| A goddess floats in mandala dream hair of sunflowers doves resting in her hands . . . . --from The Art Melen Lunn is a Sacramento poet who writes short, power-packed poems rich with imagery and emotion. She was a member of The Writer's Circle group of women poets at the Sacramento Poetry Center. -- Wendy Williams, poet of the week |  |
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 I encountered Sonia Greenfield for the first time at a reading of ekphrastic poems that I participated in at the Riverside Art Museum last August. I was bowled over by her “Nafsicrate Considers Bruegel’s Famous Work”:
I told Daedalus to watch him, goddammit, so now here I am waiting for my son to breaststroke home to me, held up on fingers of green foam. Waiting past the rise and fall of Rome through to Pieter’s brushwork which rendered the sun like a lemon on fire . . . . I loved the point of view in this poem, the implicit war between the parents, the portrait of infinite, focused and pragmatic mother-love which maintains even self-deceiving hope. And I promptly bought Sonia Greenfield's first book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, winner of the 2014 Codhill Poetry Award. Greenfield's fierce and witty work is highly inventive, and often other-directed, as in the title poem, which imagines the later life of this boy with a "metal halo" "bolted into his skull"—a life in which a broken neck turns out to have been "a lucky break." She re-invents myth, again, in "Afternoon with Redón," another ekphrastic poem, in which Galatea is not the victim of Polyphemus, but "like the heartbreaker, / the boy-teaser, the self-pleaser / who only thought to have some fun," and he "like a monster-hearted boy before he buys / his gun." In "Milk Carton Kids," she invents the places and ways children can disappear forever, not even to be found "stuffed / in a trunk" or "dragged from a lake." She asks how "thoughts and prayers go out" in response to a disaster ("Like a loon's / song transmitted by Morse?"), as when "the first plane hit" in 2001. Her metaphors and similes are fresh and exact. "At night bugs came out / and flicked their shells open // like switchblades." ("Pestilence"). They are also compressed, deft, and unsentimental; in “Sago Mine, West Virginia”—about the explosion that killed twelve of thirteen miners—the coal is described as “a black ribbon pinned to / a lapel.” Greenfield's is often a dire, threatening world seen with a cold, clear eye, a world in which "schools are ever on lockdown behind / chain-link where the mothers cling" ("School Rules"), yet there can be sly amusement in her clear-eyed inventiveness. In "A Vision in Stride Rite," the baby throws his sandal out of the pram, and eats champagne grapes "as he surveys his subjects." The narrator (echoing Allen Ginsberg?), concludes: Here he is, Baby Bacchus, making the most of privilege as his servant puts her shoulder to the wheel and shoves on up the hill. I admire the strategies of so many of these poems, the way the poet manages their "plots,” or turns them multiple times. In "Morning Coffee with Chagall," she describes a Chagall painting on a coffee cup, a painting in which The bride and groom lift off as if their feet were filled with helium, a bouquet of peonies in her hands, lips locked as if they're inflating each other like elegant balloons . . . The poem only turns neatly toward the self in the third line from the end, when the pronoun "my" deftly enters: Held aloft, alive-- before their feet touch the ground, before dishes need to be done. Before the cup is drained, rinsed and shut away in the hot spray of my top-of-the-line machine, caught flying before the gravity of domestic routine. I look forward to further work from the accomplished Sonia Greenfield. -- Judy Kronenfeld
 As Voigt is quite a reserved and private person, I am always surprised and delighted by her insight, and her generosity to share herself with the reader. She is intelligent and has a quiet grace about her and through her work. What I appreciate about her poetry is the quiet way in which her poems unfold and reveal themselves: no loud bangs and thrashing metaphors, no hyperbole of language, but a certain knowing that she is at work and in service of the poem. And respectful of her art, the reader, and her subject. Beverly writes often of her upbringing in Pittsburgh. Coming from a large family, many of her poems are of the reunions, dinners, or get-togethers on the house porch or in a historic restaurant in her home town. Her closeness to nature, how she walks through the world in wonder of the forests, and what she chooses to see, is a source of great joy to her, and a source of wonderful poetry of the natural world, for us.
-- Carine Topal Blue Mother All that long night we hovered, all of us in the room, watching her slow retreat. Her feet so cold, her fingers going blue. Again and again she raised her arm, wanting out, wanting back. Again and again, I guided it down to the bed. All the care she’d given me, repaid in such a small gift. Blue mother in the bed-- Venus in marble—glowing down that long hallway. Legs in folds of winding sheets. One shoulder shrugging off the world, the other arm missing, reaching. I think of the apple tree in blossom whose branch I’d once pulled toward me. Whoa, I whispered, when it reared in the wind. I’ve got you. Beverly Voigt  When I first recognized that my words were falling onto paper in poetic form, that is, when I started writing poems and calling them that, I felt like a surprised and vulnerable fledgling bird. And the voice that caught and lofted me further forwards was Rebecca del Rio’s.
Rebecca is an American-born poet, mother, and grandmother who divides her time between Northern California and Catalunya (Spain). We met, and I became familiar with her work, because we both attend a Zen meditation center that places creativity and compassion at the center of its practice. Rebecca’s poetry has been published in literary journals in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and she holds degrees in both creative writing and public health. For over twenty-five years, she worked as an investigator in the Superior Court in Sonoma County, California, and she has also been deeply involved in social work and public health projects in Guatemala. Her extensive work and travel have opened her eyes to multiple histories, and to global suffering. Rebecca writes poems determined to walk in the dark with beauty. “To awaken here,” she writes at the close of her poem “Auschwitz-Birkenau,” Is to know one’s Darkness, and not Turning from it, see that light. She questions unashamedly (“Who am I / in this enormous evil?”). She can dwell in the large dilemmas (“When there’s not enough to eat… we wander… We step into occupied / territory, call it our own…”) and capture small moments in crystals of specificity (“Begin with tools: a hammer, / a hoe. A moment under gathering / clouds…”). She made it clear to me that a poet is served by being observant in so many ways—watching our dreams, reading the newspapers, listening to the small, routine habits of speech (“…we say, as a way / to soothe our separate souls, / ‘We’re under the same moon.’ / Why not the same sun?”). But most of all she woke me up to the alive-ness of poems themselves. In “Poems Are Trying To Write Me,” Rebecca is chased by poems, beseeched by them, each one with an impish child’s face like a “rising moon, / grinning.” She can’t turn away: They dream me, they think in me, they step on my heels as I walk, they tug on my sleeves. I read these lines and knew that feeling. And knew that this was what I wanted to do in my poetry: create that feeling of recognition, of pleasure, of real life, even in metaphor, even in disorientation, repulsion, confusion. I wanted to learn to walk the line between singular vision and civic awareness, through attention to language, emotion, and craft. Rebecca’s poems have helped me pay attention to my own creative imps and babies, walk into my own dark questions, and listen to my own voice. I am deeply grateful for hers. -- Amy Elizabeth Robinson. |
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