The start of “Once In the Mojave Desert,” the opening poem in this debut collection, hooks the reader right from the off: “One night, years before I was born, / my father shivered by the highway / with a pistol in his coat. / If the next car did not stop, / he would shoot a back tire and pray / the driver had a spare.”
Though ARENA GLOW is the first book from California poet Angela Chaidez Vincent, it displays the maturity and sure-footedness of a seasoned writer. The work is audacious and inventive.
There are poems of the every day. A well-observed visit to the International House of Pancakes with its “beautiful beings behind the counter” and its “mostly clean silverware,” or where “My Mama Wears Spurs to the Grocery Store” and they “clink down the produce aisle ringing like pickaxes.” There are some wonderful, if sometimes willfully weary observations: “Who among us hasn’t known men who drape themselves like fusty capes on our shoulders” (from “Mrs. Peacock Turns Fifty”). This, like many other lines in the book, urge female empowerment.
Indeed, Miss Scarlett, Mrs. Peacock, and Mrs. White (the female protagonists of the board game Clue) become recurring figures the poet uses to “represent life phases of women as they age into timelessness.”
There is also the sweet Franciscan prayer of “Welcome” (“Our hearts, the damp dark finches that hover in and heat the wilderness”) and the gut-punch of the initially innocuous instructional “How to Roll a Sleeping Bag,” which ends in violence and bleak disgust.
“Pinecones of Rome” heralds a warning for the planet with its opening stanza:
Another crackled leaf.
Another canary
dropping dead, for the water
table underground descends
like the last of the lemonade
between ice cubes, unreachable
with a straw, even if striped
with bright intention.
By the poem’s close, the poet imagines catching ash flakes on her tongue.
There is a variety of styles on display, and Vincent occasionally plays with shape and form. “Hillside Lights” sees mostly single words strung across the page like lightbulbs on a wire; “On Falling” becomes vertiginous with the simple inversion of a line of bold type; and “Dot Dot Dot” sings the praise of polka-dots in a calligram. In the selection of rodeo-themed poems that appear throughout the book, the poet even uses a set of symbols to indicate arena gates. Overall, this easily accessible work has a depth and maturity of vision that bears close re-reading.
ARENA GLOW is a vivid and inventive debut collection that marks Angela Chaidez Vincent as a poet to follow.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader
