Review of Surrounded: Living With Islands
By Prof. Russ Stratton, Founding Editor, Plainsongs
The first edition of Surrounded:
Living with Islands, a poetry anthology edited by Sheryl Clough (Write Wing
Publishing, 2012), featured this epigraph by Sappho: “If you are squeamish, /
do not prod the beach rubble. In this little collection, the prodding is done
lightly and in three parts, “Ebb,” “Slack,” and “Flow.”
Ms. Clough, herself a talented poet,
tells us in her general introduction that islands do not always become Edens
for those who choose them, yet I find most of the work quietly and carefully
celebrates the experience as neither Heaven nor Hell. One, “Turtle
Island” (William Carpenter), works as a creation myth while another, the
prize-winning “Making Islands” (Henry Hughes), explores our life cycle via some
interesting erotic imagery, finally welcoming death. Among the other
poets, islands from Hawai’i to Ireland offer inspiration or in some cases
desperation.
As one might expect, keen observation,
particularly of nature, seems as vital to these poems as the characters who
populate them. Clough’s poets always make us see rather than telling us
what to see, or as the great Japanese dramatist, Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote,
“It is essential that one not say of a thing that ‘it is sad,’ but that it be
sad of itself.”
It’s an original concept, this little
magazine, well-crafted and occasionally self-conscious in a “literary” fashion,
but it holds together exactly as Ms. Clough promises, each poem anchored to the
book “in which readers may float, motor, flounder or swim from one exotic
shoreline to the next.”
