So the spring issue of The Avocet starts with three poems by ed galing, the most powerful of which for me is “voyage for two,” about a man and his wife going on a familiar journey through the woods each spring — to a cabin maybe? — “ducks were always in / no danger from us,” bringing us a beautiful scene. “sun shining on the / ripples making a sort of web…” But the web catches more than just water: “the doctor had already / told me that / memory loss is evident” and there is a beautiful twining of the natural and the personal from there to the end of the poem.
Peter C. Leverich, freed from his editing chores, gives us a poem about a heron on his pond: “he marks it with his air of hauteur…” giving the creature a real personality through the heightened tone, and making the poem fun: “he behaves like he’s the king of France!” The turn to the narrator’s voice leads us to a more philosophical end, very satisfying: “Yet I would be his alter Audubon, the illustrator of…”
Joan Colby gives us a poem, “Spring Green,” about yearning for spring — since we had snow here yesterday, particularly apt for me. ;-> “First grass / hormonal with a green intensity…” Great line. And then a paired poem, “Spring Snow,” which goes deeper into the soul, lending it power when contrasted with the previous poem. “The moon stalls…I toss in its headlight / unable to save myself…”
Charles Portolano gives us a portrait of “The American Avocet,” very appropriate indeed: “I watch unseen this / long-legged shorebird, with its pied plumage / and a dash of red around / its head and neck…”
I liked Andy Roberts’ poems, “Waiting” and “Bluebells in the Floodplain,” and the emotional renderings of M.J. Iuppa’s “Hemlock Lake.” “They are staring us down — standing guard over / 120 confined eggs.”
Finally, let me mention “Black Swallowtail,” by Charles H. Harper, having an interesting beginning: “I believe in the visible world / there is no creature softer…” which, put the way it is, gives us the first line to be read not only as a commentary on the butterfly itself, but also a declaration of the narrator’s whole approach to the world, a belief in the image, the concrete, that which is real. This sort of sly complexity recurs throughout the poem. Very nice.
Peace in the valley,
P M F Johnson