Review by Lo Gallucccio

POEMS OF SURVIVAL

Marc Widershien

Poplar Editions 2006

47 pages (including music scores)

There is much to admire and much to absorb from Widershien’s second poetry collection, "Poems of Survival." I may quarrel a bit with its cover as it seems too agit-prop, stark black vs. white, a baby in a womb that could be an anti-abortion shot, but I doubt Widershien had total control over that. And well, the old adage, "Don’t judge a book by…" In fact, the book’s scope and patina of colors ranges well beyond the black and white of its face. The world is really not an either/or proposition, though the themes of hope, survival and ultimate surrender do prevail, as in "The Appearance II",

"from the dark

intangible inception

we exist in the first dawns

of already vanishing days."

For Marc knows, as in poetry, …"… everything on the page

is told once

but over and over."

From Words, for Erik

There are many beautiful, even gorgeous rhetorical moments in this work, but what is very satisfying is the concrete place the earth has in it. Indeed we are, but are not just moon-children cast into space in fragile cocoons. Thoreau’s tree, in "Elegies" in fact has the capacity, to mirror man, to reach and embody something transcendant, so, Widershien writes:

"I am that blind brother

who walks toward you,

Thoreaus’s tree made divine.

You bear acorns, and your leaves are lobed.

Divinty runs in your veins

And lifts you toward the summits

Toward those barely imagined healing

Places."

Indeed it is the various and specific places, mostly in the Boston-area and New York which ground this book and give it real life. It is something I deeply admire, especially, the Boston part, as the City has always seemed too quaint and nakedly historical to write about well. In fact, it is the history (with much irony cast about) that fastens itself around buildings and trees and creates an intensity, a longevity, a knowing. In "For the Veterans":

"I found a plaque under the Freedom Tree

Sgt Don MacPhail MIA 1972

The tree is dying birch that the wrens,

Mourning doves, sparrows shun.

Its bark is sore, the trunk bulges with tumors,

The branches seem like mutants.

They died for an edifice."

He is speaking, of course, of Vietnam wherein he powerfully reminds us:

"Boys sent to incinerate children in a war of nearly

forty years,

to keep colonialism alive."

In that sense this book might also be titled, "War and Peace" as it shifts from odes to an inviolate sun to the dark massacres of World War II.

For there is also a positive energy running like chlorophyll through this work, as in "Life is a Shout" from "The Peopled Grass" and one of my favorite poems, "Baudelaire" in which Marc describes his dense forest, his speaking forest, his primeaval forest and ends thusly:

"Like commuters we wait

for that hour again: the transport

of the senses and return

of the shamans."

Yes, indeed. A brilliant book, I feel fortunate to have been given – it is highly recommended to all.

Lo Galluccio

Ibbetson St. Press.