James Bertolino reviews Carmen Germain’s “The Old Refusals”
The Old Refusals by Carmen Germain
Poetry, ISBN 978-1-936657-44-5
MoonPath Press,
PO Box 445
Tillamook, OR 97141
2019, paperback, 80 pages, $16.00
This is a wide-ranging and richly-endowed collection of poems. Every poem in this book has unforgettable lines. Here are some examples:
“slammed the window at bird speed” from “Suddenly at Sunset”
“black-seed eyes shining in the moment of snap and shiver” from “Mouse Remedies”
“News of his death like barbed wire in the noodle stew” from “Potluck”
“winter your first refrigerator” from “La Cucina Povera”
“the old priest shuffles like a man under water” from “Hoping for Succor”
“Green kneels in fields after the long drought” from “Supplication”
“Silent chickadees stab gray weeds for seed” from “Color Is To Do Everything”
“The treason of tangible things” from “Installation, Domestic Interior”
Some of the poems refer to art, artists, and the behavior of artists over the last couple of centuries, taking the reader to several countries. And in a poem, “Reading Aeneid In Lantern Light,” she finishes by noting that—
“it’s torment enough
being human
but better than playing a god’s game.”
Germain probes the natural world, the social world, the emotional world, and history in her poems. While she respects what she attends to, there is no such thing as a “hands-off approach.” There are passages that glow with integrity, as well as those that flip known things over.
She was a college teacher for over twenty years, and co-directed the Foothills Writers Series in western Washington. She grew up in rural Wisconsin near the Mississippi River, and it pleases me to recall that my own mother spent time as a child living on a Mississippi River houseboat in Wisconsin.
Carmen Germain is a dazzling poet, as well as a remarkable artist—the cover of The Old Refusals employs a striking image of one of her paintings.
And how excellent it is that her volume of poems was published by the wonderful MoonPath Press in Tillamook, Oregon. Germain’s marvelous work deserves top-niche publication.
James Bertolino’s poetry has received recognition through a Book-of-the-Month Club Poetry Fellowship, the Discovery Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Quarterly Review of Literature book publication awards, the Connecticut College Contemporary American Poetry Archive and, in 2007, the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize for Washington State Poets. His 27 poetry collections have been published by 21 presses in nine states, and Ravenous Bliss: New and Selected Love Poems is his twelfth full volume.
He has taught creative writing at Cornell University, University of Cincinnati, Washington State University, Western Washington University, the North Cascades Institute and, in 2006, retired from a position as Writer-in-Residence at Willamette University in Oregon. 2018 was the ninth year he nominated books for the American Book Awards, sponsored by the Before Columbus Foundation in Berkeley.
He grew up in Wisconsin, and now lives on five rural acres near Bellingham, Washington with his multi-talented wife Anita K. Boyle, a dog and two cats.