Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2005

Skyspeak, poems by Jan Heller-Levi

(Louisiana State University Press, 2005) Jan Heller-Levi likes the long hard lines and abrupt shifts –- a consciousness with flow that stutters at heart beats and wind waves across arm hairs. She connects the dots that keep creating new forms –- check her poems from “The Handbook of Inconsolable Forms,” how the not-quite-title poem “Skywatch” plays off the whole idea of orality and text poetry. But it’s Heller’s humanity that ultimately won’t let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses.

When A Woman Loves A Man, poems by David Lehman

(Simon & Schuster, 2005) The sheer joy and vavoom in When A Woman Loves A Man comes close as poems can to Manhattan sidewalk cacophony under the tender care of the shimmering skyscrapers. As Lehman says, “I am what iamb!” He transports Plato to Greenwich Village. When he riffs on Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge” he can’t help but have Calvin Coolidge jump, not shout, for joy. With Lehman, life is the poem that writes itself.

The Lives of Rain, by Nathalie Handal

(Pitt Poetry Series, Interlink, 2005) “If one were to refer to me as an Arab-American writer that would be fine so long as they understood that I could also be referred to as a Palestinian, American, French, and Latina.” Cultures collide, dignity becomes bread, respect equals language. And the body, in these terrific poems, breaks over and over as each individual steps past the horrors into a world of possibility.

The Green Piano, poems by Janine Pommy Vega

Black Sparrow, 2005) New book from Janine Pomy Vega means you get it straight between the eyes, where the dream is, where the skull is, where the opening makes for a tomorrow. The whole idea of The Green Piano is to celebrate the companionship of poets, an opening of the instrument, the organic instrument, by the artists propelling music towards the stars, providing the sounds people dance to. Janine is a fiercely political poet. And she is a poet who knows how to compose “Doing Nothing.”

Americus, Book I, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

(New Directions, 2005) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, bombs away! His epic explodes a history of poem shards, a time-traveling shriek of a manuscreed (as he terms it). A heady mix of Cantos-style culture leaps and Paterson-like text-sampling, Americus pins the nation on a map, investigates with a constantly moving eye, and is bursting with scrapple and grapple. Good footnotes allow you to go further. Ferlinghetti’s links put Google to shame.

Red Shoes, poems by Honor Moore

(W.W. Norton & Company, 2005) When the interior holds while the physical leaps and flings, you’re in the extraordinary realm of Honor Moore. Her new book, Red Shoes, dares dream incest along with the most proper of wakefulness, handles full-tilt sexuality with a transcendental brush. She’ll open up with a sestina, “New Shoes,” but by the time the title poem appears, the very last poem, the form is gone, shoes are red, all is memory. Extraordinary.

David’s Copy, the Selected Poems of David Meltzer

(Penguin USA, 2005) How great is it to have a big new book of poems by David Meltzer to join last year’s Beat Thing, uproarious tilting with Beat Iconocrophy via essay & poem. To have David’s Copy in your hands is to have the answers to the conundra in Beat Thing: folks, the “Movement” if there ever was one is up to you, but the poems are here for you to have, hold, and, as Meltzer says, de- and remythologize the thing. It’s jazz kabbalah, it’s image direct, it’s smoking & it’s fire that builds.

Heal (Between the Pages of These Folks We Seek a Panacea)

(ed. Gladys E. Perez-Bashier, Clique Calm Books, 2005) Heal is for anyone looking for the New New, an adventure into Truth and believing that Poetry is Where Things Begin. This is the self-publishing dynamic that built US poetics, still in service, deserving your support: Keith Roach, David Acevedo (first published appearance, I believe, of thelazyfleecebeast), Diana “Gitesha” Hernandez-Correa, Frank Simone, Angelo Verga, Barry Wallenstein (and, disclaimer, Bob Holman).

Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry

(ed. Emanuel Xavier, Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005) Emanuel Xavier takes the blend he created from the performing poetry scene with the drag balls and queer houses in New York and nationalizes it with Bullets & Butterflies: Cheryl-Boyce Taylor, Regie Cabico, Staceyann Chin, Celena Glenn, Daphne Gottlieb, Maurice Jamal, Shane Luytens, Marty McConnell, Mavis Montez, Alix Olson, Shalija Patel, Horehound Stillpoint, Emanuel Xavier. (Disclaimer: foreword by Bob Holman).