New poetry from Carla Stein
September 24th, 2024
Review by Ken Cathers
Sometimes one is able to get a sense of a writer’s quality by what they don’t write. The absence of cliché, melodrama and sentimentality, for instance. Carla Stein (at right) is such a writer. Her recent book of poetry, Zero Hour (Silver Bow Publishing $34.79), is rich in craft and style. Her language clean and precise, her imagery sharp. There are opening lines that pull you in: “my grandmother does not visit my sleep, your winter whitecaps etch my dreams.”
Always the sense of the spoken voice. An assured cadence that says she knows what she is talking about and knows how to say it. A voice not brash or arrogant but quiet, confident. There is in her writing a sense of the past that has not faded away. The harsh simple lives of families gone before. The life skills of harvesting, sewing, canning. The recipes and determination handed down. Nothing ground breaking here but it is handled with decency and respect. But there are poems written from broader perspectives. One of the most remarkable being a poem entitled “Lenin Lives in La Grange.” It chronicles the life of a fabled Aunt E., a staunch communist, who thought she saw FBI men shadowing her everywhere, resisted all the rich temptations of a decadent western life style to pursue a life of political activism.
The poem is of interest not just for its content but for its style. Stein’s voice and diction so suited to her poems of personal history and reflection suddenly changes and becomes one of oratory and harangue. It is the public voice of poets such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. It is not a voice she resorts to often but it bespeaks a flexibility of language and tone she is capable of wielding. In the same collection she is able to create a small tanka of delicate beauty such as “haze.” “rain, on January mountains, fog hides snow, memories blur your face,” Stein writes. Always the right pitch and voice for the subject.
As well as being a fine poet Stein is also an accomplished visual artist who works in various media such as oil, acrylic and watercolour. Although remarkable it is not a detail I wanted to lead with. Seemed too easy to draw comparisons between her visual work and her writing. Look, she has the painter’s eye for detail, the sharply defined image, the right depth of field, the perfectly framed vignette. All of that is true, of course. But what struck me was how elements of her poems resembled her graphic art in other ways. The components are balanced, connected, form a proportional whole. The poems never seem rushed or incomplete. There is a complexity and subtlety to them that invites rereading. And always the calm measured voice. The voice of someone who is good company and deserves to be heard.
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