Category: June Beisch

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A favorite poem from a poet friend

Just for a treat today, here is a lovely poem by my friend June Beisch. This was published in the Harvard Review in 2006 and also appeared online on Verse Daily.

I had the great pleasure of reading with June a couple of months ago at the Concord Library. Everyone thereI enjoyed hearing her read her work and also hearing her use her natural teaching talents in her comments between poems.

In Muir Woods

Last night, a giant redwood fell
    either from old age, disease, or
“sometimes they just give up,” the ranger said.
Listen, I was in the woods, I
    heard it too, like my own death
falling inside me.
Here in the last of the old growth forests
    where some trees are still virginal,
some older than Moses,
I thought, then, of you. You are not the one
    dying, you said to me,
and I quoted to you from Montaigne
that death was not a proper object of fear
    but only the end of life.
What is a proper object of fear, you asked,
and I said death of the heart.
    But life, you said, was
everything. And you were in love
with that beautiful lie.
Sometimes these trees send out
    all their sap at once
making them vulnerable, sometimes,
they grow burls of anxiety
Look, the ranger said to us,
    the bark is so wet because the tree
drinks hundreds of gallons of water a day
from the fog that rolls in
    over the Golden Gate Bridge.
That bridge which is so beautiful and which
holds such promise for tomorrow
    with its blue shimmering bay.
Every day when I see the fog now,
I think of you and then I can almost
    feel the fog cover me with
that enveloping mist, can almost feel
the branches of the redwood
    being kissed by its cold
ministrations. I would, if I could,
stand here all day like these trees, but my
    heart is so sore, it is almost ready to burst,
and I am filled, suddenly,
with a wild and insatiable thirst.

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What should a book review be?

Recently I read the kind of book review I hate. The book, which sounded like nothing special by an author I was unfamiliar with, was held up to ridicule by a reviewer intent on showcasing his own cleverness and erudition. What’s that about?

With newspaper book sections being cut back–like all other newspaper sections–was this a good use of the space? This wasn’t a must-review book from, say, Philip Roth or Toni Morrison. And it wasn’t a gem we might have missed. This was either a gift of sacrificial lamb for a carnivorous reviewer or maybe a favor owed–yeah, sure, we’ll review it…. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a service to the reader.

I talked about this with my friend June Beisch. June is a poet and she also writes book reviews. We wondered about the politics of what gets reviewed. But, speaking as a reviewer herself, she said it’s usually the less experienced reviewers who try to make a name for themselves by savaging a book. She starts, instead, from a place of respect.

“When I start to write a review, the first thing I think about is that the author worked five years on this,” she said.

June told me about a review she wrote recently. The book was “Walden by Haiku,” author Ian Marshall’s collection of “found” haiku pulled from the Thoreau classic. June thought the concept was interesting and that many of the poems were well done. But she also pointed out one major problem–that Thoreau used metaphor extensively, while haiku, as a form, does not.

That’s my idea of a satisfying review. It brought a book to my attention that I might not otherwise have known about and gave me something substantial to think about.

“The first line of a review should catch the reader’s attention, as a good lede might,” June said. “The review should be as succinct as a poem and should not give away the plot or just recount the contents of the book without placing it in the larger context of the genre (novel, short story, etc.). And it should, above all, be entertaining to read.

“My own belief is that before you review a book you should read all the books by that author and get a sense of the writer’s oeuvre.”

Sounds like hard work and certainly not as much fun as ripping a book to shreds. But it does give the reader something of real value.