After The Chinese by Joe Torra

Joe Torra is a poet who lives down the block from me in Somerville, Mass. Over the years our paths have crossed at coffeehouses, readings, you name it. And every once-in-a-while he drops a few books off at my house on School Street.

He deposited this gem, “After The Chinese” in my mailbox and I was damned glad he did.

Torra wrote: “These poems were written under the influence of ancient Chinese poets. They lift off from poems across centuries of writing translated by many hands.”

You don’t have to be an aficionado of ancient Chinese poets to appreciate this book. Torra writes simply and eloquently. At age 49, he is a man settling into middle age, and coming to a sort of understanding and hopefully peace with the change of the seasons.

In the lead poem “Thoughts in Exile,” the seasoned poet reflects on the different priorities he has now as opposed to his youth: “Jets depart into the sky./Money. Power. Position./After all these years they/ mean nothing to me/ I grow /indifferent towards the history men make/I’ve always felt like this/There is no place that I want to go./But nobody can stop me/ from writing poems/ about travel to faraway.”

Another wonderful poem is “Brisk Walk To Harvard Square.” This is a stream of consciousness jaunt that displays Torra’s well-honed observations of the landscape of the city, the past, and his mind.

Torra drifts back to a time when he was woefully ignorant of the great dividing line between Harvard University and the rest of the unwashed world just beyond its formidable gates: “Grow-up within/a few miles of Harvard, MIT, BU, Tufts, B.C./Why didn’t someone tell me?/ Trickle of sweat under arms,/breathe deep one, functioning nostril/ “You’re nothing but/a greasy dago./you’re a f—g asshole.”

This is a fine collection, by a poet who lives down the block, and has been around the block…more than a few times.

“Horizon” by Anna M. Warrock $10.

Somerville Poet Anna M. Warrock does what a poet should do: she puts to words what we feel, what we fail to articulate, the thing that wakes us up at 3A.M. in a cold sweat.

It is that intangible thing that pulls at us, nags at us, just when we think we have the bull by the proverbial horns. “Horizon” is an accomplished collection that should be a handbook for how to write poetry.

There is nothing arcane or rarefied about Warrock’s work. Her poetry taps into the universal pulse, and I dare anyone to say they can’t relate to at least one of the poems presented here.

Having just lost my own father, I was particularly taken by “My Father Waves.” Her Warrock writes about a long-suffering relationship with her Dad that is winding down to the end. Time has rendered her father, into a perplexed dotage. In this last stanza Warrock conveys so much about her diminished father, and his grim face to face with mortality.

Simple things such as light, the appointment of items in the old patriarch’s room are used with stunning effect: “Now my father raises his hand/looks past us and nods toward the dining room/and smiling waves./ When my husband and I turn our heads/to look/we see an empty doorway/ sunlight and shadow stippling the green carpet/and the worn brown of the wood chairs/Hello, hello, my father says, waving to the threshold./Hello, hello, he nods to the brightness smiling.”

In her poem “The Salmon Go All The Way To Death,” Warrock brings into focus the beauty of a Salmon’s life and death that many of us would take for tragic.

In this passage, Warrock writes about the Salmon’s death in the shallows after mating:“in the shallow, having given birth/to eggs and seeds, a promise to their memories, they die./The Salmon go all the way upstream, the Salmon go all the way to death.”

This is a collection by an artist at the top of her game, which fulfills the poet’s duty, to articulate in what we feel, but can’t express.

How To Read A Clock : Poems by Jeff J. Nedeau ( Finishing Line Press PO BOX 1626 Georgetown, Kentucky 40324 USA)

Somerville Poet Jeff Nedeau has penned a collection of poetry that deals with the most fleeting of commodities: Time.

As any good poet can tell you and hopefully show you is that the essence of poetry is to capture the moment in language that expresses what we feel, but most of us can’t sufficiently convey in words.

In his poem “A House Facing The Sea,” Nedeau portrays a couple staring out at the sea, aware of the imminent storms, but for now accepting the moment with all its melancholy beauty: “ For now, this pink setting is an embrace at dusk/Its streak wrapped chains around our tender breast.”

“In Praise of the Dream State,” contrasts the freedom of dreams to the drudgery of linear time: “And wake–then perhaps we wait–weathered bus stops/and hell-bent airports–/where, I suppose, Time, is all-important.”

If you have the time, than make the time, for this chapbook by Jeff Nedeau.