Merrimack Valley Magazine

Book Review – On Earth Beneath Sky

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At first glance, the poems and sketches in Chath pierSath’s latest collection, “On Earth Beneath Sky,” betray an old-fashioned reverence for literary figures whose critical cachet may be on the wane. This is most noticeable in the references to Lowell’s own Jack Kerouac but, in terms of kinship, Walt Whitman is the key figure. Traces of that great poet’s melding of incantation, the erotic and the patriotic can be found throughout.

Patriotism? Among contemporary poets? Hold on, you might say. But pierSath seems enamored of the possible America, the alternative America, and he elevates American ideals of freedom and prosperity to spiritual heights, even writing of it in celestial terms. This is refreshing during our period of harsh social divisiveness. However, it isn’t simple. It’s a patriotism of aspiration — a longing for the America of books and bards — an idealized vision free from the torments of cruelty, loneliness and rootlessness. pierSath knows this. As he says in one poem: “Doubts pencil-mark my American landscape.” 

 

For those unfamiliar with the author, it’s worth noting that he is, aside from a poet, a visual artist whose work has been shown internationally, and also a fruit and vegetable farmer now living in Bolton, Mass. He came to the United States at the age of 11, a refugee fleeing the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocide. He first lived in Boulder, Colorado, eventually arriving, via Cambodian return, in Lowell, where he lived for seven years and discovered the works of the aforementioned Kerouac and the “Song of the Open Road.”

So when I refer to this volume as being “old-fashioned,” I mean that as high praise, and in recognition of its author’s position as a self-taught artist, caught between two cultures, a witness to horrible violence (his father, a solider, died when pierSath was 2) who finds solace in his outsider status and, despite personal trauma, through books and the imagination. pierSath, whose name means “temple of the nation,” uses poetry as a means to raise Big Questions and to wrangle truth with a capital T. Like Whitman and Kerouac, he is magnetized by travel, and the poems veer from Phnom Penh to Lowell to Paris, although this takes on added meaning when considered in the light of his childhood. He is also, unlike Kerouac but much like Whitman, a nature poet, although here he has a wider range of subjects: Settings include the purple mountains and Iowa cornfields of the American drifter, but also the monsoons, rice fields and waterfalls of a writer attuned to the subtle operations of the earth, no matter where the political borders are drawn.

On Earth Beneath Sky
By Chath pierSath
Loom Press
143 pages

pierSath was recently the guest on The 495 Podcast.
Click here to listen. >>>

 

Book Review – Cummiskey Alley

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“Cummiskey Alley” contains a broad selection of Lowell poems by Tom Sexton, a Northern Essex Community College graduate who went on to found the creative writing program at the Anchorage campus of the University of Alaska and publish many volumes of verse. At the end of this collection, in a short prose piece titled “On Becoming a Poet,” Sexton writes: “I have lived in Alaska for most of my adult life, but it has never shaped me the way my hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, did and still does.” That line says much about the poetry in this book. 

These are poems filled with remembrance and layers of history, and seem like faded postcards. How do you make poetry out of the stuff of Lowell? Well, often it begins with images of the forlorn, dull and broken down. Dead ends: economic, literal. But this is just the surface. Look deeper and you see a woman getting her nails done, spreading her hands “like a peacock spreads its tail to show its feathers to the world,” a man waking up at night for a chance encounter with a passing gaggle of geese, or a pot of milk, “heating on the stove for hot chocolate with drifts of cream like snow.” 

 

The poems echo the thoughts of a solitary wanderer who experiences the world through his feet and is searching for moments in which the present dissolves into a past that might evoke pleasant memories or flash insight into what we have become. 

Sexton expounds on this relationship between the city past and present in “On Becoming a Poet,” writing, “When I can, I walk Lowell’s streets accompanied by ghosts who can be surprisingly good company.” Sexton, now 80, details a 2019 amble through the city, launched from an Oak Street Airbnb in the neighborhood where he grew up. “I had a good visit,” he notes, “but the Lowell of my youth is gone.” After standing outside the shuttered Dana’s Luncheonette, he comes to the realization that he will “never complete another book of poems about my Lowell,” before heading off for a meal of mofongo and Dominican beer. This means that “Cummiskey Alley” may mark the end of Sexton’s long walks with the ghosts of the Mill City. As he continues to publish books of poetry — his 2018 collection “Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin” is excellent — we can anticipate the chance to walk alongside him even if this means leaving Lowell behind. It also makes “Cummiskey Alley” both and introduction and conclusion to one of the great artistic endeavors devoted to our region.

Cummiskey Alley
By Tom Sexton
Loom Press
143 pages

 

Prescription: Poetry

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It’s May, and I’m still thinking about my New Year’s resolutions. That gives you a sense of what the year has been like so far.

It has been a time of snowstorms, power outages, fallen trees, insomnia, colds, flus and enough minor trials to make me feel, at times, as though I was merely trying to survive. Through it all, my wife and I have been raising our daughter, who will turn 1 year old not long after this issue hits the newsstands. I know everyone experiences fatherhood differently (I gather this from the emphatic, contradictory advice I received from friends during her early months), but I consider myself fortunate. Moments spent with Alina have been the happiest times in a tumultuous period.

Not realizing that New England weather and the flu season would throw me challenges enough, I made two minor resolutions in January. The first was to learn as much as I could about tea: from history to brewing methods.

The other was that I would start reading poetry every day.

I don’t know where in my life’s journey poetry stopped mattering. It sure mattered when I was in high school and college. I retain intense memories of late nights in New England diners, drinking coffee, eating fries and reading the “Mexico City Blues” of Jack Kerouac and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By the time I got to grad school, my interest had waned. Poetry didn’t seem to matter to me, perhaps because it didn’t seem to matter to the world.

But I began to think.

Since I make a living hammering out sentences in the English language, perhaps it was time to return to the best practitioners of said language. It seemed a revelation, and one with practical considerations. With baby and editorial responsibilities, I’m not likely to find the spare time to learn Spanish or canoe-building, but I can probably find time to read a poem.

My initial approach was chronological. In a fat anthology, I began with Chaucer. Slowly, aided by a Middle English dictionary, I crawled the lines to the Elizabethans. My plans faltered when I hit the Puritan era. I found it hard to digest. At that point, my reading list exploded. I began to read in translation: classical Chinese river and mountain poetry, modernists, surrealists, shamanic scribblers of no school like the mad Adolf Wölfli. I read, for the first time, the Dream Songs of John Berryman. I wiped the dust off Loy, Lorca and Ikkyu, and music swelled from the pages.

I read into the night, with my book light on, contemplating the moon above Thatch-Hut Mountain with Xie Lingyun, wandering the half-deserted streets with Eliot, and stoking Cretan fires with the poet known as H.D.

And then, when I opened my front door, whether I saw cardinals flirting on icy branches or green buds straining from dogwood branches, it all seemed to make sense.

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