The book, published by BTS (Between These Shores) Books in Sheffield, England, is slender with a full color watercolor illustration on the front cover of blue-purple roses with green petal-leaves atop a dreamy watercolor splotched purple and blue background.

On the back cover there are blurbs praising the book by BTS Books, Rachel Kendall (Editor, Sein und Werden), L. Ward Abel (Author, Peach Box and Verge, Jonesing for Byzantium), and Gary Gray (Editor, Global Inner Visions).

On the front cover the title is typed in a sans serif script and displayed toward the bottom of the cover, arranged with line breaks to give the look of a few lines of a poem.

The Skywriting in the Minor Key portion of the title brings to mind various images. I think of an airplane in the sky spelling out a message with its exhaust fumes (or whatever type of smoke they use to skywrite) while a sad song plays in the background. Maybe the message in the sky is a sad one, or a wistful one?

I imagine Mozart’s Requiem being played on a piano and with each note a letter of smoke puffs out of the piano and into the sky.

I imagine that I can touch the clouds and use my finger to write out thoughts that people can see and read when they walk down the street, while maybe “Rex tremendae majestatis” can be heard playing in the distance.

I imagine a canvas painted black with finger smears exposing the white canvas.

Inside is a collection of poems that starts with birth and ends with a first flight to England, with glimpses of Brooklyn in between.

The language, like the cover illustration, is colorful and dreamy. With inventively descriptive lines of verse— “spread like a bride, surrendered, storm-wasted” (page 62), “cat-spitting wind” (page 32), “like so many forged blackbirds from a tempered steel pie” (page 37), “my music is pierced, left bleeding in staccato tears” (page 84)— each poem serves as a miniature time capsule for a moment in the speaker’s life.

In the poem “East Side Birds” (page 42), we read an allegory about the rise and fall of a banded dove “all pristine feathers, effervescently cooing at just the right times.” It’s a tale of popularity, and its short shelf life. We see the bird go from perching “demurely where everyone could see” to a bird worn out by time, “the years had stained her smashing feathers with city soil and deepened her cooing to a throaty whisper.”

In the past, the “wiser birds of lesser plumage” would crane “their necks for crumbs of approval and suffered rejected heads to lower shyly to their breasts,” but now this bird who was once admired above all is reduced to sheltering herself in doorways from the rain and eyeing the speaker, a crow, “with contempt, prattling on about friends and escapades of which I’d never been a part.”

The speaker however, escapes this conversation with her former peer by raising her “gleaming, black crow feathers and proudly soared a free-flying retreat, to the triumphant heavens of redeemed girls who’d finally gained their wings.”

Peaking early and the curse of high-school popularity are popular themes, but Geraghty makes it fun by writing a poem about birds. Birds probably have popularity contests amongst themselves. Haven’t you ever been to a park where people throw bread crumbs in order to attract pigeons and sparrows? The sparrows have it the hardest, I think, because they’re the littlest and the starlings and pigeons have ways of bullying them around. Sparrows are the underdogs, which is why I love them and always make sure they get their crumbs. Crows and ravens are pretty gangster. I see them crossing the street, looking both ways for traffic before  hopping across the road, jay-walking. Crows and ravens keep it real.

Geraghty’s work reminds me of Beat poetry, but I feel like she also invokes the spirit of the lyrical ballads of the Romantics. The Beat influence is real, as Geraghty studied creative writing under Beat Generation poet/publisher Daisy Aldan.  

Pretty painted poems.

If you are a publisher or writer and would like The Tsaritsa Sez to review your book, please send an email to alexandra.naughton@gmail.com

I picked up a copy of A Modern Lover and Other Stories, along with a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock paperbacks, from a vintage book store in Nob Hill called Kayo Books.

The cover drew me in, in classic pulp novel style, a woman gazes dreamily into space while a man behind her clutches her arm with one hand, the other hand paused above her neck, gazing into her face longingly. His hair is slicked back and the way his brows are furrowed he seems to be concentrating or perhaps planning his next move. I imagine him wanting to strangle her, or at least grab her passionately. The woman is leaning her head back and staring off and she seems to be dreaming or hoping while thrusting her chest out. Her cheeks are rosy and her lips are red.

“A MODERN LOVER” in bold yellow letters sits atop a flaming hot red background. A tag line, “The master of sex and psychology reveals the hidden savagery of men and women” in small print is positioned above the authors name.


On the back cover:

The Author of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” Celebrates Modern Love… Seldom has distinguished literature so inflamed the minds of the many millions of readers who like their stories, above all, to be exciting. 

A MODERN LOVER by D.H. Lawrence is exciting because: 

- Stories such as SAMSON AND DELILAH, NEW EVE AND OLD ADAM, YOU TOUCHED ME, THE PRIMROSE PATH and HER TURN are brilliantly written novels-in-miniature that reveal the intimate differences of modern love… 

- The daring genius of Lawrence was young and bold when he wrote these world-famous tales… 

- The flashing insight into human passions that marks Lawrence’s writing is evident on every page. 

In publishing A MODERN LOVER, Avon is confident that, for the first time, hosts of readers will experience the genuine thrill that comes with discovering the vigorous, prophetic genius of D.H. Lawrence.

They’re true. The blurbs are true. Every story is incredibly descriptive, evocative of strong emotion, horribly sad, and in the end a little anticlimactic. And that’s okay, because isn’t life often like that? We feel all these crazy emotions, we get disappointed, and then move on?

Most of the stories end sort of like this, as in the last lines of “The Primrose Path”:

“Her slim, quick figure was gone, the door was closed behind her.

There was silence. The mother, still more slave-like in her movement, sat down in a low chair. Berry drank some beer.

‘That girl will leave him,’ he said to himself. ‘She’ll hate him like poison. And serve him right. Then she’ll go off with somebody else.’

And she did.”

Modern love— what do we think of this notion nowadays? I’ve been watching Downton Abbey recently and the subject of modernity and modern love comes up quite often amongst the characters on the show, the waitstaff and the nobility alike. Modern love is about being real with yourself about your feelings and letting them be known.

It seems funny, but I guess it was a new concept in 1920s England. Which kind of makes sense because you can see the characters in both Downton Abbey and Lawrence’s stories try to adapt to the changing world around them and sometimes following through with openness and honesty and other times (most of the time) faltering, or lashing out in the opposite way— as in “The Prussian Officer,” a homoerotic tale of an officer and his orderly in three parts, full of passive aggression and flat-out aggression and ending in murder. There is no mention of sex, but the beating and humiliation (sexual harassment) that the orderly takes as part of his service to the officer is rife with sadomasochistic overtones. Exciting stuff, indeed.

My favorite story is “You Touched Me,” a tale a decaying mansion, of two spinster (they’re in their 30s) sisters, their dying father, and their adopted brother. The father adopted the boy when the girls were in their teens because he wanted a son. The son, Hadrian, who left the mansion for the Canadian army or something when he was of age, returns to visit his dying father.

The sisters, especially Emmie (the younger sister) are suspicious of his motives, but Matilda, the older sister (she’s 32), seems excited for his visit and prepares the mansion by cleaning and scrubbing. Hadrian arrives a day early and enters the home while Matilda is in the middle of cleaning.

She promptly gets flustered while greeting him, blushing “deep with mortification,” and feels embarrassed by her handkerchiefed appearance. The sisters move their father out of his bedroom into a room downstairs where he can be more comfortable and have a place to entertain the visiting Hadrian, the darling son he always wanted. Hadrian ends up sleeping in the father’s bedroom, and that is where the juicy part of the story comes in.

Matilda, concerned for her father in the middle of the night, leaves her bedroom and goes into her father’s bedroom, walks to the bed, then reaches out and touches what she thinks is her father’s forehead, whispering something soothing softly to him. Of course, the father is downstairs sleeping and it’s Hadrian’s forehead she’s actually touched, waking and stirring him. Sexy stuff for the early 20th century. Hadrian is confused by this interaction, but he plays it off.

Matilda realizes her mistake and is quietly horrified, walks back to her room and decides she hates Hadrian. How traditional. But Hadrian was awakened in more than one way when Matilda touched his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair. She stirred something within him, something strong, and Hadrian decides he must marry Matilda and take her back to Canada with him, where he believes she will be happy. How modern.

I really enjoyed reading this book because I appreciate Lawrence’s style and the way he unfolds his tales. There is a lot of build-up in these works, a lot of tense, thick anticipation, and it is so delicious. While reading these stories, I did notice myself gasping a little, or pausing in the middle of a sentence out of surprise. Even if the cover illustration led me to believe I was getting into some steamier reading material, the stories were still sexy and revealing in their own way.

And after reading the stories the cover makes sense in another light. The woman staring off into space and the man hesitating behind her is kind of the theme that runs through A Modern Lover. There is a lot of hesitation. There are a lot of heavy pauses. Longing, dreaming, settling, hoping, wanting. Just like life.

I really like green smoothies until I get to the end.

kottonkandyklouds:

Photos (top, center) of video poem Shelley Duvall starring Alexandra Naughton. Nicole McFeely poses for writer photo (bottom) on cover of My Name Is Mud in which my story Fudge appears.