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Poetry from a rock-hard place.

By Edgar Mason.

PRETENDING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF geographical ties for poets – as Rodger Martin and Sid Hall’s Hobblebush Books has done in its Granite State Poetry Series – is a fine and time-honored ambition. As a rule, however, these collections don’t really tell us much about a region other than that there are poets living in it.

This is made clear by the first two books in the Hobblebush series: Earth Listening, by Becky Dennison Sakellariou, and From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, by Charles Pratt. Ms. Sakellariou and Mr. Pratt are different not only in details of biography – while Ms. Sakellariou, a New Hampshire native, was living and writing in Greece, Mr. Pratt was tending apples in his Brentwood orchard and reflecting on it in verse – but also in their technique and subject matter. Ms. Sakellariou’s poetry is fresh, unpredictable, and, not surprisingly, somewhat Mediterranean in its worldview. Her poetry can be exciting, even when she sometimes displays a propensity for light, short-cut phrases – see “this love business” in “Questions About Love,” for example.

Mr. Pratt, on the other hand, is technically impeccable. His verse uses rhyme and meter so subtly that his mastery of form slips past the reader almost unnoticed. His poetic diction, especially in the earlier poems collected here, is sometimes aloof, nearly – but not unpleasantly – stiff. The photo on the back of his book shows him in a T-shirt. It is not convincing. He taught English at Phillips Exeter for for more than a quarter-century. It is the teacher, not the T-shirt, most evident in his poetry.

If there is “New Hampshireness” here, Mr. Pratt seems to own it. This is made evident by looking at two poems that are at least superficially similar: “Evening Meditation in a Cathedral Town” (Pratt) and “The Sound of Birds Crying” (Sakellariou). Both find their authors in churches and far from the Granite State – Mr. Pratt’s poem is inspired by time spent in a cathedral in France (he lived in Rennes for a time in the mid-’70s), Ms. Sakellariou’s by a ‘quake-struck church in L’ Aquila, Italy.

“Evening Meditation” is one of Mr. Pratt’ s less formal poems, but one of his most self-aware – witness these lines from the second stanza:

In the cathedral treasury
I’ve gazed, unmoved, at the Virgin’ s shift,
Draped like dead insect wings – enough,
The histories repeat, to lift
That heap of masonry so high.

Although Mr. Pratt acknowledges that “Such precious straining of the light / Surprises stone and souls of stone to flight,” the poem ends on a reflection on the play of light through a lacewing’s wing. If the cathedral had been the one in Rennes, the contrast with the mostly 19th century (and mostly granite) architecture would be ironic, a Gothic wing in a neo-classical frame. Perhaps it was another cathedral. No matter. The image still illumines.

Where Mr. Pratt is the ruminating Yankee, however, Ms. Sakellariou is more passionate. In “The Sound of Birds Crying,” she reflects on a photograph of a fireman kissing the head of a statue of the Virgin he has rescued from a collapsed  church, analyzing the thoughts of both statue and fireman and altering her technique accordingly. The fireman’ s thoughts are given to us in earthy quatrains:

Before I even wake, I hear her praying,
before the rippling floor throws me out of bed,
I hear the sounds of birds crying, words against words,
save them take me save them.

The madonna’ s mind, however, is rendered in breathy couplets:

A desperate prayer seals my throat.
I never believed I could be desperate,

but I hear hushed moans
under still trembling blocks of cement,

oak beams torn in two, window frames askew
doors splintered open, and I suddenly know desperation.

L'Aquila, April 2009.

Ms. Sakellariou’ s poetry often focuses on a kind of spiritual understanding, and the fireman’s kiss, planted on the head of the statue, seems natural, spontaneous and right – unlike the significance of Mr. Pratt’ s lacewing, discovered after what seems to be a painstaking, thoughtful search.

Mr. Pratt is worth reading for his technical ability and his charming wryness. (“Ghost Story,” which treats of two visits to Dublin in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, is a good example.) Ms. Sakellariou’ s poetry is at its best when she is outside herself; her personal poems are delicately intimate, and when they work, they’re extraordinary. But it’s a risky thing, and sometimes, as in “Unexpected,” the poem is bought to a stop by a too-familiar reflection:

I cannot find the comfort,
that place where God whispers
the stories in my heart.
I hear only questions.

And we all have them.

This is a valiant first round by Hobblebush Books. The packaging of both titles is quite fine, and great care has been exercised in the selection of both poets and the poems on display. If the rest of the Granite State Poetry Series is anything like Earth Listening and From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, poetry readers from all states are very lucky indeed.


Edgar Mason’s latest poem,”Wings,” appears in the current Basement Stories Magazine.

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