As usual, the latest Nimrod is jam-packed with notable poems. Let’s start with the first poem in the mag, “Sequel,” by Joan Roberta Ryan, which has an argument for also being the best. “Dear Husband and King…” it starts. “Lately, your mother has been…eyeing / the kids rather strangely, / and knowing her ogreish / lineage…” I suppose this is the time to say the theme for this issue was reimagining faerie tales and such. Anyway, it’s a fun poem, dire warning ending and all. I admire the line breaks in this as well.
Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda has a clever folded poem (by which I mean she’s taken two poems and folded them together) called “Painting In An Enclosed Field At Saint-Paul Hospital.” A Van Gogh poem. “Like the painting of a peasant /Devout/ I long to haul wheat / we rise / in the fertile field.” Interesting things can happen with such poems, if done correctly. I like this one.
“She Gives Me The Watch Off Her Arm” is a sweet portrait by Marge Saiser of the relationship between mother and daughter at the moment the daughter is going off to college. “the closest she has ever been / is this / the dorm // her father had needed her / to dig the potatoes…” We see the daughter aware of how much this means to the mother.
“Burning House” is an insightful look by Diane Cadena Deulen into the midset of little boys, and how they are affected by a nearby house burning down. “Because the place was long abandoned, rumored / haunted…it was cause more for celebration / than alarm.” Great twist at the end as well.
The final poem I’ll mention is “Scheherazade,” by Patricia Hawley. “They were raised / as if feral by nuns, fed at the back door.” What a great beginning. This is about girls, however, not cats, and there is a stream of sadness running underneath. “Gen, / an artist, jumped from a tenement fire — her child stopped breathing / in her arms.” Very powerful.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
