The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
Reviewed by Kathryn Kerr, Crab Orchard Review

It is easy to fall in love with a book that begins “Doors were left open in Heaven again:” even if you have skipped over the glowing introduction by Charles Simic. It is easy to stay in love with a book that dwells in that hour between wolf and dog, when it is difficult to distinguish between them. In the first section of the book, in the viewpoint of a child during a dark period in Europe, asceticism and eroticism are dog and wolf. How can a child—or the reader—tell when pain became comfort or cruelty elicited ecstasy? In “Amen” a child forbidden to suck her thumb hides and sucks while her mother packs, yet again. Left on a farm, she is drawn into assisting when a cow, dying from a still-birth, must be slaughtered. Given the udder to carry, the girl hides and sucks it for a while. When the udder is served at supper, she is tired, hungry, sucking her thumb. The farmer pats her head, blood still framing his nails, while he says Grace.

Some wolves are identified many years later. The child, always cold in the convent in winter, can not understand why it is forbidden to straddle the radiator. Years later in the back of a black Pugeot she understood, “it was forbidden, hard, warm.” “The Pump” summarizes this section of the book. Every third Sunday the child is given a train ticket and a stick of licorice and let out the convent gate. She walks to Gare du Nord, takes the train to Antwerp, walks in that city, takes a tram, and arrives at the gate to her garden, finally bathes in cold water at a pump. The images become more and more sensual, carnal, and fantastic. The poem is a study of images, dog to wolf, played like a musical scale. If one wanted to dismiss this poetry, it could be called merely a collection of images. Some poems in the first section are merely images, but marvelously played.

Section 2 moves between Europe and America. Section 3 examines contemporary America. Here Bosselaar becomes more playful. In “Loving You in Flemish” and “English Flavors” she plays with language. In “Zen” she plays with space and rhythm. Sometimes she plays with the culture, for instance, in “Fallen” where she receives dahlia tubers packed in shredded poetry manuscripts. Always there is a surprise, sometimes as nicea s the dahlia tubers, sometimes more wolfish, yet still delightful, as in “Hotel de Touristes” where a woman surprises herself in the arms of a man she does not know. Surprise is sometimes hard-hitting. Often the reader feels like one of the bugs in the neighbor’s yard in the poem “Plastic Beatitude.” “. . . the Madonna, in her white robe and blue cape . . ./ lit from within day and night / calling God’s little insects to her shining light / before sending them straight to the zapper . . .” Bosselaar’s advantage as a poet is knowing different languages, different cultures, different periods. Her gift is seeing the dog and the wolf and being able to show them both to us.

Small Gods of Grief
Reviewed by Ken Tucker, New York Review of Books

Early on in this collection, Laure-Anne Bosselaar describes her state of mind and her immediate surroundings as "crisp, bewildered, and destined" — and she spends the rest of the book suggesting that what her circumscribed world is most destined for is change. She is materialistic in a literal sense, intensely aware of possessions, heirlooms, junk, things: "my mess: relics, hopes, insomnia, clocks"; an old Bakelite box, now unforgivingly stuck shut, in which her dead father kept postage stamps. Inspired by a household vase, she writes verse whose lines, in the manner of a modern metaphysical poet, form the shape of just such a container on the page. Like a crankier Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music," she gives us a few of her least favorite things: "stickers on tomatoes, jerky, deconstruction, nazis, doilies." Bosselaar's accumulations of everyday details combine with her questing spirituality (there are numerous religious poems, and the Communion service inspires one vibrant metaphor for a sunset: "the sky bleeds / like a sacrificial lamb, the sun's wine-bloated host slides deep into dusk's throat") to leave her, by the end of the book, grateful for a life spent "hungering for more / of these good, tough days."

Small Gods of Grief
Reviewed by Debra Kang Dean, Crab Orchard Review

Like The Hour between Dog and Wolf, her first collection in English, Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s Small Gods of Grief is marked by her irrepressible spirit and essentially redemptive imagination. If, in this new book, Bosselaar does return to the childhood memories that were the emotional center of her first book, it is less to witness than to weigh them in the light of the present. In Small Gods of Grief, the restless soul of the earlier book has made a home outside of memory, and from that place struggles to build a story of her new life. In “Personal and Impersonal,” William Matthews gives us sound advice for reading work with such a strongly autobiographical cast:

The narratives we compose (and revise continuously) of our lives are an attempt at such harmony [as may be achieved among the differing scents of flowers in a bouquet]. But they’re not documentaries. “History is what one age finds worthy of note in another,” Jacob Burckhardt wrote. The history of an individual is similar.

Matthews also writes, “probably what seems most personal to a poet is style,” and this too is true of Bosselaar. As the title of her first book suggests, she is keenly interested in the gray area between appearance and reality, and it is reflected in the often deceptively simple surfaces of her poems and in the stanzaic structure she most often uses, one that visually hovers between poetry and prose. This appearance, however, belies her expressive use of sonic devices—an attentiveness to sound most evident in her delight in onomatopoetic words—as well as her gift for extended metaphor.

Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Award, is divided into three sections. “Great Gullet Creek,” a long narrative poem that comprises the first section, is itself divided into three sections and opens in the past tense with the speaker’s mind brooding over the polders, “land reclaimed from the sea.” The first section of it ends, “Once, in a Brueghel winter, a farmer and I sailed across / Great Gullet Creek—on the anger of Flemish winds.” With that storyteller’s word “once,” we are propelled into a world rendered in rich, sensory detail; out of the facts of experience, a meaningful story emerges.

As a surprise for the six year old again left with the farmers, the oldest farmer has planned an outing for the child. There is a doubleness in this experience, for the farmer’s surprise is, no doubt, a gesture of deep affection for a child whose parents make no room for her in their lives, even on Christmas break. But it is also a test of sorts that becomes a lesson in surviving the icy winds of human feeling. Their shirts lined with “wind-rage armors,” the farmer has warned the child, “Only city fillies fuss,” before they step out on the frozen creek.

   The ice is littered with leaves, twigs,
my skates send thunder through my legs,
I can barely breathe. My lips and throat
hurt, but I scream Faster, faster! He straightens
his huge back, opens his arms

   even wider, his skates clatter,
pelt my face with ice, we’re picking up
speed, the creek sounds like a hundred drums,
my eyes freeze, I can no longer see, but I’m
no city filly, no city filly.

So cold they can’t straighten up, they arrive at a café on the other side of the creek. As they warm up, the farmer’s body language suggests animal contentment—and approval; he has even poured a little gin in her broth. Later, home for dinner, the child kisses the small cross the farmer wears and had kissed that very morning. The child’s prayer for safe passage takes the form of a wish for distance—that the small cross “will keep [her] parents very-far- / away.”

In Small Gods of Grief, the city is often a place of pain against which home is a refuge. Many of the poems in the second section locate the speaker inside, windows separating her from the outside world, and suggest the self in retreat. In “Follen Street,” she calls paintings “fake / windows I need // to comfort me from what I keep / seeing through lucid ones.”

Unlike the paintings, some objects are of value not for their material worth or the comfort or escape they provide, but because they speak to us. “Vase,” a shaped poem, describes an object the speaker keeps on her desk. Given the vase’s outline visually, we must then imagine the “tacky landscape on its belly,” which the speaker invests with meaning. She has named the figure “fishing the same / bend” of the river “Art for Arthur Rimbaud” and says he has “turned his back / on the world.” But in that peaceful, pastoral landscape, she imagines Rimbaud “longing for drunken / boats to take him back to / Savannas, forests, / shores, and suns!” Art longs to be alive because the work of the imagination proceeds only while there is breath still in us. The vase itself literally stops the speaker’s gaze “between a page and a daydream” and serves as a reality check by reminding us how closely the longing for perfection and the immutability of art may be connected to the peace death gives from life’s suffering.

However, distance can give us momentary peace, and “Tourists in Brussels” records an occasion when painful memories triggered by place are diffused by distances of both time and space. Because it is “a city [her American husband] wanted to see,” the speaker travels with him to Brussels, “the town that ballasts [her] accent.” The poem discloses that when nine years old, she had been raped there while in the company of two male cousins and their female friend. The exact circumstances are vague, for it is not so much what happened but the imposition of silence surrounding the event that matters. The speaker says that her silence is redeemed because it proceeds by choice, and not by fear or shame, but the diction of the poem’s ending—“tourist,” “lost,” “mask,” “disposable”—and the line break at “nothing” ripple the poem’s surface:

   But love, if I’m quite tonight,
it’s not with the fear to say something
happened,

   but with the peace distance brings,
and the solace of our story: I’m nothing
but a tourist here now, lost in a foreign
city with you,

   knowing I’ll soon turn my back
to Brussels, leave its history behind
like tourists do, with the masks of the past
frozen inside our disposable camera.

Turning the day’s events over in her mind, the speaker doesn’t actually speak to the “you” who is present. It thus seems to me that her heart has yet to fully assent to what her mind understands. Still, there is solace in the memories being made with her husband and a measure of peace in the fact that the speaker is silent by choice, and need feel neither shame nor fear in his presence.

In the book’s final section, the self’s longing for connection with others is identified with the body’s hungers, and the fulfillment of the former proves as essential for survival as the latter. In this section, the speaker once again literally and figuratively ventures out of the confines of the self and into the world.

“Seven Fragments on Hearing a Hammer Pounding,” from which the book takes its title, is a kaleidoscopic poem in seven sections, each individually titled. The first section opens:

   I sit by a larch, pen and journal
in my lap. Two suns in my tea, the lemon
slice the brightest.

   Tannin clouds the mug’s sky,
today’s fate still steeps in its leafy depths.

This moment, so open to possibility, is soon intruded upon by memories jarred loose by the sound of hammering. In the course of the poem, the speaker moves back and forth between past and present in search of “an augury, a sign to help [her] / believe that the pounding means something— / something good.”

The speaker’s father, we learn, made his fortune selling iron and steel during the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. “One’s misery is / another’s happiness,” he says to his five year old as they drive through the ravaged Jewish Quarter in Antwerp, and when they stop: “Nothing’s / changed here, only pigeons // and rats instead of Jews.” Her parents laugh when, the child, not knowing what the word means, asks “what kind / of animal joden are.” The memory still stings the speaker, who prays, “O Gods of Grief, grant me this: some tongues will die, some tongues must.”

Worried that news coverage of votes garnered by the extreme right during recent elections in Europe and “Israel too” indicates that “her father’s tongue” is very much alive, the speaker also recalls Oscar Vladislas Milosz’s words from a workshop she attended when eighteen. “Write about your time,” he advised, and on the blackboard wrote, Le Présent: Lieu seul d’où j’écris: Soleil de la Mémoire, which Bosselaar translates parenthetically, “The Present: single Place from where I write: Memory’s Sun.” Midway now, the poem continues:

   Two suns in my tea, the lemon slice
the brightest. Today’s writing still brews
in a mug’s leafy depths.

   From which memory
must I—will I—speak?

   Which present do I—
must I—call mine?

“Today’s fate” of the poem’s opening lines is here transformed into “today’s writing,” and the choice of auxiliary verbs in the subsequent stanzas implies weighty questions about fate and free will, action and conscience. This conflation of writing and life turns the speaker’s mind to what her friend calls “a motivating event.”

Seven years old, she waits in her father’s office and finds his pen in a drawer. When he returns, he “grabs his pen, / slaps [her] face, knees [her] chest.” But the child has already drawn “a strong, hard / green” line on her palm. In retrospect, the speaker chooses to view the event as a defining moment: she has drawn her own lifeline, her fate. “Listen,” she writes, “my need to write / started then, a hunger to write, / to own a pen.”

Outside, absorbed in thought most of the afternoon, the speaker prepares to go inside at dusk. “O small Gods of Grief, / grant me to write from seven memories // deep, but not in my father’s / tongue—but never with his pen,” she utters. In extinguishing both suns, nightfall reveals the true relation between them: no sun, no lemon slice; the imagery resolves the riddle of Milosz’s words: no present, no memory. The poem’s ending turns the earlier prayer into an invocation to the speaker’s muses and defines writing as an act of resistance where one may work to shape one’s fate, which, the poem’s historical context suggests, is finally inseparably linked with the fate of others.

However, in the logic of shame, the speaker’s rejection of her parents’ greed and anti-Semitism means rejecting happiness, too; for in this logic, happiness can only be had at another’s expense. And with happiness goes the fullness of life in the present. One of the most compellingly dramatized moments when the speaker is called into the present occurs in “Filthy Savior.” The speaker drives around in “an industrial suburb on a Sunday” at four a.m. during a storm. She’s out there, she says,

   a shirt over my nightgown,
reciting Rimbaud aloud, like an insomniac
idiot—scared to death

   by my longing for it, death,
so early in the morning, and driving
until the longing runs on empty.

Lost, too, is a gull she nearly runs over. Only after getting out of her car does she see what it is: a gull with its leg “caught in a red / plastic net snared around its neck.” She snares it with her shirt and brings it inside her car, where she saws the netting away with a nail file. “You idiot,” she says, “I’m trying to save you,” as the gull struggles, the whole time “fighting for its life, its crazed / heart [beating] against [hers].” The gull, which she brings into her world and then releases back into the world they share, is “like some vague, // bleak longing” that disappears “as the rain lifts and the suburbs / emerge in dirty white light.” In this amazing poem, inner and outer weather merge then dissipate, and the creature the speaker has saved has saved her, too.

In “Taller, Wider,” which closes the book, we encounter the speaker standing “knee-deep in lavender,” alive to scents and sounds around her, to the movement of the willow she planted five years before. It’s a perfect day. Elsewhere in the book, the speaker has exposed with humor her finical eye for detail that marks a perfectionist—“too much / blush,” “gray pants an inch / too short,” even as she fears losing her husband. Here, a small detail threatens a change of mood:

   On my wrist, the bracelet
love locked around it, long ago,
on a winter night. A wilted leaf
now caught between its links—

   I leave it there: I am learning happiness.

In the space between the dash and final line/stanza, a choice is made. If wisdom consists in knowing what to ignore, perhaps happiness, the syntax of the last sentence suggests, is a language we must learn by practice.

“We are an anthology of selves, and so, inconsistent,” William Matthews also wrote, “but the anthology is chosen by the same editor, and so, consistent.” As it happens, Bosselaar has herself edited two anthologies whose titles reflect her persistent concerns: Urban Nature and Outsiders. As with these subject-based collections, the skillful sequencing of poems in Small Gods of Grief enables selves to speak to each other while creating webs of meaning and offering us moods as changeable as New England’s winter weather. Unlike the anthologies, however, the selves in Small Gods of Grief speak to us in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s singularly warm voice.

Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City
Reviewed by Barry Mazur, Harvard Review

Urban Nature  is a wonderful anthology—the conundrum of its title theme underscores how urgently urban are its poems, and how naturally these poems sing. One hundred and thirty two different poets are represented in this densely populated volume, and yet there is a communal turbulence, if that is possible, to the language.  These poems are written in a language of motion, and at times it seemed to me that the volume itself was as a packed train at rush hour, each poem jostling against its neighbor, but, providentially, each the better for the experience. In this volume, we may very well

... look on nature not as in the hour
of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

but  we will question, constantly question.  Good poetry sows its trails, Hansel and Gretel-like, with questions, and with all of the attendant risks.

 “All men by nature desire to know” is how Aristotle’s  Metaphysics  begins.  It is fair enough then to want to know: what is nature? “Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes,”  says Aristotle at the beginning of Book II of the Physics, thereby giving separate living quarters to the unnatural, the urban perhaps.  The poems of this volume brilliantly blur this Aristotelian distinction.

   This blurring begins immediately: our  volume is preceded by a sparkling prose introduction, a riff on “nature’s metropolis”, written by Emily Hiestand; and some “Advice” by Czeslaw Milosz, who notes that

We created a second Nature in the image of the first    So as not to believe that we live in Paradise.

For “Where the shore of the bay was overgrown with rushes/ Now it is rusted with smashed machines, ashes and bricks.”

Nevertheless, Milosz ends: 

                                  Ours is no worse.
So I beg you, no more of those lamentations.

but the anthology keeps up a balanced see-saw of exultation and lamentation:

“I do not do nature.
It hurts too much.”

[Peter Murphy; “Manifesto”]

 “We are made of newspaper and smoke.
We dunk roses in vats of blue.
The birds don’t call-- pigeons play it close
to the vest. When the moon is full
we hear it in the sirens.”

[Douglas Goetsch; “Urban Poem”]

So we readers, strolling through the second Eden of this anthology, may exult-lament the aviary of Chase Twitchell’s “egrets the color of newspaper,” of Mark Defoe’s “fast hawks” who “razor the greenery./ Patrol for the slow, the careless,” of Jeffrey Harrison’s

                                                                         Thousands of chimney swifts
wheeling crazily overhead against a sky just beginning
  to deepen into evening-- turning round and round
             in their erratic spiral ragged at the edges
                        (...)
                                                                      pulled into the
            great vortex that funnels the air-
            shaft of the library, the whole day
         (...)
                                                            like bats at the last
                            moment diving and
                                  turning into
                                        words.

C.K. Williams  gets us to lean uncomfortably close to get a better look, as

                          ... a crow with less evident emotion
punches its beak through the dead
breast of a dove or albino
sparrow until it arrives at
a coil of gut it can extract,
then undo with a dexterous twist
an oily stretch just the right length
to be devoured, the only
suggestion of violation
the carrion jerked to one side
in involuntary dismay.

We stand back as the alliterative “br”s of the first line of Galway Kinnell’s poem “Under the Williamsburg Bridge” transmute into “bl”s  and as a blackbacked gull chooses an urban background for his nocturnal flight:

I broke bread
At the riverbank,
I saw the black gull
Fly back black and crossed
By the decaying Paragon sign in Queens,
Over ripped water, it screamed
Killing the ceremony of the dove.
I cried those wing muscles
Tearing for life at my bones.

 We are reminded by Gary Snyder’s “Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin” that if we want to accurately echo, in metrical verse, the hoot/hoot of owls, it would surely be in monometer:

                Owl
       calls,
       pollen dust blows
  Swirl of light strokes writhing
  knot-tying light paths,

         calligraphy of cars.

The poems in this anthology, glistening atoms, sometimes combine to make meta-stable molecules. Take the two poems on opposite pages, about fish in the Charles River. Lewis Hydes’s goldfish shine

like memories of bruises oozing blood,
a tired boxer’s lowered gloves, feed
on crap, turn edible and gold, survive.

and, facing them, Kenneth Rosen’s

Carp and sturgeon dazzle the silver
Of the Charles. They are hooked by worm diggers
And women who are very secretive and never
Quit smiling.

These women hook more than sturgeon, but on the next page of our volume, all hooks are blunted, for we find ourselves amongst Mary Oliver’s “Swans on the river Ayr”:

Under the cobbled bridge the white swans float,
Slow in their perilous pride. Once long ago,
Led as a child along some Sunday lake,
I met these great birds, dabbling the stagnant
                                   shore.
We fed them bread from paper bags. They came,
Dipping their heads to take the stale slices
Out of our hands.

 And through all this collection, we are challenged by Miloscz’s advice, for Wordsworth’s “still sad music of humanity” can be intensely sad. In  Ellen Byrant Voigt’s “Nocturne,” a woman, about to be stalked “stalls a moment,/ as a cautious animal pauses before it’s absorbed by foliage.” But this camouflage, it seems, will not help her, and the poem avoids a tone of lamentation only by deftly floating into the equanimity of the language of cause and effect. And then Philip Levine comes home, in his poem “Coming Home, Detroit, 1968”, to find “The fat stacks/ of breweries hold their tongues” while misery

stares and stares into your frozen eyes
until the lights change and you go
forward to work. The charred faces, the eyes
boarded up, the rubble of innards, the cry
of wet smoke hanging in your throat,
the twisted river stopped at the color of iron.
We burn this city every day.

By the waters of another city, the psalmist wept, because it wasn’t home.  But exultation can be sparked even by the smallest moments when one is intensely at home,as when summer night settles into dampness in Frederick Marchant’s poem “Screen Porch,” where across “wet sparkles in the mesh”  you find  “a daddy long-legs looking right at you.”