House of Silence

DanielEdwardMoore

What words want to do are crack like the knuckles of a fireman’s hands as flaming verbs leap from the window into arms the size of a library flexing to break the fall.

The sound of metaphor scratching the wind makes you ponder the colorful choices chosen to protect the transparent parts. But darling, endings, like fingers and toes can only take you so far. Maybe two sets of lips, shaped like not yet, will aim their wild, river of breath at your house of silence.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in I-70 Review, Tar River Poetry Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Bryant Literary Review and Book of Matches. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Review: Reckless Pilgrims by Allison Thorpe

ReviewedbyBarryHarris

Title: Reckless Pilgrims

Author: Allison Thorpe

Year: 2021

Publisher: Broadstone Books

Reckless Pilgrims is a collection of poems that document the author’s nearly 40 year journey of country living in her beloved Kentucky hills. Allison Thorpe, originally from Wisconsin, home-steaded in Metcalfe County, Kentucky for almost 40 years.

The opening poem of her collection, “Stone Ruins, Slater’s Field,” begins with a simple declaration, perhaps an invocation, concerning her pilgrimage.

Reckless pilgrims, we came to the land, bearing our hunger like a bony heart, our ragged dreams an open sea.

This first poem introduces us to the beginning of this pilgrimage. We hear about the country realtor who wove compelling stories about the stone ruins found there, perhaps to promote a sale. Did two old women living alone lure a preacher to their bed, operate a still, or bury bricks of gold on the property? As the prospective buyers first explore, they discover an old graveyard: and something unseen settled us to silence, something not quite like benediction.

Past the hill, I stumbled over the first headstone; then we saw the rest ~~ a crooked fairyland circle under the cool umbrella of maple; lichen-graffitied grey stone crops like loose roughened teeth of some giant lain to rest. Myrtle soothed the soil like prayer. . .

The other reckless pilgrim is the author’s husband, a recovering Viet Nam veteran, introduced to us in “To the Boy I Remember, the Man I Came to Love.”

When your number came up, I wondered if I would ever see you again. . . You came home quiet, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh, Saigon. . . You never talked about what happened no leeches, no malaria, no blood preferred instead singing to ponds patriotic with fish.

We see their relationship in other poems. First in “Old Enemies:”

Your faded camoflage shirt, fresh from sun and air, but scented still of jungles and decay, carrying the crease of some sharp-eyed certainty slung over your shoulder that I cannot iron out.

And again in “Last Night, the War Escaped:”

I soothe the battle from your brow wrap my arms gentle sentries to ease invasion.

Allison Thorpe is an accomplished storyteller and, at times, reminds me of a stand-up comic skillfully rendering a deft refer-back to a previous bit of humor. In “Duet for Zsa Zsa and the Repairman,” Zsa Zsa, who is a dog, trots “out of the woods, / old bone in her mouth” and mistakes a repairman for the poet’s husband.

. . . she realized her mistake, ears flattened, slinking off, confused, back to her bone, something in the world not right.

At the end of the poem, the poet recalls other times she, too, has encountered a similar mistake of identity.

I thought of the times I spotted a dark haired figure at the end of the grocery aisle, a blue pea coat in the crowd, the flash of a vehicle in the drive.

I wished I had a bone.

Allison Thorpe has a way with words, especially her talent for conveying a new meaning for a phrase by crafting words together in new ways. For example, examine this wonderful extended metaphor from her poem “A Government of Snow.”

A government of snow has raged across this peaceful countryside, white tongued filibuster guting overrule, gristly congress of flakes, taxing even the most hospitable among us.

Elsewhere she describes Kentucky crows as “gosspers pecking the eyes from summer” and early spring like a dumbwaiter “hauling our mechanical hearts / Our hopeful freight / Into another fickle season.”

Reckless Pilgrims is filled with images of flowers, beans and tomatoes, weeds and other vegetation. Its pages are sectioned by names of flowers: Iris, Dandelion, Lilac and Forget Me Not. The reader is soon caught up as if their own world also consisted of the wildness and beauty of nature that Thorpe lovingly illustrates.

A few poems contrast country life with its opposite, after a move to the city. In “Planting Beans by the Moon on a Small City Balcony:”

I’m no Juliet, that’s for sure. though the moon winks like a fat Romeo, and this twelfth floor stage offers no earthy base beneath my feet

Long from the hills I’ve traveled, my fingers ache the dark crumble of soil, that jagged geography of blue jay and hoot owl, of garden bright and fragrant. blueberries. ginko biloba. slmon bury them in the yard one moon-bothered night scissor that white t-shirt you sleep in the one still keening the room of him then douse the velvet-wallowed darkness bless the stricken match

In “The Plumb of Forgetting,” which TPJ originally published and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017, Thorpe offers a vivid picture of moving on from the past.

In her final poem in this collection, “Prayer for the Old Things,” we are left with a succinct benediction:

May we find value in what we are

Not in what we lack

May we, like the sun, wake and give light

Flaring our colors wildy

Before we tuck into darkness

Allison Thorpe is a prolific poet and writer. She lives in Kentucky. Though, in the past, her wandering feet have taken her across the country and back again, as well as to a few more distant locales. Her secret real life identity is Sylvia Ahrens.

She is a retired assistant professor with degrees in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Women's Studies and served on the board of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference for many years. Memberships include Kentucky State Poetry Society, LPS, Poezia, Ellie's Writers, and Buddha Girls. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Allison is currently working at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning where she provides mentoring services involving poetry, women's writing, editing, and revising.

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.