Louise Glück opens the issue with three poems. The first, ‘Thrush’ is one of my favourites in the magazine, and leads on to two poems both titled ‘Persephone the Wanderer.’ In these poems Glück is asking the reader to re-engage with the myth, to re-examine its implications, and the characters involved. Persephone comes across as a victim of her mother. “The terrible reunions in store for her / will take up the rest of her life.” Later the poet is more explicit: “in the tale of Persephone / which should be read / as an argument between the mother and the lover - / the daughter is just meat.” Demeter is not the simple grieving mother in version two. As Glück points out, she is a god and could have had a thousand children, and yet she only has one, and would willingly destroy the things that grow on the earth in her grief. She hauls her daughter out of death again and again. This is hardly a healthy representation of a mother-daughter relationship. However, these poems connect with the real world too, on a psychological level. And for me, the last three verses of the second version of ‘Persephone the Wanderer’ are just stunning. John Rybicki’s ‘Say My Name’ is a lyrical prose poem that runs almost like a stream of consciousness. Courtney Angela Brkic, the author of one of my favourite short story collections of this year, gives us a beautifully simple poem, ‘Hotel Bed’. And Brooks Haxton’s ‘Our Bedroom Window Plastered Thick with Ice’ is one of the standout works among the TriQuarterly poetry.

The nineteenth century Italian writer, Giacomo Leopardi, is represented by four poems. These are long elegant works and I particularly liked ‘The Recollections’ which reflected Leopardi’s experience of illness, and the way our childhood dreams do not take into account the things that can happen along the way to throw us off our desired paths. This is a long, four page poem, and yet it held my attention all the way through. The poet’s other works were equally outstanding. From ‘The Solitary Thrush’, ‘The Evening of the Holiday’ through to ‘The Calm after the Storm’. Leopardi was a major Italian writer and it’s great to see his work translated in a modern literary journal.

Wislawa Szymborska’s ‘The Courtesy of the Blind’ is another of my favourite poems from this magazine. Translated from the original Polish it illustrates the visual nature of language. What do dawns, rainbows, a child’s yellow jacket mean to someone who has never seen them? But the blind listeners are courteous, they smile and applaud. “One of them even comes up / with a book turned wrongside out / asking for an unseen photograph.”

I also like the work of another Polish poet, Bronislaw Maj, while fellow Pole, Ryszard Krynicki’s ‘What Good Luck’ looks to the Holocaust in a haunting poem about two survivors: “and we remember our old teachers / and girls now living only in our hearts / and the unceasing clicking of their shoes…”

Other poems I’d like to mention - to be honest there are so many good ones, but here is my own roll call: Ron Slate’s ‘One Firefly’, Jim Harrison’s ‘Memorial Day’, John Skoyles ‘In the Radiation Oncology Waiting Room’, John Bensko’s ‘Henry Wirz, November 1865’, the prose poetry of Carl Phillips, and two by Stephen Dobyns, ‘The Sacrifice’ and ‘Three Christs of Ypsilanti. And let’s not forget Adam Zagajewski’s ‘Copied from Notes and Envelopes,’ another work translated from Polish.

The fiction side of the magazine is every bit as strong. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s story ‘Creep’ is one of the best stories I’ve read out of all the small press reviews this quarter. Beatrice and Calvin live in the old servants rooms at the top of their parents’ house. They like to play games. Sometimes Beatrice presses one of the buzzers in the downstairs rooms for summoning servants and Calvin will come. But there are other games, and Calvin likes to play cat burglar. The house itself is almost a character in the story. The parents meanwhile are voices in the distance, except at the end when we finally see the father. The reader is wrapped up in the children’s world (though it’s hard to say how old they are - Beatrice seems to be in her teens). A stranger telephones and Beatrice answers, thinking it’s a friend of her father’s. They get chatting and she realises she doesn’t know this man at all. The man calls her again and again. Only Calvin in the end can see the threat the man poses, stepping in to put a stop to things. The author has created memorable characters and a self-contained world, and Calvin in particular is a wonderful creation.

‘The Dead of Night’ by John Dufresne is another first class story. There’s something dreamlike about this work. A man is driving through the night, dying to pull over and get some sleep. But circumstances continually thwart his attempts at rest. Some of the incidents are slightly surreal - like the loveseat lying across the road at the beginning. They’re like incidents in a dream. And the story weaves a spell around the reader. Dufresne keeps the reader engaged right to the very end.

Mark Slouka’s ‘Dominion’ continues the high quality fiction. An octogenarian man is suddenly confronted with the reality of his own mortality. Coyotes howling in the night and the sight of one passing with a cat hanging from its mouth haunt him. Lying in bed, he sometimes thinks he can’t hear his wife’s breathing anymore and shakes her awake in panic. He mulls over the past - his youth, his time at the newspaper office, the sex he used to have with his wife. When he was younger, he thought he would come to terms with death, come to understand the reality of it with age. But that hasn’t happened. Fortunately his wife is more practical and it is she in the end who helps break the fear, though she never realises it. Slouka’s story and his characters stay in the mind after reading.

Ellen Litman’s ‘About Kamyshinskiy’ follows Russian expatriates in the US. There are a few threads to this story, as different characters’ stories interweave. Coming to America has ultimately not brought these people into the heart of the American dream. Relationships break up, people fall ill with cancer and die. Children resent their parents. As one character notes, the US has given them the space for these things to happen - for marriages to break up, etc. Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski’s ‘God’s Country’ has a character who can raise the dead. He is a Mexican-American with Native American ancestry and he has discovered the ability to revive dead animals. He and his Mexican immigrant friends skip school and go round the streets looking for animals to revive. Eventually a girl finds out about their activities and asks them to save her brother who has overdosed. The brother turns out to be one of the local thugs, but the boys save him anyway. The resurrected youth turns over a new leaf and gets a respectable job, only to get killed by accident in a shooting. The gang of boys breaks up, going their own ways. ‘God’s Country’ is an engaging story, and the downbeat ending reflects the fact that for these boys the glory days are over, replaced with the more mundane concerns and responsibilities of the adult world.

Of the other stories, ‘Paradise in a Cup’ by Keith Scribner is worth a mention. The narrator’s wife has had a headache for fifteen months. The doctors have been unable to find the cause and the woman is reduced to an extremely limited existence. Threading through this are the narrator’s memories of a girl he once dated and the time he stayed with her parents, when her mother was dying. It’s a time that haunts him because he ultimately took off and left this girl in order to go on a backpacking trip which he could have put off another few weeks or months. Again, this is a story that stayed with me after reading it, and the flashback sections are particularly vivid.

The other prose pieces - Heather A. Slomski’s flash fiction works and Ann Beattie’s ‘Tending Something’ - and are also well written. There’s also an essay by Carlo Rotella: ‘Three Landscapes, With Gamblers’, which looks into casinos, gambling and gamblers and contains the memorable line: “That was back when casinos were still concentrated in Las Vegas and Atlantic City and not yet generally regarded as a viable alternative to the welfare state.”

TriQuarterly is a first class literary journal, offering the reader the very best in contemporary writing. I was particularly impressed by the number of Polish writers translated in this issue. It’s great to see a commitment to international writing. This is a magazine that all lovers of poetry and prose should check out. It is without question one of the best magazines in this quarter’s small press reviews.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.