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Book Review:

Beautiful Artifacts by Stork Rein

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Beautiful Artifacts
Poems by Stork Rein
Kelsay Books, October 2024
ISBN: 978-1-63980-656-0
$20; 51 pp.
Reviewed by Paul DeMarco

 

Stork Rein’s first published collection of poetry takes us deep into the interior life of a most interesting man. You won’t find out what Rein did for a living, nor where he went to school, nor what he feels about Picasso. This is memoir poetry. We plunge with him into his emotional life as he wrestles with doubt, lost faith, and emerging, if tenuous, hope.

 

The collection centers on the loss of his daughter, first when he leaves her as a child, together with his marriage, then again when she dies at a young age, reconciliation incomplete. The relationship is fraught with separation, resentment, love, mutual injury, misunderstanding, near-understanding. Along the way we meet his father, shuffling “like a shadow between rooms,” a snake-killing, delinquent half-brother, and unnamed lovers. Even more vivid characters enter: regret, recrimination, retrospection.

 

Rein carries us along his journey with unrelenting honesty, a keen eye, and thoughtful sand sifting.  He engages us with vivid imagery and a voice strong with American rural poetic tradition. Although he writes of the very specific and personal, the themes resonate with our own experiences and call forth our own responses.

 

His poignant “Blue,” eight masterful couplets, lays bare his conflicting feelings in leaving his daughter and his home for an unknown future. He turns from inside the house that he is leaving to the unknown outside, even as he is turned inside out by a wrenching decision. Departure carries opposing feelings of loss and adventure, I share [the house’s] sadness, its uncertainty … my destination unknown, enthralling. Typical of his command of metaphor, Rein’s former life is a dead fox …cooling in the silver grass (grass that was painted in a coat of full moon), that gives way as robins begin their waking songs, while across the ravine, a village faintly appears…

 

In “Collections,” while innocently sorting through his music library, Rein is blindsided by a sudden memory. He encounters a particular CD, musical evidence/of father-daughter bonding. Without warning, he’s yanked back fifteen years/ or fifteen days/ or hours since you slipped away. He does not turn away.

 

I … curl on the floor next to you,

the best of us weaving through

the notes of violin and guitar.

Even when the poems are not specific to events in Rein’s life, they express an outlook and attitude shaped by those events. In “God, Noah, and the Eastern Seaboard,” a lament for hurricane victims, the challenge to God’s honesty is a cry from his own heart:

The waters shall never again become a flood?

 

Tell that to the two

terra cotta lovers

whose one-mass embrace

was torn asunder. 

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His post-diluvian observations in “After the Flood” reflect the peace and sadness earned after trauma:

A stream that overflowed its banks with white

bone and dark water moves on, subterranean, at peace

with gravity once again.

 

            time…spirals forward towards

some unknowable conclusion.

 

Sadness a sudden companion.

A flock of blackbirds against the sun,

cinders tossed onto the white snow.

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In “Toward a Gentle Rising,” set in a feel-good West Marin County farmer’s market, his observation of a diverse and peaceful community reflects his own hope for redemption:

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such an easy thing to do   such a simple

thought to offer    to share openings

 

Readers will have to do some work to meet up with Rein’s particular culture. From Malagasy rites of the dead to the rock group James, most of his poems contain references that will send many of us searching. I imagine only a handful of readers could identify all of these: M. Scott Peck, Jan Garbarek, Luis Javier Rodriguez, Famadihana, Jane H., and Toby’s Feed Barn.

 

It’s worth the small effort. The references are often essential to understanding Rein: his sincerity, his singular nature, and his quest to use what he has learned as a way to understand the themes he grapples with. If you don’t know Famadihana, much of the experience laid out in “Startled Fish” will be lost on you. Reading “Shai-hulud” you need at least a passing knowledge of Frank Herbert’s Dune to grasp the feel of that poem.

It’s not always critical to know Rein’s cultural references. One still appreciates the fine description of writer’s block that opens “Beyond the Edge of Getting”:

 

in the blaze of promise

everywhere

the eyes of morning

edged with rain fall on

every word that is written

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But if you haven’t heard the jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek, you won’t get the full emotional feel of the plaintive appeal for inspiration,

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            waiting for the music to unlock lines

            open the doors of heaven

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Even familiar terms, such as the title word Pentimento, are worth some exploration. Pentimento, it turns out, is both a painting term referring to changes hidden beneath a subsequent layer of paint, as well as a term for repentance.  Knowing that adds a deeper meaning to the reading. More subtly, He can swallow me no longer in “Broken,” refers to the Greek god Cronus who ate his children. It’s a fine poem about escaping the shadow of one’s father, understood even without getting the allusion, but so much finer when you do.

 

The setting for Rein’s tumultuous emotional life is rooted in a countryside that nourishes his introspection. This is more than a scenic backdrop. From this closeness to nature, gardens, and small towns, Rein draws imagery and inspiration that inform his wealth of insight and poetic sense. Specific places are called upon to support the writing: Mount Shasta, Toby’s Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station, a towering bamboo grove in a Cotati garden, the apocalyptic Delta Fire of 2018 in Shasta County. All of these add fixed points that help to ground the poetry.

 

Rein lives in a land of oaks, meadows and streams. They give him comfort, remind him of the wider reality, make him whole. In the suggestion that so-called inanimate objects have souls of their own, Rein helps to revive a reemerging cosmology that there are no truly inanimate objects in the world. Rocks and trees are not only symbolic conveniences to the poet, but living, sentient beings.  In “Fenceline,” he ends with a tribute to natural unseen forces that parallel his own internal life:

 

The wind bows to wise stones,

wreathed in moss,

that lie beneath the frozen lake  

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“Take This Waltz,” his late life acceptance that his work and life are mostly behind him, opens with this evocative stanza:

 

The black oak with the beautiful scars

said, come—it is time to dance.

The sunflower nodded,

seeds fell,

hummingbirds hummed.

 

But it is in “Dreaming of Whitman” where Rein most fully describes his connection with the natural world.  He has turned away

 

from the familiar, seductive call of

the beckoning, churning sound

of ten thousand dusty feet shuffling

towards a hundred corporate gates.

 

and has recognized

 

… my need for shade

and rough bark behind my back.

Gazing at miraculous grass

and drawing life from fragrant air

 

The poem is not only a tribute to Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” it is a declaration to accept the all/that is myself, –his self in its entirety, even the parts he hasn’t yet accommodated.

 

For those of us who have left cities for life in the country, we identify with Rein’s choice to live a life defined by intentional connection to the unique land that is Northern California.  That he uses rhyme as spare and delicate as spider threads to describe a moment of perfect contentment only enhances the mood of the poem.

 

This contentment, however elusive, returns notably in “Returning to the Cauldron and “Take This Waltz.” Rein suggests that his work is finished—career over, son raised and launched. We can hope that this is not literally true, and that there are many artful and thoughtful poems to come in his engaging voice.

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Paul DeMarco is a graduate of Yale University. His poetry has been included in three anthologies published by Redwood Writers and in the anthology “Moonlight and Reflections.”

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Beautiful Artifacts

Reader Testimonials

 

Leonard Cohen sings of how the cracks in everything are how the light gets in. 

Beautiful Artifacts, Stork Rein’s new collection, shows us how a broken heart reveals the light that shines through everything.

Both deeply personal and universal in their humanity, these tender and wise poems are sweet, sad music for the soul. 

        —Larry Robinson, poet and cofounder of Rumi’s Caravan

 

Stork Rein opens his collection, Beautiful Artifacts, with a haiku titled daughter:

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dried leaves blowing free

the wind in failing sunlight

sorrow fills the air

 

Rein brings us “under a streetlamp’s sallow light”, with a knife in his pocket, as he revisits his childhood home where his father now lives alone (Broken), and the attempts to find meaning in “the melting rivulets of butter” on a toasted bagel (Pareidolia). He brings us to examples of hope in Toward a Gentle Rising and to a darkened room in an ICU (Breath) and the slow descent into understanding that his daughter is about to die.

 

We eavesdrop in on a poignant reminiscence of a loved one (Collections), are invited into his garden to watch him waltz in the twilight around a scarred black oak (Take This Waltz), and share bittersweet reflections on the generational chains that bind fathers to sons down through the years (Returning to the Cauldron.)

These poems reach out to where we meet one another with our shared grief and sorrow. A rich ongoing conversation between father and daughter, one which will never die.

        —Patricia LeBon Herb,  Ziibingkokwe Native-American Artist and Poet

 

Stork Rein’s Beautiful Artifacts invites us to be fully alive, to let our hearts be broken and open, to burn in the beauty and heartbreak of loving — children, lovers, trees, — then to find gold in the mud of tears and ashes. We start with the continuing presence of those who have been loved and still are, the forgiveness that we must have for our mistakes of the heart, the return to the rich moments of the now despite the losses, and also because of them.

 

This is a work for those willing to feel the bittersweet in every life fully lived, to encounter the “unseen sparks” in our daily travels that can ignite the memories of grief and unexpectedly catch us on fire.

        —Joseph A Cutler, published poet

 

 

Beautiful Artifacts weaves a story of love and loss and redemption that runs through his blood as a river of light. Through the eyes of a father, a son, a lover, a husband, his poems ring with vulnerability and strength.

 

Stork Rein’s poems offer forgiveness, and willingness; forgiveness of self and willingness to remove the layers of protection we all live with. Rein unbuttons his shirt and shares openings to his profound observations of a life lived, a life loved, a life that is poetry itself with all its heartbreaks and songs of joy.

        —Judith Vaughn, published poet

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In Stork Rein’s Beautiful Artifacts, the poet takes us on a deeply personal journey through memory. The book’s title comes from his poem On the Last Page of the Classified Ads, but every poem in this collection reveals the emotional artifacts mined from memories.

Rein finds poetry in the complex relationships inhabiting our lives that continue to live on, unforgotten and sometimes unresolved. Recollections of a beloved daughter— the objects, the landscapes, the personal and natural disasters we face that remain a part of us long after they are gone.

This deeply affecting book is seen by this reader as the poetry of survival— finding a lasting beauty in the overcoming of loss, regret, even irretrievable Time. Rein shows us how the emotional and sensory artifacts embedded in memory live on in our psyche through time, and in the poet’s hands, reveal their luminous human beauty.

        —Jaime Zukowski, coauthor of Sonoma Valley Sonnet

 

Poignant, heart rending and uplifting at the same time. This short book is itself a beautiful living artifact. Each poem is different, moving and full. I feel pulled forward to keep reading the next page and the next...

        —Grayson James, author and founder of Full Contact Institute, LLC