Poetry Magazine February 2020 by Don Share

Poetry Magazine February 2020 Reviews

• 
  Joseph Dante

  Solid issue this month! Leagues better than the January issue. Standout poems by Alison C. Rollins, Maggie Smith, Beth Bachmann, and Dujie Tahat.
• 
  Angie

  This one took me longer to read all the way through, than January’s issue. But I think taking a little longer might be better for me when reading poetry. One or two poems at a time is enough. I enjoyed very much Jeffrey Yang’s piece on Mary Oppen, and the art that went with it - particularly the torn tissue portraits. I have put Oppen on my reading list.
• 
  Erick Mertz

  An outstanding issue of Poetry this month. Many notable poems here.
  
  Jack Underwood's work is intriguing.
  Talin Tajajian's poem has a certain beguiling aspect to it.
  Gabrielle Bates' poem makes me scratch my head.
  More than a pen, Maggie Smith is spinning a magic wand.
• 
  Stephanie

  Favorites:
  
  - One Day I Suddenly Notice... by Daisy Fries
  - Charlene, by Jessica Greenbaum
  - Singing by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
  - Fragments of Bone and Ice by Beth Bachmann
  - This Other Thing by Lani O'Hanlon
  - salat to be read from right to left by Dujie Tahat
• 
  Timothy

  The best part was where the contributors discussed what they were reading. Most of the poetry was not for me, pick it up you might find something for you
• 
  Jesse Field

  February brought a lot of poems by and about women. (And one “blxck bxy,” Nome Emeka Patrick. It’s consoling to think Sylvia Plath has readers in Nigeria!) Virginia Keane struck me with her photographic lines on life in Ireland — the sea, whiskey, a man she apparently hasn’t seen in fifty years. “His pinched boy’s face flabby from years / of whiskey drinking next to warm pub fires.” Men, as a category, are one of the main images and concerns of women poets, as a category. That’s obvious, and yet, kind of profound. Another concern is children, as in Beth Bachmann’s “Fragments of Bone and Ice”:

  One of the first experiments we give children teaches the three states of water: liquid, vapor, and ICE at the border storing children in heelers, short-term detention facilities known as iceboxes because it’s so cold you can see your breath as it transforms from vapor into liquid and ice.

  
  
  Bachmann’s propulsiveness is disturbing, but magnetic. As is our perception of the current immigration policy. One of the strengths of Poetry magazine is to present work that addresses political and social themes, but through the form.
  
  “Singing” by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is poetical science fiction, a romp with dolphins. “Dolphins catalyze starlight to refresh water on earth.” I’m not sensitive or smart enough to read this one against Mia You’s “Gangnam Beauty,” (oh, and I did enjoy the latter poet's Spotify list of Korean pop music. More of those!) but I think it would involve something about waters and seas, wombs, uteruses, “cunt.” Also diction of science and technology that is far from random. Cartilage, four-digit code, primordial data from space. Caoilinn Hughes also shares in the ambiguous relation of subject to science and technology: “My data will be anonymized, though DNA is unanonymizable.”
  
  The music of language only really opens up into my consciousness in a few poems of this month’s issue. Zeina Hashem Beck, “Poem Beginning & Ending with My Birth” inspires a feeling of jazz form, with its repeated motifs, like an expanded villanelle, the story of a birth and the history of Palestine, interwoven. “California Ode,” by Mary B. Moore, is a tightly woven wordplay among world religions, well worthy of something from Christian Wiman himself: “The ravens circle and call / Even earth can seesaw // when the fault slides right. / It’s raven heaven here.” More hymnal, yet prophetic, in quality is “More Than Meat and Raiment,” by Angela Jackson: “Blood of heritage blood of spirit / Promise and delay, clamoring / Stammering child, weeping woman, Howling, crying man, talking baby, / Blood of heritage, blood of spirit.” This too is strongly reminiscent of jazz, which I suppose is and will long remain the musical idiom of much contemporary poetries. I don’t even speculate here about the many other poems in the issue, that don’t sing to me.
  
  I had not heard of Mary Oppen, but thanks to a wonderful essay by Jeffrey Yang, readers like me now know something of her thoughts on fame, and art, and a funky, hippie marriage and life with a poet in America. “Portrait with Hands” and other examples of her visual art are striking, leaving us thankful we’ve seen.