June 3, 2006

Granite from Sugar Water by Richard Lyons

Julie: For the first strophe and a half, I was twiddling my mental thumbs, which is a bad habit because the whole purpose of the WEE reviews is to give attention and the benefit of the doubt to all comers. But twiddle I did. From the mention of "sax" to the "small brown birds" I twiddled. And then I perked up. The twiddling stopped. Did the poem change? Did I? I can't tell you. But from there on I was reading too fast, sped along by the rhythms and the drive and when I went back to read again, savoring, I still didn't like the first strophe and a half, but now it might just be plain old contrariness.

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The Customary Mysteries by Aleda Shirley

Julie: I think there's a great poem here, but I don't think Aleda Shirley has quite found it yet. There's a story, I don't know how true, that Michaelangelo said that he didn't carve a shape into marble, he released the form that was already there. This poem strikes me as a block of marble, with some of the shape showing, but with a little bit hidden. The ampersands did start to pester me after a while. Damn, that's a lot of ampersands.