PINYON REVIEW #10

Dog lovers will appreciate the photo of the black lab wearing a bright red jacket, head turned toward some sound in a wood of aspen with yellow leaves, that appears on the cover of Pinyon Review #10. The dog’s name is Garcia, and he’s accustomed to proofing manuscripts with Editor Gary Entsminger and Managing Editor Susan Elizabeth Elliott near Montrose, Colorado. Inside "The Castle," the cabin headquarters of Pinyon Publishing, Garcia turns in early after a day of manuscript reading, climbing mountains, dancing to folk music, chasing wildlife, and helping to cultivate his owners’ large garden. Garcia often signs his name to emails addressed to me, and lets me know if my latest poetry offerings to Pinyon Review pass muster with him. I appreciate the attentions of this beautiful dog even though I’m allergic to animal dander and can only admire him from afar. 

Poetry lovers will love this issue of Pinyon Review as it’s primarily a collection of poetry from numerous award-winning poets. It also contains an exhibit of the painting/art design work of Susan Elliott. Bonus material is a suspenseful vignette by the editors that reminded me of Red Lights, one of Georges Simenon’s short psychological novels.

I usually attempt to single out a few authors to tout in a review, but the excellent work of sixteen poets in this issue begged me not to discriminate, so I finally decided to focus on a single poem that contained five parts entitled "Arizona Ruins" by Lyn Lifshin. It’s an arresting study of the Sinagua Indians, a tribe that disappeared into the cosmos and whose ruins I visited during a stay in Sedona, Arizona in the summer of 2007. Lifshin writes: "No one knows/where they went/from the cliffs/with their/earth jars and sandals/Or if they/cursed the/desert moon/as they wrapped/their dead/babies/in bright cloth/and jewels…"

On a hot summer day when I visited the ruins and became unbearably thirsty, I felt in sync with the poet who wrote: "Now cliff swallows/nest in the mud/where the Sinagua/lived/until water ran out…" I wondered if the tribe died of thirst or moved to a new watering hole, but a guide told us that they simply disappeared, and I remember writing my own poem about ghosts of these native Americans who sometimes lived on lizards and nuts. "The people left/ the debris of their lives here/arrows, dung/And were buried/with the bright/turquoise they loved/sometimes carved/into animals and birds."

I love the clean lines of this poem and the powerful images it invokes of people struggling for survival, making stone jewelry and braiding willow stems in the Arizona desert. I blinked when I read a biography of the author who lays claim to writing over 130 books —that fact is the entire bio, which is as mysterious as the poem about the Sinagua, and I respect the privacy of the creator of such powerful imagery.

From start to finish, readers are held in suspense with Gary and Susan’s "Where Was I? —for Tom Martinez," a story about a man who wandered onto the couple’s property, lost, after sunset, one evening. The man had been harvesting pine nuts in the pinyon-juniper woods and had gotten turned around, and in the vignette Gary offers to drive him back to his car via Government Springs in exchange for half his harvest of pine nuts. Gary writes that since pine nuts from Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are almost impossible to buy, except in a Chevron station in Austin, Nevada, he agreed to make the drive while Susan stayed home and fretted about him driving in the dark to Martinez’s home on the rim of a canyon. It’s a good spin about a repeat incident Gary experienced lending a hand to a lost neighbor who claims his wife’s legally blind and he’s legally insane. Gary and Susan have jointly written several books that include Ophelia’s Ghost, Fall of ’33, and Remembering the Parables.

Also in this issue of Pinyon Review is a stunning, blue-green watercolor entitled "Sea Quilt, 24"x36" in which Susan used watercolor, ink, and thread on 140-lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper. She writes: "On quiet winter morning walks when I pause and gaze across snow-covered fields of sagebrush, I sense the ocean in the stillness. The other dimension laps at my ear like the hum of Om." 

Garcia highly recommends Issue #10 of Pinyon Review and donned his red coat especially to attract readers... or perhaps, in honor of Thanksgiving, he wanted to rustle the feathers of the wild turkeys that often come to breakfast at "The Castle." Copies of this issue can be ordered from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

IN A CONVENT GARDEN

For those readers who responded so enthusiastically to my last blog about Penny, the dog who aspires to the diaconate, I’ve included a poem about her in my newest collection of poetry entitled In a Convent Garden and Other Poems, which will be published in a few weeks. The volume is a product of this summer’s writing, and rather than review my own work, I’m including the acknowledgements of fellow authors in this blog for those who read the poetry I write while I’m sojourning on The Mountain here at Sewanee, Tennessee. The acknowledgements are humbling and affirming, and I’m happy to share the endorsements of gifted writers and discerning readers:

“I do not profess to know the mind of the talented Diane Marquart Moore but I do know something of its grasp of the essential, in things both ordinary and extraordinary, from the poems collected in In a Convent Garden and Other Poems. Moore is an intuitive, fiercely intelligent, and contemplative poet who renders each poem with a precision of language that makes her ideas of the metaphysical palpable and clear. Her poems, propelled by still, but spirited narration, captivate. We are taken many places: the convent garden, a fortress on the bluff, No Name Road, the plains of Khuzestan—each place absorbed by Moore through all of her senses then conveyed in sharp but measured detail to her readers, for the purpose of leading us to higher ground. This life, seen by Moore, is never spare or hopeless, which is the true gift of this book. In fact the whole book is an urging to hope. She does not spare us the truth of the ‘marrow of bondage’ all of humanity shares, but her poems promise freedom. Moore assuredly directs us to an ineffable Source. Grace surmounts the suffering of this world, and we are led into a revelation of holy shimmer that drizzles on dogs and cats, stone angels, and gratefully on us.”

—Clare L. Martin, poet and author of Eating the Heart First, Press 53, 2012.

"Time out to reveal the heart"—such is the work Diane Marquart Moore has made for herself as a poet. Remembering to breathe inside the lines, remembering to delight in the gifts of the spirit, she turns In a Convent Garden and Other Poems into a new book of common prayer. Nothing escapes her heart and eye: the elder nuns, slugs, the convent cat, songs in dreams, wandering, the dog's way, Brother Rabbit, Appalachian dulcimers and the songs of katydids.

—Darrell Bourque, former poet laureate of Louisiana, author of Megan's Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie.

My heart leaps up when Diane Moore brings out a new book. She seems to breathe in life, then breathe out poetry—she "poems" with such ease and grace. Her poems are strikingly original and challenging; she makes the reader work hard, but the rewards are great.

—Jane F. Bonin, retired professor of English, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and author of Major Themes in Prizewinning American Drama and Mario Fratti.

Diane Moore is the rare poet who has the courage to probe the exquisite wounds of human existence: loneliness, despair, suffering, want, night terrors, and betrayal. Just when the reader is at the point of pressing the button for a narcotic to dull the pain, with imagination and skillful craft, she swings through with the wry humor of a raccoon singing barroom ballads, a demonic cat dusting her allergies with dander, a sweet Sister instructing a Psalm reader to break at the asterisk or risk being swept away with the wicked, and, most healing, with joy-filled lessons learned in the course of her God-centered life.

—Anne Simon, Louisiana District Judge, Retired.

Diane Moore's eye is more precise than most painters, and she uses that eye to make a sacred music full of love and sympathy for what often gets ignored or forgotten. She is a wonderful contemporary amalgam of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Read her now and be delighted.

—Chuck Taylor, author of Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup.

Diane Moore has become a master of seeing, describing, and immersing herself in other lives. Her retired nun, Sister Mary Zita, "enters a dark cell / but her soul is not asleep;" a sculpture, "the stone angel is laughing;" and of Thomas Wolfe, she writes, "Each time I want his ghost / to give me a stone, a leaf, a door"… In A Convent Garden consists of meditations on spirituality, dreams, art, writers, travel, music, and nature.

—Gary Entsminger, author of Ophelia's Ghost and Fall of '33.

The cover photograph of In A Convent Garden and Other Poems was taken by Sr. Madeleine Mary, sister-in-charge of St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee, and cover design was rendered by Martin Wayne Romero. Order copies from amazon.com after September 15, 2013.

FALL OF ‘33

Cover art by Susan E. Elliott

Pinyon publisher Gary Entsminger and artist Susan Elliott spend most of their time publishing other writers' books in their cabin post called Pinyon Publishing nestled in the Colorado Rockies, but now and then they take time off to produce their own writings and artwork. Together, they have written Remembering the Parables, Making the Most of WriteItNow4, and Ophelia’s Ghost, the latter, an intriguing work of fiction. This novel set in the 50's in the southwestern U.S., featured Eva, an anthropologist who disappeared from a campsite in the Canyons of the Ancients, and readers were treated to encounters with parallel universes, Pueblo cultures, UFO's, Shakespeare and the phenomenon of ghosts.

Fall of '33 takes us back to an earlier time when Eva is only 12 years old, a passenger on a train headed for Django, Colorado. She is deeply immersed in memories of the twenty days preceding her train ride, recalling her life in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and recording them as the train travels west. Her feelings are reflected in nostalgic descriptions about her childhood; e.g., "A boy standing beside a Model A Ford near the tracks waves as we pass. He looks about the same age as Billy, and our farm flashes in my mind, as we drove away in Poppy's Model A…I see Billy the day after I knew we were leaving. We were walking home from the bus stop. A hermit thrush whistled from the woods, its hollow notes ethereal and flute-like. The long shadows disappeared into deeper darkness. Indian summer, but the speckled red and yellow leaves swirling past our feet reminded us that winter was coming…"

The train takes Eva through vivid experiences to the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago, across the Midwest, and into Colorado, but it is the journey in Eva's imagination–the memory of her childhood home and stories told by her Grandfather Poppy–that will capture readers. Eva moves in and out, from visible worlds seen from the window of the train to invisible worlds, which her grandfather explains are important for ancestral connections. "Memory is more than a scrapbook of images," he tells Eva, encouraging her to connect with spirits "on the other side of the veil" to bring about a change in consciousness. Readers are led to believe that she will also receive consolation about moving from her childhood home from ancestral spirits constant in memory.

Stories about Eva's Native American ancestry and the mysticism inherent in these tales are interwoven throughout the novel. They reminded me of an interview with Bill Moyer and the poet Sherman Alexie, in which Alexie emphasizes how important "story" was and is for survival–in Eva's case, the story of her Turtle Island ancestors who survived a great flood and intermingled with newcomers called "the golden ones."

Each chapter title of Fall of  '33, or each day that Eva writes about, is symbolized by a creature or force in the natural world; e.g., turtle, dragon, deer, the river, eagle, red bird, flower…the writing is an assignment given her by Poppy in which she uses the "Day Memory System." Using an image for each day, Eva faithfully records her observations about the landscape and happenings in both the journey and her past life involving friends and family on the farm and in rural social gatherings.

One of the most arresting chapters features the family's venture into Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. On this site, they view a circular ruin, fifty feet across and sunken fifteen feet into the ground which was used as the center of religion for various groups of Native Americans. "The sipapu is this entrance, or passageway, for the souls to emerge from. And the souls, the people, go out on the path, to the center. And when they die, they come back. Out and in and back out again. Like the seasons…a middle place, a meeting ground, where all souls come together..."

Past, present, and future are represented in this complex novel filled with descriptions of the South and West and the impressive narrations by two naturalists who aren't timid about taking readers on a real life journey through dark times and a mystical journey into the life of the spirit enhanced by "story," the stuff of survival.

A poem at the conclusion of the novel completes this mystical journey into the Fall of '33, and the last two stanzas underline the authors' intent to convey the power of dreams and imagination:

"instead

I dance

in a dream

with you

and all the time

in our world."