By Zhuang Yisa

Catch and Release
Karla Huston
Marsh River Editions (2005) / 31 pages / USD 10.00

Another Word
David Chorlton
Pudding House Publications (2005) / 29 pages / USD 8.95

Opening the covers of Karla Huston's Catch and Release, I must confess I did not expect myself to be moved; I have had enough of Mary Oliver. Sometimes we do make mistakes, confusing the identities of those who do not resemble each other at the very start.

My brother and I stepped carefully into the water,
staying close to shore, while my mother
tucked pin curls into her tight bathing cap.
My dad would barrel-ass down the tank,
slice the water, show up on the other side

of the safety ropes, smiling.

('Night Swim', Karla Huston)

Catch and Release. The title suggests itself. A collection that is interested in the uniqueness or particularity of a moment's inspiration. It might be a chance recollection:

In comp class today, I try to write an important
poem, something deep and metaphysical, but Matt
asks for help with his assignment, and then Kristy
wants the bathroom pass and another kid forgets the
directions for the final draft, and I lose it. All I can
remember is fubakky, a word I typed that morning
when my fingers struck the wrong keys while trying
to type finally, and I decide I like the word fubakky
and define it as the stuff you find.

('Finally', Karla Huston)

Or the discovery of something quite unexpected and whimsical:

Between classes one day, I find them,
fifty-three slips of paper with penis
printed on each in a slanted hand

with ballpoint blue. They lie limp
on the floor in front of the trash can,
the one the perpetrator clearly missed.

I wonder who's done this decorating.

('Trickster', Karla Huston)

which continues in 'Finally':

                                                 when aquamarine
eye shadows collects in the corner of your eyes, and
then I think of Johnnie, the woman at the cosmetics
counter who says I have large "eye shelves" with no
room for shadow anyway. I picture books lined up, a
few knickknacks, pretty shells, some dust, and
decide maybe I should do something about the shelf
overhang, but remember that I'd donated my eye-
job stash to my husband, so he could buy a new bass
boat, and I realize how absurd this writing business
is – me trying to remember the lines I forgot, trying
to control the tornado in my head or the herd of
rhinoceros running down the street in that Ionesco play.
And how odd to call an eye job a blepharoplasty. But
I'm missing the point entirely. It's too cold for
sandals today, and God really lives in the pads of my
fingers – if I can just get them to the right keys.

There is no situation too absurd or trivial that Huston is unable to invest with a humour strangely filled with gravitas, not even her forgetting what she wanted to write as she attempted to begin a poem. Like Margaret Atwood, Ms Huston is a poetess of confidence – the power in her writing comes not so much from her subjects, which are wondrously diverse, than from the fact that she writes.

Her poems generally begin with a premise which she builds upon, and whose essence she reveals slowly over the course of the piece. What matters to her is not so much the explication of the initial premise, which she puts forth both to herself and her reader, than the recognition of that particular idea as a secure base from which she can further wander from to ruminate on something larger, while never straying too far from its essence.

Her poems are stories; it does not matter if there is no one else to hear them. Virgina Woolf said: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." I suppose David Chorlton would have paraphrased it thus: "As a man I have a country. My country is the world."

I imagine the world constructed within Huston's Catch as a backwater country town where the weary go to for respite. I imagine Chorlton's as the frontline of an unfinished war whose beginning no-one can pinpoint. Another Word is a slim volume of fifteen poems, consistently charged with the heat of war.

War is conflict and its resulting dislocation. Exiled from a previous state of peace, the soul constantly tries to move forward, but always finds the past looming up before it. History is slung round the traveller's back like a millstone. In 'Children's Drawings':

The lines do not show the strength
their subjects demand, in crayon
or splashed in water stained
with imaginary colour, but they hold
together anyway; the spiders' legs
and dribbled walls

that are Dubrovnik, Jajce, or wherever
these children live.

Chorlton's tone is stately and assured, and he is confident in the statements he makes. Another Word rings with a sustained musicality, which resonates through the rest of the poem:

Their cities are sheets of paper
torn apart, with people falling from
the jagged edges. A few bright strokes
make a person, a scribble
is the sun. The war

begins to look like games;
a hop left, a skip right,
and a juggler catching bricks
from houses as they break apart.

Surreal and elegiac, the poems are connected by the themes of renewal and remembrance, but the poems in the chapbook are marked by a division into two fairly distinct halves, not unlike the split being dreaming and wakefulness.

The poems of the first half display a somnambulistic quality, like words dreamt or muttered in sleep:

In cold pews
widows rustle their coats
as they sit down
and clench their beads
in fingers
stained with candle wax.

Gypsies walk
on staves of music
into a cloud of cigarette smoke
scented with apricot blossoms
and brandy.

The secret police
deal a hand
of cards
and laugh
so as to be invisible
among the crowd
at the tavern.

('Seeing Night in an Old City', David Chorlton)

A key technique of Chorlton's is to allow a word or idea to suggest the next. Strongly imagistic, his lines also result in an impression akin to the visual assault of a Surrealist painting, where swirling colours and disparate images blend together.

The contrast of sleep and wakefulness is a powerful device – even by daylight memories of atrocities haunt their survivors. It is a paradigmatic device that hints at futility of these poems to offer respite, a sense that is made all the more powerful by the function of these poems as moral witnesses to the scenes they depict. The aforementioned split between dreaming and waking is marked by the aptly-titled poem 'The Immolations':

Snow falls over snow
in an occupied country, silence
upon silence, and people run
through their cities with fire
enveloping them.

In a café, a customer
stands up at his table, sets
light to his sleeve
and the flame grows around him.
It happens all the time;

somebody tired beyond sleep
spontaneously decides
to burn. At bus stops,
waiting in line to buy bread,
or just walking home,
the impulse

is too strong to resist.
The rose coloured flash
is repeated with nonchalance.
It is a way of dealing
with the situation: matchless hiss

against sandpaper
and the ensuing fires
are everyday occurrences,
hardly noticed
except by the sweepers
whose job is to clear
the ashes away.

Thereafter, the contextual reality within the poems becomes more familiar and less surreal, as if this self-same reality demanded a head-on confrontation with the poet who is no longer allowed to negotiate his engagement with reality from the shelter of words and lines.

Drugs store racks displayed
paperbacks with covers spraying flames
and bold face prophecies of oil wars
in which we all shall burn
unless we turn to Christ.
This seemed funny
until Billy Graham
met with the president
and a real war began
with missiles
flying through a needle's eye.
The flag was raised
even on the shopping cart a homeless man
pushed downtown
as he wore a T-shirt
stained with sweat and boasting
colours that don't run;
a poor man showing pride
in a rich man's war.

('Viewing the Adopted Country', David Chorlton)

From a poem to the next, one retains a sense that each is connected to the one before, seeming to serve as an accomplice or a conspirator in some mnemonic entreprise, and the feeling that lingers at the end of the chapbook is an overwhelming sense of having journeyed through a dark forest of collective memory, where the reader has been made to bear witness. The links constructed by Chorlton are such that one gets the feeling of an infinite continuum of events from which nothing escapes:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

('Burnt Norton', T.S. Eliot)

That is why even departure is never a final escape from the past:

What I wanted to know was
which face you see when you shave, whose eyes
you close when you sleep, and how you decide
who to be when you dress. I had nothing to tell you
except that somebody not me is writing in my name
and telling me I could have had another life
without stepping out of this body. Excuse my distance
as I signed off; an admirer.

('A Letter to Pessoa', David Chorlton)

The Surrealistic touches in these later poems lend an aesthetic air to the harshness of the reality they portray. The poems gather in complexity as one progresses through the chapbook, culminating in the devastating 'Another Word for War'.

It is no longer declared
but continued.
We stopped counting
with the Thirty Years word,
played red against the white in England's word
of the Roses, outlived the Spanish-American word,
the Franco-Prussian word,
World word One, the Spanish Civil word
which rehearsed for World word Two
which chilled into the Cold word, the Korean word,
the Vietnam word
and the Gulf word

as the word moved like a spy
into our everyday vocabularies.
We took it into our homes, befriended it
as the word on drugs,
the word on poverty, the word on homelessness,
the word that ticks
in the newscast countdown
to the next time we say it:

In the beginning was the word.

The epithet to this poem, from Ingeborg Bachmann, translates as: "The war is no longer explained, but continued." Labouring under Bachmann's shadow, the clumsy assertions of the poem's polemics (not even as wildly lyrical nor poetically abandoned as Ginsberg's) take on a new dimension. It is the voice of a speaker, the observer, driven to his wits' end in the search for words.

How can I show this child the way
to write about war? She's never seen
more than what's been shown on tv:

the blown footage, the bodiless flags,
iridescent missiles arcing in some foreign
night, while bullets whistle

across a thirty-six inch screen.

('Temptimg Mystery', Karla Huston)

Chorlton's poetry is the space within which the speaker is a distant observer, unsure of the position on the margins she occupies to view the panorama before her. The best view is gained by acquiring distance and perspective, and its details can only truly be captured by one with a keen sensitivity.

By contrast, the world of Karla Huston does not deal with such loftiness. Hers is a vision derived from teasing out the wonder of the everyday, a feat which is no less compelling than Chorlton's endeavours. Her work is an impressionistic series of snapshots reflecting her world and her inimitable experience of it, while Chorlton's resembles a montage of images that ultimately constitute a massive narrative arc.

Poetry, as the great Louise Glück has aptly defined it, is "a metonymic alternation between anecdote and response". Writing poetry is thus the creation of a meaningful scaffold upon which ideas and memories can be hung and made intelligible, forming a coherent structure for both poet and reader to behold. For Karla Huston and David Chorlton, and Chorlton in particular, both writers have gone beyond mere scaffolds to build something stronger and far more powerful.

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