Magazine celebrates dynamic founder

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PUCKERBRUSH REVIEW: Memorial Issue of the Life and Works of Constance Hunting, Vol. xxv No. i, fall/winter 2006; edited by Sanford Phippen; University of Maine English Department and Puckerbrush Press, Orono, Maine; 176 pages, large format perfect bound, $15.

Puckerbrush Review’s founder and central energy, Constance Hunting, died April 5, 2006, at the age of 80, and this issue of the magazine is a compendium of encomiums, recollections and reflections on her life and work, plus a small selection of her writings. The contributors range from her University of Maine colleagues and students to writers she fostered as a publisher.

Reminiscences by Puckerbrush authors Farnham Blair and Sanford Phippen give particularly vivid shape to Hunting’s quickness, quirks and personal vigor. Hunting’s daughter, Miranda Hunting Goulden, summarizes the family history, and UMaine professor Burton Hatlen provides an overview of her career, all helpful entries for anyone seeking the underpinnings of Constance Hunting’s widespread influence on Maine letters over the last 35 years. Many of the poems and other tribute pieces will appeal mainly to members of the Puckerbrush literary family – which is large, as the number of contributions implies.

The small selection of Hunting’s own writings, including her remembrance of Leo Connellan on his death in 2001, a short story from 1963, and her last published poem, which appeared in this newspaper, provides an introduction for readers new to her literary world.

Puckerbrush Review has been the most enduring influential little magazine in Maine, and Puckerbrush Press’ relentless issue of novels and story and poetry collections has served as an important jumping-off point for a lot of writers. Phippen’s willingness to take the reins of the magazine is an emblem of the force of Constance Hunting’s literary energy, which we all no doubt believed would persist, graciously, for years to come.

AMERICANA, by Tom Lyford; Green Bough Publishing, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, 2006; 40 pages, saddle-stitched, $5.

In Tom Lyford’s world, every passing moment is a blast from the past. Either his own, Dover-Foxcroft’s, or America’s, frequently all three together. The poems in his chapbook “Americana” recount stupid teen tricks, a moonlighting McDonald’s Santa in 1972, a teacher left behind, and real encounters with Sputnik, Johnny Cash and Roman candles as well as imaginary encounters so vivid they might as well have been real with J.D. Salinger, Bob Dylan, Stephen King and Wilford Brimley. He fondly keeps decades’ worth of T-shirts commemorating events he somehow attached himself to, like the improbable Red Sox championship of 2004.

Lyford’s world, in short, is a wedge of America as it existed in the 1950s, ’60s and afterward, which a lot of people, especially Mainers beyond a certain age, will recognize. It’s sort of innocent and vulgar, dorky and charming, and also, upon reflection, sort of scary:

… what the hell was I thinking

roaring my rice-rocket at 65

down those breathless

horseshoe curves on the

kangamangus highway

But mostly, as those who have attended Lyford’s public readings around central Maine know, he has a relentless sense of humor about it all.

it’s fun riding around in stephen king

up here in maine, smack dab in the middle of

needful things and a bag of bones –

hey phyl, LOOK! The pittsfield exit!

that’s where rachel creed’s chevette mysteriously

loses power on her way back home

in pet sematary!

but phyllis never looks …

could care less …

won’t even read stephen king …

In these poems you do not encounter the verbal polish of the literary journal poets. But you do get unabashed pictures of how postwar backwater Maine has tagged along with the rest of the world. Lyford is a sort of anti-Bukowski – direct, funny and down-to-earth, but demonless.

Tom Lyford, 60, is a retired English teacher and lifelong resident of Dover-Foxcroft. He kept to himself as a poet until recent years when he has published five chapbooks and given readings at the Schoodic Arts Festival, Borders Books and several Maine libraries. His works are available at www.festivo.org/lyford.

MOODS AND MEMORIES, by Nikolai Dejevsky; Polar Bear & Co., Solon, Maine, 2006; 152 pages, trade paperback, $9.95.

Nikolai Dejevsky’s collection of poems “Moods and Memories” also reminisces on postwar Maine, and also evinces a general good humor. But the emphasis here is on the fleetingness of life and memory rather than the ironies and peculiarities of the events themselves. As a result, the book’s overall tone is philosophical and wistful, with injections of language intended to buoy the mood.

The most interesting element of the book is Dejevsky himself. He was born in a Russian refugee camp in Germany in 1945, and afterward his family emigrated to Maine where they lived first in Solon and then in the Russian community at Richmond. Eventually he graduated from Old Town High School and after graduate school in London worked for Reuters in Moscow.

The verses in “Moods and Memories” reflect driftily on childhood, family, art, religion, history and whatever else comes into the author’s mind. Rhythmically most lines are extremely flat, often to a point where it’s not clear why the sentences are cast as verse at all. Informal direct addresses of the reader (“an odd way to open a poem – / bit unexpected, eh? -“) are often interspersed with highly formal phrasing, and unanswerable questions are posed and abandoned like balloons set loose at a carnival. There’s a lot of verbal turbulence for us in the rides down memory lane.

This book may well become a cherished family heirloom, but it is unlikely to find a much wider audience.

-DWILDE@BANGORDAILYNEWS.NET