Pantoums by Dennis Daly

Pantoums

by Dennis Daly

2018 Dennis Daly

Dos Madres Press

Somerville MA

ISBN  978-1-030029-85-3

Softbound, 67 pages (including notes)

No price given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

One Poet whose work I always enjoy is Dennis Daly.  Whether he’s writing about experiences in Afghanistan, or in his habitat of Salem or translating Ajax from the Greek,

it is always interesting and most certainly educational.

In his latest book he turns his focus to pantoums, not my favorite form of poetry, but under his skillful writing they become both fascinating and enjoyable.

As he notes in his introduction, “Originating in Malay, prior to the fifteenth century, the pantoum probably developed from an oral tradition of rhythmic and repetitive rowing songs.”

Daly, in educating the uninitiated to this form of poetry goes on to say, “Pantoum are made up of quatrains. The modern form requires no set number of stanzas. The second and fourth line of each quatrain repeats as the first and third line of the next quatrain.” Of course there’s more to his explanation.

Finally Daly states, “American practitioners of this form have included John Ashbery, Donald Justice, and Marilyn Hacker.  In his book Pantoums Daly is very much a match for any of those written by those celebrated poets.

In his first pantoum Daly lays out the form’s history:

HARMONIES

For all men do there is an end,

They row and row to make pantoums.

Muscles ache, minds transcend

In happy moments one presumes.

They row and row to make pantoums,

Harmonies keep on coming,

In happy moments one presumes

All’s right that coaxes humming.

Harmonies keep on coming,

Insects skim the river.

All’s right that coaxes humming

Through mortality’s quaint shiver

Insects skim the river.

Muscles ache, minds transcend

Through mortality’s quaint shiver.

For all men do there is an end.

Now let’s look at his last pantoum in this most interesting volume. It is rooted in his many travels and reveals life in a different civilization:

TRUST

One trusts most those things unseen,

Unconquered battlement just out of reach,

Solidity projects a smokescreen,

A figure of fundamental speech.

Unconquered battlement just out of reach,

Where traitors conspire their plots,

A figure of fundamental speech,

Impaled by the writer-robots.

Where traitors conspire their plots,

Solidity projects a smokescreen.

Impaled by the writer-robots,

One trusts most those things unseen.

So these are the first and last poems in Daly’s book, and there are so many more good ones in between. Footnotes answer questions about some of the words, locations and historical context in the book.

Overall this is scintillating poetry by a fascinating poet who has seen and experienced much more than the average person.  The many poetic forms he uses in different collections he published conveys his breadth of knowledge.   This is a book well worth owning and reading

Author, The Lynching of Leo Frank, Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Feb 6, 2017 5PM Poet Gary Rainford

Poet Gary Rainford

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Gary Rainford is the author of two poetry collections, Salty Liquor and Liner Notes.  Gary’s suite of poems, We Are Here, was an honorable mention selected by Betsy Sholl for The Gabriel Zimpritch Memorial Poetry Prize.  His work is collected in the anthology, Take Heart, edited by Wesley McNair.  Down East magazine calls Gary a Maine poet at the top of his game.  Maine Today Magazine calls his latest book, Liner Notes, a tribute to music.  Gary teaches online for a college in New York, runs Island Verse, a creative writing literacy incubator, and serves as code enforcement officer and plumbing inspector for Swan’s Island where he lives year-round with his wife and daughter. 

Jan 23, 2018 5PM Poet John Cuetara

Poet to Poet: Writer, Electronic Media Scholar, Michael C. Keith Jan 16, 2018 5PM

Writer, Media Scholar, Michael C.Keith

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About the Author

Michael C. Keith is the author/coauthor of 30 book volumes and dozens of articles on the subject of radio and broadcast studies. In addition to his non-fiction titles, Keith has published over a dozen creative works, including an acclaimed memoir: The Next Better Place––a young adult novel: Life is Falling Sideways––and several short story collections: most recently Slow Train and Perspective Drifts Like a Log on a River. Mad Hat Press will publish his next story collection, Let Us Now Speak of Extinction. His fiction has been nominated for several awards, among them the Pen/O.Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the National Indie Excellence Award, and the International Book Award. He is professor emeritus at Boston College.

Dec 19, 2017 Poet Anne Elezabeth Pluto 5PM

Anne Elezabeth Pluto is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA where she is the artistic director and one of the founders of the Oxford Street Players, the university’s Shakespeare troupe. She is an alumna of Shakespeare & Company, and has been a member of the Worcester Shakespeare Company since 2011. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and is one of the founders and editors at Nixes Mate Review.  Her chapbook, The Frog Princess, was published by White Pine Press (1985), her eBook Lubbock Electric, by Argotist ebooks (2012), and her chapbook Benign Protection by Cervana Barva Press (2016). Recent publications include: The Buffalo Evening News, Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Mat Hat Lit, Pirene's Fountain, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Mockingheart Review, Yellow Chair Review, Levure Litteraire – numero 12, The Naugatuck River Review, and Tuesday, An Art Project.

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Dec 5, 2017 Poet Michael Casey

 

Poet Michael Casey

In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his foreword to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work “a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory” and “the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam.” Its raw depictions of war’s mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, and Obscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Casey’s poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, coworkers and bosses, neighbors and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Casey’s work, from his 1972 debut to 2011’s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Casey’s life and work—Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk—and an ensemble cast with a lot to say.
The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies. If Robert Frost was a poet of the rural New Englander, Michael Casey, also a New Englander, brings to life his mill town background, the guys who didn't go on to college and the larger world, but married the girls they dated in high school and got jobs in the mill. When he's sent to Vietnam he captures his fellow soldiers in their own military jargon. A master of the vernacular, he forces one to question writing in the 'correct' language when so many of us speak it quite differently, the language we think and feel in. Rare among poets, he's willing to explore colloquial speech in all its messiness, and gets it down perfectly – in fact, he's got us all down spot on. This collection, with its wide range of voices, is a unique achievement.”
— Edward Field, author of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Poet Scott Ruescher Nov 14 5PM

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Scott Ruescher is the author of the poetry collection Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017). He has won Able Muse’s Write Prize, Poetry Quarterly’s Rebecca Lard Award, and, twice, the New England Poetry Club’s Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Solstice, The Common Ground Review, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. He administers the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaches English in the Boston University Prison Education Program. (updated 7/2017)