Porous Land by Agnes Vojta: Review

Agnes Vojta

Porous Land

Spartan Press

March 2019

57 pages

978-1-950380-01-5

$15

Reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Agnes Vojta's Porous Land is nearly textbook minimalism.. Every word seems created specifically for the task she sets it to perform in the poem. I don't mean minimalist to an extreme, but rather that there is no fat on the words. The overall effect is a bracing shiver of recognition at the natural world and our place in it, as well as how that world shapes our thoughts.

I found myself in a sort of dream-state the deeper I got into the collection. in the "Greening Begins from the Ground," Vojta sets up a scene not by telling us what is in the scene but instead what is not, in lovely simple phrases and lines: "Not in the high places/that still belong to winter/not on the barren ridges/where buzzards rest on bare branches,//but in the valleys". In the valleys she describes, with an Eastern feel, where "shy white flowers hide" in the manner of Japanese masters of meditational verse.. I'm very much in the moment of the poem, my eye flowing along the images but then Vojta stumbles a bit. The Eastern feel ends at "green shoots push through the soil" and Vojta adds an unnecessary two-line coda that hammers the point home by doubling up and restating the title, a momentary and unfortunate twitch in an otherwise fine poem.

In another poem, somewhat later on in the collection, Vojta gives us a deft thirty-nine word epiphany: "The Spring Rains Were Relentless." Here she gives a class in how to use strong verbs. This river never merely flows (thank god) but "smashes", "slashes," "slices" and "crashes." Houses caught by the water "struggle" and "thrash" and "swirl," and this short poem finishes by cutting away from the house breaking up as it follows the stream, to another human intrusion in this powerful flash flood. "The round eye/of the satellite dish/does not blink/before drowning.

There are highlights on nearly every page here, but I want to discuss one more poem which can stand in for the whole of this fine book. I'll quote it in its entirety.

Oracle

The heron is the color

of a November morning.

Fog wets the river rocks.

Fossils faintly echo

a gray past.

I shall take one stone

home,

to look

through its waterworn hole

and see the future.

It's not that the images here are overtly unusual, but that this first stanza is nearly matchless in its rhythm and breaks, the subtle and deliberate repetitions that make up the poet's inimitable voice. The great blue heron makes an appearance here for the second or third--maybe more?--time in this collection. A November morning where I live, next to the ocean, also includes a damp, somewhat desolate and gray fog, so I'm already buying into what the poet is selling me, and. when the last stanza kicks in, and I think of how many stones my children and I have brought home from oceans and rivers wherever we've gone, I live that again through Vojta's poem. I've seen that waterworn hole in the stone, and I can find my own future there too. You could ask more of a poem, probably, but this is pretty damned satisfying to me. 4.5 stars of 5.

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Mike James

The River’s Architecture for Louis McKee, d. 11/21/11 The river has a shape you follow with your whole body: shoulder, footstep, and ear- those who know how to listen hear how river wind is like breath, alive in lung and line. Mike James makes his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has published in hundreds of magazines, large and small, and has performed his poetry at universities and other venues throughout the country. He has published over 20 collections and has served as visiting writer at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. His recent new and selected poems, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last collection, Back Alley Saints at the Tiki Bar, was published in April by Redhawk. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, TN.

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared. His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years. James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t

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