Title:
Whose Cries Are Not Music
By:
Linda Benninghoff
Genre: Poetry, Trade Paper,
6X9
Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)
www.lummoxpress.com
Pages: 108
ISBN: 978-1-929878-95-6
Publishing Date: Feb. 2011
Retail: $15 + Shipping To pay by check, choose appropriate amount and make
check out to Lummox Hear Linda read the title poem
here. COMMENTS Lao Tzu
said, "Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it."
As a chef, I've always loved that, and as a poet, I am always mindful of the
edge between the toasted and the burnt. Each poem is like a nation, influence
spreading far beyond its words. Evocation is the best measure of it. So many
collections try too hard. This has a more open-eyed, careful, unforced feeling
to it. It is stunning sometimes how Linda's poems achieve their flavor without a
lot of complicated verbiage or reference to other works. The way she weaves
landscape, animals, the artifacts of our lives, and emotions is actually an
intricate achievement, but in the end, there are poems that make the "I" of the
prose a consequence of the world, with a strange belonging, even in sadness, a
reverse solipsism, as though the world in fact thinks us up.
USA $18
Can/Mex $20
World $25
and send to Lummox Press c/o PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733
From the introduction by Jim Knowles
In Benninghoff’s Whose Cries Are Not Music she asks “Don’t we in dying reveal who we are?” With a steadily dealt hand, somewhere east, in a “tinseled diner” she reveals fortune’s deck of splintered seasons; the stray surprise: deer’s blank eyes, a summer gull’s pierced solitude. These poems “shine brightly. They take the stars away.”
Maureen Alsop
Linda Bennninghoff is scrupulously attentive to the underpinnings of living one’s life, whether she’s watching gulls filling the empty sky like numberless dreams (“Gulls”) or capturing the isolation and tenuous connections of relationships, to absorb the many facets of the human condition and give it back to the world with lyric precision. Her work runs wide and deep.
Barbara Southard
This most appealing
Benninghoff offering will catch you unaware when you think you know where she's
going (and where you've been) only to discover she has the ability to make being
vulnerable cathartic and being honest sheer joy.
Peggy Eldridge-Love, author of You Beckon
EXCERPTS
A few poems from the book
Snowy Winter
I remember
the praying silence
of the pots in the kitchen
after I washed them.
In April, when we went jogging
you ordered
mango juice from the new
concession.
"Don’t worry about the future,
I can always take care of you." you said.
"I feel so frightened when I am alone."
You live by yourself now
in a house with pale furniture.
I live in a place where
the ice closes in on me
in winters which are like a world shutting down.
My Christmas cards to you show
pictures of reindeer,
children opening packages
under trees,
skaters at Rockefeller Center.
their faces red like apples.
Ode to the Sea
after Neruda
rivers mouth you.
kiss you with silver
fish joining.
Whatever is unknown—
that you are.
Fishermen, boats rocking,
dawn smearing red paint over blue,
the evening like a lost cat meowing
for water and food.
I heave myself up against you,
swim.
And you are like a crow cawing
its hidden words
on branches, sky.
Whose Cries Are Not Music
I come down to the dark, torn pond
to hear the geese
whose cries are not music, but
catch in my ears:
the cry of wild birds
who can make only one sound
and put into that sound
wing-beat, empty marshes,
clouds and their quests
for home.
They have traveled miles,
are far from earth
when I hear them,
but I think of a child
who has no words
and will cry without stopping.
as if everything
must begin in pain.
I can spend my whole life
healing it,
but find in the end
that love itself contains pain
though I do not give up feeling it,
as today I do not give up
hearing these geese
whose cries are constant,
and I pause
as their shrillness softens
and the light fades
and the night comes with silence.