Michigan Books

This is an inspired book of poetry, rich in language and experience. Erickson speaks to the heart in a way that anyone can understand and appreciate. The subjects are familiar to us all--parents and children, love and loss--but her insights are fresh and let us renew our relations with the world around us.

This is a well written, compelling study of early attempts at police reform in the 1960s. A wonderful analysis of the failures of American liberalism and very interesting biography of a true unheralded American hero, George Edwards, Jr., who attempted to change the tragic course of Detroit history and for a short time looked might he succeed. An excellent read! Highly recommended. This reviewer is looking forward to the next book.

Jack Ridl writes meditative poems about raking leaves, about toys in the attic, about different times of the year, about his own conception, about his mailman. He proves that he can write about any common household object like Neruda. He invokes numbers, fractals, equations, and other abstract mathematical ideas as launching slips for his psyche's boat to let drift and wander the coastline of his life. And what a strange and magical coastline it is.

We get to understand the world of the poet who is trying to penetrate the mystery of his existence and the phenomena of time and place surrounding him. Ridl writes to find ways to enter his private world and its numberless avatars of objects that make their appearance like actors on his mind's stage.

Whatever is imagined through the magic of numbers using equations, quantum physics, or through the power of metaphor to build a bridge to this particle word, makes the speaker wonder. After all, math is just another form of writing, and writing, like math, in the hands of a poet is used to penetrate the outer visible surface of life to reveal its invisible inner structure as witnessed in these lines:


...Go deeper. All the cells split
into identical ice dancers, all
electrons spin the same bacchanal.


Ridl is like a pre-Socratic philosopher awe-struck in front of all of life's forms that divide from one substance to become all living and non-living things. It is a meditation touched on throughout the book, and Ridl returns to this ontological dilemma again and again.

I like the fact that he grabs hold of a sense of what it means to leave a trace of human discovery in the form of words-language that abstract man-made tool for diving into the unknown. He muses on this in the second poem titled "The History of the Pencil" that starts with the premise of how the lowly pencil is the true companion of solitude. The speaker in this poem evokes Thoreau, how this brilliant woodsy chronicler failed to itemize the pencil he wrote with while taking stock of all his worldly possessions in his tiny cabin at Walden Pond.

On another level, this poem is a type of "Ars Poetica" in which the speaker resurrects the Renaissance master Da Vinci to convey a sense of what it means to ponder an act of creation:



Even Leonardo, whose mind would never let
Anything escape from the possibility of being better,
Wrote those mad, mirror-written obsessions,
His maimed right hand dangling
Like a sash, and sketched his own hand
Sketching,...

Ridl wants us to contemplate the simple act of holding a pencil and using that timeless invention to create a universe of infinite combinations out of words to express even the mundane grocery list or the heartfelt note to a friend.

Starting from the opening poems in this volume, we are taken on a personal tour of people, places and things that matter in the life and memory of a man who has struggled with what it means to hear his mother's voice over the phone discussing the death of her favorite singer, Frank Sinatra, or how he feels thinking about his deceased father, or the facts of his birth and growing up, or about his own children. The speaker of these poems always returns to where everything in his universe begins and ends-to the domestic center of his life and his world at home.

He uses humor and writes a false memoir poem titled "This Was My Real Life." In the middle stanza he writes:



I never married. I built
two houses, one where my father
had his woodworking shop, one where
my mother shot our dog.


This poem reveals a great deal about the complex inner world of the poet/speaker and about the dual nature of love and how it is possible to hold two contradictory emotions simultaneously. These feelings return in other places in other poems that resonate with mixed emotions when the speaker deals again with the subject of his mother and father.

In the poem titled "Fractals," the immediate surroundings in the speaker's life recall some other time and place, and the speaker is able to move between his past and his present ending where he began. It is a beautiful poem about the passing of time and the things that fill our days. This poem is a signature poem, one of his best. Here as in other poems, the emphasis is on the act of writing of "seeing into the woods" to quote one of the key lines. This is what the poetry is about and the speaker of course wants to clear away any obstruction that prevents this from happening.

It is a tender poem filled with domestic memory of what life was like as newlyweds moving into a house in need of renovation, and filling that house with a lifetime's possessions, of kids and family, and of returning over time to that place that T. S. Eliot alluded to-where you have to travel your whole life just to know the place you started from.

There is a movement towards death in many of the poems, a reaching for darkness, for what lies underneath the earth. In "Burying the Poems" at the end of the book, the speaker fantasizes about taking all his poetry to its grave by sealing his poems in jars and burying them. The seasons and the animals in their brute indifference to poetry forage blindly around the literary crypt. This is not Wallace Stevens's empty jar left in a woods, but a jar full of what is contained in the speaker's poems-his entire life and with it all his memories. The last lines of the poem contemplate what is there in each of us when we face the void, and the poet returns us once again to those mysterious Michigan woods:


...Moles
will come, nuzzle each jar. Voles will spin
like dervishes around the lids. Winter will
bring the hard frost tightening the ground.
Then following the breakage of spring and
the blisters of summer, the fall will raise
no harvest. Nothing there. Nothing to be there.
Only the jars under the lost dark green of leaves.

I liked this book and will be using it this coming school year with my 5th grade students. It is an excellent book that focuses on self esteem, persistence, and acceptance of others with handicaps. However, it appears to be confusing for the fifth grade reading level. The advanced vocabulary and lack of flow because of the use of letters within the text makes me believe the reading level is probably at about eighth grade (12-14 years old). For younger students, it could be used with the teacher reading it to the students.

How fascinating this is -- a collection of Buddhist poems by a Japanese Shinto priestess. In the year 975 at the age of 12, Princess Senshi was named high priestess of the Kamo Shrine and continued on in that role for 57 years. She also established a salon of highly creative women who were contemporaries of such well-known women writers as the poet Izumi Shikibu and Lady Murasaki, author of the Tale of Genji.

Although a priestess in the Shinto faith, Senshi clearly had developed a deep appreciation and understanding of Buddhist precepts. But what makes this book by Edward Kamens so interesting, is the struggle we see Senshi fighting through in regard to the sexism she meets in various Buddhist scriptures, for instance, the idea that a woman must somehow become a man before she can achieve enlightenment. These sorts of inequalities were not strictures she knew in her native, earth-based Shinto spirituality, and I believe that Senshi realized that Japan would move more and more toward a masculinist spriituality under the influence of Buddhism.

A profound and fascinating study by Kamens, with some outstanding and compassionate Buddhist waka poetry by Princess Senshi. Highly recommended.

A great book of a family's life journey living in a FLW house. The highs and lows and the pride in owning a unique piece of history designed by the master builder of pride filled livable homes. A relaxing read for anyone and especially students of FLW history.

"This material is the most accurate information on Saginaw history that has been printed. These books will be excellent resource information for generations to come."

"I can't tell you which chapter I've enjoyed most. The text and pictures are so well synchronized. Your research and presentation of it is greatly appreciated."

"I can hardly put the book down! What a pleasure--an interesting book that brings back many memories of stories when I was growing up in beautiful Saginaw."

This book is very helpful when looking for host plants in Michigan.

This was an impulse purchase, but I am very pleased with this guide to butterflies. Great photos make identification easy and I love that every entry provides information about lifecycle and host plants.
If you live in the North Central U.S. and enjoy butterflies I highly recommend this book!

This book, originally written in 1944, is a true insight into the life of natives of the Upper Peninsula. Martin wrote these stories based on real interviews with the characters of this wild and untamed land. And through the stories one gets a unique perspective on not only the depth with which folks loved this place, but also the various ways in which this land was exploited for its timber, iron ore, and copper. It was in many ways the treasures that this land held that shaped its evolution. And after these treasures were depleted, the true value of the Upper Peninsula was discovered: its pristine and unchanged beauty, and its unique ecosystem, wildlife, and human inhabitants. Folks who stayed and never left, and folks who came and never left, all recognized what a sanctuary existed here. Somehow time has not yet changed the majority of this wonderful place called North Country.