UMaine instructor publishes new collection

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Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

“VANISHING ACT” by Kathleen Ellis; CC Marimbo Communications, Berkeley, Calif., 2007; 24 pages, softcover, $8.

University of Maine English instructor Kathleen Ellis has long been a prominent figure in central Maine’s literary neighborhood, and her new collection, “Vanishing Act,” offers an unsettling glimpse into a corner of the poetic world she has constructed over the last few decades.

The book’s 21 poems make up a series of reflections on the poet’s relationship with her mother, particularly the psychic difficulties encountered since the mother’s death. A range of complicated moods emerges from the mostly terse language – there’s wistfulness, the haunting chill of unresolved personal distances as in “Wearing My Mother’s Clothes,” and the regret of recollected dishonesties. The language is appropriately subdued, the rhythms mostly matter-of-fact. “Always on Sunday” goes, in its entirety:

The afternoons seem longer

since the death of my mother’s body.

The death of the “body” is specified because the mother, though departed, haunts every nook and cranny of the book.

“Vanishing Act” is a series of evocations – and really, invocations – of the daughter-mother relationship. While this general subject has become so standard it’s practically required of poets in certain literary circles, the poems here offer an unusually sincere and thorny set of disclosures. There’s a lurking sense that these poems were meant as exorcisms, but did not yet succeed: “This is the matter that still endures:/we hear it pounding in our temples.”

Kathleen Ellis of Orono has led reading groups, been a longtime participant in Bangor’s annual Poets/Speak events, and published poems widely. Her previous collections are “Entering Earthquake Country,” “Red Horses” and “The Calamity Jane Poems.”

“ANXIOUS MUSIC: POEMS” by April Ossmann; Four Way Books, New York, 2007; 52 pages, softcover, $15.95.

The poems in “Anxious Music” toy with more philosophical questions of space, time, the spirit, and our capacity – if we pay attention to the small stuff – to be bewildered by them. These topics have been largely expatriated from American poetry in recent decades, in favor of straight-up moral instruction on race, class and gender issues, or on painstaking expressions of personal angst. But the first 15 pages or so of April Ossmann’s first collection set the book apart by wandering off the beaten track in places.

“Y” opens with:

We began by trying to draw a line

between two points – but missed

the second point – drawing

a line straight to infinity, that dread number

It goes on to compare thoughts of infinity (“this greased/pig of an idea”) to the hope and problems of starting a friendship, observing along the way that “The more you know, the less you comprehend.” In the end the potential friends part ways.

A number of poems in “Anxious Music” end on questions, and there is a sense throughout the book that the poems are forays rather than arrivals. Robert Frost’s observation that a poem begins in delight, runs a course of lucky events and ends in a clarification of life is not always borne out here. “Epergne,” a poem about a dictionary search for the meaning of a word which leads to more thoughts about surrounding words (such as “ensoul” and “ensphere”) than about the word in question, simultaneously states and asks:

I have not done what the poets have done

which is to give objects or words a soul – a variation

on idolatry – or a form of grace?

Whether what hasn’t been done is idolatry or grace, we don’t know, and the poem provides no real clue.

Nonetheless, uncertainty is a fascinating reality, and there’s a delight and – to speak outside our betrammeled literary ethos – a nobility in the impulse to grapple with it, hopefully resulting in a momentary stay against confusion, as Frost put it. The poems in “Anxious Music” are to be commended for following the inclination, wherever they lead.

April Ossmann has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Maine at Farmington and is the executive director of Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies.

Dana Wilde can be contacted at poetry@bangordailynews.net.

BY JACK WILDE

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

“MOOSE EGGS: OR, WHY MOOSE HAVE FLAT ANTLERS” by Susan Williams Beckhorn, illustrated by Helen Stevens; Down East Books, 2007; 32 pages, large format hardcover, $15.95.

The book “Moose Eggs or, Why Moose have Flat Antlers” by Susan Williams Beckhorn is a story that begins in the days when (according to the story) the moose looked much like a deer does today. The main character is the Father of all Moose, and he wants to have children. But Moose’s wife says they have to wait for children. So the moose finds out from his friend Grouse that he needs to lay eggs to have children.

So Moose gets two large, gray “eggs” down from the stream, and holds them in his antlers. He keeps them there for a long time, and after a while, Moose begins to change. He gains a hump, larger feet, a sort of beard, and a droopy nose, but most important, flatter antlers from the weight of the eggs.

Then one day, Moose’s antlers fall off, and Moose has to wait all the way till next spring when they grow back, flat, and not pointy like before. He finds some new eggs, and before he can tell his wife she gives him a huge surprise – two baby moose. That is when he finds out that moose do not come from eggs.

This book was quite entertaining. It kept a good plot line going, and it was very easy to follow. It was interesting to see Moose’s reaction when he found out that moose really don’t come from eggs. This is a good book for younger children, 6 or 7 years old, who can understand that moose really don’t carry around rocks in their antlers, but who will still be young enough to enjoy the story.

Susan William Beckhorn of Rexville, N.Y., is the author of many other stories about animals, and her children’s books include “In the Morning of the World,” “The Kingfisher’s Gift,” and “Wind Rider” which was a Book Sense Kids’ Pick Winner.

Jack Wilde is a junior at Mount View High School in Thorndike. He can be contacted on AOL Instant Messenger at PntBallAddict09.