Befallen by K. Alma Peterson Befallen
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Propaganda Press is the not-for-profit small press portion of the Alternating Current Arts Co-op that helps writers with an outlet for inexpensive publishing and distributing. They have a variety of chapbooks, and Befallen by K.Alma Peterson seems to be a charming choice, like a cup of tea -- soothing, comforting, interesting. A tiny chapbook, quarter-sized, saddle stapled, with cover artwork by Carolyn Ellingson, Befallen is listed on the Propaganda Press site (http://alt-current.com) as a “Poetry chapbook of nature, abstract moments of life.” That’s true, but there’s so much more to say. Peterson writes about the mysteries of life, stars, constellations, planets, myth, symbols, and mixes it all with the mystery of humanity at its most common -- sister-in-laws, bank tellers, fragile necks, brothers and roses named Barb. I was sold with a quote by Chopin, and the small poem that pays tribute to him. Her poems took a few days to take in, but like small charms on a bracelet, they jangled in my mind while I did chores, wrote lists, drove to the store. Always a good sign.
Her poetry is indeed abstract, and expressionistic. Her modes are consistent; lines that are grooved with spaces that allow room for breath within the line (with a distinct nod to poet Craig Arnold), and a prose poem for good measure. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The New Orphic Review, Perihelion Review, Wicked Alice, ArtWord Quarterly, qarrtssiluni, and Skidrow Penthouse. This chapbook announces Ms. Peterson’s arrival.
Consider Part One of the title poem:
For the world so loved itself coming daily into light
the finish line of any sight beginning over there
where it isn’t such a stretch to think of truth as lightand in so thinking come to see yellow as much a part
as blue when it comes to green a grasshopper stirred up
amid yarrow and thistle disappears for one prismaticblink risen say the sunblind
--“Befallen”
Ms. Peterson is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has educated herself, clearly, and has ended up with a knack for sound. One of her poems “Between Us” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Though these poems are intimate, and there is some autobiographical material, what exists of that is purely for the sake of poetry, as in this excerpt from “Constellation,” the first poem of the book:
I wasn’t meant to be in a family but there I was
between two brothers Rue and Woe
and parents with three reasons to divide
The poet has a fascination with the night sky. “We Will Join Luster and Constellate” sounds sensual and sexy; sexual tension marries with a sadness, a submission, and the sublime. This is one of the finest in this chapbook, with its sound and rhythm and imagery, coupled up with her style and her voice, not quiet, just disquieting enough to dangle in the reader’s mind.
In the odd and quirky “Transitory Parficulates Become I Ching Hexagrams 57 and 59,” word choices such as “frost the floozy,” “darken the beery” and “found in the wavewash” delight as much as they imply intoxication, carelessness and youth. Then, “a mirror begins to spackle,” “magnetic as road dust,” “with peanut butter she presses her grief next utterance ferrous.....sticky with riddance” suggests something altogether different, a hardening, a loss, loss of ability to communicate except in the same incoherent syllables of youth, something iron or age does not take as kindly to, or smile upon.
Though I contemplated a few days on her use of space and form, Ms. Peterson’s poetry has form in the most fun way; it’s whimsical, really, and it’s worth following its trail. Perhaps the most feminine, formal, and seductively rhythmic poem here is her variation on the villanelle, with slant-rhymes, mixed metaphors, metonymy, onomatopoeia, and the poet’s amazing, alternating alliteration in “Undiminished:”
In the shallows the furrowed brain coral reports
its deathwash to the scoured beach sea fans
snapped off sea whips lacy delicate sortsconfirm the incremental cruelty of watercourse
over and against the grooves thinkless pans
wherein our coral brains to shallow resortrockslap foam fringe gathers waveworn
in backchannels while the pendant sea fans
whip delicately and snap the likes of us shorn
who’d leave them in their morgue but of course
we fill our pockets to the sagging end
the furrowed brain coral over eons the corpses
smooth and blacken far-off depositors
clog the Caribbean sink laughing you contend
the snappish whips don’t require a lacy formso against your blistered mouth the sugar calciforms
happily you’ve feasted since cane knows when
our furrowed brains is hallowed ruts of dead coral
snap to the indelicate sea sailwhips the racy sort
--“Undiminished”
The music of this poem is a superb surprise. You can hear the waves, see the foam wash up, feel the sea fans snap, smell the salt in the air, and somewhere within the sound of this scene, people are making love.
Titles of her poems are evocative and playful. They include “The Squid Reconsiders its Approach,” “Relationship With Picnic Motifs,” “Light Metal Romance,” “Inner Ear Math,” and “Material Fabrications of the Wooly Bully,” and the mournful and melancholy “Stand of Pines Admits No Gust Is Too Sorrowful or Pitched.”
Finally, mentioned before, her poem in praise of Chopin continues with the style and form prevalent in this book, and it captures something authentic of the pianist -- his weaknesses and strengths, as well as those of the narrator. It’s worth spotlighting, and is a perfect finale for a review on the first chapbook of K. Alma Peterson. Hopefully, she’s got more of the same elegant music and whimsy to offer us, soon.
“--silence -- you could scream --
there would still be silence”
-- Frederic Chopin
About-face in the weather a pale man in need of luxury
stiffens and begins to cough among the palms and figsPicture him partaking of the whole plant hood-shaped
purple sepals
flowers of a dark blue color in erect clusters
glossy leaves deeply divided numerous stamens at the
mouth
lie depressed a single seed in each carpel
an undeveloped fruit despite their anthers angled toward
the coming beesIt might be natural to picture his companion roughly
kindled
building them a latewood fire that smoked outwardly
I tell my piano things I used to tell you
While she took the auspices of trees he stationed
himself
you may imagine me, without gloves or haircurling, as
pale as ever,
in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gatesher adversarial bone lodged and cochlear color of a note
darkening like heartwood in the drying room the
spiral grain
adaptive of the rocky cliffsLet them guess why in a quiet setting named for and
stemming
from that stray religioso as he clears a path betweenindulgent thoughts one note would flourish in the mind-
parade stir in him a kind of come-upon doublethe way a medium enters her own voice loop as it’s
ringing off
the rim the bowl of water she implored fill her inner
mindwith spiral unadulterated nerve
--“The Teller Has Her Chopin Well in Trance”
Reviewed by Kerri Buckley.
Poets’ Quarterly | October 2009.