Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You Review of If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes Review of Anson County Review of Dissolution of Ghosts Crossword (Solution Posted in July. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Mar/Apr Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction 1998 By Samuel Hazo Booing the Pope By Matthew D. Taylor Sgt. Robert Starbuck, USMC: Elegy and Essay By John Guthrie Shrink Wrap, Diet Cokes and a Kazoo By Sara J. Ford Poetry And the Time Is By Samuel Hazo In His Winter By Wanda D. Campbell Lester By Thomas Reynolds Generation Gap By Valerie Lauria Stanske Two Poets By Gary C. Wilkens Mongolia, 1930 By Gary C. Wilkens Fiction A Death in the Family By John Speeking Letters By Suzanne Abbot Among the Briars By Pat Tompkins Filling in the Angles By Jessica DelBalzo Miss Mary By Beth L. Block Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html. |
Review of Dissolution of Ghosts Berwyn Moore’s inaugural collection of poems, Dissolution of Ghosts, is aptly named, for many “ghosts” wander through the poems in this book’s pages, ghosts of past loves, of memory and loss and connections. Unlike many collections, these lyrical poems are bound together by shared imagery, themes and style that act like threads weaving the individual works together. The poems share a dream like quality and depth of detail which makes them yield new meaning with every reading. The continuity gives the collection the feel of a unified whole, yet for the most part, each poem varies enough in tone and theme that it presents a new facet or view point on its subject. The book is divided into three sections: Pallor, the Decisive Moment and Pomegranates, and the poems in each section express a slight shift in theme or mood. In Pallor, the poems have a dreamy, specter like quality, often presenting readers with oddly juxtaposed images that have the quality of a dream or vision, though the topic addressed in each poem is different. In “Multiple Sclerosis,” for example, the narrator is asked to interpret Niels Bohr’s Theory of Spectra, page 72, while in the doctor’s office, and then later recalls a tornado’s strange aftermath: “we emerged/to a house without a roof, but on the kitchen table/a birthday cake, its pink frosting swirled into perfect/pink cones, sat untouched.” In “Dumbstruck,” a marching band plays an unexpected dirge while “scuffling through piles of trash.” The juxtapositioning of such oppositions in these poems, combined with Moore’s present tense style and use of enjambment, gives these poems a hazy dream like quality. In The Decisive Moment, Moore’s style shifts slightly, as she presents more concrete images and poems about more specific moments, such as childhood memories of playing tag and eating sorghum. Many of these poems shift into past tense as Moore writes about her own past. In “Boundaries,” she reflects on family photos that show her parents in India, where she was born: “women crowded together, like pushpa,/their saris folding in petals around dark/faces, a tilaka dotting their foreheads.” In “Sorghum,” Moore brings to light a memory of a trip to sorghum fields in North Carolina, reflecting upon the contrast between her father’s “postcard-perfect” descriptions of the farmers’ lives and the reality of “tin roofs glaring in the sun” and “weathered porches and empty rockers.” The poem ends with a nice image of Moore and her sister holding the sticky jars of sorghum and realizing that amid such poverty “this sweet does not satisfy.” These poems vary more in format, some written in tercets, some in couplets and the images are sharper, losing the hazy dreaminess of the poems in the first section. Here we see snakes “like scraps of flung rope” and moths who tease their mate along with “an explosion…an aromatic spray that holds him captive.” In Pomegranates, the poems address such topics as a child dying of cystic fibrosis, death, and relationships. Many of the poems here blend the two styles, containing dream like juxtapositioning of images with harsher more realistic details. For example, in “Sigh, Pant, Gasp, Wheeze,” the poem begins and ends with details from the medical world: “ultrasonic nebulizers” and the heart’s “systole and diastole.” But in the poem’s center, the imagery is more lyrical, including descriptions of the child’s “crayon pictures of lungs shaped and colored like upside down broccoli,” and her letter to the drug company asking for grape or cherry flavored medicine. Poems in this section repeat images from earlier poems: the image of snake skins, of a muskrat and of a sweet sticky liquid which recalls the sorghum described earlier. The collection ends with the poem bearing the section title, “Pomegranates,” a poem which echoes and completes the narrative begun in the opening poem, “Pallor.” This circularity gives the collection a sense of wholeness and closure even as it encourages readers to return to the beginning and re-interpret the meaning of the first poem in light of those which follow. Moore’s style is lyrical and filled with vivid and unusual images. Her use of present tense in many of her works gives the poems and imagery an immediacy that is appealing. Her continual use of enjambment, especially between stanzas contributes to the poems’ liquid like flow, though in places, the technique feels a trifle repetitive and even intrusive. In her best poems, the striking imagery, metaphors, and language play with double meanings and repeated images in ways that challenge readers to rethink the poem’s message. She addresses topics as varied as illness, death, divorce and relationships, topics readers can all relate to, but Moore’s inventive style encourages us to examine these themes in new ways. |