Masks, Mirrors, and Poetry from In Posse Review

You may not know this, but your humble editor is also a writer. Your humble editor writes poetry. This is not to say that your humble editor gets any of his poetry published. Some of your humble editor's poetry got rejected just yesterday, in fact, and by a very fine journal, too.
But I keep drinking from the well of poetry, because the water tastes so damn fine. And here's a fresh draught for you: The all-poetry "Mask & Mirror" issue of Web del Sol's In Posse Review has just hit the cyber-stands. The poems in this issue range in style and content from the mundane to the fantastic to the imagistic, written by veteran poets with decades of experience and by new authors receiving their first publication.
Shawn Pittard's "Fall Stream" starts with an image both concrete and fanciful, and continues in the same vein:

There’s a door in the bottom of the freestone stream
at the bend below the railroad grade.
On my birthday, I dared to open it, figuring
I’d lost most of what I had to lose by fifty.
Under the door, the water was drinkable,
like it was when I was a boy scout.
Crayfish still crawled everywhere.
A speckled trout swam by
with my lost hook in its mouth.
My front tooth sparkled in the gravel bed
near the piece of my right knee the orthopedist removed.

The simple, declarative sentences are complicated by deliberate line breaks and strong verbs. The combination of clear description and fantastic imagery makes us feel as if we're reading a fairy tale in the form of a particuarly well-written poem.
In "Tomasii and the Wise Serpent, Ourdyss," Jeff Miles recounts the experience of falling asleep while a grandfather tells a bedtime story about seven men who get chased into a cave:

In my dream, the seven found footholds
cut into the hidden cave’s near-vertical shaft.
Tomasii led them downward. The darkness
was complete. Then came the serpent’s voice:
I am Ourdyss. Who disturbs my sleep? Sleep,
said my grandfather’s voice. The seven men
groped along the cold black road, arms
stretched out before them. Ourdyss, said the voice
out of the darkness. My grandfather
said nothing, dead these forty years. He visits
my dreams, drinks from a red goblet, never speaks,
though sometimes I ask him questions. I know
he would not tell me what happens next. As always,
he would start over again from the beginning.

I love the palpable sense of adventure in this poem, but that youthful fun plays out in counterpoint against a sad adult wisdom that knows about loss and death. As I read this poem, I found myself as interested in the plight of Tomasii and his followers as in the relationship between the narrator and the grandfather; and by the end, the two threads are woven inextricably together. Poems like this make life itself seem like an adventure, a real one, whose final chapter is still unwritten.
After examining two poems with a strong narrative thread, I now want to look at a poem made of enigmatic images and metaphors. The title of Luisa Igloria's poem is also its first line:

At night, the sky's a parasol studded with points--
Its steel ribs retract, taking the woman's earrings,
her filigreed comb, the agate necklace
which she hung from a cloud's lowest branches.

Her arms grow heavy, so heavy, oh.

This is not a poem about life, or Life, or Death, or aging or sex or any of the other things poems are so often "about." Instead it uses arresting images to convey a feeling and a mood and a savor. But these are not static, unchanging moods; those steel ribs do retract, taking the stars away in the form of earrings and comb and necklace; yet the conflation of stars with jewelry does not leave the sky behind, as our attention is then directed to "a cloud's lowest branches." So the images move us from one side of a metaphor to the other and back again, and we still feel that we've never left the world drawn for us in that first line. This is a fine, fine poem.
There's a lot more where that came from, so click on over to In Posse Review, put on your mask, look in the mirror, and enjoy.