FINDING THE WAY

Editor Gary Entsminger and his Managing Editor Susan Elliott have two of the most intellectually active minds I know, and in the latest issue of Pinyon Review, Entsminger contributes an intriguing article entitled “Finding the Way.” It’s an instructive essay about how the Earth and all living creatures project energy fields and is the introductory piece in this eclectic magazine that features noteworthy poets, photographers, scientists, and artists. In the article, Entsminger, a masterful analyst, explains how readers can determine personal polarities using a compass and a pendulum. I was surprised by the sentence: “Men often, but not always, have positive polarity and women negative polarity…” and suddenly remembered having read that Jesus had 100 percent positive energy. When I find a compass, I’m going to conduct my own polarity test and see what’s going on in my energy field. Entsminger’s interests in science, philosophy, history, and literature are frequently reflected in the editorial page of Pinyon Review issues.  I recommend reading the brief article in Pinyon Review #9, which you can order from Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado.

The ninth issue of this small press magazine also features seventeen writers ranging from an artist and ecologist to a photographer who often provides the photography for covers and articles related to night sky landscapes. The latter, Stan Honda, spent a month at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico as an artist-in-residence and reported on the landscape, ancient pueblos, and the vast sky above them, photographing the changing moonlight moving across the landscape during certain lunar phases, as well as scenes like Jupiter above the North wall of Penasco Blanco.

Susan Elliott, whose artwork has appeared in many of Pinyon’s books, contributed a debut poem that reveals the energy of a highly creative mind, “a meditation on the emblem on the flag in the Death card”: “artichokes bloom[ing] in front of the mason’s old stone cottage/ – purple astral spheres/ full moon/hung/over windless/morning waters…” Susan’s word imagery matches the magic of her visual art, and her exquisite poetry reflects the insights of a practiced observer.

Stuart Friebert, who often corresponds with me, is an outstanding translator of German poetry, as well as an excellent poet. Friebert founded the Creative Writing program at Oberlin College and recently published Floating Heart with Pinyon. His prose piece “Burying Beetles,” in this issue of Pinyon Review showcases the range of his talent in a true story that reveals the cultural conditions prevailing in post-WWII Germany.  As one of the first exchange students sent to Germany after WWII, Friebert spent a winter break from his studies at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany with Richard and Sybille Kramer, relatives of one of his grandmother’s friends back home. He includes accounts of the efforts of German military to track down former Nazis and a drinking party in which the soldiers suggest doing what the Nazis perfected – “take hostages and kill one an hour until the swastika-worshippers give themselves up.” Friebert hints at a frightening understory, and the suspenseful account alludes to his experiences after learning that Sybille was a Jewess saved by Richard and hidden in the loft of a barn belonging to the widow of Richard’s best friend Dieter Braunfel. Readers shouldn’t be daunted by the title “Burying Beetles.” It’s a page turner!

Noteworthy among poems by Robert Shaw, whose latest poetry collection, A Late Spring, and After, will be published by Pinyon this year, is a poignant one entitled “Voicemail,” an amusing commentary about the recording voice of the woman in his voice mail message: “Once or twice, knowing how crazy it was,/I’ve dialed my own number to hear her,/stopping myself short from leaving a message./I couldn’t ask her – could I? – to call me back./I think the utterly disquieting truth/is that holding her calm voice to my ear/even now feels to me like protection,/and that I fear erasing it would set /a seal for all time on the house’s silence,/unbroken now unless I talk to myself.” According to my personal terminology, “Voicemail” is “pathotic.”

As usual, Pinyon Review #9, contains the work of authors with innovative approaches to memories, feelings, observations, and revelations and is a significant contribution to the body of literature published by small presses in the U.S.

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403

TIME'S BODY

I was first introduced to Dabney Stuart's work through Gary Entsminger, publisher of Pinyon Publishing, an independent press in Montrose, Colorado, and was impressed by Stuart's metaphysical musings in Greenbrier Forest, which I reviewed in 2012. His new book, Time's Body, a collection of new and selected poems, 1994-2014, is the work of a mature voice, resonating with both eloquence and humor. It is a voice filled with formal seriousness and unhurried playfulness, not wholly committed to the canons of intellectualism or confessionalism—the voice of an aging troubadour who quotes Andre' Viette in the preliminary pages of the book: "Nothing's going to grow if it's not there."

Everything is here in this multi-layered collection—from spare poems in the Chinese tradition to longer ruminations about characters like William Shakespeare and about controvertible black holes in the universe. The book's stark cover, a photograph of an annular solar eclipse by Stan Honda, could imply a certain darkness within the pages, but contrarily, Time's Body is dazzling with sensual dramas, encounters with the natural world, and lyrics about lightness and energy.

As a former clarinetist, I'm partial to woodwinds, and the poem that exemplified that sense of control needed to play music or write enduring poetry is that of "Solo," one of Stuart's newer poems. The description of an oboe player's effect on the listener is masterful, a beautiful solo in itself...

"Her music, /sinuous as swallow flight, /emptied the mind, too. /Nothing became/the way it floated, its local air, swallowed by nothing./She followed a trail of notes,/but her listeners/went off into myriad lost/meanders, keeping/almost no time. They knew/nothing, did not think/about form and void, /or anything/on the face of the earth/or moving upon its waters. /Instead they took heart/from this wind blowing them away." 

You can almost see the black notes rising in this acknowledgement of the musician playing a wind instrument and giving lift to the listener. 

In "Yucca Mountain," readers hear the echoes of a metaphysician as Stuart describes the mountain over Ghost Dance Fault and the ghosts that haunt the fault, "vibrations... crazing the music to which their bodies ribboned." Unfettered by sentimentalism, Stuart speaks of giving his father away to open mesas and leaving echoes behind, assuring the reader that 

"...if you go there/you can breathe them. Our heels click a joy/together. Our motions give a pattern/to their air anyone can join, /invisible leaves from a notebook flying, /ghosting our dance, feathering its voices."

This is a buoyant aria linking myth and the poet's memory in a spiritual refrain.

Stuart contributes a bit of sensual whimsicality in "Staying in Touch," a poem about falling in love with the same woman living "in the blind/hole at the center/of my left eye," who gives him the "big ecstasy" of lovemaking. It is told with the wryness of a poet who recognizes the body's limitations and describes the aftermath of coming together as "...beached walruses /drifting..."  

Time's Body is a collection of poems that helps readers accept the temporal state of the human condition, to see both the here and now while probing the light beyond. It is somber, meditative, and forthright about the terrors and the consolations of life in "time's body."

Dabney Stuart has published eighteen previous volumes of poetry, is a former resident at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, has held a Virginia Artists Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, he was awarded the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. His work is housed in the audio and video archives at the Library of Congress. He lives with wife Sandra in Lexington, Virginia.

Time's Body is available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.  

PINYON REVIEW #2 IS HERE…

It’s fast approaching – the date that marks the end of the Great Mayan Cycle, according to Gary Entsminger, publisher and editor of Pinyon Publishing. “To some this suggests the end of something, to others a beginning, perhaps, of a New World Age,” he says in the introduction to the latest issue of Pinyon Review.

For Gary and Susan Elliott, artist and designer at Pinyon Publishing, it seems to be the end of a successful year in independent publishing and the beginning of a New Age in literary publications as they launch Issue #2 of the Pinyon Review, a literary and arts journal they established this year. Gary is already busy collecting work from artists and writers for the third issue, and he says the Review has attracted a growing number of happy readers.

In addition to poetry and short stories, the November issue of Pinyon Review features a plethora of art and photography, including the outstanding work of Stan Honda, who spent over a week at Grand Canyon and two weeks at the Petrified Forest National Park as a National Park Service Artist-in-Residence. During that time, Honda worked on night sky settings, photographing the Chaco Canyon: “The East Sky at Pueblo del Arroyo,” “Moon and Venus,Casa Rinconada,” and “The East Sky, Casa Rinconada,” my favorite being “The East Sky at Pueblo del Arroyo,” which features the stars making odd-shaped trails across the night sky. The photographs are accompanied by an essay about the Chaco Sky photography written by Honda that showcases his facility with the written word, as well as with the camera. Honda’s arresting photograph of the eclipse, when the sun, moon, and earth align, appears on the cover of Pinyon Review #2. He’s a photographer with Agence France-Presse based in New York City and does astronomy-related photography in his spare time.



"The East Sky at Pueblo del Arroyo"
by Stan Honda



Publisher Gary Entsminger ‘s own photograph of “The Colorado River From Dead Horse Point” follows Honda’s essay, and his love of mesas and rock formations is reflected in a photograph that captures the mesa and the river in vivid color and features the sharp detail of a fine painting.

Pinyon Review #2 is rich in poetry by regular and new contributors, including two of my own, “The Final Sleep” and “Life Support.” Robert Shaw, author of Aromatics, a collection of poetry published by Pinyon, provides the opening three poems, the most cogent one entitled “Her Mother’s Seashells”: “Sometimes I feel flung up by the tide/or Sometimes I feel empty inside?...Too late now, though, to experiment./The shell was gone, shattered by someone’s/slapdash dusting. It would have listened/in calm, mother-of-pearl inertia/yielding back its never-lapsing sigh.”

Readers who have seen issues of the Pinyon Review and Pinyon’s recent books, have been extravagant in their praise, and after a look at the cover and interior, usually respond: “What a beautiful presentation.” My reaction is always “Read further.”

May this year be the beginning of a New World Age for a small press that celebrates the arts and sciences and spotlights the work of a diverse group of artists and writers. Again, Brava, Gary and Susan!

Copies can be ordered from Pinyon Publishing, 2384 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.