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Critical Praise for In These Latitudes: Ten Contemporary Poets

• Compiling an anthology is always an act of patience and love — so many small details — the concept, collection, general choreography. . . .Robert Bonazzi has done a masterful job editing In These Latitudes, which presents ten worthy, wonderful voices in a series of nourishing poems. Thanks to the generous amount of space given each writer, there is a chance to "enter in" to aesthetics, styles, and concerns. A sense of gracious timelessness, and caring detail pervades the entire text. Prepare to make ten new friends, or spend meaningful time with essential voices you have previously enjoyed.

  — Naomi Shihab Nye

• In These Latitudes is a book of consolations after seven long years of war and turmoil. Wong Siu-yung's "Setting the Table" invites us all in for a joyful dinner. Assef Al-Jundi, a Syrian-born poet, looks at the Israeli-Arab conflict with ironic insight when he notes how "the killing and dying [are] for pieces of the sky in the same window." Del Marie Rogers tells us "You're at the core of an explosion of birds," not bombs. Miracles abound, as Nancy Connolly notes in her visit to Canyon de Chelly, with "grandmothers/ squatting in specks of juniper shade." Marian Hadad wrote one of my favorite lines in this book, "Persistence drives a stone mad." And Laura Guidry's grief over her son's death is nowhere more tellingly expressed than when she writes, "all loneliness/lived in that one unremarkable cow/ in her little field." John Herndon's ambitious allegory of a grandmother turned fertility goddess, "Laurel Ash Olmos," is a guide to the healing herbs in our own gardens and local parks. The poets gathered here by Robert Bonazzi offer modest visions, moving stories about daily life that teach us how to cope with the stresses of a terrifying age.

  — Paul Christensen, author of West of the American Dream

Reviews

• San Antonio Express-NewsNovember 23, 2008

  Editor Robert Bonazzi begins his introduction to the anthology "In These Latitudes" by describing the factors that bring the 10 selected poets together, which, in addition to living in Texas, are that they "were writing from the perspective of early to late middle age — that is, writing in these latitudes of mature experience. And while all had published accomplished poems, their work has been generally overlooked by the critical establishment."

  Beyond this and their "consistent quality," Bonazzi notes the "wide range of unique voices and styles," as well as the breadth of physical and aesthetic geography the work covers. Bonazzi's own column on these pages, "Poetic Diversity," seeks to celebrate many of these same qualities.

  I enter an anthology with a sense of anticipation, eager for new voices — a clear vision, a perfect metaphor, an original voice, a well-crafted poem, a single phrase, and, as a fellow poet, I look for poets in whose work I find kinship, as well as those I admire and find some sort of odd, exotic creation.

  "In These Latitudes" does not disappoint on any of these accounts.

  This companionable volume is rich with gifts — voices, personalities and what Laura Quinn Guidry calls, in her devastating "Graveside," "a sudden, unadorned truth."

  While I would not start reading "In These Latitudes" with the work of Nancy Kenney Connolly precisely because her truths are neither sudden nor unadorned, her work's erudition and song touch chords. Her measured work reaches a point of stillness and clarity in "Reckonings" and "Evensong at the Canyon de Chelly."

  When Del Marie Rogers in "Luck" declares, "lean pure light pulls at your life," and in "Life Story," "If you come to believe you won't live forever, / you begin to live," the trail of her words is ecstatic, mystic and still concrete. Her work knows that essential Blakean paradox, the universal in the everyday, the incantatory in the breathless acceptance of what is.

  Tony Zurlo's poems reach beneath the surface of the observation of another culture, in his case China, where he taught at Hebei Teacher's University, to an understanding of shared frames of experience. His work's reticence, its organic shaping and clarity coheres with the poetry of classical China. At its best, as in "The Souls of Ghosts," Zurlo's work is the poem as gift  both gift of vision to the poet, as well as the poet's gift to the reader.

  An anthology of such richness has gifts and truths to deliver to us at different moments. Some reward return  Wong Sui-yung's work for its simplicity and vibrancy, which takes a desperate, fraught turn and tone in "Drowning"; H.C. Nash's quirky and inventive tone delivers such oddities as "Some Applications of Willfulness," in which he writes "in tubes of the horrific / in rarified air / vectors, venom, vanishing acts / of worlds & oysters / & faiths met"  this is the territory of fiction writers  Rushdie, De Lillo, Pynchon  bristlingly alive in Nash's poetics. Dillon McKinsey's poems respond as in "Assumption" to "the timeless, sumptuous, inward call." As a poet of long poems, it is hard for me to omit some mention of John Herndon's "Laurel Ash Olmos (1917-1989)," an ambitious, difficult and shape-shifting work.

  Bonazzi's fine introduction and the biographical information that begins each section prove helpful in turning our attention to the poets' roots, their conversational descriptions of what they say (or think) they are working on in their poems. These are useful cues and clues once one has let the poems work their serious magic. Marian Haddad's poems feel like one poem, like a suite. In "In a San Diego Courtyard," she writes, "I sit / by this fountain, / water folding over itself / and back; / water has softened the edges it skirts. / Persistence drives a stone mad." This suite of poems "folding over itself" captures water, persistence, rue and a ferocious embrace of song.

  The poems of Assef Al-Jundi are deceptively simple, infused with the incantatory ecstasy of Rumi and the wry realism of Hafez. Incandescent, these poems engage our senses and our consciences. They open to beauty and wisdom, as well as to injustice, stupidity and outrage. And in all of them, objects that may take on symbolic meanings are first and foremost objects we can touch, grasp and feel a weight in our hands. These poems are political, personal and universal, and they emerge from a generous sensibility that would not untangle those three. "Holy Landers" and "Collateral Savage" are among the most powerful political poems of our generation. Al-Jundi ends his "A Definition I Can Embrace" with, yes, a "sudden unadorned truth."

  He writes, "If I am a seeker / trudging up a steep mountain, / what do I hope to find at the summit? Myself, of course, / making peace . . . "

  (Jim LaVilla-Havelin is a published poet, coordinator of the National Poetry Month 2008 celebration and the director of Young Artist Programs at the Southwest School of Art & Craft.)