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Merrimack Valley Magazine

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Invocation at the Merrimack

September 4, 2021 by Matt W. Miller

And now I take a tongue into your mud, 

into your syringe and soda bottle banks,

to beg your braided silk, your Pennacook 

ikwe, your sliding tar of snake, your mouth 

of stones, your clavicle  

         of roil and moan, 

your lover ghosts thrown from Pawtucket Falls, 

your whitewater of bread and roses, 

         your creak 

of locks and lifts, your leap from burning windows, 

your fished-out crib of salmon and shiv, of shell

casings and shad, alewife and boosted tires,

your cradle 

         of flywheel, of factory, your mill 

girl offering, your doffers, your biddies, your boom 

and your busted. Penitent palmed I stand 

in this, your sun tussling dawn, to call a song.

My river, roll your blueblack big hips under 

the oxidized iron of cantilever and cable, 

deluge and slip bridge ribs and sing between 

the redbrick and brackish heft of textile mills 

turned art galleries with crack alleys. 

         You, 

bender of flashboard pins, come 

         sing to me, 

sluice me, double back and seduce me to 

your flood, tenor me down to your Irish blood 

canals, your Greek restaurant ghettos, 

fluorescent Cambodian groceries, chunk heeled 

Brazilian bakeries,       

         your cobblestones 

exposed to sell some rheumy history. 

Bones old and broken of flesh, in sack and ash,

I call a song. 

         You ferried me home, now drink                         

and spit me out where city hall has crouched

inside downtown’s diverticula,

down to the fountain at JFK plaza where 

my brother was suckered by a kid I wouldn’t 

hit back. 

         And there, just one of ten police stations, 

Pollard library, and across Arcand Ave, 

Lowell High, its field house named after

our grandfather, 

         the columned Masonic temple,

the bring your own wine Viet Thai, and bars 

and bars and bars, one for every St. Anne’s, 

Immaculate, and St. Patrick’s. 

         In your 

hydraulic drop prayers are tossed like toasts 

to tilted pints. There, here, my palms unfold.

         Give willow to me against 

my flooded nights, against my broken rites.

So you flow down and roll stones old river, 

and moor me here for what I am and not. 

Wake my song and pluck me to your pulse. 

I’ll stay down in your valley, 

         drink your ink 

of water and dream myself 

         back into you. 

Make me small again, roll me in your lap, 

your mud, your moon lit blood. 

         Supplicated, 

by the greasy vents of a train car diner, I beg

your lip of water 

         to whisper

 

[This poem, and others inspired by and relating to the Merrimack and our region, can be found in Matt W. Miller’s latest collection, “Tender the River,” published by Texas A&M University Press. Please consider supporting local, independent bookstores if you wish to purchase a copy.]

Filed Under: Community Tagged With: Invocation at the Merrimack, Matt W. Miller, Merrimack River, Merrimack Valley, Poetry, Tender the River

Book Review – Cummiskey Alley

March 15, 2021 by Doug Sparks

“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

 

Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment Tagged With: author, book, bookreview, Lowell, NECC, poems, Poetry, TomSexton

Book Reviews – Fall / Winter 2020

November 8, 2020 by Emilie-Noelle Provost

As autumn turns to winter and the days grow colder, there are few things more satisfying than curling up in your favorite chair with a good book. Here are some new publications with local links you might want to add to your winter reading list or consider as holiday gifts for the book lovers in your life.

“This Is No Time to Quit Drinking: Teacher Burnout and the Irish Powers”
By Stephen O’Connor
Gatekeeper Press
January 2020
288 pages 

Lowell author Stephen O’Connor’s latest book, “This Is No Time to Quit Drinking,” is a multilayered story chock full of clever humor and quirky characters, making it something of a departure from his previous novels, which tend toward more serious story lines. 

This book features Bartley Hannigan, a middle-aged high school teacher doing his best to cope with the ever-present demands of his job while dealing with the death of his father and inheriting a haunted farmhouse in the process. At the same time, Bartley is struggling to negotiate an amicable divorce from his wife while unexpectedly finding himself in a romantic relationship with an exotic dancer from a local strip club. Throw in a few Mafia thugs with high-powered weapons, an authentic Irish banshee hunter, and an ancient stone circle with otherworldly connections that’s being threatened by a real estate developer, and you’ve got the makings of a highly entertaining, at times hilarious, read. 

O’Connor displays his writing skills by keeping the story plausible, even at its most fantastic moments. Although it was published in January, “This Is No Time to Quit Drinking” is an ideal book for the pandemic, injecting a bit of smart humor into readers’ everyday lives at a time when many people need it most.

 

 

 

A Kitchen Witch’s Guide to Recipes for Love & Romance
By Dawn Aurora Hunt
Tiller Press, 2020
 208 pages
( Review by Doug Sparks )

You may have tasted the work of Dawn Aurora Hunt before having read her — she’s the owner of Cucina Aurora in Salem, N.H., and her infused olive oils are available throughout the Merrimack Valley. I note this because her writing isn’t what you’d expect from a business owner. It’s funny and candid, and makes the introduction to her latest book worth reading even if you’re ready to skip over it and drive right into the recipes.

Hunt is a proponent of what she calls “spiritual nutrition,” a way of cooking that involves mindfulness and awareness of how food affects us both in the preparation and consumption. This relates to the book’s focus — cookery that inspires love and romance — and it’s refreshing that Hunt opted to consider how we can strengthen our relationships with the people we care about in a year when so many dietary trends were self-centered.

As for the recipes, they represent an omnivore’s delight. The author doesn’t shy away from anything that might lead to kindling healthy amorous passions: avocado chocolate mousse, turmeric-ginger bone broth, spicy fried oysters, and red rose velvet cake are all on the menu. The photography is suitably gorgeous, making it an all-around perfect Yuletide gift for your favorite witch or warlock.    

Note: Dawn Aurora Hunt was recently a guest on The 495 podcast. You can listen to all episodes of our community podcast here. >>>

 

“Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell”
Edited by Paul Marion, Tina
Neylon and John Wooding
Loom Press, March 2020
335 pages 

This eclectic collection of short stories, essays and poetry brings together the work of 65 writers from Lowell, Massachusetts, and Cork, Ireland. The idea for the book was sparked by the participation of Lowell and Cork in the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Global Network of Learning Cities, a forum in which municipalities around the world can share ideas with the aim of creating or advancing lifelong learning opportunities and equal access to education for the people in their communities.

“Atlantic Currents” contains work from notable locals such as poet Michael Casey, novelist David Daniel, poet Kate Hanson Foster, novelists Elinor Lipman and Stephen O’Connor, journalist David Perry, and poet Tom Sexton. Irish contributors include novelist and playwright Cónal Creedon, author Liam Ronayne, and novelist William Wall.

The book is divided into 10 numbered sections loosely based on themes, each containing pieces from writers from both Cork and Lowell. Be sure to read the introductions by editors John Wooding and Tina Neylon, who offer insights into the literary cultures of both cities and the creation of the book.

Note: Paul Marion is a regular contributor to mvm. Read more of his work here. >>>

 

“The Docks”
By Joanne Carota
Neptune Books, July 2019
329 pages 

“The Docks,” the debut novel by Chelmsford author and UMass Lowell adjunct writing instructor Joanne Carota, is a murder mystery/thriller set in South Boston’s tightly knit fishing community. Carota’s experience as a former administrator at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington comes through in the form of the novel’s protagonist, Kate Finn, a marine biologist employed by the Food and Drug Administration. 

When Kate’s father, Seamus, is accused of murdering a local fisherman, she vows to stop at nothing to prove his innocence. Unaware of her father’s checkered past, Kate leaves behind her promising career and goes to work for Greely Seafood Labs, a company owned by local businessman Colin Greely that specializes in the genetic engineering of fish. Using her scientific training to track down the real killer, Kate faces a number of challenges and distractions that bring to light the conflicts between tradition and innovation in the modern fishing industry, and the ubiquitous battle between corporate greed and sustainable practices.

The novel’s many twists and turns, and Carota’s emphasis on family, trust and loyalty, will satisfy mystery/thriller fans, while the book’s local setting will appeal to New Englanders and readers who enjoy stories set by the sea. Although this self-published novel could benefit from additional editing in places, all in all it’s a solid read.

Note: A story by the author of this article also appears in the anthology “Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell.”     

Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment Tagged With: Books, Cookbook, Essay, Fiction, novel, Poetry, review

Eight Great Things To Do This Weekend – Book Lovers Edition

April 2, 2020 by Doug Sparks

Readers across the Merrimack Valley are turning to books — to be entertained, to find connection with our region in a safe manner, and to keep our minds active and engaged during these unusual times. We put together a special, all-literary edition of Eight Great to point you to books written by Merrimack Valley authors, past and present, whose works make for good reads.

 

 

ONE: “Sweet, Sweet Jayne,” by T.R. Monaghan, is set in the Lowell of the early ’70s. It’s a violent, dark crime novel, with touches of beatnik flair — kind of like Raymond Chandler meets Charles Bukowski. This tense, chilling novel is filled with local color, and the city itself figures prominently. Those who were there will enjoy being reminded of the city as it was. Those who weren’t will enjoy the experience of traveling back in time, however grim it could be at times.

TWO: Jane Brox grew up in Dracut, and among her books is “Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History.” This 1999 book tells the story of Brox’s Lebanese American grandparents and their apple orchard. Its more complicated than that — Brox uses her grandparent’s story to frame the history of farming in the Merrimack Valley from its native origins to the end of the last century.

THREE: “Mid Drift” is one of my favorite poetry collections put out by the locally owned Loom Press. The poems are set against the Lowell landscape, and the poet, Kate Hanson Foster, handles the subject matter in a manner both lyrical and unflinching.

FOUR: Also at Loom Press, the anthology “Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell” includes 65 writers who are connected to either Lowell or Cork, a city in Ireland. Just published, the idea is to draw parallels across the ocean. You may find the book’s “hunger for harmony” particularly relevant in the uncertain times we’ve suddenly found ourselves in.

FIVE:  NECC alumna and West Newbury resident Diannely Antigua was recently one of 10 emerging writers to receive the prestigious Whiting Award. Her debut poetry collection, “Ugly Music,” was featured in our 2019 summer reading guide.

SIX: Although largely set on a farm in Vermont, the first chapter of “Total Loss Farm,” is set in Lowell. A funny and offbeat memoir, ostensibly about a farming commune, it has remained in-print, and an inspiration to the counterculture, since its publication in 1970. Author Raymond Mungo is featured in the forthcoming May/June issue of mvm, in which he recalls his childhood growing up in Lawrence.

SEVEN: I suppose no Merrimack Valley-related literary list would be complete with a nod, and a raising of the glass, to Jack Kerouac. Although not as famous as “On the Road,” I’m going to suggest you check out “The Dharma Bums.” At the end of the novel, the narrator retreats from society to work at a national park, where he experiences a horrifying loneliness, offset by a willingness to find spiritual solace in the face of his isolation. You see where I’m going with this.

EIGHT: Finally, my last choice isn’t out yet, but it will be next week. Preorder it and help out a local writer. “Barker House” is the debut novel of UML prof and former correctional officer David Moloney. The story interweaves the lives of people who work at the fictional Barker House prison in the non-fictional state of New Hampshire. This one is all about the characters: Moloney makes the smallest moments: a prisoner anxiously shaving his face during a tense moment, a guard preparing to pitch at a police league softball game, into rich psychological portraits. The drama doesn’t come from riots or prison breaks. It’s in the daily struggle to find meaning in life under extraordinary circumstances. We profiled Moloney in November and you can read it here.

Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment, Community Tagged With: anthology, authors, Books, Fiction, Kerouac, merrimackvalley, Mungo, nonfiction, Poetry, prose

In the Valley of the Poets

August 26, 2019 by Paul Marion 1 Comment

Part I: The Historical Landscape. The Whittier Bridge connecting Amesbury and Newburyport. Kerouac Park in downtown Lowell. The Robert Frost Fountain on Campagnone Common in Lawrence. Across the Merrimack Valley, people walk, bike and drive past named places and structures that are only there because of the writers whose books are part of the American story.

Many of us know the Mount Rushmore-scale authors from our region who have gone from literary notables to historical figures. Former North Andover Poet Laureate Karen Kline promotes the area as the “Valley of the Poets.” There is a case to be made that our river valley is extraordinary, if not unique, among national locations with significant clusters of authors. 

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) is acknowledged as the first woman from the North American colonies to publish her poems and the first English-language American poet. Born Anne Dudley, Bradstreet and her husband, Simon, arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 and settled in what is now North Andover 16 years later, religious pioneers in the colony that was dominated by Puritans. Highly educated for an English woman of her time, the devoted spouse and mother of eight children was a committed writer whose poems were taken by her brother-in-law to London and published in the name of a “Gentlewoman from Those Parts” under the title “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.” She wrote about her life and relations at home from a spiritual perspective. While her gravesite is not known, she is remembered by a marker in North Andover’s Old North Parish Burying Ground. 

 

A chicken farmer in Derry, N.H., before people knew him for his poems, Robert Frost (1874-1963) wrote articles for farming magazines and taught school in the area like his mother did. A graduate of Lawrence High School, Frost touched down briefly in Methuen, Amesbury and Salem Depot, N.H. He had to take his family to England and publish a book of poems there to generate the first serious attention for his work. By the time he returned to New England after a few years he had established a name in the book world. Through the middle of the 20th century, Frost personified “poet” in the United States, winning four Pulitzer Prizes and reciting the inaugural poem for President John F. Kennedy in 1961. He remains one of the nation’s most identifiable poets. Some years ago, when visiting a school, I asked students to name a living American poet. “Robert Frost,” someone shouted. But he had died 25 years earlier. 

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) retains the highest local visibility with two historical houses (Haverhill birthplace, Amesbury residence), an attractive blue bridge over the Merrimack River, a large mural portrait in downtown Amesbury, and a few buildings named in his memory. While not in vogue today, Whittier was a rock star in his time, selling so many copies of his long poem “Snow-Bound” about a family weathering a New England blizzard that he raked in $10,000 in royalties — about $158,000 in current dollars. 

In the 1950s, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) became a one-name celebrity like Elvis after the publication of the novel “On the Road,” a highway tale about two guys searching for the meaning of life in a society with atom bombs. Kerouac gave the name to the Beat Generation, whose ideas about liberation, love, spirituality and the pursuit of happiness would flower in the mid-1960s. As for being classified as a poet, Kerouac said he was, but that he wrote in paragraphs most of the time. Truth is, he wrote a lot of poems and invented some original American poetic forms to counter the sonnets and villanelles of old: blues, pops, tics, choruses. 

In the next orbit outward, lesser known but substantially accomplished is Lucy Larcom (1824-1893), who moved from Beverly, Mass., to Lowell, where her mother ran a mill boarding house while young Lucy tended machines in a factory with other “mill girls” in the 1830s. Larcom wrote poems and the memoir “A New England Girlhood,” which was an early classic of the genre. She was active with writers at “The Lowell Offering” magazine, including Harriet Curtis and Harriet H. Robinson, both of whom were members of a women’s literary circle in Dracut in the 1840s.

Larcom ventured west to teach in Illinois before returning to Massachusetts, where she taught at Wheaton Female Seminary and worked as an editor of several publications. She was an ally of Whittier in the abolition movement and collaborated with him on publishing projects. Her poem “Weaving” expresses solidarity with enslaved black women harvesting cotton for shipment to Lowell’s profitable textile manufacturers. The unholy link between “the Lords of the Lash and Lords of the Loom” held fast until the Civil War ruptured the business partnerships.

Introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), President Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” After the enormously popular and consequential “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly” was published in 1852, Stowe moved to Andover the same year with her husband, the religious scholar Calvin Snow of the Andover Theological Seminary. In the 19th century, the only book to outsell her anti-slavery novel was the Bible. While in Andover, she continued to write both prose and poems, though she is not as well known for the latter. Nancy Lusignan Schultz of Salem State University is working on an edition of Stowe’s collected poems.

The mid-20th century was John P. Marquand’s time in the literary sun. With roots in Newburyport’s high-yield seafaring era, Marquand (1893-1960) graduated from Newburyport High School at a time when his extended family had fallen in social rank. After Harvard College, where he wrote for the “Lampoon,” and a stint of magazine articles, he won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Late George Apley” in 1938, a novel and sly memoir that makes sophisticated fun of Boston’s upper class. His Mr. Moto espionage stories, the basis of films starring Peter Lorre, gained him a wide readership. An industrious writer, Marquand’s oeuvre includes 22 novels and collections of short stories. He’s buried at Sawyer Hill Burial Ground close to Maudslay State Park.

Two of the most admired prose writers since World War II called this region home.

John Updike (1932-2009) lived in Georgetown, bordering the valley, from 1976 to 1982 and spent most of his adult life in northeast Massachusetts. His hometowns figured in his books. For example, “Rabbit Is Rich” represents Georgetown, where he would be seen running like the novel’s lead, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The author was a familiar face in the region, collecting an honorary degree from UMass Lowell in 1980 and giving a talk sponsored by the local Kerouac group, which is interesting, given that Updike parodied Kerouac’s “On the Road” as naive in an essay titled “On the Sidewalk” for The New Yorker at the height of the Beat author’s newsmaking.

For too long, the books of Andre Dubus II (1936-1999) books were like delicious meals served at a 30-seat restaurant that foodies with inside knowledge enjoyed for themselves. His reputation grew as publisher David R. Godine of Boston issued one collection of stories after another, the work drawing accolades from Updike and other reviewers. Dubus’ fortitude paid off as the “writers’ writer” crested the literary hill into “readers’ writer” altitude. His stories are being reissued in handsome volumes by Godine with introductions by Ann Beattie, Richard Russo and Tobias Wolff. 

In 1986, I wrote to Dubus to invite him to Lowell for a writers’ series I was organizing. He accepted gladly and read on April Fools’ Day in the national park auditorium, paired with Peggy Rambach, who read her own gritty local stories. My journal tells me he read his story “Townies” from the book “Finding a Girl in America,” and to this day my wife remembers the deep empathy in his reading of “The Fat Girl.” We adjourned to an Irish pub across the street, where we talked about trains, Raymond Carver, a triple murder in Hollywood and, of course, the Red Sox, with him reciting a suggested lineup for Opening Day. I wrote the next day: “He’s on the verge of breaking through to a huge audience, but for now he’s not out of reach and still among us.”

One of his sons, Andre III, who has risen to the top rank of writers (“House of Sand and Fog,” “Gone So Long”), appeared this spring at the Newburyport Literary Festival with author Peter Orner (“Am I Alone Here?,” “Esther Stories”), talking about the elder Dubus’ influence on other writers and themselves, as well as the place of his work in the American catalogue.

I have my worn yellow paperback of “Separate Flights” (1975) with blurbs on the back cover saying Dubus is the nation’s “most underrated writer” (Atlantic Monthly) and comparing him to Anton Chekhov (Los Angeles Times). How satisfying it is to see this author’s work flying gracefully through the wide blue sky of bookland today.   

Click here to read Part 2 of ‘Valley of the Poets’ – Paul Marion takes a look at today’s writers of note. >>>

Illustration by Jim Roldan.

Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment Tagged With: author, Bradstreet, dubus, Frost, history, Kerouac, Larcom, literature, Marquand, merrimack, Poet, Poetry, Stowe, Updike, Whittier, writer

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