This childish delight of Ed Moses is evident throughout his fishing memoir, Pilgrimage with Fish, a tightly written narrative of his experiences fishing as a child and as an adult, primarily with his son, Jeremy, blended with a sensible philosophy of human bonding and shared wonderment on the lakes and rivers of Pennsylvania, Kansas, Minnesota, and Ontario. Moses spends much of this memoir detailing his familiarity with catch-and-release fishing, the only kind his son will participate in. He ponders the differences between sport fishing and survival fishing, enjoyment and boasting. Punches are only slightly held back as Moses comes down on those who pull multitudes of fish from the rivers and lakes, especially those who eat only a portion of what they catch or none at all. While Moses may be a naturalist as heart, he is a friend of the everyday angler and the fishing families who make the connections between human life and the natural world. Despite what readers might expect from a book about fishing, Moses turns away from the mythic fishing tales of the perfect place to sink your lures; instead, he attempts to debunk them. “At fishing resorts, time collapses.” he writes, “The proprietor will tell you fifty fish stories in an hour, every one of them true. They sound like they all happened last week, instead of during the twenty-four years he’s owned the place, but what is the truth?” For readers not interested in fishing, this probably is not the best book for you. Moses knows his stuff, and lets us know through his fishing jargon and explanations of fishing scenarios that sent this reader reeling. At times poetic, others conversational, Pilgrimage with Fish is a gentle and generous book. Moses meditates on life, but mostly shows us the joy he finds in fishing and spending time with his family on the water, even as the days come to an end, “Nothing and nothing again—we’ve caught what we’re going to. Which in a sense makes the honor of throwing the last cast into the bridge hole an empty one, but still. I lean the rod tip back over my shoulder….” ○ ○ ○ Review by Brian Baumgart ○ ○ ○ Pilgrimage with Fish By Ed Moses New Rivers Press, 2004 Price (Softcover) $14.95 Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 13 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ freshingly humble. He writes about the “Argento curse,” whereby strange accidents befall him during public moments. During the premier of one of his works, he was invited to come up on stage, but opened the wrong door, wandered through a maze of hallways, and found himself out on the street, locked out. There are many such narratives in this book, a fine model for future musical memoirists. The Full Matilda By David Haynes Harlem Moon Broadway, New York, 2004 Price (Softcover) $14 Page 14 Corresponder Spring 2005 ○ Review by Michael O’Hearn ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Dominick Argento, Minnesota’s most renowned classical composer, has assembled a memoir structured around his memory of performances of his compositions, which range from church anthems to full-blown operas. Over the past five decades, the arc of his career parallels that of Minnesota culture in general. This book is not just for classical music lovers. His account of his collaboration with Tyrone Guthrie—for whose dramatic productions he often wrote incidental music—is especially worth reading. Argento has an eye and ear for the absurd. When the GuthrieArgento version of The House of Atreus played on Broadway, with its pre-recorded musical interludes, union rules required that a stand-by orchestra of twenty-nine musicians be hired, who did not play their instruments but “played poker … in the theater’s basement while overhead Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon in his bath and Orestes and Electra plotted to even the score.” As should be evident from the above quoted passage, Argento is a skilled writer. Though highly cultured and trained in music theory, he tells his story in such a way that the layperson can enjoy it, highlighting not just the shape of his compositions, but also the context in which they came to life, with especially good anecdotes about fellow musicians and composers—the best example of which is how Argento’s conservatory teacher Nicholas Nabakov (cousin of Vladimir) served America during the height of the blacklisting era by sniffing out Communist motifs in seemingly innocent melodies. I most deeply appreciate Argento’s sensitivity to literature, as expressed in his adaptations of such works as The Aspern Papers and The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, and also in his description of craft which seems parallel to the craft of writing, especially poetry. “I have found… that by not concerning myself with what note comes next, my imagination is completely unhampered and I feel free to give my full attention to … shape, texture, and mood.” While proud of his accomplishments, especially his Pulitzer Prize, Argento is also re- ○ ○ ○ ○ Reviewed by Roger Sheffer ○ ○ Catalogue Raisonne As Memoir Dominick Argento University of Minnesota Press, 2004 Price (Hardcover) $22.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ Odell gives voices to a large range of realistic characters from different socio-economic backgrounds that make a lasting impression in this heartfelt, optimistic account of a town on the verge of change. In the Full Matilda, David Haynes follows the rise of the Housewright family over nearly a century, beginning with Matilda, her brother Martin, and their father Jacob, who heads the service staff in a wealthy senator’s home in Washington, D.C. Living under the senator’s roof and the strict hand of their father, Matilda and Martin come to understand the complex, unstated rules of service, power, and race. “The truth about men of prominence is that they are just like you and me. When you grow up as part of the household of someone like the senator, you live behind the curtain, as it were. Out front, in places where these people put themselves on display, everything is designed to make them look grand and important and larger than life,” Haynes writes. After their father’s death in 1947, Matilda moves into the family home, which she and her father sacrificed to acquire, while Martin marries and starts a catering business. Matilda rarely leaves the house after that, but through a succession of relationships, passes down the Housewright family knowledge to Martin’s children and grandchildren, with each new generation building the family business until it is a multimillion dollar food service corporation. Haynes is skilled in dealing with race, being both honest and fair, and relegating it to only part of the story. In the end, it is Matilda’s greatnephew Jake, who must struggle most with race, as he is born to a white mother and black father, and finds it difficult to fit in on either side of the fence. The stories of the Housewright progeny and the Housewrights’ time in the senator’s home, are skillfully interwoven, showing how each time period reflects on the other, and how the values Matilda learned from her father Jacob work in any era. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ September 8 Diana Joseph (Fiction) Richard Robbins (Poetry) Roger Sheffer (Fiction) ○ September 29 Steve Gehrke (Poetry) Nicole Helget (Nonfiction) Mike Magnuson (Fiction/Nonfiction) ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ November 10 Charles Baxter (Fiction) December 8 Stuart Dybek (Fiction) NEWS AND NOTES The Corresponder is a biannual publication that features Minnesota writers. Direct all correspondence and review copies to: The Corresponder Department of English Minnesota State University, Mankato 230 Armstrong Hall Mankato, MN 56001 Or E-mail inquiries to: [email protected] Now On-line at: www.english.mnsu.edu/cwpubs/ corresponder/corresponder.htm ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ October 20 Ed Bok Lee (Poetry) Juliana Pegues (Poetry) Thien-Bao Thuc Phi (Poetry) The Corresponder is edited by Nick Healy and Hans Hetrick. The editors would like to thank all reviewers for their great work. ○ Sarah Stonich, a St. Paul resident and author of the novel These Granite Islands, sets her second book, The Ice Chorus in Mexico, Canada, and Ireland. The multiplicity of locations gives Lise, the protagonist, the distance necessary to reconnect with herself and discover some truths about her supporting characters. Stonich uses Lise’s career as a burgeoning documentary filmmaker as a vehicle for introspection. The camera lens is a springboard into Lise’s struggle to reconcile with her father, her lover, and her son. Lise, fifty-ish and unhappily married, accompanies her absentee husband, Stephen, on his archeology research in Mexico, while their teenage son Adam remains behind in Toronto. She finds herself alone in the villa, drawn to and distracted by Charlie, a stereotypical brooding artist. The relationship with Charlie produces some of Stonich’s strongest writing. Charlie’s paintings create the clearest view of Lise. It is as if the writer is holding the paintbrush. And in viewing those same works of art, Lise is able to see herself. Lise’s affair with Charlie, her subsequent divorce from Stephen, and her own father’s infidelity haunt her in the secluded cottage in Ireland where she has sought refuge. However, Lise emerges from her seclusion renewed. Armed with her camera, Lise draws out the stories of Siobhan, Remy, and Margaret for her documentary, and at the same time, opens her life to the reader. Stonich’s writing flows seamlessly between present day and remembrances of the past. The lens of the camera quietly capturing a memory, the paintbrush stroking the canvas, and the secrets brought to the surface blend many tales into one. This multifaceted love story of a despondent woman becomes a neatly wrapped gift FALL 2005 GOOD THUNDER READING SERIES EVENTS ○ ○ ○ Review by Colleen Arey Timimi ○ ○ ○ The Ice Chorus By Sarah Stonich Little, Brown and Company, 2005 Price (Hardcover) $24.95 ○ ○ ○ ○ David Haynes’s other novels include All American Dream Dolls, Live at Five, and Somebody Else’s Momma. He teaches creative writing at Southern Methodist University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Corresponder Spring 2005 Page 15 *210011* The Corresponder Department of English Minnesota State University, Mankato 230 Armstrong Hall Mankato, MN 56001 A member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System. The Corresponder MSU is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity University. A Fan Letter on Minnesota Writers This document is available in alternative format to individuals with disabilities by calling the Department of English at 507-389-2117 (V), 800-627-3529 or 711 (MRS/TTY). Are you a local author or publishing company in Minnesota with a recent work for review? For review consideration in an upcoming issue of The Corresponder, please send your book, along with a short biographical sketch to: The Corresponder Department of English Minnesota State University, Mankato 230 Armstrong Hall Mankato, MN 56001 Page 16 Corresponder Spring 2005
