Literature & Libations: Four Way Poetry
April is National Poetry Month, and I've greatly enjoyed a few new titles from Four Way Books while kicking back and drinking something tasty.
Wild with supernatural imagery, the poems in The Halo by C. Dale Young detail a rapid spiral into fever dreams as the narrator recovers from a grisly car wreck and comes to terms with the broad wings that stretch from his naked back. Tensions are high as he confesses, "So few of these transformations are ever a blessing." The metaphysics of it all had me craving the Obituary Cocktail, a ghostly gin martini with bianco vermouth in an absinthe-rinsed coupe.
Emoticoncert by Maya Pindyck contains a multitude of intricate, crystalline syllabic structures. Emotion resonates against a dazzling landscape of history and mystery, as in the short poem "Exquisite Corpse": "I sought/ a definition: beetle skin;/ fragile; iridescent; for writing/ on strange paper/ this unfinished story." Poems this magical should be paired with something effervescent; the Seelbach mixes bourbon and Cointreau with Peychaud's bitters and Angostura bitters, and then tops it off with champagne.
In The Taxidermist's Cut by Rajiv Mohabir, "a queer flutter knocks about your ribs." The poet takes instructive texts on taxidermy and pares down lines and phrases until we're left with a new relic from a painful past. These intoxicating pieces puncture the boundaries of identity with the unflinching grip needed to repurpose the tough hide of a carcass. I'd pair this visceral collection with the Red Hook: whiskey, Punt e Mes, maraschino liqueur and cherry garnish.
There are a lot more where these came from, too. With five more titles out this spring, Four Way Books continues to publish an impeccable list of lovely and provocative poetry. So maybe T.S. Eliot was wrong about April after all. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness
As a child, Dahl was more interested in photography, cricket, or childish pranks than in words. He was born in Wales on September 13, 1916, to Norwegian parents. Dahl's later childhood straddled two very different worlds--long and glorious summers in Norway, and the rigors of English boarding schools during the academic year. Dahl's memories of sadistic, cane-happy headmasters would infuse his work for the rest of his days. Adults are often frightening, repulsive, even filthy creatures in his fantastical stories. Both the noblest and nastiest extremes of humankind are represented, often with the noblest (a child), destroying the nastiest (an adult), in a ghastly act of revenge for some injustice. In a jolly-metered poem called "Mister Unsworth," first published in Vile Verses (2005), he paints a dark picture of a cruel teacher:
Dahl first wrote for adults, but ultimately found his best audience when he had children of his own to regale with stories. His daughter Ophelia, one of five children Dahl had with American actress Patricia Neal, recalled that the funny, sometimes morbid vignettes that her father told her at bedtime were the seeds of his most popular children's novels. Editor Roxburgh, who became a good friend of the family, said that Dahl was a different person around children than he was around adult colleagues or friends. "He would play the BFG," said Roxburgh. "The sentimentality in his children's work is pure, if you can ever say Dahl is pure. I think he drew heavily from his idyllic early childhood. And he loved children. That's the source of his great works.".jpg)
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and Matilda, Dahl persisted in playing with words. In fact, it is difficult to discuss Dahl as a poet separately from Dahl as a storyteller; his poems are stories, and his stories, however "no-frills," are poetic. The BFG (1982), for instance, is a charming novel about a big friendly giant who blows dreams into the bedrooms of sleeping children at night and speaks an endearingly mangled language all his own. When the young orphan Sophie, whom he kidnaps, tells the giant she thinks his garbled English (his "terrible wigglish") is beautiful, the giant is overcome: "How whoopsy-splunkers! How absolutely squiffling! I is all of a stutter."
Dirty Beasts is also crawling with story-poems about vigilante justice, Dahl-style. When the pig eats the farmer before the farmer eats him in "The Pig," readers can imagine Dahl's boarding-school fantasies at work. Many of the poems seem bent on frightening the wits out of children at bedtime. Three-quarters into a poem about a crocodile who likes to eat children, the narrator whispers, "Shh! Listen! What is that I hear/ Gallumphing [sic] softly up the stair?/ Go lock the door and fetch my gun!/ Go on, child, hurry! Quickly, run!"
Jim Harrison, the prolific fiction writer, essayist and poet, 
