Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(InkerMen Press, 2008) Land’s End, the follow-up anthology to 2007’s Green and Unpleasant Land, is a fairly dark and sinister collection of tales covering a broad range of themes within the confines of that narrow strip of land betwixt the sea and the larger world. Consisting of twelve stories and a Preface (“Didn’t we have a Lovely Time?”), Land’s End covers, for example, mythology, seaside entertainments, sea creatures, and plenty of ghosts. Lucy Ann Wade starts off the stories with her take on the Calypso and Odysseus episode from The Odyssey (“Calypso”), doing so with great success as she explores the always treacherous nexus of naiveté and sexual lust. The “do as I say, not as I do” two-facedness of Calypso’s fellow Naiads made them read like a pack of modern high-school girls and not the far-off subjects of what is often (wrongly) seen as an irrelevant and antiquated tale. Over the past several years of reviewing InkerMen titles, I have made no secret of my fondness for the tales...

(Moongazy Publishing, 2006, www.stonewylde.com) Last year I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Magus of Stonewylde, Book One of the Stonewylde series. The seemingly idyllic pagan community that serves as the stage for this engaging series is populated with heroes and heroines, shamans and witches, Villagers and Hallfolk, all partaking in the eight festivals that mark the cycles of the year in pagan practice. At the center of Stonewylde is the all-powerful and charming Magus, against whom is set the series’ hero—a teenager named Yul, who shares in a star-crossed love with the very complicated and unique Sylvie, whose arrival and adjustment to Stonewylde were central to Magus. Moondance of Stonewylde succeeds in the many ways I mentioned in my review of Magus, and builds on that success in several new aspects. Berry goes into great detail about the daily and seasonal workings of the community in the sequel, covering everything from the harvesting of apples and the making of cider ...

“Building Words in Time”: A Review of Ed Baker/Cid Corman’s “Restoration Letters (1972–1978)” (tel-let, Charleston, IL, 2003) and Ed Baker’s “Restoration Poems (1972-2007)" (Country Valley Press, 2008, countryvalley@mac.com) In the age of e-mail, at a time when the Post Office is deep in the red and thinking of scaling back delivery to five days a week, it was a welcome pleasure to receive “Restoration Letters” as a companion to “Restoration Poems” from poet and artist Ed Baker. Ed’s minimalist, stream-of-consciousness poetry had caught my attention several months before, as did his goddess drawings, and I was eager to read the collection of poems he had written while restoring the John Penn house outside Hanover, PA during the years 1972–1975. “Restoration Letters” represents five and a half years of correspondence between Baker and the poet, editor, and translator Cid Corman, who was living at the time in Kyoto running a struggling coffee shop with his wife Shizumi, a former tel...

It’s always easy to like a book with which you instantly agree. We embrace the familiar, the similar, the types of things made of the same prima materia with which we’ve built our beliefs. But so much the better when an idea, a thesis, a text that we at first reject wins us over through a mix of solid research, real-life examples, and strong writing. Such is the case with my experience of Guilt with a Twist. In the Overview, Dr. Staples states: “We have to sin and incur guilt, if we are to grow and reach our full potential” (xv). Being a “lapsed” Catholic who had often experienced guilt as a weapon and thought the concept of “Original Sin” or having to confess your sins to an intermediary was nothing but power-clenching propaganda on the part of the Church, I found myself inching toward dismissing the book entirely, a feeling that persisted as I continued through the first section. The idea here is that there is “Good Guilt,” as demonstrated by such historical luminaries as Socrates, R...

Chatelaine (chain)—A set of short chains on a belt worn by women and men for carrying keys, thimble and/or sewing kit, etc. (from Wikipedia) “Kapwa”—a Filipino cultural concept of interconnectedness whereby other people are not “others” but part of what one is. (from the opening page; emphasis in original) How does one get to truly know the artist? Especially when the one doing the searching is the artist her- or himself? Dostoyevsky and Freud put forth the notion that it is impossible for an autobiography to reveal the Truth because of our penchant for self-delusion and both positive and negative exaggeration. Aldous Huxley seemed to agree, saying: “there is never a one-to-one correspondence between an author’s work and his character.” If poetry, like all writing, is a form of autobiography, then the path to the Truth is lined with thorns and nails and broken glass, at the end of which are myriad locks. The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys is a collection of reviews of many of Eileen Tabios’ b...

Winner of the The Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry prize, for which Filipino poets from around the world are eligible, Jean Vengua’s Prau is a fascinating journey in the often stormy seas of nontraditional poetry. It takes as its overarching theme images of boats and boating, bracketing its interior selection of poems with a beginning quote by Herman Melville and an ending quote from The Dhammapada. The quotes served, for me, a navigational purpose, functioning as the start and end points on a map or as the buoys that mark a channel or inlet, calling to mind the mnemonic device of “Red, Right, Return” that I learned as a teenager living near the ocean and learning to sail. Such anchors, if you will, are an essential part of any nontraditional writing, as they clue the reader to the fact that the author is not working randomly, or haphazardly, just putting words, phrases, and constructs on the page, but that the collection holds in important, vital ways. In reading Prau, I often tho...

Eileen Tabios is proof that one need not be locked into either a right- or left-brained set of experiences over the course of one’s life. With an MBA from NYU and an undergraduate degree in political science, she had a successful career in finance before shifting her attention to poetry. Her list of publications and awards is impressive (including the Philippines’ Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Poetry). She is an editor as well as a writer, and since 2001 has been integrating mixed-media and performance aspects into her work. She is also the founder of Meritage Press. Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is a subtle cinematography of words. It is a meditative and gentle read, drawing on the deeply experiential and ultra-personal, framed by a referential triumvirate—poetry, painting, and place. This book of what might be termed “prose poems” is composed of three sections: My Greece, Returning the Borrowed Tongue, and Triptych for Anne Truitt. The collection opens with four...