Another Country
I recently was handed (by the author) a copy of Another Country, a poetry chapbook by Joan E. Bauer (Pudding House Publications). Joan is quite a good poet (and winner of the Earle Birney Poetry Prize), and there isn't a weak poem in the entire chapbook. That's saying something. As is the fact that some of my favorite poems of hers don't happen to be in this collection, yet it's still strong.
If there is a weakness, it's in two items of repetition. There are several poems touching on a spouse's passing (and we're given to understand, without the name, that mesothelioma was the culprit), and the same elements recur. We learn about four or five different times that a certain house burned down. But these dramatic elements didn't build upon each other, they seemed only to repeat.
The second issue or repetition is one I'm prone to, and therefore sensitized to. Joan frequently writes poems put in the voice of famous people, so I'm used to historical reference in her poems, but none of the poems in this collection is like that. Still, I noticed that in 25 poems we get at least 38 references to named historical figures (Woody Allen, Borges, Li Po, Neruda [am I the only poet in America who doesn't reference Neruda??], Buddha, Gödel, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Feynman (misspelled), Houdini, Einstein, Will Durant, e.e. cummings (twice), Sgt. Bilko, Paracelsus (twice), Basquiat, Whoopi Goldberg, Erasmus, Holbein, Cassandra, Olof Palme (misspelled, as many reference works also do), Hammarskjöld, Soleri, Abelardo Morrell, Carlos Castaneda, Che, Joan Baez, Robert Frost (twice), George Washington, John Ciardi, Emily Dickinson, John Paul Stapp (who is cleverly invoked), Joan of Arc, Madame Curie and Pierre Curie; not to mention (and we shouldn't be surprised, given the title) about 40 place names, many of them repeated in several poems.) There's nothing in any one poem that's inappropriate, but taken together it begins to feel like name dropping, like borrowed fire.
But those lengthily-stated quibbles should not overmatch my opinion. This is one of the strongest collections by a non-famous poet I've seen lately.
CBsIP: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Ross E. Dunn
A History of Warfare, John Keegan