December
2002
Book Reviews:
Poetryworks:
New Jersey Poetry Society, Inc., Anthology 2002
Published by The New Jersey Poetry Society
Lawrenceville, N.J.
By
Mark Feffer
Poetryworks:
New Jersey Poetry Society, Inc., Anthology 2002 is
an interesting mix of work by established artists, novices and students.
As such, it's an ambitious effort, though it's also uneven in the
quality of its poetry and the impact of the collection as a whole.
Whether or not the book exemplifies the group's mission is something
I can only guess at, since it offers no foreword or editor's note
to put it all in context. But that's all right, because the work
presented in these 112 pages portray a cross-section of talent and
approach that is often lively and, at times, exceptional.
Clinton Campbell's What I Want is a true jewel, formed from
words of nostalgia and romance. In the voice of an aging man, he
sketches a vision of content retirement even while revealing shadows
of a life in the past. He writes:
My
wife, intimately near
in an overstuffed swivel,
two inches of flour-sack slip
exposed under a cotton dress.
Upstairs, her bottom drawer
full of pretty new dresses,
the prints and polyesters,
safe among camphor flakes
and her old love letters.
What
Campbell does here is amazing to me: Here he describes and old woman,
as dowdy and frumpy as she can get, but tints the portrait in a
sepia of romance, the context of a lifetime spent together. At their
best, poems use small moments to tell whole stories, and this is
what Campbell achieves in his piece, and it's no easy task. Similarly,
Carolyn Foote Edelmann's Quest is a sensuous mood piece,
describing both a journey and a wave of emotions at the same time:
I
plunge to where the weeds rise
- green/bronze in the half light -
swaying in delicate currents
spawned by the slimmest fins
of those who belong
deep
Taken
together, the pieces in Poetryworks have the feel of wistful
memory. While the book offers no biographies, I venture to guess
that most of its contributors are older, for the worldview they
express seems more rooted in the experiences of the World War II
generation than those of Baby Boomers (with the exception, of course,
of the poems by student winners of the society's poetry contests).
This is an observation, not a criticism, and indeed there's something
refreshing about reading work that doesn't shy away from themes
of love, family and innocence.
I do wish the society spent more time on the details of publishing
than it has. The book suffers from the lack of an editor's presence;
we're given no idea of who selected these poems or how they were
chosen. Just aAs bad, it's rife with typographical errors and spelling
mistakes, and I always believe writers and poets deserve to have
greater care taken with their work. And, as ambitious as it is,
I wish it better reflected the character of New Jersey, but it seems
to me a suburban book, made up of work from poets in Cherry Hill,
Somerset, West Windsor, Princeton and nothing from Trenton, Camden,
Elizabeth or Newark.
# #
#
The
book is available at Barnes & Noble or From the Society, 12
Rydal Drive, Lawrenceville NJ 08648.
Mark Feffer is founding editor of the Trenton Writes Project
