Evansville Books

This book is an outstanding representation of poetry written by contemporary conservatives. In fact, it's not clear at all what Thomas Newton means when he says that "it has been heavily redacted by the American liberal university hegemony." The simple truth of the matter is that the book is solely the creation of Dr. Baer, and that no "redacting" pressure has been brought to bear by anyone. There very well may be a "liberal university hegemony," but it had no part in the selection of these fine poets and their work.

An attempt at an anthology of conservative poets is always to be applauded, and this book has turned out as well as can be expected, considering it has been heavily redacted by the American liberal university hegemony. There are three poems of genius ("The Ballad Rode into Town" by William Baer, "Snowflake" by William Baer, and "The Mei Lin Effect" by Frederick Turner) that are well worth the price of the book.

This book is not out of print. I do not know why you list it that way

I expected this collection to be maudlin, melancholy or wistfully reminiscent. WRONG!

This is a marvelous collection of sonnets (a feat in itself) that gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a man whose wife died at an young age, leaving him with two sons to raise. His grief is obvious, but so is his love of life, of his sons and of having and sharing new experiences. His sense of humor endures the hard times. I laughed out loud at the Classified Ad series. My favorite poem is the lighthearted "Canny Shopper".

If you love poetry, even if you don't know that you love poetry, buy this book. It is a beautiful little book. I have now purchased half a dozen for dear friends. Each one has been impressed with my (until now hidden!) literary sense of fine poetry.

Richard Wakefield is welcomed new voice in poetry. He writes in the tradition of Frost and Wilbur. I found this gem of a book accessible, and I don't mean easy accessible, because many of the poems are thought provoking. Almost all the poems have a rural setting, yet they speak to modernity.

Poems like "Keep this Day", "Horses" and "At River's Edge" illustrate the love of the North West and working the land. "Horseback", "Meshing the Gears" and "The Bell Rope" have youth and the countryside as backdrops.

"Learning by the Narrow Light" is an amazing and novel look about love.

Poems about modernity are intriguing. "A Standing Place" illustrates vividly the effects on the land from the policy of Eminent Domain. "A Rooster Refugee", speaks to the issue of suburban sprawl. How we all wish to escape from our troubles is explored in "Airborne". Relationships in our fast-paced times are written about in "Divergent Ways" and "Sometime Lovers".

"In a Poetry Workshop" the debate in the poetry community between the free verse and New Formalism is humorously dealt with. "Verse and Universe" is another related poem--just as playful as well.

The issue of aging and loss are explored in the powerful "Old Age Should Know", "the Searcher", "Late Spring", "Deadweight", and the wonderful "Upriver".

I have only touched on a few of the treasures that are in this book. What comes through most in Richard Wakefield's book is his love of the North West and the inventive way he has instilled it into his poetry and me. I am eagerly looking forward to his next book of verse. Buy this book, you won't regret it.

A colleague and I did a similar book on Attleboro, MA. These books are great because they give patrons a glimpse of what their community looked like in days gone by. When all of the images are contained as they are in these books, they reveal new perspectives of community life across the country. For those who moved from the area it makes a great gift. In the community, it stimulates conversation about what was and what is. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, many cities, towns and villages have Images of America books in print.

This remarkable little book was started by a teacher and a group of expelled middle school students reconnecting to their own community. The author has researched in archives, interviews, and in Vietnam. The resulting book lays out in clean crisp form what we know of the lives one community sacrificed to the US effort in Vietnam. It is not an anti-war piece, and yet it counts clearly the cost of each name on our wall of remembrance and invites one to ponder what might have been.
peace,
Dr. Greg Brown

This is history at its best. Butler's work discusses the emergent class and ethnic tensions in a industrial midwestern town and situates its history in the larger patterns of change across America. Butler's style and writing has a flare and a richness unique in historical accounts of this sort--I could not put the book down! Butler has style!

Billy Collins said, "Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is pointing straight at you." Alfred Nicol's poetry is exactly that kind of light. It is intensely personal, yet it reveals the numinous--the hints of something other, and somewhere else--that is all around us. I highly recommend this remarkable book.

Alicia Stallings has been a favorite poet of mine for a couple of years now, and I can't recall being this attached to an artist since my Romance With Larkin, when I was a kid. Her art improves with each reading: simple, strong observations become the bricks with which she creates often shattering poems. If this sounds precious, then listen:

"It's like," decides the telecaster,
"A movie set of...some disaster,"
Lacking, in the wake of these
Tornadoes, useful similes.

But metaphor's the thing that carries
Cold front into warm, that buries
Metal in a man's deep chest,
Uncorks an oak tree with a twist.

The metaphor is green with power,
Spins a hundred miles an hour,
And with a sound of trains it blows
Apart all windows as it goes.

Forsaking emotion for exposition, Stallings often achieves both beautifully. In "A Lament for the Dead Pets of Our Childhood", she writes,

Even now I dream of rabbits murdered
By loose dogs in the dark, the saved-up voice
Split on that last terror, or the springtime
Of lost baby rabbits, grey and blind
As moles, that slipped from birth and from the nest
Into a grey, blind rain, became the mud.
And still I gather up their shapes in dreams--

Stallings finds meaning and symbol in the Greek myths, but they're darker than those in her later collection. In "Tour of the Labyrinth", the Minotaur is an embarrassment--"though one of their own", it's kept in the basement, where it:

...lived a while on rats and bitumen
And played with its one toy, a ball of string,
To puzzle out the darkness it was in.

These are anxious and sad thoughts, and this collection is full of those who are left behind (Penelope shows up), forever losing things, or suffering from crushing fear, as in the amazing poem, "Why Reason Can't Overcome an Irrational Fear"---"the phobia whispers to me that I am special/His chosen, fondly disheveling my nerves with his fingers--"


Although she uses less rhyme and form in this collection, A.E. Stallings has argued passionately for formal poetry, citing its egalitarian, genderless, ageless ability to transport the reader and guide the writer. "Hapax", her next book, would explore form (and humor) more thoroughly. Formless or formal--either way, she's right. She always is.

First, I know A E Stallings and have taken a poetry class from her. I like her. I also am drawn by her poems, the surprising word images, contrary points of view, sometimes petulant, sometimes insightful, often fanciful. This may not be be as accurate a description of her poetry as a professional critic would craft, so I would summarize by saying that my inclination after reading one of the poems is to want to read the next. That seems like a four star recommendation to me.

"Archaic Smile", a term from art history, refers to the enigmatic smiles on Greek statues from the archaic period, which ends roughly with the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 B.C. What is enigmatic about the archaic smile is that the serenity or pleasure suggested by the facial expression is commonly at odds with the sculptural narrative, which may depict a character in mortal danger or pain, as in the pediment from the temple of Aphaia at Aigina, housed in Munich, or the many statues from the so-called Persian destruction layer of the acropolis, housed in the National Museum at Athens and including the statue on the dust jacket of "Archaic Smile."
In the first section of "Archaic Smile" it seems to me that Stallings explores the notion that death, as reflected in familiar myths, is like ataraxia, that condition of freedom from anxiety that was an ideal of the Epicureans. (Perhaps this has something to do with Stallings' interest in Lucretius). Because this conceit, this association between death and philosophical serenity, is attractive without being totally satisfying, it presents opportunities for drama and a sort of dialectic which give to these poems, as to poems in the later sections of "Archaic Smile," much of their tension and many of their moments of discovery.
Stallings' poems shows an awareness of suffering and of the ephemeral nature of pleasure and triumph, but this awareness yields neither bitterness nor self-obsession. Rather, her poems have far more in them of joy and consolation than of sorrow or complaint. I will refrain from saying much about her technique, since earlier reviews have made it clear how widely admired she is for her lyric virtuosity. Stallings is most certainly a lyric virtuoso, but her poems are also full of life and wisdom. They will please a casual perusal, and generously reward the most careful reading.

That over-used tag 'collector's item' is well-deserved by this publication. Readers whose knowledge of Greek myth is rusty or rudimentary need have nothing to fear. A.A.Stallings wears her learning as lightly as she holds the reins of her metrical horses. Humour bubbles up from time to time as does a tenderness which never slurps into sentimentality.
Themes range from the personal (housework, lost belongings, garden disasters) to the public (the instability of urban civilization, the festering scars of war). Practising poets have much to learn from Stallings' easy switches from myth to modern
reality, from colloquial to formal registers. Hers is indeed an art which conceals art.
More, please!

This is a pretty good book, and Ms. Stallings is a pretty good poet. Her poems are psychologically girlish and naïve, but technically competent and musical. Among the bad to mediocre poems in this collection, few were able to move or surprise me. Perhaps because I am too much of a cynic and curmudgeon?

Ms. Stallings possesses a minor talent, one that other formalists are seriously lacking: She's blessed with a fine ear and a delicate touch. However, this reader requires more vision and psychological depth from his poets. Tonight I will reach for Richard Moore and Tom Riley.

I'll put this book away for my daughter, and I'll give Ms Stallings 2 stars.

I greatly enjoyed reading Rathburn's first collection of poetry; she captured for me the ways in which the relationship between two people can shift from joy to despair and back again in seconds.

I've struggled to understand Ms Post's Review, and confess I find it hard to understand why she dislikes the poem so much. Here's how it appeared in "The Hudson Review"; it has more impact for me in the poet's format:

Slow Drowning

"NOT TO BE USED AS FLOTATION DEVICE."
The warnings on those plastic rafts are clear,
but if you were drowning, wouldn't one suffice?
And if not used as flotation device,
what use is there? We heard all the advice,
but we held on for our dear lives, my dear.
"NOT TO BE USED AS FLOTATION DEVICE,"
we should have heard. The warnings were so clear.

I'm not a poet, nor even a very good critic of poetry. But, I really enjoyed reading and re-reading this poem aloud -- my single best test of what sounds well to my ear.

I particularly liked the way Rathburn repeated the warning label. It emphasized, for me, the idea that both parties to the relationship were using the same "flotation device" to maintain their relationship -- sex, perhaps, although if it is sex the allusion is very subtle with a lovely ambiguity -- "we held on for our dear lives, my dear".

I also liked the use of the word "heard" rather than "read" -- that shift recognizes all the advice our friends give us about a floundering relationship -- and you can read plenty of "good" advice as well.

I truly don't understand Ms Post's phrase "the poem is as clichéd and dull as anything ever written by a teenager on LSD. Banal and boring." I have never seen Ms Rathburn's image used this way before, but certainly have experienced clinging to something I've shared with another person in hopes of maintaining and enhancing the relationship -- and sometimes failing. It's important to find something -- or many somethings -- to accomplish that, and I read Rathburn as urging us to try.

Frankly, it wasn't clear to me that Rathburn was writing about one of her own relationships. But even if she was, she captured for me a more universal truth about human relationships. And in language that sang as I recited the lines, and later as I reflected on them.

Best of all, to my taste Rathburn is becoming a stronger poet; The Atlantic for July/August 2008 contains an excellent example of her current work:

"A Raft of Grief

"The raft that means "a great number" is not related at all to the raft that carries people or their possessions in the water. The two words are homonyms. Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins

"If only there were a boat,
low and long and loaded
with all we'd brought or built:
the fatal inattentions,
anxieties and tics
that time had sanctified,
our good and bad intentions,
rages, lapses, and aches.
If only it were that easy,
to stand only ankle-
deep in the sullied water,
hoisting our shared cargo,
sinking no further beneath
its weight. If only the boat
did not need a rower;
we'd push it off together
then wade to opposite banks
absolved at last, forever,
buoyant, watching it go."

If only the end of a relationship could be so simple, so complete, so absolute. Rathburn captures that desire beautifully.


Robert C. Ross 2008

Chelsea Rathburn's poems can easily be compared with Paris Hilton's trysts. Both display an overwhelming lack of affect. Both also firmly adhere to the credo: "to be extraordinary is beyond an affront to a woman's intelligence, it is treason."
Case and point: The Shifting Line. Consider the received-form poem "Slow Drowning." "Not to be used as a floatation device."//The warnings on those plastic rafts are clear,//but if you were drowning, wouldn't one suffice?//And if not used as floatation device//what use is there? We heard all the advice,//but we held on for our dear lives, my dear.//NOT TO BE USED AS A FLOATATION DEVICE,"// we should have heard. The warnings were so clear.

Indeed, the warnings are abundantly clear. There is nothing in this poem that floats above the regurgitated prut spat into open mikes on Amateurs-R-Us night. Rathburn's lines look like the typical shots of a starlet's stand-in. Somewhat presentable, but totally off kilter. Hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. For all Ms. Rathburn's academic schooling, good marketing skills, and accomplished schmoozing, she cannot make silk purses of sow's ears. Why hasn't a well-meaning relative or friend (surely, she must have some?) told her that good poetry, even to this date, requires some artistic talent?

Chelsea Rathburn's The Shifting Line makes heavy use of iambic pentamater, but does so in a way that is both supple and sonorous. One doesn't come to such deft substitutions without years of hard work beforehand; clearly, this is a poet who has paid her dues. What appear on the surface to be mundane concerns and everyday scenes -- an argument in a restaurant, the school cafeteria social hierarchy -- are recast in meditative, even philosophical, terms by a poet with an unusually skilled ear. Look for a clever formal shift in the poem "In Praise of the Florida Manatee" and enjoy Rathburn's deft variations on the sonnet throughout the book. She also writes a masterful triolet and exhibits great flexibility and risk in poems like "Biopsy" and "Teaching Poetry at the School for the Blind." This is not a poetry of self-indulgence. It is a striking first book from a newer new formalist, and one from which any serious reader or writer of poetry will profit.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about these poems is the subtlety they lend to highly charged emotions and difficult forms. A reader finds herself swept along by the current, only to wash up somewhere she hasn't expected. As the title of the book suggests, the direction shifts. And how to write a book of poems in large part about love and marriage and not drift once into sentimentality? Ask Rathburn. She's mastered it.

Dude, what *up* with your bad prose? Your metaphors
that don't land? (Lines of poetry = actors'
headshots: Huh?) Your passive voice constructions?
(". . . can easily be compared": Is there some reason
you resist agency? Compared by whom? What are you
hiding?) Even your hackneyed phrases are wrong: It's
"case *in* point," not "case *and* point." And how
you love cliches! "The stuff dreams are made of!"
"Silk purse from a sow's ear!" I won't get started on
your sophomoric faith that Latinate words
automatically elevate an argument. Go home and write
"simplicity" a hundred times until you learn how to
make your points clearly and economically. And what
is your point? "Chelsea Rathburn's talent fills me
with jealous rage?" And who is writing your bad
jokes? Script writers from *Two-and-a-Half Men*?
Seriously, if you're gonna take a *superior* tone,
your writing kind of needs to sound remotely smart!
Ms. Rathburn's poetry is tensile, funny, graceful,
perceptive, agile, complex - and published! Which I
am guessing you are not! I'd say, "Put down the
weapon, pal," but you don't have one! Put down the
wet noodle! Have a little self-respect! I say this
with love. . . John Weir

"Don't Call Me Rosie" is very inspiring! These women and men are terrific role models and proud Americans. I gained a greater appreciation of my father's war experience after reading this book. Everyday people who made a difference!

This was truly a different view on life in a world at war. Women and men building ships to defend our country and the type of people that applied to do the job. Truly an interesting and enlightened viewpoint to a time period I did not know. My father served on one of those ships that were built and I would like to thank the women who carefully built the ships and the way they suffered through cold and nasty weather and long days to make sure they were top notch. Thank you.