THRUSH Poetry Journal

TRUSH Poetry Journal posts six issues each year on a cute little beige-colored website guarded by two thrushes under its navigation bar. Its July 2013 issue contains seventeen different poets, although many of the poets had titled their work as "Three Poems" and "Two Poems" which doesn't provide much variety on the outside. However, when I opened up the pages of every single poem in that issue, I saw that each poet had his/her distinct line structure and form. Cynthia Atkin scared me with her lack of true line breaks, while Joshua Young reduced himself to the very simple without any capitalization.  

Two poems stood out to be the most: "Vanishing Point" by Corianna McClanahan Schroeder and "Broad Wings Above the Tall Grass" by Tracy Zeman mostly because both pinpointed imagery very well. 

"Vanishing Point" begins with what many of us know too well: mornings and family members heading to work. Then, it transitions to the author "teaching" herself (and by default, the audience, too) the names of the organisms in her yard. Soon, ordinary birds and spiders weave into art that few people take the time to appreciate. 

Schroeder's "needles shuttering like chimes of light" and "red-bellied woodpeckers" with "checkerboard wings" combine multiple forms of imagery into a single poem, and sometimes even a single phrase or sentence. I especially admired how this poem scatters the narrator's thoughts throughout its descriptions, such as "There's too much to lose through the needle's eye" in the sixth stanza and "We were two breaths among millions--and I was nearly breathless." This dialogue between the narrator and nature places a human factor into the lines so that they avoid becoming a flowers-are-pretty-and-animals-are-pretty-too monologue. The density of lives in such a small space astonishes the narrator, much like how the density of description in the poem can astonish the reader. 

Zeman's "Broad Wings Above the Tall Grass" relaxes less than Schroeder's poem. The strange formatting and spacing inside lines set up punctuation-less caesuras and force the reader's eyes to move. This makes the poem feel active with life without the use of thick imagery. It also emphasizes certain words, such as "possess" and "swirling mass" by separating them with space but without totally disconnecting them in the way more traditional line breaks or periods would do.

Zeman's poem also doesn't aim to please with niceties: "swim in runoff & moss," "hedge-apple smashed roadside," and "to cut one's teeth on comfort" portray the rough sides of nature. The dead deer in the second stanza and old windmill in the third also suggest that nature exposes the weaknesses of what most usually see as beautiful.