Ann Menebroker's new book, "Walking The Dog, Selected Poems 1959-1989," --Sacramento Poetry Center Workshop

86 pages with some 60 poems, has just been released from Eclectic Press, Freedom, CA. The book itself is handsome -- perfect bound with glossy cover and printed in a neat, readable typeface. The poems are vintage Menebroker-- lyric, biographical, incantatory -- with an informing theme of mutability -mutability and the poet's warm, wry and welcoming resignation in the face of the inevitable. "Look at me! I say, and/take notes/of the kiss you receive/and watch the shine/of my exit/...," writes Menebroker in "I Slide Through Like Death," as she slides into and out of relationship. In "5 Stanzas In The Day Of Death," she writes, "I take a few small/offerings/left over from your life/and toss them shallow," loss and change culminating in vacancies Menebroker fills with "such a final silence." Death itself becomes a kind of repeton in "The Repetition Of Morning & Death & Six O'Clock". "I am sipping gin at six o'clock in the morning/" she writes, "and I have built an early fire/to warm the death in me./" lines she repeats to end the poem, a virtual aubade to mutability. "Inside," she writes, "I am turning the clock back." -- an attempt (successful, I would say) to render accessible this subsumed death by reflexive processing. Process in these poems is everything. In "Singing Madmen," Menebroker writes, "Waiting like little boys/in closets/or girls in love/or singing madmen/to test our skills/against the best/and find it has been/the least of our glories.", the process of testing, in the final analysis, so much more important than the results, as everything, eventually, shifts and warps and finishes. "Aches/" says Menebroker in "Catalysis," "that leave us open/to the invasion/of soft-footed madness;...", a madness she never quite succumbs to in her dance with the transitory. She leaves us at the close of Catalysis with "...only the turn of shadows/and a pause.../and a wetness/and the burying of the sun."Ann Menebroker is a treasure. You can order "Walking the Dog" for $10.50 per copy, which includes postage and handling, from:

Eclectic Press

Meade Fischer, Publisher

P.O. Box 1925

Freedom, CA 95076  

(you can make out the check to Meade Fischer)

WALKING THE DOG, Selected Poems 1959-1989 by Ann Menebroker, Eclectic Press, P.O. Box 1925, Freedom, California 95076 (www.baymoon,com/~eclecticpress,eclecticpress@baymoon.com), $10.50, 2003.

POET ANN MENEBROKER, stay-put contemporary literature survivor no less firmly footed in solid verse and natural narration than her old friend Charles Bukowski, has been collected in Walking the Dog, Selected Poems 1959-1989, a decades-array of amazing truth and inner life. When Ann Menebroker, a young mother and wife, began publishing in the late 1950s, the Beats were alive and well off. Following the beat other own femme eternelle heart-drum, though, Ann Menebroker found poetic joy, discernment and redemption in Life where Ginsbergs found irrevocable angst to howl about. Published in countless counter-culture, "outsider" literary journals, "lit mags," that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, the Muse of her inate beauty and creative voice attracted Charles Bukowski who became her long-time epistolary friend and dedicated poetry to her. The 1980s found Ms. Menebroker Starting Over but still, she wrote on. Award-winning poet Joyce Odam, in her Introduction in Walking the Dog honors Menebroker's honesty, her"...Free Spirit, impulsive of nature and uncompromising of self." Ann Menebroker, tireless autodidact, knows of de Chardin to ask in her poem "Candlelight": ".. .What of de Chardin's/spiritual progress, the life/that becomes greater than itself?/..." Self-aware in "The Gloomer Loves Her Friends" she goes gently: "...Your friends care, but remember/that even Jesus tossed in his sleep/and sighed over the weight/of loving." People-watcher, wise storyteller, she captures conclusively her "John": "...He once gave me an identification bracelet/without a name on it./That is the real/story of John." Of peripatetic, legendary American poet Kell Robertson, another of her endurable, inspirable acquaintances, she writes precisely-fine metaphor in "Flexing":

• "In the cellar
• of my winter mind
• in some far corner
• a small winged insect
• makes ready to fly, flexing
• its new wings, wondering
• if it knows
• the mechanics inherent in its breeding.
• And it does. It always does."

Survivors are "picaroons," Mark Twain has said, who are always in the art of becoming. "Though it be only the moment, for Ann Menebroker, there is the next moment and the one after that..." Joyce Odam aptly concludes in her foreword, assuring that Walking the Dog, though a long time coming for readers and hagiographers of Ann Menebroker's work, promises, without a doubt, continuum of Ann Menebroker's dauntless and proper energy placed upon paper displayed so extensively in this fine sample of her arte eternelle.

 Joan Jobe Smith,

For Small Press Review