What do you think?
Rate this book
Interstate
Interstate is a collection of lyrical poems in four sections that concentrate thematically on animals, love and sex, compassion, and loss. A unifying elegiac conceit, even in the more ecstatic and humorous poems, betrays the bittersweet nature of the book's muse. Alternating between free and formal verse, the poems contain a lyrical tension in which their "broken music" evokes metaphysical paradoxes, romantic humor, and the "dark sounds" that effect what Garcia Lorca called "the power everyone feels" in the mystery of duende "but no philosopher can explain."
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 2015
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 1, 2016
I know Chard (once a colleague) and am aware of his Putney, VT-Providence, RI, commute: interstate indeed.
It might mean something to learn that Bardo, VT, also suggests bardo, in Indian Buddhism, the intermediate state of the soul between lives; interstate indeed. One poem, "Oh, Besotted, Critical Father," (p 60) takes that "critical," italicizes it, suggesting that it marks a transition from one state to another, certainly apt in a poem about a doctor as it is in a poem about a father, one who is about to die.
The book has four untitled sections. I have not worked out the organizational pattern, but, given the clues in the preceding paragraph, the book's opening poem might be both a promise and a fulfillment:
"I Keep the Windows Open
to watch the curtains fly as a sign
of the old spirits on the move again, passing through.
I take them in through the mouthpiece
of my bones and let them out again.
I stare at the oak outside my window,
the one that holds its leaves throughout the winter.
'No matter,' they say with so many names
I call them just one. 'No matter,' they say again
as I hold a thread to the eye of a needle
and feel their stillness blow inside."
(p 3)
This would seem simple enough if one were not attuned to the sound pattern of "w"'s and "th"'s as the wind/spirit moves the curtain and, in the "o"'s, blows through. That "inside" concludes the breeze, shutting it down as the curtain falls back in the stillness of threading that Biblical "eye of a needle, finding another, external reality in this very common touch. "Starlings," which ends the I (p 20), I found delightfully charming and ominous as "you could hear the silence in the sky/ beyond their singing."
A number of poems in II suggest Renaissance wit with Herrick providing the epigraphs to "Dress Poker" (pp 25-26), a poem which also plays with the hidden and revealed, though the reality is much more down to earth. There is humor here.
And in the square dance-infused "Grouse Call" (p 76):
"Do si do and say hello
to drummin' bird. Slow
it down then pick it up.
Once and a half and let
her go. It's right by right
by wrong you go. Turn
to your left and freeze
the doe. Promenade
to the field below.
It may be the last time,
I don't know. Allemande
right with Mr. Crow.
You can't go to heaven
when you carry on so.
Yellow rock, red rock,
oh by Joe. Dangle now
outside the know, tim'rous
beastie, beastie, O!"
(p 76)
There is much more here of "cloud[s] of unknowing," lovely nature that may or may not be Transcendental New England signs, but the shape-shifting crow and Burns's "beastie" give the reader pause.
This is a very good book, worth the kind of attention deNiord gave it as he composed its various parts.
It might mean something to learn that Bardo, VT, also suggests bardo, in Indian Buddhism, the intermediate state of the soul between lives; interstate indeed. One poem, "Oh, Besotted, Critical Father," (p 60) takes that "critical," italicizes it, suggesting that it marks a transition from one state to another, certainly apt in a poem about a doctor as it is in a poem about a father, one who is about to die.
The book has four untitled sections. I have not worked out the organizational pattern, but, given the clues in the preceding paragraph, the book's opening poem might be both a promise and a fulfillment:
"I Keep the Windows Open
to watch the curtains fly as a sign
of the old spirits on the move again, passing through.
I take them in through the mouthpiece
of my bones and let them out again.
I stare at the oak outside my window,
the one that holds its leaves throughout the winter.
'No matter,' they say with so many names
I call them just one. 'No matter,' they say again
as I hold a thread to the eye of a needle
and feel their stillness blow inside."
(p 3)
This would seem simple enough if one were not attuned to the sound pattern of "w"'s and "th"'s as the wind/spirit moves the curtain and, in the "o"'s, blows through. That "inside" concludes the breeze, shutting it down as the curtain falls back in the stillness of threading that Biblical "eye of a needle, finding another, external reality in this very common touch. "Starlings," which ends the I (p 20), I found delightfully charming and ominous as "you could hear the silence in the sky/ beyond their singing."
A number of poems in II suggest Renaissance wit with Herrick providing the epigraphs to "Dress Poker" (pp 25-26), a poem which also plays with the hidden and revealed, though the reality is much more down to earth. There is humor here.
And in the square dance-infused "Grouse Call" (p 76):
"Do si do and say hello
to drummin' bird. Slow
it down then pick it up.
Once and a half and let
her go. It's right by right
by wrong you go. Turn
to your left and freeze
the doe. Promenade
to the field below.
It may be the last time,
I don't know. Allemande
right with Mr. Crow.
You can't go to heaven
when you carry on so.
Yellow rock, red rock,
oh by Joe. Dangle now
outside the know, tim'rous
beastie, beastie, O!"
(p 76)
There is much more here of "cloud[s] of unknowing," lovely nature that may or may not be Transcendental New England signs, but the shape-shifting crow and Burns's "beastie" give the reader pause.
This is a very good book, worth the kind of attention deNiord gave it as he composed its various parts.
Displaying 1 of 1 review