Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

The best books, the ones with deepest meaning—the ones we know upon our first engagement with them that we will go to them over and over again—invariably have an interesting genesis.  Möbius: Meditations on Home, by first-time writer W. David Hubbard, is no exception. Born of a question asked after the celebration of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday at the Kennedy Center, as a group of participants stopped to look at an exhibit of displaced peoples from around the world, this collection of reflections and meditations on the meaning of home is timely, profound, and, in my case, cause for misty eyes.  I have been a longtime fan of poetry and other writing that functions as a meditation. My longtime friend and subject of several of my reviews, the poet Ed Baker, who left us for the eternal home several years ago, wrote meditations on home restorations, and, even in his more traditional work, there was always a sense of searching for, celebrating, and marking the boundaries of home....

(Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, www.marshhawkpress.org , 2016) To mark the occasion of my tenth review of a poetry collection by the prolific and boundary-stretching poet Eileen Tabios, I knew I wanted to do something special—something that would honor Eileen’s ability to take the reader from a position of relative passivity to one of co-creation. I made an attempt at this before, ending my review of Tabios’ Sumptuous Sculpture (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002) with a poem crafted from another one of my reviews ( Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole , same publisher and year). This review, however, takes things much further. Since beginning her ongoing work “Murder, Death, and Resurrection (MDR),” Eileen has created new poems and published seven books that use re-constituted lines from a database of 1,146 lines from her previous works. The Connoisseur of Alleys is one such work. Following suit, the following is a poem formed from 27 lines taken from my 9 previous reviews of Tabios’ wo...

(Chicago: Moria Books, http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html , 2015), ISBN: 9780991212132 This month marks 10 years since I wrote my first book review. In that time, I have had the opportunity to review multiple books by the same author (in several cases, different books from a continuous series, but not always). Of the 110 reviews that I have done, there are half a dozen reviews of books that Eileen Tabios has either written or edited. This has been an easy decision to make, because no two are the same. Tabios is not only a talented wordsmith, and visual artist of language—she truly is an innovator. She invented a style of poetry called the Hay(na)ku, which numerous authors have adopted. She writes poems that pull in visual and literary art, music and dance, and that employ an impressive array of styles. She can go from dense prose poems that fill page after page with compact images and historical/literary references to very brief forms. Some months ago, I reviewed Tabios’s ...

(Marsh Hawk Press, www.marshhawkpress.org , 2002) In 2009 I reviewed Eileen Tabios’ Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (2002, Marsh Hawk Press; http://newmysticsreviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/poetic-meditation-review-of-eileen.html ). I encourage the reader to take a few moments to read that review, because what follows, including a reconstitution of that review as a poem, proceeds directly from where it ends. Always pushing boundaries, Tabios, after 12 years, took the prose poems from Reproductions and reworked them as “written-sculpted” poems, likening the process in her Preface to a sculptor releasing the image from a block of stone. While the prose poems in Reproductions employed mainly painting metaphors, this re-constituted collection brings in music, dancing, architecture, writing, and, of course, sculpture. Revisiting and reworking one’s work is not without precedent. Poets such as Walt Whitman and novelists such as F. Paul Wilson have made edits and updates t...