Poetry Books

I Want this World offers character and plot. When I read it, I worried that someone would try to make a movie of some of the poems. I have trouble with that. Poems are events and the images that make them up fill this collection. I envision the people with whom I am sharing the moment. The poems help me recognize them - not always as themselves, but in their qualities, motivations, pain, and joy. I see these people as they move throughout the book, sometimes starring in a stanza, a whole poem, or several poems, and in other cases having a supporting role. Some characters exist only as referred-to names. Each of these people lives in my imagination. The houses, roads, towns, rivers, beaches and markets that we visit are real and vital, too. These people continue to live outside the lines of the poem. Their world is mine to understand and visit.

Place is important to Margaret Szumowski. In I Want This World, she shares her travels to Africa, and a past and present Poland. She takes us to the banks of rivers, along hot dirt roads with dusty borders and to the American Southwest. She allows us to BE her for the moments of her poems. The sounds, the sights, the tastes and the rhythms of experience inform her verse, and we get to partake. We eat tomatoes, cabbage, coffee, bagels, pick apples, make applesauce, watch fruit crops ripen, value potatoes in new ways, learn about the birthright of mushroom knowledge.

She gives us the gifts of colors and textures, shows us light everywhere - in Poland, like a verbal Canaletto, in her own experience and in parental memory. Light happens in Africa, in West Texas, on Cape Cod, and in her childhood. She shares sweat, pain, helps us taste foods familiar and foreign. In "The Fish at Vista" beliefs sing throughout, taking us from experience to decision. The chosen path may not be everyone's. In "Take Any Light You Can" she shows us Race Point Beach on Cape Cod telling us about wind and light and strength. In that same poem (in fact, in that same stanza) she talks to her daughter. She reminds us that we move through time and space and light and that movement changes us and keeps us the same.

" the wind at Race Point is so strong,
it can lift a human from the ground,
and I want to be lifted in the wind.
You, too, my dancer.
I love to see you leap as if lifted by the wind."

She goes on to share with her own need for light, advising her daughter;

"One night in childhood I seized a flashlight and was punished.
Take a flashlight, a lantern, take any light you can."

She tells us in "Going Out to Greet Whatever Lives," how that same daughter as a young child caught fireflies, was a safe haven for small living creatures, and, swinging high at night, touched her toes to the moon.

In "Starry Night" we share space in all its connotations, and, again, light.

"stars magnified until we are thousands of years
closer to them than we have ever been before.

The whirling, spinning stars we ached for are
now close enough to burn us.

I did not know the cost,
night at its peak, excruciating light,
all of us humans, awake, awake."

Watch, also, her use of space on the page. Words flow through the pages of I Want this World carefully measured against the beige frame of paper. Again, the need for light - and the needs of light, come through to the reader.

Some poems, like "Under a Hazy Halfmoon," make us, along with Szumowski and her mother, wait for night vision to bring back the body's memory of how things were in childhood. Preparing to go down a remembered path in the dark, we find that;

"By daylight we wandered this forest
from the little tree house overlooking the river-
marsh birds and gold leaves-
it shook with our weight."

The poem on the page sparkles with lightness, with spaces between lines, between stanzas of varying lengths.

The poetry about her father moved me deeply. His travels through memory, his courage in finding something to come to in a new country, his comfort in comparing old to new and seeing value in each are great gifts. He shares with his grandson the joys of the stamp collector. The great thing is promise: "we promised never to lose, never to tear those stamps." There are promises to the reader, to the future and to the past.

Margaret Szumowski gives us the gift of her experience as it blends with her vision. I Want this World is our world and her world in a very short book. We visit throughout time and space with her, with her family and with her imagination.

A science fiction short story I read many years ago postulates a highly specialized world at war, where hospitalized soldiers are in comas. Some soldiers, though catatonic, manage to go to imagined pasts where poorly remembered knowledge combines with dreams. The commanding general wants to know more. An expert suggests that a poet would understand. Sadly, though, in that world, there are no poets left.

Today, perhaps more than ever, our poets need to be protected from this philistine reality. Let's start by preserving Margaret Szumowski.

Colonel Chabert is a man disfigured in the Napoleonic Wars who was left for dead on a battlefield. After digging his way out of a mass grave, he finds that he has no legal right to his title or his massive estate. Nobody will believe his true identity. For ten longe years he goes about trying to communicate his plight to anyone who will listen. They only see a crazy bum, and his wife rebuffs his letters. She already has a new husband and kids. Finally Chabert is able to convince a lawyer named Dervilles to accept his case, namely that of reclaiming his title, lands, and wife. The problem is that noone is really interested in his life being resurrected. Most people would rather that he remained dead. So begins the ludicrous battle of a man against the law to prove his own existence.

This short but great novel, or novella, is a tragic take on the world's thirst for social status and the judgement by visuals that our society is only too guilty of to this day. If it walks like a bum, talks like a bum, it must be a bum. Colonel Chabert has such a hard time convincing people of his identity because of how they perceive him. It sounds echoes of Frankenstein in that a good man is reduced to a monster when all he really needs is love. The fact that even his wife wishes he were dead just drives home the isolated suffering of the book. As in all Balzac novels, you feel a world moving under the mantle of the book. The Human Comedy of Balzac is one of the crowning achievements of literature and ranks right up there with Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy.

The tale is one of greed, intrigue, loyalty and disloyalty. As usual, Balzac manages to cast a light, pitiless and bright, on every rotten corner of the human condition, while offering a few inspiring examples in contrast. Every detail of a lawyer's life in 19th century Paris is scrutinized, every glimpse of urban dairyman or elite country squirehood rings true. No wonder I admire him so much, no wonder I have no hesitation in urging you to read COLONEL CHABERT and any other volume of Balzac you can lay your hands on.

The story itself is fascinating. In a nutshell, it focuses on a military man who is essentially erased from society, and the tribulations and insights he has from this 'non-existant' state as he tries to re-establish himself. Not only is this a witty and profound social commentary, but an entertaining twist which just keeps twisting.

In reading other's reviews of this short masterpiece, it seems as if many people have missed the meaning of the finale. While it is indeed a very enigmatic ending, it is not as lugubrious or fatalistic as most believe. What happens is that Colonel Chabert, in essentially having his old identity annihilated, becomes enlighted. In the ultimate destruction of his ego he becomes free. This is the magic finale which Balzac labors so hard, and so majestically, to set up in the plot.

This tome is very impressive, and relatively short (just over 100 pages) for those new to Balzac who want a nice, piquant appetizer. Balzac is one of the most brilliant French fiction writers of all time! He is a giant, and in 'Colonel Chabert', he weaves another illustrious stitch into his tapestry the Comedie Humaine.

Read this beautiful book of poems and I think you will know what Wilder means! This is a book both poetic and saintly, a book of vision. Pavel's crafted and gifted words opens eyes and opens hearts. A good, good book.

Pavel's work is lyrical and intensely personal. There are observations of the physical world included in the verse [including a delightful response to the goldfinch in " The Small Musician"] but most of the poems are spiritual landscapes - poems that speak of a lively mind's encounters with guilt, grace, God, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Observations of nature are essentially the beginnings of a spiritual insight so that a toad, a dragonfly, birdsong or storm becomes emblematic of a spiritual life that transcends the physical. In this sense, his work owes much to the nineteenth century Romantics; the same sense of the poet alone in the natural world characteristic of Wordsworth or Gerard Manly Hopkins pervades the poetry of Lion Sun.

Using simple verse forms, Chichikov brings a visionary style to the work. The poet's own voice is a constant feature of the verse. Many poems begin with and specificity the poet conveys. The weakness, perhaps, is that the poet may become baffling in the allusions spun. One sometimes leaves a poem curiously unsatisfied that the power of the message is lost when a crucial element is missed by the reader. There are few contexts in which to fix the poems. The works are largely undated and there is no introduction or biographical information in which to fix the work. Where the poems work well without contexts, they are powerful and winsome.

The spiritual landscapes drawn in the verse are often on the largest canvas. Saints and sinners, giants and angels, creation and redemption figure in the poems. Political features only intrude into the landscapes for their spiritual interest as in the sonnet The Voice.

Chichikov is at his best when he is most tender and personal, when the biggest allegories give way to the fine observation and instress, as Hopkins would have it. My favourite poem in the anthology is called Creation - a sonnet written for his wife Nancy. Like the person to whom it is dedicated, the poem is gentle, subtle and intelligent

The book is stunning in its design with an exquisite typeface and display. The illustrations by Eric Young are lively and attractive. This is a book that will puzzle, charm and inspire and deserves a wider readership than poetry usually commands