PoetWorks Press
http://www.poetworks.com/titles.html
ISBN 1-930293-29-1
$18.95 plus s&h
Review published in Poetry Magazine.com March 2003 Issue
Reviewer: Thomas Fortenberry
This book could not be more aptly titled. A garland is both a wreath and an anthology.
Garland is a jewelry box, a recollection of keepsake memories. Inside we find the author’s collection is not just rich, but quite honest and full of old heirloom pieces, the jewelry slightly tarnished and brooches with missing stones, as all memories are both good and bad, weak and strong.
This anthology does a lot of things, not the least of which is acting as homage:
“a beveled pane of glass admits
the morning sunbeam that falls across
my mother like a homage, illuminating
a halo around her….”
But even the now saintly mother was once victim to the real four-year old child whom we find:
“With no one watching,
grinding sole on every crack.
Never broke her back.
Ground up ants stuck to my soles.”
The lingering glee-guilt of insects ground into her poetic soul (sole) is profound and subtle. Stazja is honest and open to the world in these verses.
She begins the book stating:
“I cannot go back
to do it better or recapture
what was perfect
except, perhaps, in poem.”
Later she writes of her “fuel injected time machine.”
But it all leads us back and recounts the days and nights of summer sheets, snoring old men, chicken pox, and her “booger head” sock-pelting brother.
There are many poignant moments captured, quite a bit of insider humor, and even mature statements on life, family, couplehood and singledom, and issues such as feminism, albeit softly delivered through the veil of genealogical memory:
"Lone-gevity: (p 29)
On both sides
of my family,
the women have
outlived the men
by decades
and never
remarried."
In perhaps the most powerful piece, especially for baring the heart of the writer, she states:
"The Poem I Want to Write
Will take a medical degree
in cardiology, requiring
self-surgery to reach
that deep inside and rip
my heart out"
I've known Stazja for many years and she never ceases to surprise me. She can always find a fresh way to present the familiar, snapshot the world, and rediscover ourselves. She knows how to say the most complex things with the simplest of language, presenting a down-to-earth text for the most confounding problems of life.
In a tribute to Edith Gassion (“Piaf” p 87) she makes a dramatic indictment, questioning herself and the world through the music of her Little Sparrow subject:
"Fragile package
labeled
'handle with care'
delivered with a wail
to a world
that never does."
The answer to this, of course, is that Stazja cared enough to craft this fragile package and we care enough to read it. Handled with care, indeed. In “Haven’t We Met” we have the universal mirror-moment of human and poetic contact with memory:
“Haven’t we met somewhere before?
I could not turn away the breathless whisper
of my racing heart.” (p 81)
Neither could we, blessed by our meeting.
Garland is a superb book, replete with everything that life grants: memory, experience, and hope. Let us hope for more of her writings. They will be welcome.
Copyright © 2002 Thomas Fortenberry
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.
Thomas Fortenberry is an author, editor, and publisher. Owner of Mind Fire Press, he has judged many literary contests, including The Georgia Author of the Year Awards and The Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. His award-winning work has appeared internationally in publications such as Amelia, Cicada, Maelstrom, Contemporary Southern Poets of 1997, PoetryMagazine.com, Writer's Choice, Fiction Network, Soul Unmade, Poetry Superhighway, Ariga, Eternity, Gravity, Uno, Lower Than the Angels, Wooden Head Review, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Lumi Virtuale, Storytellers, Left Bank Review, Biblioteca di Babele, Painted Poetry, Main Street Rag, Independence Boulevard, Midwest Book Review, The European Legacy, Poets4Peace, RAWA, The World Book of Healing, Haiku Hut, Verse Libre Quarterly, Taj Mahal Review, Annetna Nepo, Dew-on-line, Peshekee River, the introduction of H. G. Wells' The Outline of History, and is forthcoming in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry.