My Life On Little River

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Comment on this article My Life on Little River by Phibby Venable 48 poems, 68 pages, $12.00 Quill and Parchment Press 2357 Merrywod Drive Suite A Los Angeles, CA 90046 Reviewed by Ed Bennett Water has been a part of poetic imagery since pre Homeric times. The palpable movement of a river lends itself to the passage of time and its rich aquatic life has become a symbol of regeneration or rebirth. Phibby Venable's collection of poems, My life on Little River has elements of all of these facets of aquatic imagery but she takes it further, allowing Little River to be a character and to pose a continuum of time and place. The River and the characters in each poem are related through the river and through their common experiences of love, disappointment and the beauty of their surroundings. While I have been reading Ms. Venable's work for the past year, it has been as discrete poems, each a separate story, each a discrete creative gem. This is the first time I've seen her work collected and themed and the effect is no less exciting. A lesser poet would have lumped the poems together with some thought to the placement with their eye toward two or three anchor poems with the rest placed around them. This is not the case with My Life on Little River. The placement is somewhat reminiscent of Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology but instead of interleaving the stories of the characters, Ms. Venable interleaves the emotions of the characters against the backdrop of the ever present, ever changing river. The title poem for this collection, My Life on Little River sets both the character of the river and the tone of the poems that follow. Lovingly, a relationship is set between narrator and the River: "Everything I hold dear, Little River, you have tossed in a bowl of yellow, or laced in blue greens and gray, as softly as the fish eggs, " And yet there is also a foreshadowing of the pain and disappointments of life with the ending lines: "My words drop into your clay banks, red with my wounds. Your rain voice leads me to sleep." The relationships between characters is stark and honest, as with One Night Stand where the narrator is making love with a loud fan rasping in the background. One is led to believe that this is simply another description of a chance occurrence acting on the narrator until the final lines "Having heard nothing else so far, I clung, to the constancy of deafness, like a redemption, but mumbled something back, you could not hear, just to keep you in the game." Do not expect a moral to her poems or a happy ending, for that matter. Life goes on with each emotion played in front of the curtains. In The Boat That Ran Away there are again two characters in a relationship and the river's actions expose the friction between them. The boat slips its moorings and drifts away and the narrator is blamed for picking a poor site for the tie up. The boat is later found by the manager of the boat rental, because he "had a reputation for being responsible". The narrator blames herself for losing the boat and the accompanying blame excoriation yet discloses her truer feeling that there was irresponsibility for the relationship. There is a layered effect in this self examination and throughout the collection the reader is given a long look at the action and its consequences followed by a deeper truth that the narrator is aware of. Not every relationship is failing, however. In You Are My Red Sky the narrator sings a morning canticle to her lover who is an Apollo - like creature to her "benighted eyes". "I search you for a hero and a priest.... You are my exploration of red heat. You are the morning fire at early light." Surely, this is what lovers should sing to one another and there is no stark disclosure of imperfection. My Life on Little River reads like a collage of experience connected to the geography and the emotional inspiration of Little River. As mentioned, the coherence around both the character, actions and discoveries of Little River bind this collection of poems into a creative work rarely found in "nature poetry". Mary Oliver has said with no little chagrin that people refer to her as a Nature Poet while she sees herself as a Poet. Readers might try to do the same with this work, pigeon holing it into a convenient subject heading. This would be inadvisable. The poems in My Life On Little River deal with a universe of actions and emotions bordered by the river. It is a complex amalgam of love, hurt, dreams and a pure affection for the people and the creatures that inhabit this universe. Most importantly, Ms. Venable uses the River as a lens for all of us to look through, finding truth in the large and small things in God's creation. This is no mean feat. Editor's Note: This collecton of poetry is the first in a series of "by subscription" poetry books from Quill and Parchment Press. My Life on Little River will be printed in a limited edition. Please order right away to reserve a copy and to ensure that we can continue to support our poets. © 2001- 2011, Quill & Parchment Productions All contributions are copyright of the respective authors

Author's Note

this book includes a poem to W.k. Kortas, a great mentor and inspiration to me.

Reviews

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...oh cool i love meeting people who have books out. Nice job.

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Oh Wow this is wonderful. I am so happy for you.

[Emily B]

I'm extremely happy for you!