Dos Madres Press, A Three-Book Review by Diane Kendig
Dos Madres Press; A Three-Book Review
Diane Kendig
Dos Madres Press, a small press in Ohio run by Editor Robert J. Murphy and artist Elizabeth Murphy, has been publishing books of excellent poetry with fine production values since 2004. From their stable of over 150 poets, here are three that reflect their mission that every book be: “unique – the typography, layout and illustrations are created specially to harmonize with and enhance the particular poems in the book. [Elizabeth]Murphy often creates illustrations for each book, but occasionally she uses existing art work both of her own and also from other artists. The goal is to make an appealing book, one where the art of the written word is in balance with the visual arts that both, present it, and accompany it, into the hands of a reader.”
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Poet Leonard Trawick’s A 24-Hour Cotillion” is the first full-length collection from a 50-year career as poet, professor, editor, and artist. The poems have been selected from august journal publications such as Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Antioch Review as well little magazines in Cleveland, where he is now retired from teaching at Cleveland State and editing over 120 volumes of poetry published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center. The poems range from formalist ballades, villanelles, and haikus, such as this conclusion to his ballade on dandelions in Section IV, poems on nature:
Prince of Darkness, you I pay
With Sweating brow and fingers bleeding
For knowledge that, do what I may.
Has damned me to eternal weeding.
(“Ballade of the Lion’s Tooth”)
to prose poems and free verse, like these words to child who has just awakened with a nightmare in Section II, “Bound Each to Each” (poems on family headed by a Wordsworthian allusion, alluding also to Trawick’s studies in the British Romantics):
things with no face were chasing you?
A flower died and you couldn’t bring it back to life?
Someone was going to tell a wonderful secret,
And slugs came out of his mouth?
Come crawl under the covers.
I know that dream.
(“Three A.M., Five Years Old”)
Section III “From Okeepoka” contains poems based on Trawick’s childhood in Alabama, redolent of the Southern accent he still retains:
Now don’t you cry, Suthun Accent, you know
I wouldn’t change you for Midwestun or any of them.
You’re wrapped all around me like a kudzu vine.
You’re the breath of my life, till the Chattahoochee
Runs try and all the catfish sing “Glory hallelujah!”
(“Suthun Accent”)
The other three sections of the 127-page collection are “How to Play” (poems on water, people, weather); “Antic Hay,” (with many fun poems, such as “Jug Music” conveyed as four stanzas subtitled Allegro, Adagio, Andante, and Rondo); and “Where Do Songs Go” with its many tributes to poets, musicians and visual artists. The last poem, is an elegy to cellist Jacqueline de Pré, which ends the book:
Jacqueline du Pré, when your muscles came untuned,
wasn’t the music still there, all those silent years—
just as, after the last note, when the players poise their bows
triumphant for one still moment before the applause,
the whole quartet hangs perfect in the air?
The cover, designed by Elizabeth Murphy, is a grayish-sepia swirl with a white light beaming, the title in red superimposed on the swirl, and the wonderful, heavy endpaper image, front and back, is Trawick’s monotype, “Dance of the Gnats.”
Certainly this book meets Dos Madres’ goal of being a unique, appealing, balanced book, one that is a far-ranging, pure delight to read.
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The Apricot and the Moon, one of two Dos Madres Press book by Cathryn Essinger is a book of domestic poems in the very best sense of the word domestic. One gets the feeling that most of these poems arise from people, animals, places, and things near Essinger’s home in western Ohio and that none of them have ever been so lovingly and closely revealed by a poet of heart, humor, and intelligence.
The first section, “She Said the Word Moon” has twelve poems, all bearing some reference to the moon, from the squash in “For the Birds,” “as pale/ as the new moon” to some as fully exploratory of the moon as “To Name the Moon,” “Super Moon,” and “A Corner of the Moon.” As someone who studied Sylvia Plath’s moon imagery and has written a lot of moon poems myself, I thought of Artur Lundkvist’s quote when I read this section: “Are all the poems about the moon written? Oh, no, there is still much to say about the moon.” And by “much,” I don’t mean blather about the moon, but trenchant words, like this little three-liner:
ENVY
The moon Climbs
until she can see
into every attic window.
(from “Missing Wakayama”)
Still, my favorite of Essinger’s moon poems is the title poem from the book’s third section, “Now and Again.” Set during the solar eclipse of 2017, the poem is a lyric narrative set at table where two family members are using fruits to represent orbs in the solar system while the father walks through to give unsolicited advice. The whole homey scene grows darker when the child holds the apricot up to its eye, pronouncing all the things he cannot see with blocked vision, on and on till bedtime, when the speaker notes:
You fall asleep with the apricot on your pillow.
I am afraid for you, until I remember that you
have the apricot to protect you from the things
you do not want to see. And I wonder if you
are right, if it is really that easy, so I get up
And look at the moon and extend my hand
Until I cannot see that simple light.
(“The Apricot and the Moon”)
The second section “Tangled in Time” contains nature poems, anchored in the specifics of an Essinger poem, such as “Heliotrope,” “Zinnias,” “The Blue Heron, Fishing,” “The Old Heron, Rising,” and “Spring Creek.”
The cover of this book is as sharp-lined as Trawick’s is swirly, a bright orange circle nearly covers a larger circle of white that rims it, the title in an Art Deco font, all white caps, except for the word APRICOT, in an orange that matches the orange of the sphere. These well-wrought poems and their well-told stories just shine in the light Dos Madres casts on them.
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If Essinger’s work illuminates what’s close at home, Anne Whitehouse’s Outside from Inside ranges far in persona and place, from My Lai to the Mackinac Bridge to the Canyon of Chelly to New Orleans; from a survivor who works with troubled youth to Hemingway’s second wife, to “generations of rabbis.”
The book is Whitehouse’s third book of poetry with Dos Madres, after The Refrain (2012) and Meteor Shower (2016). She has previously published two full-length books and two chapbooks of poetry and a novel. Her stories, essays, reviews, and her poems appear in many journals, including Charge Magazine, which published the book’s title poem. Set in an internment camp in Arizona, during World War II, “Outside from the Inside” is a based on a real letter in the Smithsonian collection to the Surrealist artist Man Ray from Isamu Noguchi, one of the twentieth centuries most famous sculptors, at age 38. He wrote, “Outside from the inside/it seems history has taken flight/and passes forever.”
The poem ends:
Oh, for a mountain peak,
a glacier glistening in the sun.
Oh, for an orange,
Oh, for the sea.
(Charge Magazine 2019)
Each of the book’s four sections is titled by its first poem. The first, “Tides of the Body” begins with a distant third person scientific description of circulation in the body that becomes the intimate first person in the second stanza: “Gently I place my fingers/over the openings of my ears. / The sound of my breath inside my throat….” And although the poem begins inside the body, it is a distant, outsider’s inside as the poem moves inside, closer to the heart of the speaker.
Part II, “It Wasn’t An Hallucination” has many poems in a voice other than the poet’s, though not unrelated. I n addition to Noguchi, the section opens with a poem in the voice of the Mexican-American guitarist Carlos Santana and contains poems from the point of view of a soldier, a mother, Pauline Pfeiffer, and indigenous people in the Amazon basin, whose story and songs end this section.
“The Ancient World” is the title poem of the third section. Among other settings are the Necropolis, Cairo, and Jewish homelands, lost and found, ending with one of the most moving poems in the book, “My Grandmother Listens to Paul Robeson Recite Othello.”
The last section, “A Dog’s Life” begins and ends with dogs and humans running, some joyfully, some to exhaustion, but “So with the slowest as with the swiftest, / all of us finishing in beauty.”
The theme of beauty in nature and art permeates the poems and the cover artwork which appears to be an Asian wall hanging in oranges, greens, and tans and crammed with people, symbols, and plants, a full and rich array just like the poems within.
Diane Kendig‘s forthcoming book of poetry is Woman with a Fan. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now she curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write. Her website is dianekendig.com and her blog, “Home Again”