Passing Through Blue Earth, by Cynthia Neely

Review by Mary Ellen Talley

Caught up in the mishmash of creation, humans and animals arrive on this earth with natural proclivities of caring and of cruelty. Cynthia Neely begins her third book, Passing Through Blue Earth, with the poem “Hunger” which takes on this theme directly. Sometimes a hunger that leads to cruelty takes precedence. Neely is descriptive rather than accusatory when she acknowledges instinctual hungers that lead to cruelty. Stark images arise as we consider the “vultures // whose shadow-wings / mark the earth.” With Neely, vultures could be real or metaphorical. The last lines of the poem foreshadow grief to come in later poems: an “absence hollowed out / from a fullness in my throat.”

In the same poem, Neely’s frequent use of imagery stands out, such as “quills white as rib-bones”; a cougar’s tail “black and shivering”; “stubborn aspen leaves”; and how “ice gnaws the riverbank.” She gives a literary nod to William Carlos William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” with the creation of what could be an adage, “So much / depends on hunger.”

What a fitting introductory poem to this pocket-sized gem of a book!

Arranged without section breaks, the poems in this chapbook move as a river of connections from words in one poem to similar wording in adjacent verses or poems. Neely finishes two back-to-back poems, “Tonight a Blue Moon Rises” and “Bone is Bone,” mentioning variants of time ticking.  Later in the chapbook, we feel there is real and metaphorical “Crazy weather” in “Forecast” with the last lines, “The storming / off. We are altogether too much / weather.” In the next poem, “Home and Here,” Neely writes of fog and place, noting that “These are the places / that pull me by each arm / like quarreling parents.” The connections resonate because they are straightforward and there for the taking. In the end, the speaker reports wandering with the Mother, “over moss and waves / and [I] wonder how I will find my way back.”

Water and grief traverse the long poem “Hopewell Bay” in its thirty-one numbered free verse stanzas. Besides being a writer, Neely is also a noted Washington State painter, so she comes naturally to using color to depict emotion. In #5, she asks,  “What if green (blue and yellow) expressed all grief?” Before naming colors, #4 describes how water flows and literally takes on “the color of its surroundings.” Presenting other reflections on the physical properties of water, Neely reminds us that we swim, we float and we are buoyed up in water before birth.

The poem “Hopewell Bay” describes and explores grief. We are given personal narrative verses with Latinate medical vocabulary not typically part of a poem. Whenever Neely does this, she offers enough surrounding information that the reader gets the gist, as in  25: “Dysgerminomas are extremely sensitive to / chemotherapy, as are all fast growing cells.” In #26, Neely adds:

This summer’s in a hurry
moving off on a gust. My only son
wants to swim to Hopewell Bay.
Today. A round trip of a thousand breaths.
Alone. And I don’t want to let him go
though I should know
no rotating prop will dice him up
slice those lovely legs, render him.
He wants this test, his will
against my own. Still
most days I would go
match him stroke for stroke
breathe his breaths if I could,
swallow air for him.

Neely’s use of Latinate words juxtaposes emotion and image with medical complexities that will give rise to grief. Laminaria is a seaweed that has uses both in cancer prevention and terminating a pregnancy. In #2, cysplatinum is “iridescent, lovely and cool as water.” It also triggers “cell death.” It becomes evident why this long series begins with “I fell in love with grief.”

The poem has a universal perspective, but I wondered if it was grounded in the personal, since Neely often writes in first person. A quick search led me to her poem/bio online at “Survivor’s Notebook,” which suggests that this long poem reflects the poet’s experience with ovarian cancer and an associated pregnancy termination.  

A lover of the environment who resides in the Cascade foothills and summers on an off-grid Canadian island, Neely excels at using nature metaphors to suggest the human condition, as in, “Some ecosystems have evolved with fire as necessary for / habitat renewal.”

The speaker in the long poem is a mother who has studied grief. In #13, she writes, “There are five stages to grief. Once through each / stage we are ready to let go. / This is myth.” There is the personal in #29, what a mother might have told an unborn child. There is also the sense of an end to grief, “now that I have almost stopped / mourning for what’s been lost.” We note a nod both back to hunger and to Emily Dickinson that arrives in the same verse:

If hope’s a finch
that lightly touches down
and leaves the earth for sky
then grief must be a hungry thing
that suckles and suckles
and leaves its mother dry.

Neely’s long poem satisfies all our senses. Her aural imagery rings true in #14, “Sorrowing I love best. It sings like a / saw – a poor man’s viola.”

Cleverly, we are given an entry to resolution with a poem that acts as a transition to the final poems.  In “Hope’s a Transitive Verb” Neely welcomes Emily Dickinson again, as hope becomes a “feathered shaft / air filled wing.”

When we arrive at the next poem, “What This House Knows,” we sense a shift, a door swinging open on a hinge to poems of place and to poems that move toward healing. There is a vacant house to leave, a dwelling that can be an empty house or a metaphor for moving psychologically toward resiliency and/or resolution. Neely has already stated that it is a myth we “let go” of all grief. This poem acts as a hinge poem in the chapbook. The subsequent poems are reflective and move toward hope.

“The Wrecked” continues the poet’s reflection on loss by way of metaphor, “You search for wreckage / then search the wreckage for clues.” In “Since the Return of the Massasauga,” the speaker is more aware of dangers behind her and the possibilities of future pain. But she is determined to move forward, “Give me something / I can face head-on, a black bear in the trail.”

This small book will grow on you. Loss and grief are described briefly and reflected upon. But the book again addresses hope, what Dickinson calls “a the thing with feathers.” After all, hope is another thing we all hunger for.

Who would have suspected that the “Blue Earth” of the title is a town in Minnesota that the poet passed through? The first line of the final poem, “Passing Through,” reminds us that our planet Earth is just another place. Neely has written a linear trajectory reconciling the particular with an existential grief.

This chapbook includes a mother’s worry for the natural and for her personal world. Neely alludes to climate change, aging, and pain while focusing on nature, the personal, and the strong pull of DNA. She admits to worrying about nature and her son. This small book is packed with lyric wisdom and is spoken in the voice of a mother who knows and loves nature. The speaker could be Mother Nature considering her planet as well as a human mother who is programmed to worry about her children.

This poet knows where she has been and where she is going, even as she knows we are mere blips in the currents of time as we respond to our hungers and pains. In her final poem, Cynthia Neely speaks of and to creatures, events, and places that literally and metaphorically become part of a life journey. With reflective precision, the final lines of this final poem hold the key to the book’s title:

this blue planet
this perfect earth
we are all
only passing through

Cynthia Neely is a poet and a painter. She lives with her husband and son up an unmaintained mountain road in the Cascade foothills of North Central Washington and spends her summers on an off-grid island in Georgian Bay, Canada. These places have been indelibly etched into her persona and so into her poetry and paintings. The natural world and her place in it have always been important to her and to her work. When she travels from these areas she invariably heads north. Neely is the 2011 winner of the Hazel Lipa Poetry Chapbook Prize for Broken Water published by Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her critical work has appeared in The Writers’ Chronicle, and her poems in numerous print and online journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, and Terrain.org, and in several anthologies. Her full-length book of poetry, Flight Path, was published in 2014 as a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University.

Mary Ellen Talley is a former speech-language pathologist. Her poems have appeared widely in publications including Raven Chronicles, Flatbush Review, and Banshee, as well as in several poetry anthologies. Her poems have received two Pushcart nominations. Book reviews by Talley appear online and in print journals, such as Compulsive Reader, Crab Creek Review, Entropy, Sugar House Review and Empty Mirror. Her chapbook, “Postcards from the Lilac City,” was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.

Calling the Garden from the Grave by Lesley Clinton

Review by Herman Sutter

Reading Lesley Clinton’s exquisite first chapbook, I was struck by the breadth of her vision–the feeling of scope and magnitude radiating from her poems, but even more by the simultaneous intimate intensity of her focus. And I was reminded of two of the 20^th century’s finest poets: Elizabeth Bishop and Jane Kenyon.  Clinton clearly walks a similar path, a razor’s edge between a kind of ordinary grace and something like sourdough surrealism, evoking a very appealing sense of vertigo. Through her transcendent shifting of focus from the dry rot of an old rubber band to the starlit wonder of a desert night, she gleans the fine dust of the infinite in even the simplest and most earthbound moments. As she writes, despite the fact that so much of our life seems wasted puttering around, there comes a moment when we lean horizonward and catch a glimpse of something more.  This book is wonderfully full of those glimpses of that something more.  Including the “fossil drama” found in a paleontology exhibit case in the poem, “Contingency”:

Here, a fossil drama, cast
in Paleozoic throes.
A horseshoe crab trenched
in mire. Its death march kept

pristine. 

Clinton, an award-winning Texas poet, and celebrated English teacher, writes often of her daily life as a wife and mother; but–as in the brief and quietly intense, “Careful,”–she is always aware of the risks lurking just beneath that apparent stillness:

A rare ice day.  We tend to things
gone still or stuck, add heat—but slowly,
or a crack might burrow in
and root apart what’s whole
//
_______________________Night frost
 has punched the windshield white. You run
a tepid lip of water
on the glass to clear a vision
of the road ahead. But we don’t speak–

I find that some of her most powerful writing comes in poems where she takes on a persona. Poems like “Cabeza de Vaca Weathers the Gulf,” “Jacal Mother,” and “Rothko Paints the Central Triptych,” where she adopts the persona of the suicidal painter, the lost explorer, or the indigenous mother. Through these voices, she is able to give us glimpses into a world that feels both foreign and familiar. 

Pushing away from the kitchen table, she leans horizonward and fearlessly explores the pain, the loss, and the sacrifice and discovers in it moments of courage and hope, truth and grace that expand our gaze, open our hearts and inspire us to look up and see the glorious and uncertain world around us.  With “Cabeza de Vaca Weathers the Gulf” she comes to see that perhaps survival itself is something worthy of wonder and praise.  The explorer in search of a new horizon, new worlds, loses almost everything only to discover something stranger.  Broken, he rises from the swelling surf, realizing suddenly that:

I’m no part of the swell
after all   maybe churned
in its maw all this time
but now beaded away
like loose mercury
on a mad roll

And rising from the waves, he finds that, though he may be “marrow formed,” he “can’t go back.” There is only one way and it is forward:

I heed the drum    its pulse
writhe self from selfish germ
and rise   go forth   made new

I find myself returning again and again to the poem, “Jacal Mother.”  It is a poem that reminds me of Tolstoy. (Which may be one of the highest compliments I can pay any writer.)  In it, Clinton imagines life as a primitive woman living in a wattle-and-daub hut in the deserts of the Southwest, evoking a life lived in the inescapable shadow of loss. Life and death walking always hand in hand,

______________________________ The baby
roots for milk. Another labor
gathers within.  One day

the stepchildren will whisper
rain and gardens to my babies.
A woman will braid my orphan’s hair.

//

The fourth wife’s daughter. Now my daughter.

In a year, whose?”

In the character’s quiet acceptance, I hear an echo of Tolstoy’s peasants, especially the quiet and simple Nikita from Master and Man. 

One of her finest poems, “Undying,” is a brief narrative about the last two people on earth.  In some obvious sense, it is a poem of catastrophic loss, and yet feels not oppressive nor elegiac, but lit by a spark of hope that arises out of what Keats called “negative capability,” which simply means the ability to contain contradictions without feeling the need to justify them.  This poem never addresses why these are the last two survivors, a kind of mythical bookend to Adam and Eve, if you will.  Nor does it assert any new Eden to come; but she acknowledges the human drive to assert itself, to always and everywhere leave a mark:

___________________ Survival on his breath,
he exhales into her hair, a gesture
wholly human—the last of such,
of saying, wanting to say.

The veins teem with a drive to build,
to knead from the sand one last civilization
even as the foundation caves–

for something always lasts,

That phrase, that hopefulness, the belief that “something always lasts,” could be the key to her poetry, to entering into these splendid pages; we must open our eyes and see that despite all we think we know of life and loss, there is always something more to learn, another song to hear, another hand to hold, another sky to ponder, another dance to step into as we leave our longings behind and discover that there is a tenderness in the hand that guides our lives; the hand that holds all history is the same hand that invites us to come and join the dance.

I have known Clinton for a few years now and seen a handful of these poems in their nascent state, watched them develop under her tireless scrutiny and dogged efforts.  She is a writer of such energy and insight that I am humbled every time I approach her work.  When I compare her to Kenyon or the wonders of Bishop, I don’t do so lightly.  In Clinton’s lyrical narratives, I sense an echo of Kenyon’s stories of hardware stores, dog walks and doctor visits. And her verbal juxtapositions create the kind of off-kilter surrealism that one discovers in Bishop’s strange fable-like pieces or her quietly transcendent “The Moose.”  What amazes me, though, is how Clinton’s work stands up to such comparisons. She is already a skilled and polished writer, accurate and honest in her observations and keen in her sense of details.  She has a musical ear for language that is at home as easily in formal works (whether in the sonnet: “Mother’s Reply,” or the lovely blank-verse: “The Sure Roots”) as it is in free verse meditations like “Engulfed” or the gorgeous imagistic “The Cathedral Sees Morning,” from which are the last lines that are the book’s title.

I would venture to say that someday not too far hence, when people talk of Texas writers, they will mention Clinton’s name alongside Vassar Miller, Larry McMurtry, Horton Foote, and Katherine Anne Porter as one of our finest writers, and when someone in that distant conversation begins to recall a line from one of her poems, the others will pause and listen and all will feel the warmth of “holding the horizon close” and the gathering soft-light of solitude rising as the word itself takes flesh and steps from the page.

Read these poems, experience the beauty of their mysterious calm, their contemplative peace and the radiance of their incredible artistry. These are poems to contemplate and to nourish the soul, but they are also poems to delight and inspire.  Open this book anywhere and you will find genuine poetry, and the voice of a great writer discovering her art.

Lesley Clinton, a Board Member of Catholic Literary Arts, has won awards from the Poetry Society of Texas and Press Women of Texas. She has been a Juried Poet at the Houston Poetry Fest three times and in 2019 received the Lucille Johnson Clarke Memorial award. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as America Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, The Windhover, Texas Poetry Calendar, Ever Eden, Ekstasis Magazine, Radiant Magazine, Sakura Review, Literary Mama, Euphony Journal, Gulf Stream Magazine, and By the Light of a Neon Moon. Her chapbook of poems, Calling the Garden from the Grave, is available from Finishing Line Press. Lesley has a Master of Arts in Teaching. She teaches at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory and is Assistant Editor of the Crusader Chronicle. Her husband and three children keep her smiling with game nights, backyard s’mores, and general adventuring. The family pet hermit crab has grown shockingly large over the years and is hatching an elaborate scheme to take over the house.

Title: Calling the Garden from the Grave
Author: Lesley Clinton
Publisher : Finishing Line Press (October 30, 2020)
Paperback : 40 pages
ISBN-10 : 1646623312

Herman Sutter (poet, librarian and volunteer hospital chaplain) is the author of the chapbook The World Before Grace (Wings Press) and a long-time reviewer for Library Journal. His work has appeared in: Saint Anthony Messenger, The Ekphrastic Review, tejascovido, The Langdon Review, Iris, Benedict XVI Institute, Touchstone, i.e., The English Review, The Merton Journal, blonde on blonde, as well as the anthologies: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019).   His narrative poem Constance, received the Innisfree prize for Poetry, and The World Before Grace, a poem for voices (about a survivor of the Bataan Death March), was honored by the Texas Playwrights Festival. He is also the author of the blog: The World Before Grace (and after) in which he contemplates the counter-cultural paradox of finding grace through the loss of self.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe