NOTE: Due to a tech glitch, my blog was down for 24 hours and when it was restored, this post had been deleted. Though I was not responsible for this development, I certainly regret that anyone looking for this review found themselves stymied. In addition, I want to thank Will Slattery for pointing out that two other posts had been deleted by the blog maintenance crew at GoDaddy during my blog’s suspended availability.
Clough – Fire Roulette
FIRE ROULETTE: Poems by Jeanette Marie Clough
Monday, April 21, 2025
One of the founding members of the Cahuenga Press Collective asked me to review this book, and since I was one of the original members of this enterprise, I think I should start with that full disclosure. Originally, in fact, the group wanted a book of my poems to be their first project, but I wasn’t particularly happy with my work at that time. In any case, I found myself more financially pinched than ever back then, and after helping out with the typesetting on a couple of books, I reluctantly parted ways with them. My main contribution to the group proved to be its name. We had gathered in a restaurant back at the earliest stages of the project and had yet to settle on a name. Suddenly, as possibilities that would evoke our home field were being suggested, I thought of the street the restaurant was located on: Cahuenga. “Cahuenga Press,” I blurted, and it immediately resonated with the group. “Two iambs,” said Jim Cushing, in seconding my motion. And so it came to pass.
It’s a tribute to Cahuenga Press that three of the original members are still publishing each other’s books, and have recently invited Jeanette Clough to join them. Her first collection with Cahuenga is deserving of all the praise awarded by it on the back cover. In poetry, unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a memorable book of poems is unlikely to ever get much in the way of a review beyond its blurbs. Fortunately, the blurbs by Marsha de la O, Gail Wronsky, and Mariano Zaro are not just formulaic praise, but point to the aspects of Clough’s work that I would like to emphasize in this brief commentary.
In particular, when Wronsky mentions Clough being a highly skilled poet, and Zaro unabashedly claims that the book is a “masterclass in perception,” I wish that at least one of them had mentioned the word that perhaps they were afraid would scare off readers: meter. Clough shares with another very fine poet, Alex Umlas, the ability to write well both in meter and free verse, and such dexterity is rare. While I deeply admire a poet such as Tim Steele, whose work has championed the continuing viability of verse as a “meter-making argument,” I also appreciate the way that poets adjust their rhythms to the experiences being staged in the poem, and if it is in a kind of free verse that I regard as a radical form of prose poetry, so be it. “Rhythm is the total sound of a line’s movement” was Karl Shapiro’s summation, and Clough’s rhythms encapsulate the pulses of her astute perceptions
.
One problem for Clough is that the majority of individuals who send their work out for publication these days don’t have the slightest clue as how to hear that “total sound,” which is hardly limited to where the accented syllables fall in a line, but more crucially involves how vowels and consonants blend with and animate that beat. It has to be dismaying, if not demoralizing, to realize that one’s potential “readers” can’t read what you’re writing. A line is a band: drummer, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, lead guitar. Clough’s deft fingerpicking enables the variety of her lines to reinforce the oscillating tempo of perception and thereby lure the reader into the maze of meaning; or at least that is what is happening for the precious few for whom meter is second nature.
Take, for example, two lines in one of her seven “Imperfect Villanelles,” “Paranoia,”
“a blur of clearest ambiguity”; and “Imaginary, our proximity.” Each line’s skipping iambs accelerate the anguish’s irony. The ambiguity of “our” is not least in its solitary monosyllabic presence in the line. The longer lines in the poem, in contrast, unleash the desperation squirming at the heart of the poem with carefully aimed squeezes of syllabic energy, and each line hits its fraught bullseye.
While the majority of Clough’s work in FIRE ROULETTE is not written in meter, I have started with that aspect to drive home the point that her compositions involve a choice, and it’s hardly a limited ability to wield a metrical brush that leads to poems with looser applications of cadenced imagery. While her eye and ear are often astutely ambidextrous, a few poems fall slightly shy of their potential fulfillment. Her poem about a search party for a missing person, “Lost,” oscillates between “you” and “we,” and like many poems in which the first person plural shares center stage with another pronoun, the vagueness of the “we” proves more perplexing than it should be. Such is not the case in another poem, “Coloratura,” which delineates “the search party” as the seat mates, at a classical musical performance, of a floundering mother and a chagrined daughter; although the former is suffering from Alzheimer’s, it is she who is given the final say. After the daughter apologizes to the poem’s narrator for the mother’s behavior during the singing by claiming that she feels so embarrassed that she is “mortified,” the mother rebukes her daughter, “Mortified?…. Unmortify, unmortify. It is beautiful.” One is not expecting a person enduring the ravages of cognitive disintegration to proffer a variation on Rilke’s “You must change your life,” but Clough is alert enough as a poet not to pass up a gift from the muse.
While the title poem of Clough’s book has an eerie sense of premonition, given how large-scale fires wiped out entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles County at the start of the year, there are several other memorable poems that also concern the forces in nature that seek “a house to devour.” “Dog Days,” for instance, is the conjunction of August’s relentless heat in Los Angeles and the swarming termites for whom “Home is food until it is gone.” Humanity’s responsibility for setting some of these forces in motion is the theme of several fine poems, including “Hovering over Greenland” and “What the Planet May Look Like.” Though Clough could not possibly have known How Greenland would become for the Trump administration what the Ukraine is to Vladimir Putin, she has poignantly sketched not only the ecological crisis as it plays out in Greenland but also implicitly demarcated the scale of hubris the United States is risking in retrofitting manifest destiny to accommodate the devastation that our fossil fuel obsession has generated.
Since the authors who make up Cahuenga Press rotate their production schedule on an annual basis, it will be a while before we see another book from Clough, but I am already eagerly anticipating it. In many other books of poetry I have recently looked at, one would be lucky to find two poems of the quality of ones I have not yet mentioned: “Optic Nerve” and “Artesian Spring.” When one adds these poems to the ones already cited, my overall assessment is that it would be a challenge to categorize Clough’s collection as anything less than “superb.” You can write for a copy of the 29th book produced by Cahuenga Press at: Cahuenga Press, 1223 Grace Drive, Pasadena, CA 91105 ($20 plus 5.50 shipping and handling).
About Bill Mohr