Marie Lecrivain reviews HUNGER CROSSING by Larry Colker and Danielle Grilli

"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived." - Margaret Mitchell

A poet cannot be a poet without writing about love: lost love; unrequited love; love gone wrong; hot, steamy animalistic sex. Even those poets (and there are many) who eschew the actual experience will inevitably find the lure of extrapolating on any of the above-mentioned scenarios too strong to resist. In Hunger Crossing (copyright 2006 Larry Colker and Danielle Grilli), Colker, and Grilli have come together to intersect their shared experiences (though not necessarily with each other), of what love has done to them and how it has refined and reformatted their poetic psyches.

Colker's concrete poetry filters the longing for love through the lenses of regret ("Apology"), Celtic animus ("Legend"), and entomology ("Fornix"). This is an almost perfect foil to Grilli's sensuous ("Kiss"), universal feminist ("Language of My Body"), though abstractive poesy ("Miss Bliss"). As for the intersections, they are not so apparent at first, but they are there, if one is willing to seek them out by sorting through the poetry in a deliciously random fashion. This is possible because of the actual physical appearance of Hunger; a small post-industrial folio that contains 17 poems printed in sepia tones on semi-transparent heat treated paper decorated with extreme close-ups of eyes, wheat stalks, and geometric shapes. The clever avant-garde packaging places Hunger in the "hard to shelve next to other volumes of poetry in one's own library" category, but renders this collaboration impossible to ignore, both in form and content.

Back to the matter at hand - the aforementioned intersections of longing expressed in the poets' work. Take for example Colker's poem, "LYRIC," an impassioned plea for the opportunity to be dragged out of a humdrum existence to experience a fleeting moment of mind-blowing ecstasy, and not just to hold onto the moment, but to come back to re-live it:

O MISBEGOTTEN FOOL OF INKLINGS

IN POOLS OF INK

THINGS CANNOT BE CLEAR...

SUCH A MESS OF HORMONES

MORE OR LESS BECALMED

IN A MONTH OF DOG DAYS

PICK ME UP, I SAYS,

TAKE ME OUT OF THESE STICKS

FOR A CHANCE TO

TOSS

AND STEM

THE STEMSTORMY

OUTBACKS OF YOUR

EYES TO MAKE THEM

SWIM & ROLL SNAKE

EYES OR HARD SEX

O I WILL SAILAWAY

SWAY

IN THE CRAFT OF YOUR LOVE,

HP HIGH AND MIGHTY AND

SWELL SWELL SWELL

TILL THE MOON EXPLODES

A WHOLE NEW SET OF STARS.

AND WHEN ETERNITY ARRIVES

WITH ITS ARTIFICIAL RESURRECTION KIT

I WILL RETURN AGAIN AND AGAIN

TO YOUR EMBRACE,

UNTIL LIKE CHARIOTS

THE SWEET LOWING COWS SWINGS BY

TO CARRY ME HOME.

Though the longing for completion in "LYRIC" is articulated in more physical terms, the longing for completion and the desperate anticipation of waiting is delicately expressed in Grilli's poem "Silent":

How to explain

Cracked Bark

Tongue of Jasmine

Fist of Sun struck blindly

off rusted pipe

bleached abalone

Silence

I await creak of door

carriage of kiss

gold eyes

to this terrestrial eden

hidden beyond rush of traffic

heights of exacted stone

Only a whispered echo

Only a foggy distance

My Love

we gather small gods

to our fingertips

Praying

One wants; one yearns; sometimes one get what one wants, and then looks back over the course of one's actions to discover that the moments of actual wanting and desire have been wrought sweeter through the fog of memory. Hunger Crossing is a successful collaboration that honestly communicates this deeply felt, universal concept. And on a more personal note, Hunger would make a lovely and affordable gift to non-poets as a way to introduce them to some well crafted contemporary writing.

- review by Marie Lecrivain, executive editor of poeticdiversity

Bios: Larry Colker's poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, RATTLE, Spillway, ONTHEBUS, Solo, Pearl, Cider Press Review, Blue Satellite and elsewhere in print; online at The Cortland Review, King Log, nthposition, Poeticdiversity and Poetry Super Highway; and in anthologies from Tebot Bach, Valley Contemporary Poets, Arroyo Arts Collective and poeticdiversity. In 2003 he published his chapbook What the Lizard Knows: New and Selected Poems. In 2005 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Danielle Grilli is a poet and visual artist, and a former poetry editor for the Muse Apprentice Guild. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and webzines including The Pedestal, Unlikely Stories, small spiral notebook, and Big Bridge.