Luna – Spring 2007

Luna, which is just the right size to conveniently slip into a purse, offers up multiple works by such poets as Mark Conway, Sara McCallum, Dobby Gibson, Rigoberto Gonzáles, and Crystal Williams, among others. The editors’ preference is for free verse, some so free, in fact, as to cross the boundary into prose. For example, Denise Duhamel’s “You’re Looking at the Love Interest” is a wonderful anecdote set on the page to look like a poem. And while the most basic requisite of a poem is that length of the line be determined by the content, I gravitate toward verse that uses a variety of poetic devices.

Luna, which is just the right size to conveniently slip into a purse, offers up multiple works by such poets as Mark Conway, Sara McCallum, Dobby Gibson, Rigoberto Gonzáles, and Crystal Williams, among others. The editors’ preference is for free verse, some so free, in fact, as to cross the boundary into prose. For example, Denise Duhamel’s “You’re Looking at the Love Interest” is a wonderful anecdote set on the page to look like a poem. And while the most basic requisite of a poem is that length of the line be determined by the content, I gravitate toward verse that uses a variety of poetic devices.

In addition, since Luna’s subtitle is “a journal of poetry and translation,” I expected to see translated works, yet this volume, at least, contains none, though some of Gonzáles’s works are multilingual.

Many of the poems in this volume have a personal, confessional tone. McCallum speaks the language of the human condition in the quartet of poems appearing here: in “Parable of the Stones” a fateful misadventure haunts; in “Then” the persona finds herself only “a character in her own life”; in “The Shore” the tenuous boundaries of love stretch toward the unknown; and in “Luck” a woman acknowledges the pivotal events that allowed her to escape her “other life.”

Seminal people and events make up the history of a country as well. If you like political poetry, try out Gibson’s “Where Wings Take Dream,” titled for a dyslexic slip made by President George Bush in 2000. It begins:

First he awakens, then they apply his makeup.
Then he fetches his morning paper
and delivers it to the trash unread.
A monkey could do this much, it is true,
and this is precisely why we have elected one to do it.

It’s refreshing to see an American poet so openly take on our leader and so à propos in our current political climate. However, for something less scathing and instead emotionally wrenching, try “Vespertine” by contributing editor Gonzáles. The 24 stanzas are bursting with simile, metaphor, and a staccato rhythm exemplified by the refrain “Stop-breath, stop-time, stop-world, steering wheel” that punctuates this narrative poem. Its conclusion will leave the reader moved – and anticipating the next volume of this fine literary magazine from the University of Minnesota.
[www.lunapoetry.blogspot.com/]