The Donner Party, one of the darkest episodes from the American West, has been a subject of legend and morbid fascination for a hundred and fifty years. The group of settlers, lead by George Donner, broke a trail through the Wasatch Mountains with great difficulty, and reached the Sierra Nevadas with few supplies left and snow on the passes. Shana Youngdahl's Donner: A Passing, (Finishing Line Press) gives us ice-cold glimpses of the expedition, particularly in its grizzly moments of starvation, murder and cannibalism. A poetic cycle in 25 parts, Donner begins in Missouri but quickly crosses the Rockies and the salt fields, rolling towards disaster. Youngdahl mixes facts with images, feelings and ideas in roughly-broken free verse. We see both the trail and the mindset of the emigrants upon it:
They walk southward. Eddy avoids new meat, until near death, the party feeds him. He continues to lead. Pulp of feet where toes once were. Sudden signs of favor: snow crusted, three feet deep. Oaks appear among thinning pines.
The narrative aspect of the poems are rather sketchy, with only a nominal heroine in Tasmen Donner; the other names appear only episodically, and so a little background on the Donner Party would be advised before attempting these poems. (PBS produced an excellent documentary some years ago.) Riding by train over the Donner Pass in 2005, I looked over the lake where the party made their desperate winter camp-it was, like Youndahl's poetry, chillingly beautiful.
Closer to home, Austen poet Tim J Brennan marked his fiftieth year on earth with the chapbook Fifty White Stones (Pudding House Press). His reflections turn from aging parents to past love affairs and poems that twine nature with philosophy, like "Deciduous":
We heal, simply, others, like leaves fallen next to a bare tree stripped by naked season
Fifty White Stones is a grab-bag of poetry, and not all of the pieces work, but at his best Brennan has the wonderful ability to free-fall away from the subject of his poems (dancing the minuet, visiting e.e. cumming's house, his mother's love of candles), throwing out glittering fragments of verse like this haiku: "Listening to you / last night with brown hair still damp: / a lovely word bath."
Farther east, in Ronkonkoma, New York, Rob Plath practices in what might be called the hard-boiled school of poetry. Though mentored by Alan Ginsberg, Plath's Tapping Ashes in the Dark (Lummox Press) seems more influenced by Bukowski or Frank O'Hara. The subjects of the chapbook, in order of the frequency of their appearance, are: smoking, Plath's angry father, and his role as an underground poet ("I am the poet laureate / of the landfills" he warns us in the first lines of the book). Plath's offhand poems hold a strange fascination-perhaps because his gritty brand of truth is honest without being confessional. He is a figure waiting in a car, smoking, as he describes in "Feeling Lucky", while:
sitting at a red light tapping the ashes out into the dark I think for a moment of all the men spending their first night in their graves
- Joel Van Valin