|
ASH
(Glass Lyre Press, 2021) GLORIA MINDOCK In Ash, Gloria Mindock writes a gritty, beautifully haunting collection of poetry. Ash is what remains behind after destruction, ruin, death, and burning. Similarly, the poems in this collection are what will remain. Fight the shadows and wade through the darkness on a path paved by Mindock's vivid imagery, stark language, and dynamic voice, all of which make for a most memorable experience. Now more than ever, we need these poems. With the utmost economy of words, skillful syntax, and emotional connections, each poem reverberates into the depths of your consciousness. Dark, intense, and wholly unique, Ash, by Gloria Mindock is what you've been waiting for- a collection of poetry that consumes and smolders. Are you ready? -Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire |
|
|
|
|
|
|
More Rave Reviews for ASH
Poetrybay
Winter 2021-2022
Book Review by Francine Witte
Gloria Mindock’s newest book, Ash, is a master class in how language can be deceptively simple and direct and yet simultaneously explosive. The (near) title poem “Ashes,” is a perfect example:
Ashes
Bury me into your heart.
Don’t forget.
Even when you distribute my ashes,
embers of arms will flow out into the wind.
What will I attach to.
The rain will push my ashes to the ground
mixing them with mud.
Stepped on, maybe someone will bring
me home on their shoe, wipe the mud off with
a rag, throw it away, then off to the dumps.
This is all I am, garbage!
To be buried again into non-existence.
There is a chance I will be recycled.
Later, I could be part of that doll
your child embraces.
No overwrought or tortured overwriting here. The emotions that are evoked by these straightforward images speak for themselves. The poems throughout are presented as the fire and the beautiful ashes they create linger after.
The metaphor of ash is turned over and over in this collection. In the first three of the four sections, Burnt, Baked, Buried, we see the various facets and nuances of “ash.” We read about ashes as the remains of love, of violence, of what is left after the everydayness of life. This recurring idea fascinates in the same way the blaze in a hearth does. The same yellow flames, the same crackle of logs, but each lick and shimmy is just different enough to hold you for hours.
The last section, Opposition, closes out the collection with a series of mini-dramas that use letters for character names.
O/E
O was the master of confessions,
He would tell of fires he started,
Felt a sensual tinge watching,
This tradition was romantic.
E was very complicated.
Did not want to hear what O said.
There was much too much ash torturing her,
She romanticized her objects, was mad
he destroyed them.
The volcano developed.
Mindock is, indeed, a master of the craft of poetry. She served in 2016-17 as Poet Laureate of Somerville, MA. The acknowledgements page of Ash is evidence of how widely published she is, and she heads up the wonderful Cervena Barva Press. All this in addition to having published previous books and receiving notable awards.
The poems in Ash are dark and moody and Mindock is confident enough to never direct the reader with maudlin qualifiers. She presents each poem as a fire. It’s as if she knows the ashes will live in your heart.
--------------------
Readers Views
Reviewed by Amy Lignor, December, 2021
“Haunting.” I’ve been sitting here for hours, hemming and hawing over the perfect word to describe this collection. In my own personal history, when it came to poems, I found very few books that stood out. Yes, there are many about romance, with the whole ‘Romeo and Juliet’ kind of endings. There are those that focus on brutality and pain, which can (no offense) turn off readers after a while. And there are those that try comedy, like going back to the time of limericks to get their point across. Some make you laugh out loud; others make you roll your eyes. It all depends on the delivery… or, of course, how exhausted you are when you dive into one of them.
I even mulled over the fact that I disliked the genre because I didn’t feel, as a writer, that in a few stanzas someone could explain the power of pain, love, disloyalty, friendship, etc. Maybe I believed that was cheating, because so many authors write tomes in order to describe the power of just one of these emotions, let alone a book full of them. I concluded that poetry was just not my type of thing… until 2021 came along and I was presented with about five in a row – this one now included—that worked like a loving grandmother. They knocked me upside the head (in a nice way) and said, “Hey! Listen to me! I’ve got something to say!” And, as this year comes to a close, I’m extremely happy that happened.
When I opened the cover to “Ash,” I wasn’t really expecting poet Gloria Mindock to deliver such personal, hardcore poems that felt more like stories. But just reading the Table of Contents, and seeing the sections were titled: “Burnt”, “Baked”, “Buried” and “Opposition,” gave me a clue that this was not going to be an ordinary compilation of romance or a bunch of limericks written in the back booth of a pub somewhere. Gloria Mindock has put together tales of a variety of characters who live, work, and deal with personal issues each and every day. Using a tone of compassion and empathy for the people and issues she writes about, Mindock seems, at times, like a counselor or a psychiatrist who uses her words to get these characters (and readers) through their problems and around the blockades set in their specific paths in order to find something more.
There are so many to call out, but I have to say “The Axe” is one poem that made me think on many levels. Why? Because this is a poet who adds invisible lines and ideas in her work that enter your mind as you read her words. I present a short snippet of this:|
“The population is going down. Too many fires not put out. Too many songs not completed. Existence turned downward…”
A fireman’s axe does hit and shatter glass in order to stop this smoke, fire, and eventual ash, but this is a condition, Mindock states, where “water is incapable of saving.” The never-ending fires. The pandemic. The school shootings – all of these issues in 2021 made this poem even stronger and more realistic in my eyes.
Mindock has a powerful voice that offers memorable experiences. With few words, stark language, and intelligent syntax, she brings to life—in vivid color—“real life.” This assembly will, for me and, I predict, for anyone who reads it, remain in their consciousness for a long time to come. It will “haunt” you… because that’s exactly what honesty and power does.
--------------
Gloria Mindock’s Ash
Reviewed by Ann Wehrman, Pedestal, Issue 88, 2021
Throughout Ash, Gloria Mindock’s speaker laments a broken marriage, a husband despised, and a home destroyed by fire. Mindock crafts shattered, hallucinatory poems, illustrating the process of destruction and what remains, both within her and without. She writes of intimate relationships and in expanding spirals of consciousness, surveying a modern society fragmented by instability and war. Mindock’s verses persist without remorse, bearing a darkly emotional tone and frequently nihilistic view. Scattered pictures yield mosaics of heartache, while the speaker expresses frustration and despair toward a mate, humanity, and the world.
Mindock’s poems are effectively foreshadowed by the fairy-tale image on the collection’s cover: an elongated doll-like woman set against a blackened brick wall and standing beside piles of white ash. She is not a huggable, fabric doll with a faded, painted-on face; this is a more sinister fairytale. The doll is tall and slim, model-beautiful in a trailing satin gown. She leans with one arm crooked behind her head, flame-like russet curls flowing past her hips, wistful eyes staring to the side as if in a dream or trance. The title poem reinforces the pain and dissociative tendencies suggested by the image:
This is all I am, garbage!
To be buried again into non-existence.
There is a chance I will be recycled.
Later, I could be part of that doll
your child embraces.
One is reminded of the road that writers walk, dying (symbolically) and being reborn as they express their lives’ pain and happiness, transmuting their experiences into art, their process serving as an alchemical “recycling.” In “Crawling Stones,” Mindock eulogizes a lover, perhaps a husband:
He was an insensitive bastard, with his
heart a stone, his eyes, a stone, his legs, a stone,
his arms, a stone
Crawling stones reaching
I got scratched, an achy body, every time
I was with him.
…
He finally drowned and me, I soared
like a bird, flying across the water, singing.
In “Carrots,” Mindock’s oppressed speaker internalizes blame, at the same time possibly imagining revenge:
There is blood on my hands
from the knife.
It was an accident I said as I
sliced the carrots into tiny roundness.
You lost your appetite.
Blood will do this.
I took the carrots to the sink seeing
water mix with redness.
I pictured a long coffin with water inside,
soaking a body.
The sink was drained, carrots thrown out.
Orange circles in the garbage.
You banged your hands on the table.
It was legitimate.
Does that banging express the ire of a husband who thinks his dinner was spoiled? Did he also use those same hands against the wife who sliced her own finger while preparing his meal? And, in “Plowing” (below), to whom does the speaker muse? She might still love her husband, love mixed with deadly anger, but is there another love being subtly referenced and idolized?
On the edge of the beyond, will you anxiously await me?
What can I say? I have never forgotten you.
There is so much unknown.
Will the endurance pay off?
That there is a different partner being longed for is perhaps confirmed by the final lines of the direct and succinct “Thorn”:
You weighed me down.
Your intelligence, exhausting.
In this hemisphere, aloneness strikes,
an emptiness, a hollow heart shaking.
You are a thorn, hurtful.
Condemned, you realize you aren’t the one.
In several poems, including “Air,” Mindock moves from exploring personal relationships to address broader concerns:
Is there no more hope for the brave
voices shouting out?
There are tears for the widowed families,
for those who lost friends, and prayers offered.
Why is there such violence?
Hate?
…
Broken bones stay broken.
Killing is natural for some
…
The dead bodies cannot sing,
therefore, the world is empty.
In the collection’s penultimate and poignant poem, “Without Peace,” Mindock further expands on her Dantean vision:
The dead have gray skin
Ashes fall on them today
Church bells ring dreamily as the survivors weep
Life is empty, hollow
Wind ceases
The world forgets this place
Mindock’s bleak and passionate poems focus on the tensions within human beings and between loved ones, as well as between nations. The urge to fight, to destroy self and others is not new. Arguably, at this time of widespread tribulation, including global warming and climate change, war, international and national tensions, overpopulation, and the wreckage caused by COVID-19, people everywhere are experiencing anxiety and confusion. Parallels between the speaker’s personal Armageddon and the annihilation she sees in the world point to the axiom, “as within, so without.”
For rebirth to occur, however, the past must be destroyed so that new life may sprout and grow from its ashes. Mindock’s intensely personal poems are particularly relevant in this time of tumultuous change: dark verses intoned while standing in the ashes, her world and the broader world burning, the possibility of something new barely visible on the horizon.
Winter 2021-2022
Book Review by Francine Witte
Gloria Mindock’s newest book, Ash, is a master class in how language can be deceptively simple and direct and yet simultaneously explosive. The (near) title poem “Ashes,” is a perfect example:
Ashes
Bury me into your heart.
Don’t forget.
Even when you distribute my ashes,
embers of arms will flow out into the wind.
What will I attach to.
The rain will push my ashes to the ground
mixing them with mud.
Stepped on, maybe someone will bring
me home on their shoe, wipe the mud off with
a rag, throw it away, then off to the dumps.
This is all I am, garbage!
To be buried again into non-existence.
There is a chance I will be recycled.
Later, I could be part of that doll
your child embraces.
No overwrought or tortured overwriting here. The emotions that are evoked by these straightforward images speak for themselves. The poems throughout are presented as the fire and the beautiful ashes they create linger after.
The metaphor of ash is turned over and over in this collection. In the first three of the four sections, Burnt, Baked, Buried, we see the various facets and nuances of “ash.” We read about ashes as the remains of love, of violence, of what is left after the everydayness of life. This recurring idea fascinates in the same way the blaze in a hearth does. The same yellow flames, the same crackle of logs, but each lick and shimmy is just different enough to hold you for hours.
The last section, Opposition, closes out the collection with a series of mini-dramas that use letters for character names.
O/E
O was the master of confessions,
He would tell of fires he started,
Felt a sensual tinge watching,
This tradition was romantic.
E was very complicated.
Did not want to hear what O said.
There was much too much ash torturing her,
She romanticized her objects, was mad
he destroyed them.
The volcano developed.
Mindock is, indeed, a master of the craft of poetry. She served in 2016-17 as Poet Laureate of Somerville, MA. The acknowledgements page of Ash is evidence of how widely published she is, and she heads up the wonderful Cervena Barva Press. All this in addition to having published previous books and receiving notable awards.
The poems in Ash are dark and moody and Mindock is confident enough to never direct the reader with maudlin qualifiers. She presents each poem as a fire. It’s as if she knows the ashes will live in your heart.
--------------------
Readers Views
Reviewed by Amy Lignor, December, 2021
“Haunting.” I’ve been sitting here for hours, hemming and hawing over the perfect word to describe this collection. In my own personal history, when it came to poems, I found very few books that stood out. Yes, there are many about romance, with the whole ‘Romeo and Juliet’ kind of endings. There are those that focus on brutality and pain, which can (no offense) turn off readers after a while. And there are those that try comedy, like going back to the time of limericks to get their point across. Some make you laugh out loud; others make you roll your eyes. It all depends on the delivery… or, of course, how exhausted you are when you dive into one of them.
I even mulled over the fact that I disliked the genre because I didn’t feel, as a writer, that in a few stanzas someone could explain the power of pain, love, disloyalty, friendship, etc. Maybe I believed that was cheating, because so many authors write tomes in order to describe the power of just one of these emotions, let alone a book full of them. I concluded that poetry was just not my type of thing… until 2021 came along and I was presented with about five in a row – this one now included—that worked like a loving grandmother. They knocked me upside the head (in a nice way) and said, “Hey! Listen to me! I’ve got something to say!” And, as this year comes to a close, I’m extremely happy that happened.
When I opened the cover to “Ash,” I wasn’t really expecting poet Gloria Mindock to deliver such personal, hardcore poems that felt more like stories. But just reading the Table of Contents, and seeing the sections were titled: “Burnt”, “Baked”, “Buried” and “Opposition,” gave me a clue that this was not going to be an ordinary compilation of romance or a bunch of limericks written in the back booth of a pub somewhere. Gloria Mindock has put together tales of a variety of characters who live, work, and deal with personal issues each and every day. Using a tone of compassion and empathy for the people and issues she writes about, Mindock seems, at times, like a counselor or a psychiatrist who uses her words to get these characters (and readers) through their problems and around the blockades set in their specific paths in order to find something more.
There are so many to call out, but I have to say “The Axe” is one poem that made me think on many levels. Why? Because this is a poet who adds invisible lines and ideas in her work that enter your mind as you read her words. I present a short snippet of this:|
“The population is going down. Too many fires not put out. Too many songs not completed. Existence turned downward…”
A fireman’s axe does hit and shatter glass in order to stop this smoke, fire, and eventual ash, but this is a condition, Mindock states, where “water is incapable of saving.” The never-ending fires. The pandemic. The school shootings – all of these issues in 2021 made this poem even stronger and more realistic in my eyes.
Mindock has a powerful voice that offers memorable experiences. With few words, stark language, and intelligent syntax, she brings to life—in vivid color—“real life.” This assembly will, for me and, I predict, for anyone who reads it, remain in their consciousness for a long time to come. It will “haunt” you… because that’s exactly what honesty and power does.
--------------
Gloria Mindock’s Ash
Reviewed by Ann Wehrman, Pedestal, Issue 88, 2021
Throughout Ash, Gloria Mindock’s speaker laments a broken marriage, a husband despised, and a home destroyed by fire. Mindock crafts shattered, hallucinatory poems, illustrating the process of destruction and what remains, both within her and without. She writes of intimate relationships and in expanding spirals of consciousness, surveying a modern society fragmented by instability and war. Mindock’s verses persist without remorse, bearing a darkly emotional tone and frequently nihilistic view. Scattered pictures yield mosaics of heartache, while the speaker expresses frustration and despair toward a mate, humanity, and the world.
Mindock’s poems are effectively foreshadowed by the fairy-tale image on the collection’s cover: an elongated doll-like woman set against a blackened brick wall and standing beside piles of white ash. She is not a huggable, fabric doll with a faded, painted-on face; this is a more sinister fairytale. The doll is tall and slim, model-beautiful in a trailing satin gown. She leans with one arm crooked behind her head, flame-like russet curls flowing past her hips, wistful eyes staring to the side as if in a dream or trance. The title poem reinforces the pain and dissociative tendencies suggested by the image:
This is all I am, garbage!
To be buried again into non-existence.
There is a chance I will be recycled.
Later, I could be part of that doll
your child embraces.
One is reminded of the road that writers walk, dying (symbolically) and being reborn as they express their lives’ pain and happiness, transmuting their experiences into art, their process serving as an alchemical “recycling.” In “Crawling Stones,” Mindock eulogizes a lover, perhaps a husband:
He was an insensitive bastard, with his
heart a stone, his eyes, a stone, his legs, a stone,
his arms, a stone
Crawling stones reaching
I got scratched, an achy body, every time
I was with him.
…
He finally drowned and me, I soared
like a bird, flying across the water, singing.
In “Carrots,” Mindock’s oppressed speaker internalizes blame, at the same time possibly imagining revenge:
There is blood on my hands
from the knife.
It was an accident I said as I
sliced the carrots into tiny roundness.
You lost your appetite.
Blood will do this.
I took the carrots to the sink seeing
water mix with redness.
I pictured a long coffin with water inside,
soaking a body.
The sink was drained, carrots thrown out.
Orange circles in the garbage.
You banged your hands on the table.
It was legitimate.
Does that banging express the ire of a husband who thinks his dinner was spoiled? Did he also use those same hands against the wife who sliced her own finger while preparing his meal? And, in “Plowing” (below), to whom does the speaker muse? She might still love her husband, love mixed with deadly anger, but is there another love being subtly referenced and idolized?
On the edge of the beyond, will you anxiously await me?
What can I say? I have never forgotten you.
There is so much unknown.
Will the endurance pay off?
That there is a different partner being longed for is perhaps confirmed by the final lines of the direct and succinct “Thorn”:
You weighed me down.
Your intelligence, exhausting.
In this hemisphere, aloneness strikes,
an emptiness, a hollow heart shaking.
You are a thorn, hurtful.
Condemned, you realize you aren’t the one.
In several poems, including “Air,” Mindock moves from exploring personal relationships to address broader concerns:
Is there no more hope for the brave
voices shouting out?
There are tears for the widowed families,
for those who lost friends, and prayers offered.
Why is there such violence?
Hate?
…
Broken bones stay broken.
Killing is natural for some
…
The dead bodies cannot sing,
therefore, the world is empty.
In the collection’s penultimate and poignant poem, “Without Peace,” Mindock further expands on her Dantean vision:
The dead have gray skin
Ashes fall on them today
Church bells ring dreamily as the survivors weep
Life is empty, hollow
Wind ceases
The world forgets this place
Mindock’s bleak and passionate poems focus on the tensions within human beings and between loved ones, as well as between nations. The urge to fight, to destroy self and others is not new. Arguably, at this time of widespread tribulation, including global warming and climate change, war, international and national tensions, overpopulation, and the wreckage caused by COVID-19, people everywhere are experiencing anxiety and confusion. Parallels between the speaker’s personal Armageddon and the annihilation she sees in the world point to the axiom, “as within, so without.”
For rebirth to occur, however, the past must be destroyed so that new life may sprout and grow from its ashes. Mindock’s intensely personal poems are particularly relevant in this time of tumultuous change: dark verses intoned while standing in the ashes, her world and the broader world burning, the possibility of something new barely visible on the horizon.
LYRIC AS GREETING, LYRIC AS FAREWELL
by Alisa Velaj, Poet, Researcher, Albania, A New Ulster, Issue 107, September, 2021, Ireland
According to Edward Hirsch, "Poets have often taken waving as an emblematic gesture of the poem itself: lyric as greeting, lyric as farewell.".[1] Gloria Mindock's poems in her latest collection, "Ash", are fervent farewells of a time of utter destruction that yet transcends to one of superior dignity. They are the farewells from a land where the fire of destruction burns down everything, toward another land where the fire of a loving soul dances a magnificent dance. In this context, ash comes as a word of double connotation: the ash left after everything has been burned, which in fact should have never happened, and the ash from which hope is reborn. This latter kind emerges as the kind of ash from which phoenix is reborn. The poetic collection is structured in four bundles: burnt, baked, buried, and opposition. The first three acts appear to describe the process of burn-down by the destructive fire, the kind of fire that leaves behind the cold ashes of death, while the last act (opposition) aims at conceiving the image of a world that has degraded the meaning of true love. Three instinctive human dimensions have tossed love into flames, exactly the opposite of what Mindock glorifies in her fourth dimension. The poet appeals for a new dimension in order to comprehend the world and the bird of the sun or the bird of fire. The flame must regain a resurrecting quality; the idea that a flame is just a flame (“Plastic”) is altogether intolerable. The poet seeks answers through direct existential questions or subtle poetic conditions, at times in verses and at times in prose poetry, where her poetic fervor craves to see a different image of the world.
"The man surfaces his heart./ He carries it away delicately./It still beats, and he breathes asking / how much sorrow can this heart take? /There is never an answer." (Protected)
"The house becomes ash from the couch burning, / the windows shattering, and glass breaking into air." (Burned beyond recognition)
The answer to why we cannot resurrect within our spiritual boundaries won't be found, as long as we are burned down in cold ashes, without first gaining awareness of the light of true fire. It is like sleepwalking on the path of death, while wrongly thinking you're rollicking on a swing seat in the gardens of El Dorado. The house that burns is actually us—the human beings, who wake up and go to bed getting burned beyond recognition. Beyond recognition turns into a kind of sarcasm that takes two interpretive directions: first, we just erase awareness as a process of enlightenment and thus, dim-minded, pass up on clarity; second, awareness goes far beyond our sick egos, which means we burn down because we ignore the concept's life-saving essence. In the second bundle, baked, Mindock offers her testimony on how to pursue the path of absolute love, describing for us evil with her heart on a platter. Devil has polluted the air and human brains have been polluted to the extent that killing is natural for some. As if a human being may be roasted in a fire oven just like killed game or fowl!
“Angel. Wrap your wings around the oppressed./ Hold and protect against evil and the hands entagling /the last breath…the last gasp…/The dead bodies can not sing,/therefore, the world is empty” (Air)
The world is empty for lack of regenerating air, for we keep angels away and submissively follow the command of Devil, who has become the Almighty of the air that our minds are breathing. How can we give birth to human thoughts and resurrect out of cold ashes, at a time when the very air we breathe is polluted?![2] In the third bundle, buried, the poet revisits even more determinedly the barren lands of our spiritual demise, the nearly fatalistic impossibility of the resurrection process, if we still insist on our journey down the dark valleys of death. With her eyes heaven-ward, Mindock prays and chants psalms of light, while calling on the reader through verses like the ones below:
“Scream to the black sky, the endless sky, the abyss-/All else is prohibited./Give up, close your eyes, and beg for a light kiss/keep your mouth closed.” (Light)
These are, in brief, the grounds supporting the observation that all the poems of the first three bundles stand for as metaphorical dimensions of the spiritual destruction and, simultaneously, as the poet's personal bidding farewell to evil. Her kind of lyric intensely wants such a farewell to be a pathway to light. The last bundle, opposition, or the blueprint to absolute love, shapes the lyric as a greeting to the enlightened soul, the soul that, like Phoenix, is born out of the ashes of salvation. The structuring of the collection in four bundles that stretch from death to life, along with the manner how the symbols of ash and fire are rerun from one poem to the other in order to justify either a function of a word or the opposite of its function, are certainly poetic techniques that have resulted in superb poetry well-delivered to elite poetry readers.
[1] Hirsch, Edward. (1999). How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry. San Diego, New York, London: The Center for Documentary Studies in association with A Harvest Book Harcourt, p.46.
[2] See the analogy to the biblical verse (in particular to its part in bold) in Ephesians 2:2 NIV: “in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.”
by Alisa Velaj, Poet, Researcher, Albania, A New Ulster, Issue 107, September, 2021, Ireland
According to Edward Hirsch, "Poets have often taken waving as an emblematic gesture of the poem itself: lyric as greeting, lyric as farewell.".[1] Gloria Mindock's poems in her latest collection, "Ash", are fervent farewells of a time of utter destruction that yet transcends to one of superior dignity. They are the farewells from a land where the fire of destruction burns down everything, toward another land where the fire of a loving soul dances a magnificent dance. In this context, ash comes as a word of double connotation: the ash left after everything has been burned, which in fact should have never happened, and the ash from which hope is reborn. This latter kind emerges as the kind of ash from which phoenix is reborn. The poetic collection is structured in four bundles: burnt, baked, buried, and opposition. The first three acts appear to describe the process of burn-down by the destructive fire, the kind of fire that leaves behind the cold ashes of death, while the last act (opposition) aims at conceiving the image of a world that has degraded the meaning of true love. Three instinctive human dimensions have tossed love into flames, exactly the opposite of what Mindock glorifies in her fourth dimension. The poet appeals for a new dimension in order to comprehend the world and the bird of the sun or the bird of fire. The flame must regain a resurrecting quality; the idea that a flame is just a flame (“Plastic”) is altogether intolerable. The poet seeks answers through direct existential questions or subtle poetic conditions, at times in verses and at times in prose poetry, where her poetic fervor craves to see a different image of the world.
"The man surfaces his heart./ He carries it away delicately./It still beats, and he breathes asking / how much sorrow can this heart take? /There is never an answer." (Protected)
"The house becomes ash from the couch burning, / the windows shattering, and glass breaking into air." (Burned beyond recognition)
The answer to why we cannot resurrect within our spiritual boundaries won't be found, as long as we are burned down in cold ashes, without first gaining awareness of the light of true fire. It is like sleepwalking on the path of death, while wrongly thinking you're rollicking on a swing seat in the gardens of El Dorado. The house that burns is actually us—the human beings, who wake up and go to bed getting burned beyond recognition. Beyond recognition turns into a kind of sarcasm that takes two interpretive directions: first, we just erase awareness as a process of enlightenment and thus, dim-minded, pass up on clarity; second, awareness goes far beyond our sick egos, which means we burn down because we ignore the concept's life-saving essence. In the second bundle, baked, Mindock offers her testimony on how to pursue the path of absolute love, describing for us evil with her heart on a platter. Devil has polluted the air and human brains have been polluted to the extent that killing is natural for some. As if a human being may be roasted in a fire oven just like killed game or fowl!
“Angel. Wrap your wings around the oppressed./ Hold and protect against evil and the hands entagling /the last breath…the last gasp…/The dead bodies can not sing,/therefore, the world is empty” (Air)
The world is empty for lack of regenerating air, for we keep angels away and submissively follow the command of Devil, who has become the Almighty of the air that our minds are breathing. How can we give birth to human thoughts and resurrect out of cold ashes, at a time when the very air we breathe is polluted?![2] In the third bundle, buried, the poet revisits even more determinedly the barren lands of our spiritual demise, the nearly fatalistic impossibility of the resurrection process, if we still insist on our journey down the dark valleys of death. With her eyes heaven-ward, Mindock prays and chants psalms of light, while calling on the reader through verses like the ones below:
“Scream to the black sky, the endless sky, the abyss-/All else is prohibited./Give up, close your eyes, and beg for a light kiss/keep your mouth closed.” (Light)
These are, in brief, the grounds supporting the observation that all the poems of the first three bundles stand for as metaphorical dimensions of the spiritual destruction and, simultaneously, as the poet's personal bidding farewell to evil. Her kind of lyric intensely wants such a farewell to be a pathway to light. The last bundle, opposition, or the blueprint to absolute love, shapes the lyric as a greeting to the enlightened soul, the soul that, like Phoenix, is born out of the ashes of salvation. The structuring of the collection in four bundles that stretch from death to life, along with the manner how the symbols of ash and fire are rerun from one poem to the other in order to justify either a function of a word or the opposite of its function, are certainly poetic techniques that have resulted in superb poetry well-delivered to elite poetry readers.
[1] Hirsch, Edward. (1999). How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry. San Diego, New York, London: The Center for Documentary Studies in association with A Harvest Book Harcourt, p.46.
[2] See the analogy to the biblical verse (in particular to its part in bold) in Ephesians 2:2 NIV: “in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.”
Review of ASH
Neil Leadbeater, Lily Poetry Review, Issue 6, Summer, 2021
As I write this review, wildfires are raging across southern Europe and certain sections of the North American continent. Fire is a destructive force that is hard to tame once it is out of control and there is lot of it in this latest collection of poetry from poet, editor and publisher, Gloria Mindock, who was Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA during the period 2017-2018.
The collection comprises sixty poems divided into four sections. The alliterative headings of the first three of these sections (Burnt, Baked, Buried) are as stark as the titles of her poems, many of which simply consist of a single word. They give us a hint of Mindock’s direct, no-nonsense style. The final section, headed ‘Opposition’ pitches one person against another in relationships that are complicated and riddled with conflict. Here again, the text is sparse.
What are we to make of the title? Ash is the dust or remains of anything that has been burnt. It is all about disintegration, a word that appears several times throughout this collection. Alongside the words ‘fire’ and ‘flame’, the word ‘heart’ appears more prominently than any other: it is used at least thirty times. It underlines the fact that this is a book dealing with human relationships and that the fire burning through its pages is more metaphorical than literal. The heart, after all, is the seat of the emotions, the part of the body that houses our innermost thoughts and affections.
With the exception of the first poem and the whole of Section IV where individuals are referred to anonymously by a single alphabetical letter, Mindock generally makes use of the first person singular but it should be pointed out that these poems do not in any way relate to her own personal life, they are a collection of stories about other people and their relationships as told to her.
Where do you begin when a past relationship is nothing more than a burnt-out shell? In ‘Missile’ Mindock provides the chilling answer: ‘there is a smoldering that never goes out’. Although the focus of the collection is mainly about relationships between two people, Mindock widens the scope of her subject matter which is largely concerned with the brutal, darker side of human nature, to ask in general terms : ‘Why is there such violence? / Hate?’ The word ‘hate’ is given a line all to itself as if to emphasise the extent of its presence in the world and the enormity of its consequences.
If all this sounds overpowering, there is in evidence a seam of dark humour that runs through many of these poems. It is present in the opening sequence of prose poems titled ‘Plastic’ and it is particularly evident in poems such as ‘Baked’, ‘Escape’ and ‘Ticket’ where the sarcasm is searing:
Ticket
Come get your ticket to expire.
Your lover wants you.
Take this drug, he says, it is good for you.
It only has 10 side effects –
if you’re lucky, you will never forget me.
It will cripple you or kill you with yearning.
If you feel numbness or start to die,
go to the nearest ER.
Whoops, too late.
Guess you shouldn’t have taken the pills.
Not everything in this collection is dark. Remember those wildfires that raged through the bush in Australia? Not everything died. Green shoots very quickly began to appear out of the scorched earth. Any farmer will tell you that stubble is burnt for a reason. In mythology, the phoenix rose out of the ashes. So too, here, Mindock provides us with hope. In ‘Air’ she writes ‘Not everyone believes in destruction. / All the heart wants is to beat’ and in ‘Crawling Stones’ the victim of an unhappy liaison, after she had cast her burdens into the river, ‘soared / like a bird, flying across the water, singing.’
In the final section, titled ‘Opposition’ each of the seven titles is represented by a letter of the alphabet, followed by a forward slash which is then followed by another letter of the alphabet, e.g. A/K; J/M; etc. The letters refer to individuals and the use of the forward slash is the membrane between them that is about to burst, the lines of demarcation that cannot be crossed under any circumstances. Each poem, which consists of two short stanzas, is presented with an air of detachment, directly opposing what has gone before. They are all framed in the past tense, and are cast as if being reviewed by a third party. In each them, Mindock exposes a catalogue of faults and human failings.
Mindock’s poems are models of concision. She chooses her words carefully. Part of the reason why these poems are so powerful is because they convey a lot of emotion in a confined space. She writes with conviction, revealing the depth of her understanding as she exposes our vulnerability with surgical precision.
It is often hard to write convincingly about something which conveys both comedy and tragedy at one and the same time. If it is not done well, the one tends to diminish the other with equal force but one of the many strengths of this collection is that Mindock manages to find the right balance between the two and is able to walk the tightrope without falling off. Fully recommended.
Neil Leadbeater, Lily Poetry Review, Issue 6, Summer, 2021
As I write this review, wildfires are raging across southern Europe and certain sections of the North American continent. Fire is a destructive force that is hard to tame once it is out of control and there is lot of it in this latest collection of poetry from poet, editor and publisher, Gloria Mindock, who was Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA during the period 2017-2018.
The collection comprises sixty poems divided into four sections. The alliterative headings of the first three of these sections (Burnt, Baked, Buried) are as stark as the titles of her poems, many of which simply consist of a single word. They give us a hint of Mindock’s direct, no-nonsense style. The final section, headed ‘Opposition’ pitches one person against another in relationships that are complicated and riddled with conflict. Here again, the text is sparse.
What are we to make of the title? Ash is the dust or remains of anything that has been burnt. It is all about disintegration, a word that appears several times throughout this collection. Alongside the words ‘fire’ and ‘flame’, the word ‘heart’ appears more prominently than any other: it is used at least thirty times. It underlines the fact that this is a book dealing with human relationships and that the fire burning through its pages is more metaphorical than literal. The heart, after all, is the seat of the emotions, the part of the body that houses our innermost thoughts and affections.
With the exception of the first poem and the whole of Section IV where individuals are referred to anonymously by a single alphabetical letter, Mindock generally makes use of the first person singular but it should be pointed out that these poems do not in any way relate to her own personal life, they are a collection of stories about other people and their relationships as told to her.
Where do you begin when a past relationship is nothing more than a burnt-out shell? In ‘Missile’ Mindock provides the chilling answer: ‘there is a smoldering that never goes out’. Although the focus of the collection is mainly about relationships between two people, Mindock widens the scope of her subject matter which is largely concerned with the brutal, darker side of human nature, to ask in general terms : ‘Why is there such violence? / Hate?’ The word ‘hate’ is given a line all to itself as if to emphasise the extent of its presence in the world and the enormity of its consequences.
If all this sounds overpowering, there is in evidence a seam of dark humour that runs through many of these poems. It is present in the opening sequence of prose poems titled ‘Plastic’ and it is particularly evident in poems such as ‘Baked’, ‘Escape’ and ‘Ticket’ where the sarcasm is searing:
Ticket
Come get your ticket to expire.
Your lover wants you.
Take this drug, he says, it is good for you.
It only has 10 side effects –
if you’re lucky, you will never forget me.
It will cripple you or kill you with yearning.
If you feel numbness or start to die,
go to the nearest ER.
Whoops, too late.
Guess you shouldn’t have taken the pills.
Not everything in this collection is dark. Remember those wildfires that raged through the bush in Australia? Not everything died. Green shoots very quickly began to appear out of the scorched earth. Any farmer will tell you that stubble is burnt for a reason. In mythology, the phoenix rose out of the ashes. So too, here, Mindock provides us with hope. In ‘Air’ she writes ‘Not everyone believes in destruction. / All the heart wants is to beat’ and in ‘Crawling Stones’ the victim of an unhappy liaison, after she had cast her burdens into the river, ‘soared / like a bird, flying across the water, singing.’
In the final section, titled ‘Opposition’ each of the seven titles is represented by a letter of the alphabet, followed by a forward slash which is then followed by another letter of the alphabet, e.g. A/K; J/M; etc. The letters refer to individuals and the use of the forward slash is the membrane between them that is about to burst, the lines of demarcation that cannot be crossed under any circumstances. Each poem, which consists of two short stanzas, is presented with an air of detachment, directly opposing what has gone before. They are all framed in the past tense, and are cast as if being reviewed by a third party. In each them, Mindock exposes a catalogue of faults and human failings.
Mindock’s poems are models of concision. She chooses her words carefully. Part of the reason why these poems are so powerful is because they convey a lot of emotion in a confined space. She writes with conviction, revealing the depth of her understanding as she exposes our vulnerability with surgical precision.
It is often hard to write convincingly about something which conveys both comedy and tragedy at one and the same time. If it is not done well, the one tends to diminish the other with equal force but one of the many strengths of this collection is that Mindock manages to find the right balance between the two and is able to walk the tightrope without falling off. Fully recommended.
The Somerville Times, June 16, 2021
Article by Michael Todd Steffen
With the passage of time, consciousness expands from the center we’re made to believe we are, to a sphere of awareness back toward ourselves, self-knowledge, with its pains and gift of empathy for the world around us. It isn’t us acting upon the world so much as the world reflecting back at and through us, forging the spirit in us. This is a subtle sense hovering about the more direct and passionate appeals in Gloria Mindock’s new book, Ash (ISBN: 978-1-941783-75-7, 2021, Glass Lyre Press, LLC, Glenview, IL), a sense which emerges in a pristine still moment in the poem Room, with its lament of diminishment and disintegration as being part of the inheritance of the world of facts:
Walking into the living room
the TV, couch, pictures, chairs,
are all watching me.
Watching every move, every gesture…
So powerful, my bones shudder…
Years of different apartments and only a few
objects remain, wondering when their time
is up, wondering when they will be discarded to disintegrate…
All they can do is watch a web being
weaved in the dark.
I am sorry, but this room matters… (page 30)
Beyond this room, and the book it is in, we know Mindock’s awareness goes out to the suffering, not the lavish worldly world which the prophets denounce, but the world where 4 out of 5 human beings live in low-stability situations, many in areas of poverty, disease, starvation, climate detriment and in armed conflict. Her previous books, I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate Books), Whiteness of Bone (Glass Lyre Press), Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa) and Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson Street) carry on, in poet and critic Tim Seurmont’s adequate words, “her examination of brutality and its toll on humanity,” from personal relationships to the great political demons of dictatorship, the Spanish Civil War and the atrocities in El Salvador.
At one stunning moment in this more personal collection of laments of the dissolutions of farewell, the poet reminds us (and herself) of her mission, after Carolyn Forché, as a witness:
The fact is people will go on brutally
killing each other.
Who will take my place and write about it? (page 47)
For the greater part, however, this book is different in its paradoxically localizing and generalizing focus. It becomes a practiced poet’s objective (reminiscent of T. S. Eliot, also associated with fire and ash) beyond the arrangements of words, to make the world at large personal to the reader. These poems do that by intensifying the immediate sphere of their speaker, in complaint and lament after lament, especially in the first section, Burnt, about the debris left by fire. In days we are hearing so much about climate change, it’s not a far leap to understand the metaphorical encompassment of the burned element, especially as the image becomes a haunting refrain, like the one piano key struck over and over in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut:
Smoke is everywhere.
Down to the floor… (page 2)
The crackling was so loud, it hurt my ears…
Things got smokier, battling the embers with
false waters… (page 4)
The house became ash from the couch burning,
the windows shattering, the glass breaking
into air.
The fireman’s foam, water puts the flames
out that engulfed us.
Long sentences burned my skin.
No bandages helped… (page 6)
In the odd intimations – “Long sentences burned my skin” – we gather little by little that this isn’t only literal fire and smoke Mindock is talking about. It is intimate – even to the art she practices, writing, with its “Long sentences.” And, as we’ve mentioned about climate change, this fire is, as classically portrayed through the myth of Prometheus, about the technological harvest of our society and how it pervades the essential element, air:
My skin was burned by your compulsion
to be famous.
Poor thing, the numbers look bad for you.
Somehow, you crashed into the roof and it buckled.
Life is a conviction for us… (page 7)
2017 and 2018 Poet Laureate of Somerville, which boasts one of the highest rates of published authors per capita in the United States, Mindock has exerted great influence in Somerville and Boston – and beyond. Her press, Cervena Barva, celebrating its 16th anniversary this year, is one of the most productive small presses around, with the special boast of authors from more than a dozen foreign countries around the world, many of them Eastern European. In turn, Gloria’s poetry has been published into eight other languages. The press, with a studio location in the Somerville Armory for the Arts, is a hive of activity for poetry including readings and roundtables, which have continued via Zoom during the pandemic. She is the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center and has come away twice with the Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice. And this is just a short list of her accomplishments and appreciations for community enhancement.
“I hide from you in ways/you’ll never know,” she announces in the poem Exit (page 23), piquing our curiosity with the sleight-of-hand expression. James Merrill exalted the turn of phrase as one trademark of the good poet. In Ash, along with the too-late alarms sounded and their distancing echoes of grief, we also get flashes of verbal wonder that uphold Mindock for the daring and stubbornly original poet she is:
Extinction happens quickly. (page 10)
All the heart wants is to beat. (page 21)
The family deputizing the body
with abandonment. (page 33)
And, amid all the bitterness, giving passage to the acknowledgment of the mysterious union that resonates beyond separation:
There is an equation between us…you = me.
Some things are beyond the dark room we entered.
It is spring, and we released each other into the blossoms. (page 50)
http://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/108909
Article by Michael Todd Steffen
With the passage of time, consciousness expands from the center we’re made to believe we are, to a sphere of awareness back toward ourselves, self-knowledge, with its pains and gift of empathy for the world around us. It isn’t us acting upon the world so much as the world reflecting back at and through us, forging the spirit in us. This is a subtle sense hovering about the more direct and passionate appeals in Gloria Mindock’s new book, Ash (ISBN: 978-1-941783-75-7, 2021, Glass Lyre Press, LLC, Glenview, IL), a sense which emerges in a pristine still moment in the poem Room, with its lament of diminishment and disintegration as being part of the inheritance of the world of facts:
Walking into the living room
the TV, couch, pictures, chairs,
are all watching me.
Watching every move, every gesture…
So powerful, my bones shudder…
Years of different apartments and only a few
objects remain, wondering when their time
is up, wondering when they will be discarded to disintegrate…
All they can do is watch a web being
weaved in the dark.
I am sorry, but this room matters… (page 30)
Beyond this room, and the book it is in, we know Mindock’s awareness goes out to the suffering, not the lavish worldly world which the prophets denounce, but the world where 4 out of 5 human beings live in low-stability situations, many in areas of poverty, disease, starvation, climate detriment and in armed conflict. Her previous books, I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate Books), Whiteness of Bone (Glass Lyre Press), Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa) and Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson Street) carry on, in poet and critic Tim Seurmont’s adequate words, “her examination of brutality and its toll on humanity,” from personal relationships to the great political demons of dictatorship, the Spanish Civil War and the atrocities in El Salvador.
At one stunning moment in this more personal collection of laments of the dissolutions of farewell, the poet reminds us (and herself) of her mission, after Carolyn Forché, as a witness:
The fact is people will go on brutally
killing each other.
Who will take my place and write about it? (page 47)
For the greater part, however, this book is different in its paradoxically localizing and generalizing focus. It becomes a practiced poet’s objective (reminiscent of T. S. Eliot, also associated with fire and ash) beyond the arrangements of words, to make the world at large personal to the reader. These poems do that by intensifying the immediate sphere of their speaker, in complaint and lament after lament, especially in the first section, Burnt, about the debris left by fire. In days we are hearing so much about climate change, it’s not a far leap to understand the metaphorical encompassment of the burned element, especially as the image becomes a haunting refrain, like the one piano key struck over and over in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut:
Smoke is everywhere.
Down to the floor… (page 2)
The crackling was so loud, it hurt my ears…
Things got smokier, battling the embers with
false waters… (page 4)
The house became ash from the couch burning,
the windows shattering, the glass breaking
into air.
The fireman’s foam, water puts the flames
out that engulfed us.
Long sentences burned my skin.
No bandages helped… (page 6)
In the odd intimations – “Long sentences burned my skin” – we gather little by little that this isn’t only literal fire and smoke Mindock is talking about. It is intimate – even to the art she practices, writing, with its “Long sentences.” And, as we’ve mentioned about climate change, this fire is, as classically portrayed through the myth of Prometheus, about the technological harvest of our society and how it pervades the essential element, air:
My skin was burned by your compulsion
to be famous.
Poor thing, the numbers look bad for you.
Somehow, you crashed into the roof and it buckled.
Life is a conviction for us… (page 7)
2017 and 2018 Poet Laureate of Somerville, which boasts one of the highest rates of published authors per capita in the United States, Mindock has exerted great influence in Somerville and Boston – and beyond. Her press, Cervena Barva, celebrating its 16th anniversary this year, is one of the most productive small presses around, with the special boast of authors from more than a dozen foreign countries around the world, many of them Eastern European. In turn, Gloria’s poetry has been published into eight other languages. The press, with a studio location in the Somerville Armory for the Arts, is a hive of activity for poetry including readings and roundtables, which have continued via Zoom during the pandemic. She is the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center and has come away twice with the Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice. And this is just a short list of her accomplishments and appreciations for community enhancement.
“I hide from you in ways/you’ll never know,” she announces in the poem Exit (page 23), piquing our curiosity with the sleight-of-hand expression. James Merrill exalted the turn of phrase as one trademark of the good poet. In Ash, along with the too-late alarms sounded and their distancing echoes of grief, we also get flashes of verbal wonder that uphold Mindock for the daring and stubbornly original poet she is:
Extinction happens quickly. (page 10)
All the heart wants is to beat. (page 21)
The family deputizing the body
with abandonment. (page 33)
And, amid all the bitterness, giving passage to the acknowledgment of the mysterious union that resonates beyond separation:
There is an equation between us…you = me.
Some things are beyond the dark room we entered.
It is spring, and we released each other into the blossoms. (page 50)
http://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/108909
Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene
Review by Zvi A. Sesling, Poet Laureate, Brookline, MA 2017-2020 and Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
April 29th, 2021
Life can be extremely dark for many people. For Gloria Mindock that darkness is expressed in her wonderful poetry. Her previous books include I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me, Whiteness of Bone, Nothing Divine Here and Blood Soaked Dresses, each with its own degree of the dark side that readers of her poetry expect and respect.
In Ash, her latest volume of dark poetry Mindock exceeds expectations. Beginning the book are four prose poems which make me laugh, though most readers might not find the initial offerings as humorous as I do.
So what is ash? Ash is the remains after a fire and a metaphor for the disintegration, wearing away that occurs in relationships. This is the theme of Mindock’s poems and a reader may suspect that her writing in this volume recalls a husband or husbands, a lover or lovers or perhaps friends.
In “Protected” we meet an anonymous man whose life is reduced to ash:
Inside his house was his life,
protected by a roof.
By the time the firemen got there,
it was gone.
He sifts through what remains,
eyes sunk, hands asleep,
brain idle for hours.
The man surfaces his heart.
He carries it away deliberately.
It still beats, and he breathes asking.
how much sorrow can this heart take?
There is never an answer.
In “Bitten” there a revelation telling readers more about a relationship in which the other person is the loser:
I was bitten by your heart, injured and
burnt by the flame.
The crackling was so loud, it hurt my ears.
Did I listen to my own voice which was clear?
No. I should have taken it seriously.
Everywhere I went in the house were his clothes,
his books, his life, which I let dust collect on.
Things got smokier, battling the embers with
false waters.
It did not work.
Tomorrow we find each other’s breath
faithfully flowing in the wind.
Gloria Mindock’s poetry is filled with angst, anguish, heartbreak and fright. For example in “Exit” she writes “I hide from you in ways/you’ll never know.” Or in “Carrots” the first stanza reads, “There is blood on my hands/from the knife./It was an accident I said as I/sliced the carrots into tiny roundness.” What happens next is the expected loss of appetite. But this is really about a relationship in which the knife, the carrot and the blood symbolize the negative aspects of two people fighting, the aggressive one and the passive aggressive partner.
In the poem “I Don’t Think of You” we see the discarding of a relationship compared to a lawn that has not been tended and has grown brown and ugly. It is a metaphor for the people or events Mindock experienced over time.
I don’t think of you,
not even in my dreams.
There is no existence between
your heart and mine.
Your heart I carved up
in the thick air.
Pieces rain down on the lawn.
Dead with no color, not keeping the yard beautiful,
Just something that blends in
over time.
Knives are important in this volume of poetry. They are used as the symbolic severing of association with others who become the ash of a relationship that was doomed to end and left smoldering.
The book is a losing battle of intimacy. Mindock’s imagery is extraordinary, showing he depth of her understanding of human suffering. The stark scenes of falling apart or destruction of love is written in a memorable voice which is ultimately brave despite the wounds and pain suffered in relationships that were never meant to be.
Gloria Mindock’s Ash is a must read for those who enjoy poetry on the edge or verse that rings with the futility of failed love.
Ash is written by the former Poet Laureate of Somerville, MA, in 2017 and 2018. She was awarded the 5th and 40th Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice for her poems “Adventure” and “Listen” which are in her book Whiteness of Bone. Mindock was awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She has been a visiting artist at Tufts Experimental College, Northeastern University, Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College.
This is an extraordinary book by a wonderful poet whose words have brought much to the understanding of the dark side of human nature. Readers of Mindock’s poetry will become enthralled with this first-class poet.
Review by Zvi A. Sesling, Poet Laureate, Brookline, MA 2017-2020 and Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
April 29th, 2021
Life can be extremely dark for many people. For Gloria Mindock that darkness is expressed in her wonderful poetry. Her previous books include I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me, Whiteness of Bone, Nothing Divine Here and Blood Soaked Dresses, each with its own degree of the dark side that readers of her poetry expect and respect.
In Ash, her latest volume of dark poetry Mindock exceeds expectations. Beginning the book are four prose poems which make me laugh, though most readers might not find the initial offerings as humorous as I do.
So what is ash? Ash is the remains after a fire and a metaphor for the disintegration, wearing away that occurs in relationships. This is the theme of Mindock’s poems and a reader may suspect that her writing in this volume recalls a husband or husbands, a lover or lovers or perhaps friends.
In “Protected” we meet an anonymous man whose life is reduced to ash:
Inside his house was his life,
protected by a roof.
By the time the firemen got there,
it was gone.
He sifts through what remains,
eyes sunk, hands asleep,
brain idle for hours.
The man surfaces his heart.
He carries it away deliberately.
It still beats, and he breathes asking.
how much sorrow can this heart take?
There is never an answer.
In “Bitten” there a revelation telling readers more about a relationship in which the other person is the loser:
I was bitten by your heart, injured and
burnt by the flame.
The crackling was so loud, it hurt my ears.
Did I listen to my own voice which was clear?
No. I should have taken it seriously.
Everywhere I went in the house were his clothes,
his books, his life, which I let dust collect on.
Things got smokier, battling the embers with
false waters.
It did not work.
Tomorrow we find each other’s breath
faithfully flowing in the wind.
Gloria Mindock’s poetry is filled with angst, anguish, heartbreak and fright. For example in “Exit” she writes “I hide from you in ways/you’ll never know.” Or in “Carrots” the first stanza reads, “There is blood on my hands/from the knife./It was an accident I said as I/sliced the carrots into tiny roundness.” What happens next is the expected loss of appetite. But this is really about a relationship in which the knife, the carrot and the blood symbolize the negative aspects of two people fighting, the aggressive one and the passive aggressive partner.
In the poem “I Don’t Think of You” we see the discarding of a relationship compared to a lawn that has not been tended and has grown brown and ugly. It is a metaphor for the people or events Mindock experienced over time.
I don’t think of you,
not even in my dreams.
There is no existence between
your heart and mine.
Your heart I carved up
in the thick air.
Pieces rain down on the lawn.
Dead with no color, not keeping the yard beautiful,
Just something that blends in
over time.
Knives are important in this volume of poetry. They are used as the symbolic severing of association with others who become the ash of a relationship that was doomed to end and left smoldering.
The book is a losing battle of intimacy. Mindock’s imagery is extraordinary, showing he depth of her understanding of human suffering. The stark scenes of falling apart or destruction of love is written in a memorable voice which is ultimately brave despite the wounds and pain suffered in relationships that were never meant to be.
Gloria Mindock’s Ash is a must read for those who enjoy poetry on the edge or verse that rings with the futility of failed love.
Ash is written by the former Poet Laureate of Somerville, MA, in 2017 and 2018. She was awarded the 5th and 40th Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice for her poems “Adventure” and “Listen” which are in her book Whiteness of Bone. Mindock was awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She has been a visiting artist at Tufts Experimental College, Northeastern University, Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College.
This is an extraordinary book by a wonderful poet whose words have brought much to the understanding of the dark side of human nature. Readers of Mindock’s poetry will become enthralled with this first-class poet.
In Gloria Mindock’s powerful new book, the flames of love die out and the ashes linger until they dissolve into air. The body is hostage, in charred relics of failed intimacies—The burnt-out ends of smoky days (T.S. Eliot). There’s beauty in the truth of Mindock’s words and images: Things got smokier, battling the embers with//false waters. And there’s hope: Not everyone believes in destruction.// All the heart wants is to beat. Above all, these poems radiate feeling, compassionately aware, attuned to a world of broken love that is burned beyond recognition, the ashes drifting and settling: how much sorrow can this heart take?// There is never an answer. Ash sears and sings.
-Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest
-Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest
Gloria Mindock is a poet with singular vision: in Ash, a human heart is rolled out, then baked, then thrown to the birds; broken crucifixes are shoved into junk drawers and gather dust; a spurned/murdered woman turns into a beautiful plant that gives her ex-lover a rash. With mordant, Pinter-esque wit, Mindock explores just how far love, and even human decency, can unravel—to the point of arson, to the point of war.
Ash begin with a series of poems about lethal house fires that may be literal or metaphorical (“my skin was burned by your compulsion to be famous”), then expands to pinpoint the similar essence of human cruelty that enables soldiers to kill. As the narrator of “Doomed by the Numbers” explains: “the fact is people will still go on brutally/killing each other./Who will take my place and write about it?”
Ash concludes with an engaging, Rabelaisian roundelay of voices—mini-plays, summed up in just two stanzas, about complicated relationships between two people.
Once again, with Ash, Mindock proves herself to be unafraid of the dark. She is truly a leading, contemporary master of the edgy.
-Karen Friedland, author of Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace.
Ash begin with a series of poems about lethal house fires that may be literal or metaphorical (“my skin was burned by your compulsion to be famous”), then expands to pinpoint the similar essence of human cruelty that enables soldiers to kill. As the narrator of “Doomed by the Numbers” explains: “the fact is people will still go on brutally/killing each other./Who will take my place and write about it?”
Ash concludes with an engaging, Rabelaisian roundelay of voices—mini-plays, summed up in just two stanzas, about complicated relationships between two people.
Once again, with Ash, Mindock proves herself to be unafraid of the dark. She is truly a leading, contemporary master of the edgy.
-Karen Friedland, author of Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace.
Passionate and observant, Gloria Mindock is a tragic poet. Her books are wounds revisited. She knows that nothing, never heals.
“With a rolling pin in my hand, I roll your heart out flat… stop it from beating. The redness of blood turns to wax, sticky while wet.” (Baked)
She senses the pain of the world in her being.
“The void looms deep, scorched like the desert blowing aimlessly.” (Exit)
As her latest book Ash attests without doubt, Gloria is both a warrior and a martyr. Her words are swords that slowly transform into tears.
Her anger at life’s injustice is mighty, but mighty is her generosity and her openness towards repair, harmony and universal peace. A must-read Ash conducts the reader through thorny labyrinths of pain and despair, allowing now and then a glimpse of ultimate resolve and liberation in verses of a rare beauty:
“…but gravity is about to free me into space… People will look at me day and night and ask, “what is it?” There is no control over what happens. The cathedral is high and my freckles fell on the floor as I left. Paleness now, that no one sees, but in the universe, I will be a prism.” (Gravity)
“…A hunger surrounds us, dust gathers, and is wiped off, space evading all this as songs of the wind come through the window and we all hum.” (Room)
-Flavia Cosma, author of In the Arms of the Father, Val-David, QC
“With a rolling pin in my hand, I roll your heart out flat… stop it from beating. The redness of blood turns to wax, sticky while wet.” (Baked)
She senses the pain of the world in her being.
“The void looms deep, scorched like the desert blowing aimlessly.” (Exit)
As her latest book Ash attests without doubt, Gloria is both a warrior and a martyr. Her words are swords that slowly transform into tears.
Her anger at life’s injustice is mighty, but mighty is her generosity and her openness towards repair, harmony and universal peace. A must-read Ash conducts the reader through thorny labyrinths of pain and despair, allowing now and then a glimpse of ultimate resolve and liberation in verses of a rare beauty:
“…but gravity is about to free me into space… People will look at me day and night and ask, “what is it?” There is no control over what happens. The cathedral is high and my freckles fell on the floor as I left. Paleness now, that no one sees, but in the universe, I will be a prism.” (Gravity)
“…A hunger surrounds us, dust gathers, and is wiped off, space evading all this as songs of the wind come through the window and we all hum.” (Room)
-Flavia Cosma, author of In the Arms of the Father, Val-David, QC
Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa C. Taylor
May 13, 2021
Occasionally a poetry collection comes along to remind us of the fragility of life and the volatility of relationships. Gloria Mindock’s new book, Ash does just this. With spare language and stark details, the debris left behind by fire becomes a symbol of the ways humans fail each other. The human heart, erratic and misshapen beats the rhythm of these shortcomings in poem after poem.
Ash, ponders what remains after relationships smolder and fizzle out, and the range of destruction that can be wrought becomes a dominant narrative throughout the collection. The book is divided into four sections, Burnt, Baked, Buried, and Opposition. Fire is used as a metaphor for failed passion and human cruelty in poem after poem. The heart, often heralded as a symbol of love and life, is flawed and easily destroyed. In the poem, Protected, “The man surfaces his heart, /He carries it away delicately.” (p. 3). Even nature offers no solace, as the poem Sky aptly illustrates. “The air was crisp, the sky clear, /like when someone dies, the emptiness/is always there.” (p. 17). This is not poetry designed to comfort but rather art that exists to help us to face our own shadow side.
What remains when the worse impulses of the human race are allowed to run rampant? From simple tasks turned into tests of relationship, to the certain betrayals that follow attractions, Gloria Mindock does not look away from this baser side of humanity. In the poem, Carrots, a domestic task turns into a wound that spoils the appetite of the lover.
“There is blood on my hands
from the knife.
It was an accident I said as I
sliced the carrots into tiny roundness.” (p.22)
In the poem, Disloyalty, the letdown is expected, as if all relationships have a deadly flame waiting to consume a house or scar a person.
In the third section of the collection, Buried, the author takes the reader further into this doomed landscape. In the poem, Light, “blackness empties into the light.” and “It is over between all the hearts/that yearn.” (p. 43). Veterans, lovers, soldiers, and hapless humans share a sense of brutality. The exaggeration of violence serves this collection, showcasing a human penchant for mayhem and the exploitation and harm of other humans. Is anyone innocent? Are we all culpable in this unraveling tale of the darker impulses of the human race? In exaggerating acts of violence, fire, and the eventual death of everything and everyone, Gloria Mindock calls attention to the spiraling crises facing the world: climate change, domestic abuse, poverty, addiction, homelessness. In the poem Time, the speaker says, “I can forgive the city/Forgive the power it has over me.” (p. 46).
The last section of the collection, Opposition, is written theatrically, with initials used for people who meet varied challenges and endings. Imaginative and dark, this section has a playful tone in its sensual descent into death. Fire creeps in, people meet unlikely ends, and the reader ponders what is truly left when life is pared down to the bone. Blunt language, combined with a flair for the absurd help to create a vivid tableau of fishnet stockings, alligators, booze, and toy soldiers.
The brutality of the modern world is something that numerous poets and writers have addressed in their work. In Ash, it is less reported upon than actually experienced through the lives of characters like Albert who says, “It feels good to own/the dark alleyways.” (p. 53). Perhaps that best sums up the bleakness of these poems; sometimes one must descend into the depths to understand the trajectory of the human race in this time period. The challenge is on to find the beauty in fire, the redemption after betrayal, and the reasons for venturing out into a world that often times seems irretrievably broken.
-
Review by Lisa C. Taylor
May 13, 2021
Occasionally a poetry collection comes along to remind us of the fragility of life and the volatility of relationships. Gloria Mindock’s new book, Ash does just this. With spare language and stark details, the debris left behind by fire becomes a symbol of the ways humans fail each other. The human heart, erratic and misshapen beats the rhythm of these shortcomings in poem after poem.
Ash, ponders what remains after relationships smolder and fizzle out, and the range of destruction that can be wrought becomes a dominant narrative throughout the collection. The book is divided into four sections, Burnt, Baked, Buried, and Opposition. Fire is used as a metaphor for failed passion and human cruelty in poem after poem. The heart, often heralded as a symbol of love and life, is flawed and easily destroyed. In the poem, Protected, “The man surfaces his heart, /He carries it away delicately.” (p. 3). Even nature offers no solace, as the poem Sky aptly illustrates. “The air was crisp, the sky clear, /like when someone dies, the emptiness/is always there.” (p. 17). This is not poetry designed to comfort but rather art that exists to help us to face our own shadow side.
What remains when the worse impulses of the human race are allowed to run rampant? From simple tasks turned into tests of relationship, to the certain betrayals that follow attractions, Gloria Mindock does not look away from this baser side of humanity. In the poem, Carrots, a domestic task turns into a wound that spoils the appetite of the lover.
“There is blood on my hands
from the knife.
It was an accident I said as I
sliced the carrots into tiny roundness.” (p.22)
In the poem, Disloyalty, the letdown is expected, as if all relationships have a deadly flame waiting to consume a house or scar a person.
In the third section of the collection, Buried, the author takes the reader further into this doomed landscape. In the poem, Light, “blackness empties into the light.” and “It is over between all the hearts/that yearn.” (p. 43). Veterans, lovers, soldiers, and hapless humans share a sense of brutality. The exaggeration of violence serves this collection, showcasing a human penchant for mayhem and the exploitation and harm of other humans. Is anyone innocent? Are we all culpable in this unraveling tale of the darker impulses of the human race? In exaggerating acts of violence, fire, and the eventual death of everything and everyone, Gloria Mindock calls attention to the spiraling crises facing the world: climate change, domestic abuse, poverty, addiction, homelessness. In the poem Time, the speaker says, “I can forgive the city/Forgive the power it has over me.” (p. 46).
The last section of the collection, Opposition, is written theatrically, with initials used for people who meet varied challenges and endings. Imaginative and dark, this section has a playful tone in its sensual descent into death. Fire creeps in, people meet unlikely ends, and the reader ponders what is truly left when life is pared down to the bone. Blunt language, combined with a flair for the absurd help to create a vivid tableau of fishnet stockings, alligators, booze, and toy soldiers.
The brutality of the modern world is something that numerous poets and writers have addressed in their work. In Ash, it is less reported upon than actually experienced through the lives of characters like Albert who says, “It feels good to own/the dark alleyways.” (p. 53). Perhaps that best sums up the bleakness of these poems; sometimes one must descend into the depths to understand the trajectory of the human race in this time period. The challenge is on to find the beauty in fire, the redemption after betrayal, and the reasons for venturing out into a world that often times seems irretrievably broken.
-
REVIEWS
Reading Ash
Amy Small-Mckinney, June 2nd, 2022
Gloria Mindock’s book, ASH (Glass Lyre Press, 2021) balances anger, lost love, violence, despair, and the terrible dichotomies of being human, with wit, startling imagery, and language that radiates. Anger is not easy to craft in poems, but Mindock manages it with clarity and sting; she is fearless and does not stand down. Her world went up in smoke and only ashes remain. Mindock is speaking to an individual and to our violent world. In her poem, Murderer, she tells him: “In this apartment, which was blessed, the / angels shiver. / They know what you are like. / They open their wings and wrap me up like / a cocoon. / You are left with a burning head, and death because / it is your turn to go without a blanket, no covering, / no window open. / Everything closed.” Later, in her poem, Crow, she says, “Every summer, days last longer / making more killing easier. / The crows cry.” And then, “Gather yourself, bullets are flying on / this hot day forcing skin to connect / tricking the body into ashes.” I wish this poem was no longer necessary. Juxtaposed with anger and grief, there is also transformation and humor: “I will become a beautiful plant. / When you walk past, I will / give you a rash.” And: “Brutality, murder of the innocents. / I need to somehow take all these / bodies and pieces to a new place. / Create a new image.” Indeed, this book does create many new images shaped from despair.
Lyrical and Intelligent
-Kathleen Spivack, February 26th, 2022
ASH by Gloria Mindock is striking in its originality. It is beautifully organized; each poem thoughtfully placed. Lyrical and intelligent, this collection invites us forward. The voice, the observations, and the glints of wit make ASH sparkle.
Words from the Heart About the Heart
-Robin Stratton, October 4, 2021
“How much sorrow can this heart take?” asks Gloria Mindock; and the follow up, “There is never an answer,” is the perfect opener for her latest collection. Later, “When the torpedo hits it is / inevitable that there is disintegration. / This is what happens to a heart / when goodbye is said.” These poems are insightful, beautiful and tragic. Mindock has never been better!Amy Small-McKinney
Amy Small-Mckinney, June 2nd, 2022
Gloria Mindock’s book, ASH (Glass Lyre Press, 2021) balances anger, lost love, violence, despair, and the terrible dichotomies of being human, with wit, startling imagery, and language that radiates. Anger is not easy to craft in poems, but Mindock manages it with clarity and sting; she is fearless and does not stand down. Her world went up in smoke and only ashes remain. Mindock is speaking to an individual and to our violent world. In her poem, Murderer, she tells him: “In this apartment, which was blessed, the / angels shiver. / They know what you are like. / They open their wings and wrap me up like / a cocoon. / You are left with a burning head, and death because / it is your turn to go without a blanket, no covering, / no window open. / Everything closed.” Later, in her poem, Crow, she says, “Every summer, days last longer / making more killing easier. / The crows cry.” And then, “Gather yourself, bullets are flying on / this hot day forcing skin to connect / tricking the body into ashes.” I wish this poem was no longer necessary. Juxtaposed with anger and grief, there is also transformation and humor: “I will become a beautiful plant. / When you walk past, I will / give you a rash.” And: “Brutality, murder of the innocents. / I need to somehow take all these / bodies and pieces to a new place. / Create a new image.” Indeed, this book does create many new images shaped from despair.
Lyrical and Intelligent
-Kathleen Spivack, February 26th, 2022
ASH by Gloria Mindock is striking in its originality. It is beautifully organized; each poem thoughtfully placed. Lyrical and intelligent, this collection invites us forward. The voice, the observations, and the glints of wit make ASH sparkle.
Words from the Heart About the Heart
-Robin Stratton, October 4, 2021
“How much sorrow can this heart take?” asks Gloria Mindock; and the follow up, “There is never an answer,” is the perfect opener for her latest collection. Later, “When the torpedo hits it is / inevitable that there is disintegration. / This is what happens to a heart / when goodbye is said.” These poems are insightful, beautiful and tragic. Mindock has never been better!Amy Small-McKinney
Stories beneath the stories
-David P. Miller, August 9, 2021
People tell Gloria Mindock their personal stories. A retired social worker, she betrays no confidences, but knows a lot about the wrong turns and dead ends of other lives. Also, complete strangers confide in her out of the blue. With directness and compassion, she tells some of these stories in Ash. A blind date with an apartment full of staring dolls. The buried whose gravestones are mere tourist attractions. Someone who feels watched by the living-room furniture. Even Christ, defending his crucifix images from junk drawer encroachments. The satisfying alliteration of section titles – Burnt, Baked, Buried – itself elevates the anguish and confusion. The final section, Opposition, features seven brief stories of two people apiece, lives whose collisions make it onto the page in nearly surreal fragments. Most of the poems in Ash are brief; it will be worth your while to take your time with them.
-David P. Miller, August 9, 2021
People tell Gloria Mindock their personal stories. A retired social worker, she betrays no confidences, but knows a lot about the wrong turns and dead ends of other lives. Also, complete strangers confide in her out of the blue. With directness and compassion, she tells some of these stories in Ash. A blind date with an apartment full of staring dolls. The buried whose gravestones are mere tourist attractions. Someone who feels watched by the living-room furniture. Even Christ, defending his crucifix images from junk drawer encroachments. The satisfying alliteration of section titles – Burnt, Baked, Buried – itself elevates the anguish and confusion. The final section, Opposition, features seven brief stories of two people apiece, lives whose collisions make it onto the page in nearly surreal fragments. Most of the poems in Ash are brief; it will be worth your while to take your time with them.
Allow Gloria Mindock’s indelible poetry to nest in your consciousness and rest in your marrow
-R. J. Jeffreys, August 9, 2021
Gloria Mindock doesn’t write about daisies or dancing on ethereal plains. She writes from her gut, and lends her voice to serious, vital topics. Her exquisitely word-weaved poetry is deeply moving, emotionally evocative and fearless. Her lines speak for those whose voices have been silenced by censorship in restrictive regimes, violence, and trauma. Be bold yourself, and buy this exceptional book. Allow Gloria Mindock’s indelible poetry to nest in your consciousness and rest in your marrow.
-R. J. Jeffreys, August 9, 2021
Gloria Mindock doesn’t write about daisies or dancing on ethereal plains. She writes from her gut, and lends her voice to serious, vital topics. Her exquisitely word-weaved poetry is deeply moving, emotionally evocative and fearless. Her lines speak for those whose voices have been silenced by censorship in restrictive regimes, violence, and trauma. Be bold yourself, and buy this exceptional book. Allow Gloria Mindock’s indelible poetry to nest in your consciousness and rest in your marrow.
Hard to forget!
-Martin Golan, July 30, 2021
Gloria Mindock takes your breath away with this latest collection. Warning: these poems will keep haunting you long after you've read them.
-Martin Golan, July 30, 2021
Gloria Mindock takes your breath away with this latest collection. Warning: these poems will keep haunting you long after you've read them.
Its focus on the body, grief and loss is remarkable!
-Pamela L. Laskin, July 28, 2021
Gloria Mindock's emotionally charged ASH brings the reader on a journey through fire and sorrow. The grief is so"touchably alive" and the diction is so stinging that one must plow through the pits of despair in order to rise. I found myself buried, along with the author, in her wounded heart where,"the only thing it knows, lightning." The world may be empty and the author may struggle with death, grief and several inequalities; she may be "broken in pieces", her heat, shattered, but the fire of her language and her passion propel the reader forward. Plus, there are "still angels in the world, ones who open their wings and wrap me up like a cocoon." This poetry collection is a must read-the ultimate tour de force.
-Pamela L. Laskin, July 28, 2021
Gloria Mindock's emotionally charged ASH brings the reader on a journey through fire and sorrow. The grief is so"touchably alive" and the diction is so stinging that one must plow through the pits of despair in order to rise. I found myself buried, along with the author, in her wounded heart where,"the only thing it knows, lightning." The world may be empty and the author may struggle with death, grief and several inequalities; she may be "broken in pieces", her heat, shattered, but the fire of her language and her passion propel the reader forward. Plus, there are "still angels in the world, ones who open their wings and wrap me up like a cocoon." This poetry collection is a must read-the ultimate tour de force.
Rising from the ashes
-Gunter Purdue, July 25, 2021
Gloria Mindock is one of the finest versifiers around and her new book shows her at the height of her creative powers. Each piece leaves the reader feeling he/she has encountered something rare and perfect.
-Gunter Purdue, July 25, 2021
Gloria Mindock is one of the finest versifiers around and her new book shows her at the height of her creative powers. Each piece leaves the reader feeling he/she has encountered something rare and perfect.
Powerful title, powerful book!
-Christy Mahon, July 25, 2021
This is a really powerful book. The poems are both highly readable and potent. The poems really live up to the powerful and evocative title. Gloria Mindock is a treasure and it's always a treat to see new work by her.
-Christy Mahon, July 25, 2021
This is a really powerful book. The poems are both highly readable and potent. The poems really live up to the powerful and evocative title. Gloria Mindock is a treasure and it's always a treat to see new work by her.
Gloria's poetry ASH
-Alexander Motyl, July 25, 2021
Beautiful, moving, harrowing texts!
-Alexander Motyl, July 25, 2021
Beautiful, moving, harrowing texts!
COMPASSION
-Susan Tepper, May 18, 2021
I have been reading the work of poet Gloria Mindock for some years now. She is acutely aware of the world, both in the large scale of being: many people and places out there; plus the smaller more intimate view of the world as interior life. Mindock's grasp on both is deeply ingrained in every poem she writes, and as she transitions the poem almost without the reader noticing. It's a tricky balancing act that very few poets pull off successfully, but this poet's hold on her craft is rock solid. ASH has been divided into four sections: BURNT (Sec. 1) opens with PLASTIC, a series of 4 connected prose poems structured around a male prototype she names X: "X was only two months sober and was telling everyone he had a date. Despite being told to concentrate on his sobriety and not women, he would not listen. The next day, he said they went out for dinner. Afterwards, she invited him to her place for coffee. When they walked into her apartment, there were dolls sitting at the kitchen table, on the couch, in the bedroom, and even on the toilet. Doll eyes watching him. /.../ " Of course this poem continues, and sections 2 through 4 complete this short saga in the life of X. It is this moment of bizarre twist that moves things to a whole different level, and spun my head around. Mindock knows deep in her artist instincts, that the world both large and intimate, is a place of unexpected and incomplete truths. (you will have to read the whole poem to see what happens in the world of X). BAKED (Sec. 2) contains a darkly whimsical poem I love called CARROTS: "There is blood on my hands / from the knife. / It was an accident I said as I / sliced the carrots into tiny roundness. / You lost your appetite. / Blood will do this. /.../" Mindock has been called a 'resistance poet' because of her many poems that resist genocides and killing in general and particular. BURIED (Sec. 3) contains the powerful lyric poem CROW: "Every summer, days last longer / making more killing easier. / The crows cry. / Sick of this , I long for winter snow / burying the dead in ice a little longer--".../..." OPPOSITION (Sec. 4) is a sort of riling up, a verbal demonstration between 2 perceived 'characters' that the poet differentiates by the use of letters. In the poetic dialogue between S and A, the poem S/A begins with a short study of (male figure S): "S was in exile and drunk. / He could not forget about his exotic lover.../ ..." There is more from S but A intercedes: "A had eight children by S / The children cawed while looking into the mirror. / A played dead when they did this. / How could S leave her? / Her mouth was singing." Many of Mindock's poems end with cryptic humor, which is the stuff that carries most of us along in life. ASH covers every corner of the world, dark and filmy, collecting in all the nooks and crannies. A most highly recommended poems collection.
-Susan Tepper, May 18, 2021
I have been reading the work of poet Gloria Mindock for some years now. She is acutely aware of the world, both in the large scale of being: many people and places out there; plus the smaller more intimate view of the world as interior life. Mindock's grasp on both is deeply ingrained in every poem she writes, and as she transitions the poem almost without the reader noticing. It's a tricky balancing act that very few poets pull off successfully, but this poet's hold on her craft is rock solid. ASH has been divided into four sections: BURNT (Sec. 1) opens with PLASTIC, a series of 4 connected prose poems structured around a male prototype she names X: "X was only two months sober and was telling everyone he had a date. Despite being told to concentrate on his sobriety and not women, he would not listen. The next day, he said they went out for dinner. Afterwards, she invited him to her place for coffee. When they walked into her apartment, there were dolls sitting at the kitchen table, on the couch, in the bedroom, and even on the toilet. Doll eyes watching him. /.../ " Of course this poem continues, and sections 2 through 4 complete this short saga in the life of X. It is this moment of bizarre twist that moves things to a whole different level, and spun my head around. Mindock knows deep in her artist instincts, that the world both large and intimate, is a place of unexpected and incomplete truths. (you will have to read the whole poem to see what happens in the world of X). BAKED (Sec. 2) contains a darkly whimsical poem I love called CARROTS: "There is blood on my hands / from the knife. / It was an accident I said as I / sliced the carrots into tiny roundness. / You lost your appetite. / Blood will do this. /.../" Mindock has been called a 'resistance poet' because of her many poems that resist genocides and killing in general and particular. BURIED (Sec. 3) contains the powerful lyric poem CROW: "Every summer, days last longer / making more killing easier. / The crows cry. / Sick of this , I long for winter snow / burying the dead in ice a little longer--".../..." OPPOSITION (Sec. 4) is a sort of riling up, a verbal demonstration between 2 perceived 'characters' that the poet differentiates by the use of letters. In the poetic dialogue between S and A, the poem S/A begins with a short study of (male figure S): "S was in exile and drunk. / He could not forget about his exotic lover.../ ..." There is more from S but A intercedes: "A had eight children by S / The children cawed while looking into the mirror. / A played dead when they did this. / How could S leave her? / Her mouth was singing." Many of Mindock's poems end with cryptic humor, which is the stuff that carries most of us along in life. ASH covers every corner of the world, dark and filmy, collecting in all the nooks and crannies. A most highly recommended poems collection.
