BOOKS AND EBOOKS...

THE DOLL WITHOUT A FACE.
NEW POEMS AND REVISIONS BY BRETT RUTHERFORD.

A faceless Iroquois doll is presented to a young boy by his grandmother, along with a wrenching tale of how Native Americans lost children, children their parents, and all, their identities, as the Mingo Indians were driven west out of Pennsylvania. The same grandmother relates a folktale full of warning to the present-day, as playing children are whisked away into the sky by mysterious forces. The boy who grows up to be a poet is charged with keeping these stories as dreams, “until the time of remembering.”

In this collection of 46 new poems and revisions, presented consecutively as they were written in 2018-2019, Brett Rutherford leaps from childhood memories of another set of desperately-poor grandparents (“Out-Home Summers”), to a Medieval Annunciation painting, to a battle of the Napoleonic war set in bombarded cemetery, to stories of the gods and heroes of Greece and Norse/Germanic mythology.

Inevitably, a troubled era intrudes on the poet’s writing, in poems that ask a complacent symphony audience, whose children have not disappeared, whom they voted for; in a hex song for thirteen witches planning a beer-infused punishment for a high-court judge; in a dream-message from frightened animals; in a ballad-style lyric about a partisan-fighter and the woman who loved him; and in a lonely mountaintop vigil, looking down on the horrors of war. One autumnal poem set at a Pennsylvania lake challenges, “Where does one take a stand for life?”

Translations are an important part of this volume, and each has a special urgency. A war narrative by Victor Hugo. A rumination about degenerate empires and their cruelty by Yevgeni Yevtushenko. A political warning by Solon the Athenian. Sad lyrics about being a poet in troubled times by Anna Akhmatova (“Who Cares to Listen to Songs?”) and Ludwig Uhland (“The Poet Who Starved.”)

Love poems, supernatural fantasies, and other word-explosions in this volume show the poet still as mischievous as ever, sitting with Poe on a Manhattan pier, recounting Providence’s urban horrors, a dream of being Dante, trying to fend off love with plasma physics, reflecting on rampant fungus, eavesdropping on the Virgin Mary, and employing sorcery to fight off a persistent vampire.

THE WARNING

I think the animals will come and live among us,
their habitats ruined, their forests burned, their seas
afloat with the litter-tide of our abominations.
It comes in small ways, foretold in dreams: the snake
amid the lettuce leaves: how does one eat
around its coiled length without disturbing it?
Is it a venomous one? — Will it take an egg
if I poise it at one end of the salad bowl,
and, swallowing it, slide off and ignore me?
Why, when I open my wardrobe door,
do two fawns stagger-stumble from it,
their deer-horse voices calling, “Hide us!”?
Why do I awaken, just half the bed my own,
the other half fur-snuggle full of breathing:
a great gray wolf, red-eyed and drooling?
“No need to worry,” his bass voice assures me,
tongue lapping my hand ’twixt double dog fangs.
“As long as I’m here, the others will spare you.”
“Others?” I ask. I sit up in bed and find
amid my clutter of chairs and Chinese, Egyptian
tchotchkes, blocking the view of Renaissance
boy (the enigma-smiling Bronzino print),
a diorama of wild animals on the move: bear cubs,
an eagle and a fox in tug-of-war fight
over a leftover steak from the refrigerator,
dark-mask raccoon faces, opossums peeping
from under the uplifted carpet’s corner,
a raven (not stuffed, a living raven!) a-perch
my bust of Hermes. My foot, in search of slipper,
startles a whippoorwill that hoots at me.
A badger rejoins its den beneath my floorboards
. I am not their food and they are not mine,
but somehow, they will have to be provided for.
They are here for the duration, as the water rises,
the tornadoes whirl, the fracked earth shivers.
It is hard to look into their eyes without shame.

*** ***

THE PLASMA PHYSICIST EXPLAINS

If you want to understand me,
it’s all in the science, really.
I am not like men.
I am not like women.
I am not an animal at all.
I am the fourth state of matter.

The soul of me
is a plasma core,
my heat contained
in vacuum walls
no cry can penetrate.

Swift currents and fields
hold me in check.
My delicate bell
of unprotected truths
must not be touched,

for I am lethal:
I have the sun’s
incarnate eye chained here.
It is all I can do
to hold it in.

Come not too close.
Do not inquire
what burns within.
I have coped too long
with the break of heart
to need a supplement
to my magnetic fields.

Though I bulge out
ionosphere coronas,
and Northern Lights splay
through the bullet holes
of once-attempted affections,
my furies are self-contained.
A detonation was imminent
when someone came too close,
but one look at my lightning
is usually enough of a warning.

Orbit me at a safe distance.
Be warmed by what I generate.
If space and speech
did not restrain your hand,
if any speck of you leapt to my heart
it would become a barren nucleus
chained like the rest of me
into this welded egg of fire.

No need to feel sorry.
I am fine in here. I will last
as long as sunlight, till gravity
calls everything home to null.

This is the 241st publication of The Poet's Press. ISBN: 978-0922558964. 132 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. Published May 2019. $12.95. CLICK HERE to order the paperback from Amazon.

Also available in a PDF e-book edition. Published December 2020. CLICK HERE to order from Payhip.

Version 24 Updated February 24, 2024.