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  • Between the Moon and Earth
  • Michael T. Young (bio)
Phased II
George Held
Poets Wear Prada
www.pwpbooks.blogspot.com
38 Pages; Print, $12.00
Waging Beauty as the Polar Bear Dreams of Ice
Daniela Gioseffi
Poets Wear Prada
www.pwpbooks.blogspot.com
58 Pages; Print, $15.00

There are objects in our culture so encumbered with symbolism that to write about them is to fight against those meanings. The rose is one. Another is the moon. In his new collection, Phased II, from Poets Wear Prada, George Held tackles the moon a second time. With the first poem, Held strips the moon of that weighty symbolism, telling us it is, "Just hard rock / For the moonstruck." This distinction between the indifferent object and the subjective feeling of the observer allows Held to then engage not only in creating a personal mythology around the moon but to probe the boundaries of meaning itself.

One of the more speculative poems in the collection asks,

What if the moon disappearedand left us bereftof its cyclical luminosity?

Ultimately, the speaker concludes, it wouldn't matter much because "those born after // would never know the difference." In fact, he says, "the poets among them / might be more, er, down-to-earth" Although flippant in tone, the speaker hits upon the imaginative source of our meanings and through it suggests a freedom from dualism. Dualism of terrestrial and celestial desires pervades the collection. In one poem it's expressed as a love for apples and moon.

Heaven is to muncha Winesap

while I watchthe full Harvest Moon.

Although it seems a reconciliation, it's temporary since dualisms by nature are not static and we are natural dualists.

The moon accepts its fatewith serenity,it's we who mourn

The dualism here is between the bare fact of the moon and we who need to find meaning. Our world is weighted with it because it is a projection of our own craving. The speaker in these poems is often wrestling with bare facts against those meanings he creates.

These poems wrap themselves tightly in their words. It may be not only the facility of someone adept in formal poetry as Held is, but also a bracing against the cold and dark, of someone admitting they are "gibbous waning to nil." Few of the poems are more than half a page and there are haiku among them. But even among the longer poems the compression seems to strip its subjects down to essentials. First the moon down to object, and then that object into personal association. These are moments of gazing into the heart of things, not peripheral distractions.

Held's poems are linguistically playful and sometimes enjoy double-meanings, which is appropriate to a collection devoted to the changeable moon. So the speaker of "Menses" says of times when there are two full or new moons in a month,

I'm likely to have two mensesthat month, and why not?my periods as powerful

as the moon's.

Again this circles back to the personal relationship we all have to the moon, this thing that is "just hard rock." The collection explores this hard rock not only as blue moons, black moons, red moons, or harvest moons, but as that personal mythology created in such things as a "Baleful Moon" or "The Broken Moon."

Phased II is a kind of love letter written in compressed forms of observation and meditation. It is a beautiful way to ponder that changeable beauty and come away, as one poem title says it, "Gripped."

Gripped as we are by the moon and George Held's meditations on it, Poets Wear Prada also recently published Daniela Gioseffi's collection Waging Beauty As the Polar Bear Dreams of Ice. These two collections complement each other well. While Held's book takes us into the personal meanings we find in the moon and back to its reality as a bare object, Gioseffi's collection is more about the significance of the earth under our feet, its endangered state at our own hands and how our fate is inextricable from its...

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