Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 49

I. Four Poefs: Promise and Playfulness THE CAVE PAINTER By Mary Dougherty Automatic Press. 52 pp. $4 STEPPING INTO A FIELD By Robert Spiegel Automatic Press. 52 pp.

$4 SEVERE CHARM By Jon Gill BentSey Automatic Press 52 pp. $4 By Miriam Sagan -1" V't A vf Jon Gill Bentley's work is drawn more from the shape of the mind than from the shape of the land. This abstraction is both his strength and weakness. At times, the reader of Severe Charm may feel hopelessly lost in the poems. And it can be difficult to locate the poet's actual experience and meaning in his maze of words.

However, Bentley can show poetic power, particularly in the long sequence "Toot Suite: Lines For The Music Of Dreams." The suite, in 21 parts, has a cumulative power, despite its abstraction. In "The Rented Room of The Skin," for example, "A dream of utter silence" moves convincingly into a scene of "the empty skull-white rented room." In these poems the imagery is more consistent and the overall effect more convincing. Dougherty, Spiegel and Bentley have different voices but share an important characteristic: They all succeed when they use their own visions and experiences and they all fail when they rely on abstracted notions about poetry. And although they are not yet in full maturity or authority as poets, the work of all three bears reading. Automatic Press itself needs to develop stronger design and production values to attract a wider audience.

Still, the work of Dougherty, Spiegel and Bentley makes a varied and interesting introduction to Automatic Press. Miriam Sagan is a poet who lives in Santa Fe. Barbaraellen Koch Small press publications often provide a vital forum, particularly for new poetry. Such ventures, however, can run the danger of being cliquish or simply mediocre. The three new poetry collections from Automatic Press all show some skill and promise, although none of them is an undiscovered gem.

The most solid is Mary Dougherty's The Cave Painter. Dougherty concentrates on the staples of contemporary poetry family, landscape, art but has her own voice. And her poetry unites inner and outer experience, combining imagination and observation. Dougherty fails only when she relies on the too easy turn of phrase, on the abstract notion of poetry. A line like "Love isn't a poem in the head" seems too self-conscious and forced.

By contrast, Denise Chavez A LOVER'S QUARREL WITH AMERICA By Gene Frumkin Automatic Press. 53 pp. $4 They all succeed when they use their own visions. By Stanley Noyes The first notable thing about Gene Frurnkin's fine new book of poems is its format. Frumkin has written across the page turned sideways, the length of the page.

In some poems, "A Good Story," for Beyond Ethnic Tales To Universal Appeal THE LAST OF THE MENU GIRLS By Denise Chavez Arte Publico Press. 190 pp. $8.50 By Eugenio Garcia In her first book, short stories connected by character and setting, Denise Chavez captures the flavors of a sleepy New-lexico town. Chavez's particularly feminine view of life among Spanish-speaking New Mexicans is alternately amusing, revealing, bathetic; her female characters are well-focused, occasionally naive but never weak. The title story introduces Rocio Esquibel, a hospital menu girl who daydreams of beauty and fame and dreams of "loving women." It is among sickness, death and despair that Rocio learns most about life.

Her observations of hospital characters are precise, and she rarely allows sentiment to soften the edges of the old women and men who have become children in diapers, waited on, fed and nursed in their straitjacket beds. In "The Closet," Rocio and her sister take turns looking at a luminescent holy picture in the darkness of a hall closet. She spends most of the story in the closet of her mind. "The Closet" is the tightest, liveliest chapter of Rocio's life because so much is revealed. The tactile emotions come out naturally, persuasively.

The closet is simultaneously a metaphor for security, loneliness and a vault rife with childhood memories. Rudolfo Anaya's introduction welcomes Chavez to "the ranks of writers who are rounding out the parameters of Chicano literature" an intended accolade that unfairly limits Chavez to that rather puny and fortuitous genre. Chavez's interpretations of the Spanish-speaking community hold water, but the universal appeal of her feminine voice is more important than her regional, ethnic interest. The Last of the Menu Girls does not speak about the "hard life" of a Chicana. Instead it explores the mysteries of a childhood of daydreams and ambition.

Eugenio Garcia, raised in Santa Fe, is working on a novel. example, the lines extend eight inches. The form fits the poet. The principal quality of Frurnkin's poetry is the subtle play of his intelligence upon subjects that are serious, even profound. The unconscious, sex, death, love, history, time, aging, meaning or its lack, malefemale relationships, social criticism, God all of these, and more, are dealt with in poems whose surfaces are playful but which, in their totality, reverberate to the reader's sonar.

Despite its essential seriousness, there is nothing heavy about Frurnkin's poetry. The key word is "playful." These poems delight because of their humor, because of surprises given off like static electricity from line after line of original language and imagery (not to mention rhythm and assonance). For example: The wordy dandy who so charmingly confronts his image in glass imagines himself a crisp lettuce And, in "Sediments," the poem's persona stares "at his teeth which remind him of baby marshmal-lows But the poet writes out of more than his intelligence and learning. Several of the best poems here are expressions of sexuality and portray both the comedy and the delight of sex. Sometimes, notes the poet, sex may even coincide with love, as in an especially admirable poem, "Embrace in an Open Field." Even though A Lover's Quarrel with America is modestly printed by Automatic Press from typescript, someday it will be a collector's item.

Stanley Noyes is a Santa Fe poet. Dougherty is at her strongest when combining a carefully observed ordinary life with heightened language: In the next room the baby sighs faint as a wasp Shirt pressed damp to skin, she sprawls and growls. Her small teeth gnash at my heart. Here, the leap at the end, where emotions become concrete, gives the poem a particular authority. Robert Spiegel's Stepping Into A Field is a less consistent performance than Dougherty's.

His shorter, more purely lyric poems, are his strongest work. A charming example of this is "Cowboy Boots," whose last stanza reads: My feet are Southwestern, comfortable as an entire region, soaked in whiskey, waiting for the hot dust to settle down like rain. However, in his longer poems Spiegel tends to rely too much on clichdd or stale language. Phrases like "worn hands," "warm mouth" and "beaded with sweat" do not refresh the reader. And, like Dougherty, Spiegel overuses certain abstract words like "love," "death" and "poetry." Both Dougherty and Spiegel draw on the specific landscape of the Southwest and of New Mexico.

The reader finds Jemez, Placitas and The Downs at Santa Fe in their work. By contrast, the landscapes of Severe Charm are more internal and abstract. May 6, 1986 IMPACT i Albuquerque Journal Magazine 1 1.