Poetry
Around the neighborhood or the world? Into the past, the kitchen or the soul? At least one of these new books by Seattle poets should take you where you want to go.
Twenty years ago, Alan Chong Lau was laid off by Boeing and began working for a greengrocer in Seattle's International District. This, he says in the preface to "Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker's Journal" (University of Hawaii Press, $17.95), is where he started writing poetry. But his book is no portrait of the artist as a young grocery drudge.
Lau throws himself joyously into his work and sends his radiant attention outward to find health and laughter nearly everywhere. In short lyrics, prose poems and some ebullient, twitchy drawings, he records the sights and sounds around him - and the smells, whether from "an alleyway / of crushed flowers /soaking in yesterday's piss" or a whiff of restaurant barbecue.
To him, it's all amazing. With unsentimental fellow-feeling the poet notices the "callused feet and cracked heels" of passersby, the techniques of a woman scavenging vegetables in a dumpster, and a long black hair, in a new crate of Mexican peas, from the head of a picker who's surely underpaid. He observes shoppers as they prod mangoes, sample grapes and swap stories, treating the produce market as "their own private kitchen" where clerks are "uninvited guests."
Beyond it all he notes "The charcoal squawk of crows" and "This sky / the ribs of / a blue clam shell" above Elliott Bay. Though Lau's publisher apparently couldn't resist printing some of the book's weaker stanzas on its cover because they mention China, water chestnuts and ancestors, Lau himself doesn't emphasize his Chinese-American origins.
He speaks above all as a person and a poet, large-hearted and tireless, filling his pages with fresh wonder at the ever-changing same old workaday world just south of downtown.
Susan Rich has traveled far from Seattle and around the globe for the Peace Corps, Amnesty International and various writing projects of her own.
The poems in her first book-length collection, "The Cartographer's Tongue" (White Pine Press, $14), weave these journeys with narratives from her Boston childhood and many love poems.
Throughout, Rich is drawn to life's injustices and dangers as if wanting to master them by meeting them head-on, and of the poets reviewed here, she works with the riskiest, most difficult material. Her poems juxtapose ordinary images - conversing, drinking tea, picking plums - with scenes of abject poverty, war-scarred streets and torture's aftermath that lead to painful self-questioning: "Do I leave to take a stand?" "Is memory a chain of alibis?" But though questions are sometimes the only possible reply to horror, Rich's multiply until they grow tiresome, even awkward.
Watching a noseless leper she wonders, "what / does she miss the most?" About the ordeal of gathering shattered bodies after a Tel Aviv bombing she asks, "Whatever happened to the elbows, kneecaps, teeth?"
To Rich's credit, she seems aware of the difficulty of writing well at life's jagged edges, especially when the writer is visiting an edge where others must live.
Her best work is closer to emotional home.
A fine understated lyric honors the journalists of war-torn Sarajevo who kept on publishing: "There was just bread and paper, / and there were many days without bread."
"Men At Work" perfectly balances humor with generous appreciation of the weirdness of others, and "1959" is an unpredictable, affectionate meditation on the peculiarities of the author's parents.
Seattle poet Edward Harkness' first book, published by Bainbridge Island's Pleasure Boat Studio, brings the reader home again to narratives set in familiar Northwest locales along with poems of memory and travel.
The title of "Saying the Necessary" (Pleasure Boat, $14) reflects its blunt, plainspoken approach, and Harkness' economy of style works especially well in poems about his children, where transparency of language is a window on a complex sensibility.
In the lovely "My Son's Drawing of a Smiling Deer," the father sees the child add to his sketch of a doe the "long smile . . . of a boy who has seen / something wild return his gaze."
With the stroke of a pencil, the son has revealed his "secret self," his father muses, "a boydeer from the other world."
It's harder to locate the emotional center or purpose when the point of view isn't Harkness' own. The title poem, for example, is based on a heartrending journal kept by a Montana motorist stranded in snowy mountains who died of starvation.
Harkness quotes from the man's notebook and outlines what he might have seen and heard but gives him almost no interior life. So while the events are powerful enough to evoke tears in a reader, it's not because they present the death of a developed consciousness or allegorize the fate of lonely, unheard writers.
Perhaps it's because the reader can fill the blank in the poem's main character with her own unarticulated woes.
A more fully realized sensibility inhabits Molly Tenenbaum's work throughout, and it seems right to end this poetry roundup where it began, with a lover of produce and all its possibilities.
Tenenbaum's "By a Thread," from Seattle's newest publishing house (Van West & Co., $14), presents lyrical meditations on ordinary events like taking walks and weeding the garden.
On this everyday material, the poet's art works a liberating magic: she notices "a spark when it cools black / and lands, a dot of dark"; she imagines that barnacles "curled in their salty houses" under the sun must feel a rising tide to be "like a cool basement / on a hot day"; she persuades us that "The World Is the Shape of a Cat."
A few sharp edges and turns of thought give these poems bracing qualities, though the words are often too precious for this reader's taste.
Tenenbaum gravitates to choices like "twinkle," "nestle," "tucked," "snug," "caboodle," even "cavortle" - the book could use more passages like its nice, creepy bit on slug anatomy. But the poet's intention is to sing a praise-song of gratitude for a bountiful life, and audiences crowd the rooms whenever she reads from "By a Thread."
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Author appearances
Susan Rich and Molly Tenenbaum will read at Bumbershoot's Starbucks Literary Stage. Rich appears 1:30 p.m. Sept. 3, and Tenenbaum, 2:30 p.m. Sept. 4 (information: 206-281-8111 or www.bumbershoot.org.
Alan Chong Lau will read at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 16 at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. in Seattle. Information: 206-624-6600.