SANDINO’S GRAVE AND OTHER POEMS
By Preston M. Browning Jr.
Wellspring Press
For almost 20 years, Preston Browning Jr. has overseen Wellspring House, a writers’ retreat in Ashfield that’s something of a well-kept secret nationally but a popular spot for writers from the Northeast. A retired professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he’s also the author of several books — including his newest, the poetry collection “Sandino’s Grave.”
It’s a compilation of older and newer poems, as well as some translations that Browning did in the 1980s of work by several Central American poets. In an introduction, he notes that he visited Nicaragua in the 1980s and was also inspired by the work of poets such as Otto René Castillo of Guatemala, who fought against the U.S.-backed authoritarian regime that ruled his country in the 1950s and 1960s.
In addition, the book’s title references Augusto C. Sandino, the leader of a peasant rebellion against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933.
Browning, not surprisingly for a writer who’s now in his late 80s, covers a lot of different ground in his collection, from the political to the personal. In “Vietnam Christmas Recollected,” he recalls the sorrow, anger and confusion of marking Christ’s birth during the middle of a deeply divisive war:
“so let the bells ring out with laughter / and the sound of peace on earth / in a little hour or after / men of stout heart will hymn the birth / and the righteousness that clothes us / like the spray that kills the leaves / will resume the extermination / of God’s slant-eyed enemies.”
There are poems dedicated to loved ones both past and present, and to other people he admires, like the late poet Richard Wilbur. He also offers tributes to the natural world and to his former home, Chicago, where spring, he playfully writes, “is winter’s / timid stepdaughter, / almost apologetic / for occupying the same / space, for asking / to renew the lease.”
As one critic puts it, Browning’s poems offer both “linguistic integrity” and “mastery of traditional forms — from sonnet to ode to limerick to Wordsworthian elegy to haiku.”
And Browning, in his introduction, says that as he nears his 90th birthday, he continues to write poetry for a number of reasons, most simply this: “It’s what a person does if he is in love with the Earth, in love with human life, and in love with language.”
HOME GROWN
By Mary Ellen Shaughan
Raised in Iowa but now firmly settled in Amherst, Mary Ellen Shaughan has published her poems in a number of literary journals and magazines over the years, including “Mid-America Poetry Review,” “Timber Creek Review” and “Silkworm.” With “Home Grown,” she offers her first collection.
Shaughan, who describes herself in one online poetry site as an “accidental poet” who initially wanted to write short stories, has built her collection around themes that reflect both her familial and geographical roots.
From profiles of parents, children and friends, to remembrances of her childhood in Iowa during World War II, “Home Grown” is something of a self-portrait filtered through sometimes distant memories; people and situations, Shaughan writes, are sometimes described “not as they are, but as seen though the eyes of the poet.”
In “1942,” for example, she recalls a train trip she took as a child from Iowa to California with her mother, when war had come to the United States: “As only a toddler can, I flirt / outrageously with sailors in their formal whites, / all headed to California, too. / Many of them are homesick, / leaving the farm in the rear view mirror, leaving family for the first time/ My mother could be their mother; / I, their little sister.”
In “Unfiltered,” years have passed, and the poet is a passenger in a car driven by a grown daughter “whose blonde hair has strands of gray intermingled”; yet she still can’t resist the urge to try and shield her from danger.
“… nor will I admit to the fact that / when the car comes to a sudden stop / I have trouble refraining from / throwing my arm across her body, / the only means of child protection / we had in those years before seatbelts.”
Shaughan, who has previously published a number of the poems from “Home Grown” in various journals, also offers some flashes of humor in work such as “And Now In Aisle 4….” in which the dull routine of supermarket shopping is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious, golden couple.
“A young woman, auburn hair piled high / her slim body ensconced in shimmering satin / glided between shelves … Her right hand held the crook’d arm / of a young man, equally grand in military green … As they passed, frazzled mothers halted mid-stride, / grocery lists fluttered to the floor, / carriages rattled to a stop, / and words ran off into silence.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.