Steve Potter Looks at 5 Poetry Collections from Charles Potts’ Hand to Mouth Books
Poetry Collections by Terry Zipf, Stephen Thomas, Dennis Held, Joshua Lew McDermott & Greg Bem
A Review by Steve Potter
The varied terrain of the Pacific Northwest—from the Salish Sea/Pacific Ocean to the Olympic/Cascade Mountains—is a common point-of-focus among four of five poetry collections from Walla Walla, Washington's Hand to Mouth Books. They feature poems with titles such as; "The Snake River, June 2nd, 2012” (Joshua Lew McDermott), “Cannon Beach” (Teri Zipf), “The View from Manashtash Ridge” (Stephen Thomas), and “Walking Along a Nature Trail in Wenatchee, Washington, the Poets Speak of Unimportant Matters” (Dennis Held).
In addition to the aforementioned “Cannon Beach,” other poems in Teri Zipf's The Vertigo of All Those Stars that feature Northwest-specific titles include; “Drawing, Montana,” “November in the Northwest,” “Patterson Ferry Road, August Near Hermiston, Oregon,” and “Camped at Trail's End.” Here is her poem “The Idea of North”:
My brother tried to teach me
orienteering, explained the difference
between true and magnetic north,
showed me how the Big Dipper points
to the North Star. Told me
I could get from Trails End
to Lake of the Woods with just a compass
and a map. In the movie I watched
last night, Glenn Gould walks alone
on thick lake ice, neckscarf and dark
coattails flapping, while a brittle
piano plays the Goldberg Variations.
He was Canadian. He understood
snow. How your life breaks
into seasons, splits like firewood,
between outside and in. How to explain
a childhood nurtured by the cruelty
of snow. It is a paradox to want
to talk about solitude.
There ought to be a language
of silence, a grammar
of loneliness. Along the floor
lay a layer of cold—a reprieve
from the crackling
of my mother's voice, the sparks
of woolen blankets. The cold
against the window soothed
my burning cheek. I hope I fear cold
exactly as much as I ought to.
I wish my life was as steady
as the North Star, but I
am still learning the compass.
Kudos to poet, editor, and publisher Charles Potts for creating Hand to Mouth Books centered in Walla Walla, Washington.
Many of Zipf's poems slow time to a standstill so one may embrace and appreciate a particular moment from the poet's past that inevitably reminds the reader of a moment from his-or-her own past. They make me think of the little scenes trapped inside old snow globe paperweights, Joseph Cornell's diorama boxes, Edward Hopper paintings, ancient ants preserved in dried amber.
Stephen Thomas covers a lot of thematic ground in the five sections that make up What Is Between Us. I especially like the fourth section, “Jones Among Friends,” which I find somewhat reminiscent of John Berryman's The Dream Songs. In the first section, Thomas reflects on the influence the Pacific Northwest landscape he grew up in had on his character with poems such as “The Highline Trail,” “Mountain Wants Down to the Sea,” “The Same River,” and “In the Wallowas.” His poems share a similar time-stopping quality as Zipf’s poems. Here is “September-Cedar Park”:
The world is busy now.
The chill night air has triggered
in the small, somatic minds of spiders
an idea, providence.
Maybe they aren't thinking,
but I think they are.
Their thoughts run out along their limbs
and on to the limbs of trees.
I follow them in my mind,
watching as they string their catchers
and their caches in the shadows.
Little engineers, can I dismiss you
as beneath me, when I know
beneath us all there's nothing? Look.
It is late afternoon. The low sun
finds some apertures among the boughs,
and in the shadows, gleaming
like the bright dark images of Hubble
and of Palomar, the canted panes of galaxies
poise crazily.
And in the center
of each milky grid
a single, dark and hungry star.
In the title poem of his collection, Not Me, Exactly, and others such as "Upon Being Served with a Restraining Order," "Rhythm Method," and "Heat," Dennis Held takes us into some of the darker, more depressing recesses of the human experience. He reminds us that there's often a menacing David Lynch film interior hidden within life's Norman Rockwell painting exteriors, but he also depicts sweeter moments of country life when the darkness has passed in poems such as "Forage Apples":
Speckled like a bird's egg, red on yellow
Dense and wet, tart on top and sugar beneath
Free for the asking in the generous
Season of gifts unearned, the low-hung branch
Far out on gravel roads long abandoned
Pushing a sixty-year run of good luck
In a primitive Ford with two bald tires
A Thermos of coffee, dark bread and cheese.
Chimney in a field, barn down to granite blocks
Homestead gone to ground, single grave out back.
But the spot of red through the field, the lost tree
With seeds that bear for no one's hand but mine,
Along the fence line, beside the slow creek,
The sweetest deep-set share of left-over love.
Joshua Lew McDermott's poems in Codex intertwine the spiritual with the mundane. They find secret depths in drab moments of day-to-day life and stare with unblinking honesty at scenes of sensuality and grief, heartbreak and joy. At times, the naked emotions on display made me think of the poetry of Frank Stanford. At other times, his reminiscences of a rural working-class childhood reminded me of Justin Torres' sad and lyrical novella We the Animals. McDermott's poems swing out like cracked whips that snap at the end and leave the reader with a sting of recognition. Here is "Why a Poem about the Coyote Works":
for Charles Potts
life is so big that lately I
can't see the point in being
topical—the play dough
is all mixed up—you can't write about
a smiling coyote without writing about
a children's hospital being bombed in Yemen.
But the coyote works because it's
not topical, it's anatomical: flesh and blood:
how are you going to isolate a theory out
of a rock-hard miracle? The coyote is everything.
when receiving heartbreaking news—
she did not survive the night—
the strangeness of the horses in the field
behind the house will be enough.
I'm being literal: eleven years old,
Jessica and I are awakened by Justin
as we sleep on the couch-bed with
the Strawberry Short Cake quilt,
and I hear the blond paramedic woman
upstairs in a yellow coat tell my father
I'm sorry
and me, wearing just my underwear,
run past the paramedics, run past
my father, burst through the back door,
seeing the horses, and run.
For a moment I believe I can reach that country road,
gray and straight forever—I am not just
running now. I am the run. But my father
catches me, halfway across the property,
grabs my arm, and we both fall onto the ground
beneath the cottonwood trees
where he cradles me and sobs
before he gets up and carries me toward
the house. And from his arms I
see a policeman, a man who has just watched
a dad chase down his son, a boy who,
for some reason—for something beyond
reason—simply began to run when he learned
that his mother had died in her sleep that night, and
the policeman is crying. My father walks me right
past him. The whole time we stare into each
other's eyes. I am expressionless.
He cries for me.
Greg Bem's collection, Of Spray and Mist, is the only one of the five books that doesn't include any poems explicitly titled after specific Pacific Northwest places. The book's title, though, is suggestive of the Pacific Northwest coast, and the poems themselves are suffused with Pacific Northwest atmosphere, as evident here in "Pondering the Wait":
If you dream hard enough they'll come back.
Orcas obliterating the tide under the moon.
The grays splashing for a moment like silicate.
Jellies blooming like fat entrailed across pier.
Dream hard, they tell me. Dream and dream.
Crowd of the singular autonomous automaton.
We've cleverly positioned it on the bank,
resting the way the slacks do, along the ankles.
Way of hip or skirt. Fishing rod. Pacific catch.
They came here tramping against the brush.
They saw a beach near a point and splayed.
Bem writes of the direct influence the Pacific Northwest coastline had on the writing of "To Harbor," the first section of his book, in his notes at the back of the book:
“The poems in this sequence were originally written at the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Labs in December 2019, as part of a scholarly retreat. They were written in the hours after being exposed to the Pacific Northwest air and the coastline and coastal forests that make up the Friday Harbor Labs Preserve.”
Steve Potter is the author of the novel Gangs With Greek Names, a short fiction collection called Easy Money & Other Stories, and two poetry collections: Mendacity Quirk Slipstream Snafu and Social Distance Sing. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in publications such as E·Ratio, Otoliths, Parole, and Word For/Word. Real Stand-Up Guys, the sequel to Gangs With Greek Names, is forthcoming.
The Vertigo of All Those Stars
by Terry Zipf
ISBN 979-8-9857601-0-1
Hand to Mouth Books,
Walla Walla, Washington
https://www.amazon.com/Vertigo-All-Those-Stars-Poems/dp/B09YM1TCF1
2022, paperback, 142 pages, $15
What Is Between US
by Stephen Thomas
ISBN 979-8-9857601-1-8
Hand to Mouth Books,
Walla Walla, Washington
https://www.ravenchronicles.org/books/what-is-between-us
2023, paperback, 157 pages, $18
Not Me, Exactly
by Dennis Held
Hand to Mouth Books,
Walla Walla, Washington
Checks to Dennis Held,
P.O. Box 1342, Spokane, WA 99210
2020, paperback, $15
Codex
by Joshua Lew McDermott
ISBN 978-10804110-5-4
Hand to Mouth Books,
Walla Walla, Washington
https://www.amazon.com/Codex-Joshua-Lew-McDermott/dp/1080411054
2019, paperback, 118 pages, $12
Of Spray and Mist
by Greg Bem
ISBN 978-1-6368487-4-7
Hand to Mouth Books,
Walla Walla, Washington
https://www.amazon.com/Spray-Mist-Greg-Bem/dp/1636848745
2020, paperback, 132 pages, $12
Hand to Mouth Books are published by
Charles Potts
P.O. Box 100
Walla Walla, WA 99362-0204