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

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

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