Louisville Review

The Spring 2005 issue of the Louisville Review treats a wide variety of subject matter in its poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Selections in fiction are well-crafted and readable in styles both realistic and fanciful. Subjects explored ranging from a mother’s concern about her son’s involvement with Jihad to a junior high boy’s preoccupation with the development of his own social identity, from the power of the mega-church to subsume the identities of its practitioners to the power of cultural myth to explain private choice, and from the perspective of a dog on life and death to one man’s culpability in the life and career of another. Nonfiction ranges from craft to personal revelation.

The poetry for the issue is primarily free form with one to three selections representing the work of the 30 poets chosen for the volume. The poems are short, often anecdotal, with a strong sense of voice and a contemporary approach to subject matter. The subjects explored range from such current experiences as the Tsunami and West Nile Virus to such traditional subjects as multiple roles of the self, the nature of writing, crises in relationships, and the cacophony of urban life.

The best short story in my judgment is “Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers” by David Brendan Hopes. In a self-confessional mode, the narrator introduces the reader to the artist Carlos and traces the development of the relationship between the two from the earliest encounter to the point at which Carlos disappears from the narrator’s life. The narrator plays Judas to Carlos, a kind of Christ of the paintbrush. As a freshman, the narrator meets Carlos one night when he hears his cries of anguish in the empty university building that housed both art and business. The business major finds the art major kneeling before a painting, “tears streaming out of his eyes.” There was compassion but no blood. The scene reminds the reader of the single icon on Carlos’ apartment wall described in the opening paragraph: “a staring lynx-eyed Christ with Byzantine ambiguity of expression, between wrath and longing.”

The narrator becomes an instant disciple of the young master painter, and moves through a cycle of betrayal. While the painter, a kind of suffering servant who never complains and is ultimately giving, sells off his possessions and nearly starves, the would-be business manager sells his paintings at increasingly higher prices for a tidy commission. He rationalizes the thefts by insisting that the painter knows what is happening and by setting up a trust fund in both their names. While the Judas archetype is enacted in the life of the narrator, the story only seems predictable at the end when the artist disappears leaving behind a lasting gift of artistry. It is then that the narrator’s wish to connect with the artist, to figure in his journal, is realized as a bid for immortality. The ultimate nature of the artist’s love for the narrator and the self-consuming devotion to the often absent father-figure play into the writer’s use of myth as well.

In nonfiction, I was impressed with what Pamela White was able to do in the brief personal essay “Meeting June.” Looking backward to an experience she had had as a young child on a cold winter night in Alaska, she is able to capture the sense of the excitement of the rare trip to Goose Lake for skating and to combine with that excitement the darker sense of danger of cracking ice that she only partly understood at the time.

White uses the reflection in the car window as a focal image to foreshadow the experience she is about to reveal. She notes that the passing lights provided a fleeting reflection of her child’s inner self, “clear and inviolable, wise and all-knowing” before it turned back to darkness.

Anxious to join the darkness, the daughter is called by the father to the light of the hut where she has seen him kiss June Faulkner on the cheek. With the laughter of the two adults in the background, the child fantasizes that she pushes June through the cracked ice. She skates away from the other children, holding the “stars in the grip of [her] eyes and pulled [her] reflection all the way back down and into [her] heart.” But the ice didn’t crack and she heard only June Faulkner whispering in her ear.

One of the most interesting poems in the volume is Jonathan Weinert’s “Blazes.” The speaker observes a reader reading. In the first stanza, the reader is compared to a ranger who “walks until the end of woods.” The woods become a metaphor for the interaction of man and text that extends through the next seven stanzas. In the last stanza, the poem turns back to a concluding denotative description of the reader.

The woods are “untraveled” with few hikers, the trails are difficult for the ranger to clear, and the trail markers are hard “to renovate.” The ranger has time to think and is transformed by his experience in the woods. He imaginatively extends himself into the life of “someone else,” and he catches the illumination of a shadow self that in effect makes himself transparent. The ranger’s experience and the reader’s experience are equated and each extends himself, the reader “to the end of words” and the ranger “to the end of woods.”

Weinert reinforces the relationship between the tenor and vehicle of his extended metaphor by describing the brush as “scribbling up the trail—a single line, like prose” and comparing the stars to “letters on a page.” He deepens the sense of the metaphor by alluding to such traditional images of the imaginative role of literature as the mirror and the lamp and the shadows in Plato’s cave. The ranger “sees himself as someone else” reflected in the beaver pond. This stranger is “built of shadows.” The stranger doesn’t look at the ranger but “looks right through him.” The experience of illumination comes from this reversed image, “a world in negative.” The blood of the ranger “runs green or clear,” and the “brook trout’s veins run gold.” There is alchemy in the experience of reading that blazes in “pointed fires” of the white pines and the “night sky’s blinding.”

The reader reads to the “final page, and then beyond the page.” His mind extends beyond the reading and this superlative of illumination is figured in the title and touchstone of the poem. The word “blazes” is used in all of its multiple meanings. It signifies the mark that indicates the path, the strength of the emotion, the shine of the illumination, the intensity of the imaginative fire, and the dissemination of meaning or spreading of news.

A similar use of extended metaphor can be seen in Debra Kang Dean’s “The Bog.” In this poem, the rescue of a woman who has broken her ankle is used to explore the refraction of light or the ambiguity of illumination. The anecdote pits the pragmatic interests of the rescue party against the seemingly petty concern of the woman for the shoe that must be removed. Obsessed with the fate of the shoe, the woman redirects her emotion from her own pain and embarrassment to the one thing that she believes she can control. The closing image—“She cradles the shoe”—distances her from the cradle or stretcher that removes her from danger.

The extended image distorts the reality of the situation while it clarifies the nature of the woman. It’s not merely that she is concerned about a pair of shoes, but it is that she is interested in maintaining control of her life. Reflecting back on Ms. Pogany, the extended metaphor explains the central concept of the poem that “light distorts and clarifies.” When “seen dead on,” Ms. Pogany appears “eerily alien.”

In both Dean’s and Weinert’s poems the extended metaphor carries the poem and provides the poetic dynamic that captivates the reader. In Gabby Kindell’s “Mother Poem,” the poetic intensity comes from the first person narration, the voice of the poem. The persona engages the dead mother in dialogue over the flowers that she brings to celebrate each birthday. She questions whether she might exchange the flowers for the bones that are left in the grave but concludes that the boundary cannot be crossed, that “dirt or flesh” dictates the separation.

The power of the poem comes through the direct address, the request to “hold the hips” that “held the weight of [the narrator] for months.” Embodied in that request there is a deeper request, the request to know “some secret part” of the mother that has never been known and to gain a level of intimacy that is forever denied. The reality of separation rides on the irony of the italicized “beautiful” in the last line.

The poem with the greatest metrical beauty in this volume is Richard Newman’s “Dumpster Fires.” Written in terza rima, the poem celebrates the beauty of the contained urban fire against the night. The interlocking rhymes of the tercets move the commuters in the poem from office to home and provide a sense of order and safety in an otherwise dangerous environment. The presence of firemen relieves the travelers from anxiety freeing them to enjoy the dance of the flames and detonates the potential for rage. The experience is even provided a sense of ordination by the concluding couplet. Not only is the fire “contained,” but thanks to the heavens, “It rained.”