Super Blood Wolf Moon, by Gary V. Powell, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Super Blood Wolf Moon

Gary V. Powell

Kallisto Gaia Press 2020

41 pages

$12.95

Powell's chapbook is an impressive undertaking, Beginning with the evocative title, Super Blood Wolf Moon, the collection takes us through rocky pitfalls of life with wit and poignance. "On Learning of the Death of an Old Girlfriend on Facebook Before Finishing Your First Cup of Coffee" uses repetition to make its point, in a a chant or wail of sadness in which the narrator bemoans the loss of an old love while performing the odd tasks of a life, walking the dogs and remembering that annual flowers are just that: they always come back, but that she won't. Age and accident rule us all, and it's never easy to take.

Another poem which uses repetition to its great advantage is a poem titled "Crowder Peas." The first and last stanzas are identical: "Remembered picking crowder peas/for the first time in years." Yet in the middle, contrary to the first poem, the narrator catalogues the natural elements that remind him of a girl and her father, the doilies his grandmother crocheted, and the bark of a dog on his father's farm. It's a lovely, if sentimental, perhaps because it deliberately and bravely risks sentimentality, poem.

"Super Blood Wolf Moon" is the most representative poem here in its descriptions and mood, so I'll discuss it at length. from the first third of the poem

. . .You've seen this first, full winter moon before,

hanging like a lantern over Indiana corn fields,

floating like a Mardi Gras mask over Lake

Pontchartrain, rising like a New Year's'

ball over Lake Michigan, and riding

like a horseman over Iowa prairie.

I admire the way the poet gives us four different views of the moon, not any of which you would normally take to look like the other, so it's a fine piece of writing that brings together disparate looks at the same thing. And later on, "You've seen a lot because you're retired, now,/ like the winter copperheads burrowed beneath/these stones, and you have plenty of time,/. . . . The narrator has plenty of time of course, but these snakes probably don't, and this the fragility of life retired or otherwise offers itself up for our consideration. The remainder of the poem describes the meaning behind super blood wolf moon, and I find myself interested in it only as a way for the retired narrator to give us his thoughts on what it means. The technical definition, eh, not so much.

Poetry collections like Powell's serve to show how much there is to discover about American poetry. In all its hives and cells and uni programs and community centers, there are beating hearts of poetry each so different from the other it beggars belief. Kallisto Gaia Press may be one such locus. I do know one thing, of all of them Gary V. Powell deserves much more recognition than he currently has, and the poetry world at large, in all of its multifariousness, could use his wisdom.

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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