Book Review of “Yes” by Rosemary Griebel

“Yes” has been shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for poetry, The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, congratulations Rosemary.

Beth Everest
A Review of
Yes.
by Rosemary Griebel
Frontenac House
ISBN 9781897181492
$16.00

I have been looking forward to reading this collection because of Rosemary Griebel’s recent successes, not least of which have been three winning contest pieces in FreeFall in two years. I anticipated being encouraged, if not motivated by a book titled Yes. I was not disappointed, but the book was hardly what I expected.
Yes opens with “My Father Comes Back,” and I was ready for the father to be a central focus. Not so. Instead, it’s the final line of this poem that sets up the ghosts that are to appear in the following pages: his large white eyes /turned on a darkening world, cavernous nostrils/releasing ghosts into winter air.” The world appears mostly dark, and the people in it struggle with its language in many forms. The ghosts appear as such characters as the father, mother, various others from dream and reality, and most curiously Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.
In these Helen Keller poems, that seem to be echoes in most of the other pieces, there is a sad yearning. Take this stanza, for instance, in “Helen Keller to Anne Sullivan Macy”:

The reporters will ask about the wedding. Say I cried with joy,
my arms open to the day. If they ask about the future, tell them it
is like the lake that rocks the boat safe to a shadowless shore.(70)

These poems are very much about love, and language in its many forms. It is clear that Helen is in love with Annie, but Annie makes the safe choice; it is a shadowless one, as if the sun is too bright, too relentless for someone like Helen who is blind. Annie marries John Macy, and Helen is left to find her way alone. This is not to say that Helen cannot see, and we get the familiar theme of seeing without using one’s eyes:

….The water lapped beneath us: here gone, here gone
The sheer happiness of being together. You spelled the light into
my hand, and I held you with everything that has ever been true:
words, water, the night. This love.(70)

What’s different is the connection of language to the vision. The light is “spelled” in a myriad of ways, including the alphabetical spelling, the magic of touch, and the illumination. Moments like these draw me in to Griebel’s poetry. Here gone, here gone is a lovely echo of the yearning that follows like a ghost for the entirety of the book. It is the yearning of loss and the yearning of love. This is not to say that the yearning is all melancholic, because for Griebel, it isn’t. The happy/sad creates poetic tension. Take the centre section of “Words, Burning”:

I don’t want to remember farewells,
there’s too much cold in the world.
I want to sit and think about my grandmother
humming as she kneaded bread, her snowy arms
moving like dancers, or lovers in a warm bed….
….The way we lose loved ones, by something said—
or not said. The smell of rising bread and that light opening….(31)

The light opens. The light is energizing. The light illuminates, whether we see too much or too little. Or not at all. It is also connected to story and the emotion that story/memory brings. It is the “spool of narrative/ that reveals other ways/of seeing.”

The characters in this book connect to the land and the language through using all of the senses, and like Helen rely on heavily on the sense of touch, whether it is the “weight of the stone in my hand,” “the silence of swallowing,” or the placing of “my finger/upon the pale and leaven moon.” There is an abundance of mouth imagery, with the silence of things not said, or the “way your silence holds a story” or how it is “your mouth finding its way in the dark.” The ghost of Helen Keller moves throughout the book, pointing anew in other ways of seeing.

In a book called Yes I never get the sense I am listening to a motivational speaker. Rather, whether I am following Helen, the father, the grandmother, or any one of the montage of ghosts that appear and reappear, Rosemary Griebel’s voice urges me gently: she says, “Look at this world. Just look at it.” And so I do. But I use more than my eyes. And I am uplifted, and open to the light that no longer feels so shadowless. She ends her book with these lines:

There I quaffed the sharp chiseled air, the slow, sad light
of merciless winter and said, yes, this world is for my mouth forever…
And I am in love with it.
Yes.(82)

This Review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXI Number 2 Fall 2011

New open issue guidelines as of May 1, 2012

Annual Submission Deadlines:
April 30th – Fall Open Issue – Issue released in Sept. – email submissions only
August 31st – Winter Open Issue – Issue released in Jan. – email submissions only
December 31st – Annual Prose and Poetry Contest Issue – Issue released in May – electronic or paper entries

HOW TO SUBMIT FOR THE OPEN ISSUES – INCLUDES Prose, Poetry and Art / Photos
EMAIL SUBJECT LINE
Your Name and type of submission (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Flash Fiction, Short Fiction, photo, art work etc.)

EMAIL BODY
Include your name and complete contact information, description and title (example: poetry, title 1; title 2; etc.) and a 50 word or less bio in the body of the email (do not attach a cover letter document with this information in it, the body of your email is your cover letter).

ATTACHMENTS CONTAINING YOUR WRITTEN SUBMISSIONS
All emailed attachment files submitted for the open issues must be named with the authors first name last name and title (in the case of poetry if all the poems are in one file replace the title with the word poems).doc or .rtf or .pdf The text in your document should be Times New Roman Font size 12 or equivalent.
Example: John Doe House On Fire.doc or John Doe House On Fire.rtf or John Doe House On Fire.pdf
Prose: Maximum length 4000 words
Fiction: short story & novel excerpts, Non-fiction: writing related or general audience
topics, Creative Non-fiction, Plays, Postcard Stories Payment is $10.00 per printed page
in the magazine, to a maximum of $100.00 and one copy of issue in which your piece is
published. Payment is made upon publication.
Poetry: Submit 2-5 poems, any style. Length of any individual poem cannot exceed 6
pages. Payment is $25.00 per poem and one copy of issue in which your piece is
published. Payment is made upon publication.
Art: Black & White photographs of Original Artwork or photographs of any other subject matter. Photo format – submit as black & white to a maximum size of 6” x 4” —
minimum of 300 dpi, as artistname_title.jpg.
FreeFall pays $100.00 for cover art/photo and one copy of the magazine upon publication. We also provide the artist/photographer a one page bio inside the issue to promote themselves.

FreeFall considers queries with a proposal for the following:Author Interviews or Author Focus (guidelines supplied when proposal approved) and
Book Reviews (guidelines supplied when proposal approved). Payment is $10.00 per
printed page in the magazine, to a maximum of $100.00 and one copy of issue in which your piece is published. Payment is made upon publication.

Pamela Porter Poet

As the managing editor of FreeFall I have come to know Pamela Porter through the wonderful poems that she has submitted and FreeFall has published, never guessing that she was also a children’s author. I was pleasantly surprised to recently attend a reading and launch of her newest children’s novel set in Saskatchewan in the ‘dirty 30’s’ I’ll Be Watching, Groundwood books .
While there I also came across an earlier novel The Crazy Man, (2005) Groundwood books winner of a Governor General’s Literary Award, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People, the Rocky Mountain Book Award, the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award, Ontario Library Association Best Bets, Jane Addams Children’s Book Award – Honor Book and the Texas Institute of Letters, Friends of the Austin Public Library Award for Best Young Adult Book. Wow. The Crazy Man is also set in small town Saskatchewan, but this time 1965. Emaline, an 11 or 12 year old girl is injured in a farm accident and while we follow her healing progress we come to learn of the misunderstanding surrounding mental illness that was prevalent during that time period.
It is easy to see why The Crazy Man picked up so many awards, it is outstanding. Written entirely in verse it captures the essence of the time and place as well as the characters. The Chapter/verse that defines the Saskatchewan I remember from visits to my grandparents is “Harvest, At Last” in the lines:

Me, I’m filled with the wind, sky, smell
Of ground, harvest dust in my nose,
My lungs, the land in my skin and hair.

I’m land, I’m sky.
I’m Saskatchewan. (173)

I’ll Be Watching is proving to be every bit as age and character defining as The Crazy Man was and I’m sure will garner a collection of awards. They are both outstanding books and can be enjoyed by children of any age, even 80. I highly recommend them.
by Lynn C. Fraser

Book Review of ‘And Me Among Them’

Annie Vigna
a review of

And Me Among Them
by Kristen den Hartog
Freehand Books
ISNB 978-1-55481-054-3
$21.95.

Almost five feet tall when she starts school, Ruth towers above the other children.

Imagine being Ruth; imagine being the other children; Ruth’s parents. What to do? The doctor says everything seems normal. Should we get a second opinion? If only . . . and then, regrets.

Kristen den Hartog gives her narrator an omniscient point of view which enables her to not only soar above everyone else, but to know intuitively how her bigness affects everyone around her. Moreover, she is also able to see the past—her mother’s past, her father’s past; therefore able to reveal the innermost feelings and vulnerabilities of her parents, Elspeth and James.

From the womb of Elspeth, the story unfolds chronologically, piece by piece, inch by inch, focusing on the minutiae.

I had tunnel vision, but an eye for detail. In fact, I suppose this has always been true of me: I can hardly pull my eyes from the infinitesimal details to take in the broader picture, so vast and vague that I don’t know what to make of it.(68)

The author embellishes her fiction with references to real people and characters from pop culture “who’d grown to great heights”; ergo, the title “and me among them”. She has skillfully interwoven fact with fiction and recognizable fictitious characters to produce a credible story of Ruth whose most ardent wish is to belong, to have a friend to love, and to be loved, to be accepted. And she finds this special person, Suzy, who moves into the house next door. Witness the longing:

One day she caught my eye, waved, and motioned for me to come outside. No one had ever been so familiar, so casual with me, and I rushed to put my shoes on and get out to her before she changed her mind and wandered away . . . . We were closer than ever, then. She was right beside me, holding my wrist, and she looked up and said, “Wow—you really are tall. No matter how much I see you I just can’t get over it. You seem bigger each time.”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “I know it’s strange.”

I turned to go, but Suzy called to me, “Strange, yeah. But pretty amazing too. See you tomorrow?”(73-75)

Kristen den Hartog has written a provocative novel, one that I urge you to read for all its truth and elegance.

This review was first published in Prairie Journal magazine and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

FreeFall 2011 Prose and Poetry Contest Shortlist

Poetry short List Titles
Our Black Dog Who Disappeared
They called him ‘Wing’
Once, in a story
One Morning
First Frost
After Sappho (Fragment 130)
Cinema Verité
Shooting Rats
South Saskatchewan
Overcast
100 Words
Incessant Hum
In My Mother’s Kitchen
The Fifties
A The Bee Master’s Stag
Sunday’s Child
Best Wishes
Dark Night, solo
Rock On Chicago
The Lake
Of
Wedding #1
P.S.
What We Learned Beyond Grandfather’s Dare
Five Veils After Noon

Prose short List Titles
Buried Under His Weight
Paint Your Children Red
Near Miss
Redolent
Darren, Almost in Love
Hunting Muskie
Destiny’s Dance
A Boat A Man and A Fish
Easy on the City John Hancock
The Quinzie
The Depot
Look How Pretty
Measurements

Book Review of Noble Gas, Penny Black

Micheline Maylor
a review of

Noble Gas, Penny Black By David O’Meara
Brick Books
ISBN: 978-1-894078-68-9
$18.00

David O’Meara’s third collection is a study in absences. This is not a collection of an optimist, nor a book of reverie. These poems ask that you, the reader, look offstage at what isn’t immediately on set. Through absence the poems reveal themselves wholly in terms of longing. In “This Age – after Ahkmatova” the mood of the book is reinforced.

Why are things worse than they’ve ever been?
Sometimes, distracted by the mind’s great grief,
we’d lop our own hand off to stop the pain,
then fidget with the stump so there’s never relief. (22)

Thematically, the poems seek some sort of relief and the authorial voice creates a distance between narrator and reader that holds the reader, at arm’s length. What is sought is always off stage, out of range. Perhaps an example of this is best shown in “I used to Live Around Here.”

I used to live around here:
two rooms, one window, a year’s lease.
After circling the park I’d climb the stair,
just sit, and watch the flags snap in the breeze.

We used to meet around here.
There’s a part of us left in these places:
a hand held, a look, a dumb joke. A mere
sketch resists what time erases.

But I was circling your absence then,
like a climber whose base camp is lost in snow. (47)

O’Meara’s observations, musings, never provide relief. They skirt the periphery rather like a dog patrolling territory, uneasy. Technically, the poems show a refinement of craft. The metrics and rhyme of this short piece are evidence of this skill. Yet, the distance of the narrative, the grey tone provide little room for an exhale, a sigh of relief. Sufficed to say, relief isn’t a value judgment or yardstick of quality. And the poet delivers much skill. But the tone is grey.

Thematically the book could fall under the “nothing new under the sun” category. O’Meara creates a lackadaisical sense of déjà vu. All this has happened before and will again. The palindromic, “Nothing” captures this theme in both content and form to create the best effects in terms of meaning.

“Nothing,” he said, “it’s nothing.”
Then nothing was said. Silence; nothing.

What she asked had come from nothing.
Sweet nothing, really, was all he said.

They cut their links like little wires, said
Nothing about it afterward, nothing.

All over nothing.
So never to talk of what they said

until all that was ever said
was nothing, and so nothing was ever said. (24)

The collection is a tight program of skillful poems. It is no mistake that O’Meara’s skills place him on the judge’s panel at the Griffin prize this year. Indeed his work has the sense of a master craftsman, in the ilk of Don Coles or Don Domanski. The intimacy of loss, the perpetual seeking that is much a part of the human condition is finely wrought.

FreeFall Author in Broken Pencil Deathmatch

You can vote once per hour.

http://www.brokenpencil.com/deathmatch-2012/heart-string

Winter Issue Launch

Can you guess where this picture was taken?

Join FreeFall
for readings and festivities
showcasing the authors of
Volume XXII Number 1
When: February 2, 2012 at 7:00 PM
Where: Owl’s Nest Books
815 – 49th Avenue SW
Calgary
Readers:
Lori Hahnel
Naomi Lewis
Barbara Parker
Jessica Pia
Juleta Severson-Baker
Refreshments provided