REVIEW: Beth Houston, electronic poetry chapbook from The Literary Review, http://webdelsol.com/tlr/Featured_P&W/Beth_Houston/houston1.htm Beth Houston is a California poet from the San Francisco Bay Area and her poems have been widely published in magazines. I’d never read any of those magazines, at least not those issues containing her poems. It’s almost impossible to keep up with what’s happening in poetry, especially if it’s happening on the other side of the country. It’s good to note that online publication is changing that. I’ve always loved chapbooks – the format, the intent. Chapbooks allow you to gather a group of poems that “go together” by some standard. I don’t see it as a bunch of poems in the same place at the same time, but as a group of poems united by theme or style or some principle of association. Houston’s poems group around family – the one we are born in and the one we select. If I were publishing this I’d rearrange the poems to separate the poems about family from the ones about art and the seeking after other spiritual things, although at times these two themes find their way into the same poem as in “The Zen of Sex”: All the generic melts away. You are left with your true absolute essence merging with the absolute essence of the other. When the two are one they are most fully two: The Zen of paradox. The best word to describe Houston’s poetry is lush - in the sense of elaborate or extravagant. He lines are usually 10 syllables long (except for Dividing Irises) and her vocabulary is often particularly scientific, psychological, philosophical, aesthetic, veering from the abstract to the concrete and back again. Houston is a thinker, there’s no doubt there’s a mind here, busy assessing the universe, but that mind is clearly centered in a body and that body lusts, loves, hates, makes – it’s a rich and interesting combination: from “Yes” My mind crosses its forefingers to ward off the vampire wrapped up cloak-and-dagger like a black calla lily. Bleeding I’ve sat here the hour through dusk and the hour of darkness it takes human eyes to adjust 100,000 times more sensitive to light. Sometimes the lush narrative style becomes too talky. There are too many details and you get lost in the syntax: From “Hexagram (Sestina)” Add incense of frankincense and myrrh to your bowl, Let flakes of gold in oil be stars reconfiguring this night, Transfiguring your destiny, let your stars in their shadows this night burn Against the terrors of darkness, let terror’s power spill Its seed in the desert; add seed and sand, a thorn, its drop of blood To your bowl from the finger pointing a circle for each savior pierced. The reader gets overwhelmed in the detail, gets tired in the long sentence with no where to stop. I’m a plain style poet so take that into consideration, maybe attention span problems. Houston’s poems are lyrical, intense, complicated. At her best, she weaves the daily with the spiritual as in “The Buddhist’s Window.” where she is discussing Buddhism while cutting and piecing material for a stained glass window. The wonderful colors of the window are assembled for you as you read, a complicated and precise task. I cut my thumb on purpose, letting its single blood drop slick and dry on the delicate piece of pink and creamy white opalescent reserved for a magnolia blossom. He advises me to shatter this yearning for sensation and enter the clear colorless light of the mundane void. The poem goes back and forth between the now and the maybe, quite an elegant composition. My favorite poem in the collection is “Dividing Irises” where Houston describes the act of digging rhizomes in her grandmother’s garden. Each step in the process is captured simply and directly in short lines, the pace of the poem like the pace of the task: a handful of bone meal Firmly tamping the soil. Knowing this cultivation does not explain life. And yet, the brief flush of blue and purple flowers. Houston is the featured poet in a back issue of Able Muse, http://www.ablemuse.com/premiere/bhouston (autumn 1999) which includes an interview and another chapbook of formal works. Her print work has appeared in Yale Review, Massachusetts Review, Feminist Studies, 13th Moon, Chicago Review, Florida Review, etc. This online chapbook reveals Houston and her work unlike one or two poems in a crowded issue of a magazine. However, there should be a reason for the grouping. The assembly of poems here has the feel of an inbasket. Grouping the poems into three parts allows you to print sections and not have to download the whole thing, but a good chapbook does more than make for a quick gulp. It should allow you to see what the obsessions of the author are, what compelling subject matter she/he favors. And I would be in favor of titling the chapbook. We should all have a name. - Helen Ruggieri Home