Jubilat – 2007

“At last, terror has arrived.” Thus begins the big bang of this little journal in Arda Collins’s “The News.” Quality poems follow, as is guaranteed by titles like “Heaven,” the silly goodness of Robyn Schiff’s “Dear Ralph Lauren,” and “1450-1950” by Bob Brown, a picture-poem, for want of a better word. It has eyes surrounding the verses “Eyes / Eyes / My God / What eyes!”

“At last, terror has arrived.” Thus begins the big bang of this little journal in Arda Collins’s “The News.” Quality poems follow, as is guaranteed by titles like “Heaven,” the silly goodness of Robyn Schiff’s “Dear Ralph Lauren,” and “1450-1950” by Bob Brown, a picture-poem, for want of a better word. It has eyes surrounding the verses “Eyes / Eyes / My God / What eyes!”

An interview with Peter Gizzi, a sketch-sample of American bats, and weaving patterns are spaced out between the gush of poems, easing them down the palate. Gizzi says, “To me naming Poe is like naming a tree – he’s absolutely real and a part of the living landscape now. And we could say that Whitman is the ground we walk on in the American language.” Smartly said in this issue, since there’s also an essay on “Abstract Practices,” by Maggie Nelson, exploring twentieth-century seminal artists, including Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest, and “Their Others.”

I most like “A Hood is Like an Ancient Chalice” for its even lines, and similes:

A hood is like a maroon canoe, and the head inside it like a body
lying long in the canoe – the body in the hull,
and around the hull, the water,
and around the hull,
the lull.

A quiet weekend afternoon demands these poems to shake free the mind’s insistent slumber and inertia. Sketches of the Greater Doglike Bat and the Common Vampire Bat create the final mood of this volume, which culminates in “The Wolves” by Craig Morgan Teicher with the lines, “Pass through the woods whenever you like. What you have to fear is not / in the woods.”
[www.jubilat.org/]