E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Possibility Glimpsed Through Windows: A Review of Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems Ben Mazer.  Selected Poems . (Ashville, NC: MadHat Press, 2017). 248 pp., with a preface by Philip Nikolayev.   A project that has been incubating since his debut collection White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions, 1995), Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2017) has arrived. Spanning over twenty years of zealous creative output, this volume begins with three euphonious glimpses of Mazer’s poetic career. To read these early poems is to peer through the ornate window of some far-flung edifice to discover scenery and situations ripe with the allure of intrigue and espionage, as in the poem “The Traveller”:                           In a strange country, there is only one                ...

THE SHIT GOT REAL The Cavalry   As the early results curdle, I text my father three words - This Is Bad. Like thousands of others, I’ve spent the last year volunteering and working to elect Hillary Clinton. The long fight. The good fight. The first fight I’ve truly thrown myself into, again and again. Election Night finds me in southern Virginia, a ramshackle campaign office held together by duct tape, off-white cracked paint, and five other community organizers. Growing up, the evening news was my family’s sacred time. Six years old, I watch a Palestinian child dive behind wreckage as gunfire crackles. Peter Jennings’ lullaby voice informs us that the child is unaccounted for. My father responds to my text with two words - I know.             Hour ago a packed office, trusty volunteers using an auto-dialer to rapid fire call as many inconsistent voters as we can. After polls close in Virginia, volunteers shu...

Jackself by Jacob Polley REVIEWED BY ROSANNA HILDYARD Jackself is a scarecrow made up of lean meat and fat, frost, daws, lanterns, digestive biscuits, roundabouts and cow parsley. Jackself is Polley’s alter ego in this series of narrative poems, which work equally well individually as they do patchworked into a collection. Jackself is a wild pagan figure, a wodwo from ancient England, Jackself follows a snotty teenager growing up around the crumbling farms of Lamanby, in Cumbria. Although Jackself is a hodgepodge of tones and references, it forms a remarkably coherent collection when read end to end. It is structured as a poetic bildungsroman , charting Jackself’s loss of innocence as he comes to terms with grief. Jackself is the love story of two friends: Jackself of Lamanby and Jeremy Wren, who bully and wrangle with each other, go fishing in Lamanby’s deserted tarns, and stay out at night to drink white cider and Malibu together ‘way out among the hedgerows’. ...

Leah Fritz reviews A WorldElsewhere by Shanta Acharya   A World Elsewhere, by Shanta Acharya, is a novel about India, in particular its conventions regarding women. Although the English it is written in is faultless, its style is as Indian as a film by Ravi Shankar – which is no mean feat. This book is an excellent read but it is necessary to remove Western spectacles and imagine oneself in the faraway country it's about as if it's your own, in order to glean its conventions as if you are a native. Attitudes toward women are strange everywhere of course, and wife-battering, for instance, is not unknown in the West – far from it! – but the particular justifications for being cruel to women are as different from one country to another as their languages. This novel is placed in Orissa, India. Acharya intersperses Indian words within English sentences and, although there is a glossary at the end of the book, I found I was able to read them in the text almos...

Lesley Saunders reviews BoneMonkey by Janet Sutherland Like Hughes ’ Crow , Sutherland’s Bone Monkey (from Shearsman) is elemental, brutal, amoral, part Jungian shadow, part Freudian id, a trickster and shape-shifter nightmarishly familiar from the old dark tales – yet wholly original, authentically uncanny , in the forms and voices he takes on between the covers of this book.   On the front cover is a reproduction of an 18 th century mezzotint of an écorché, a human figure stripped of skin and flesh to reveal, in this case, how the major muscles are attached to the skeleton: an apt image for the psychic flaying that the poetry enacts and exacts. Bone Monkey is a manifest apparition, a conjured entity, both primitive and contemporary.   I heard Sutherland read from the work at Lauderdale House in spring 2014, not having come across her work previously, and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled animal-like to the stalking presence she invoked.   I ...