Wood: Poems from the Belfast Poetry Woodshed, Vol 1
Joel Lipman and Ellen Sander, Editors
Inked Toad Press, 2020
There’s magic at work in Belfast. Abandon your preconceptions about small town writing groups and take a tumultuous ride through fog, a china shop, then have a sip of eaux-de-vie. Or, as Margie Kivel, one of the poets in this collection puts it in her bio: “Moving back to Maine was the gunpowder that blew me out of the water.” Here are tender moments, deep sadness, and an incident with a tree-climbing alligator. This is a rousing collection by the Woodshed poets of Belfast, Maine: Avery Booth Stone, DiTa, Matthew Eichenlaub, Jacob Fricke, Rebecca Jessup, Margie Kivel, Joel Lipman, Catherine Neuhardt-Minor, Susan Reeder Taylor, Ellen Sander, and Lourdes Tutaine-Garcia. As the editors and Woodshed founders Joel Lipman and Ellen Sander say in the Foreword, the Sheddies have been meeting three times a month since the summer of 2015, and the Belfast poetry community “is nurturing, sustaining, and unusually active for a provincial city of roughly 6,000.” Belfast is that rare small enclave on Mid-Coast Maine where poetry is nourished by an annual festival, a poet laureate, and at least four on-going writing groups.
Throughout the anthology, Wood is sculpted by language, in Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s words, “that’s simple and sharp as a scalpel.” One of the Sheddies, DiTa, has a rollicking tour de force of a French repast/seduction, “fete des amoureaux: huit cours.” In 2. Amuse bouche, she writes:
. . . often accompanied
by a complementing wine
(a dark red, pinot noir)
served both to prepare lover
for the fucking meal –
offers a glimpse into her approach
to the art of her love.
Matthew Eichenlaub’s “Spring”continues this earthy theme as he day-dreams about the young woman raking“Black humus . . . into a wheelbarrow”when he enters the library.
One of my favorites—I’m a lifetime English teacher—is Margie Kivel’s terrifying “Classroom Signage” that ends:
Is this Active Shooter Drill real or fake?
There has been a disconnect
between head and heart.Does the door lock
from inside
or out?Will there be time?
I’m taken by the range of forms in Wood. Clearly experimentation is encouraged. Lourdes Tutaine-Garcia, a Cuban by birth, uses line breaks to underscore meaning in “Second Marriage.” In “Found Your Glove,” Jacob Fricke takes us from “Tiananmen Square to the wrist of a senator” and finally to “holding a single bird’s egg one empty ghost of promise.” Joel Lipman’s machine gun rat-a-tat-tat in “Bar Thefts, Club Founds & Parking Lot Appropriations” leaves us clutching our guts, both wincing and laughing.
Perhaps it’s something in Belfast’s salty, seaweedy air, or maybe it’s simply dedication to the craft of poetry. In any event, Wood is the product of the poets’ thrice monthly meetings in the woodshed and untold hours at their desks. Try this collection: varied, explosive, tuned, and a product of delightful little Belfast with its poets laureate, its annual poetry festival, and its abundance of poets.
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Thomas R. Moore’s fourth book, Red Stone Fragments, was published in 2019. His poem “How We Built Our House” won a 2018 Pushcart Prize, and his work has been broadcast on Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. He is a former poet laureate of Belfast, Maine.