The Sycamore Review's 20th Anniversary issue opens with a brief editorial statement in which Mehdi Okasi appeals to the value of "meaning" in the poems selected. For this issue of the Sycamore Review, it seems "meaning" is often suggestively blurred into "memory," and the epic act of detailing one's intimate memories, the connective tissue on which relationships, stories, and history are constructed may take the place of constructing new meaning or even extricating meaning from the present. The past is where most of these poems dwell, and it does seem as if acts of excavation preclude acts of exploration, that recitation is often favored over the creation of new cognitive associations. Dead deer, missing lovers, unborn children--most of the poems seem to meld into one big, muddy wallow.
A few do stand out, however.
Masin Persina's "Death of a High-Ranking Terrorist" manages to skirt bathos ("blending peace into pain like cream into coffee") with a nonchalance that reflects how accustomed we have become to government-sponsored violence and how disconnected from the actual experience of killing. "...I don't know what governments do/with the bodies they've killed but/his has floated away from my mind's tiny shore." Indeed, it is this "tiny shore," that lends Persina's poem additional heft, with its recognition of our own smallness, our incapacity for comprehension, even as the effects of these actions, these acts of violence, muddy the waters we stand in.
Though Amanda Turner's "What We Are Given," has some pretty and profound moments, it barely scrapes by under a heavy, heavy load of fortune-cookie profundity. Still, "The Japanese maple reddens with premonition" remains a striking line.
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