Gary Metras, Francis d’Assisi, Finishing Line Press, 2008. $14.
Gary Metras, Gary Metras, Greatest Hits – 1980-2006, Pudding House Publications, 2007, ISBN
1589985370, $10.
Susan Edwards Richmond, Purgatory Chasm, Adastra Press, 20067, ISBN 097766675551, $20.
Mary Jane White (translator), Marina Tsvetaeva, New Year’s: an elegy for Rilke, Adastra Press,
0977666778, $14.
Ed Orchester, The Republic of Lies, Adastra Press, ISBN 97809776667, $14.


The poet as a printer and publisher includes Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Not a bad connection.
We would not have modern literature if we did not have them promoting modern poetry. Gary
Metras continues the tradition with his own poetry as well as printing other writer’s books with his
Adastra Press. He evens uses the “old school” printing of hand-set letterpress. Take a look at his
press at:  http://www.pw.org/content/letter_time_adastra_press.   His press won the Publisher of the
Year, 2006. I only know of one other poet/printer in this time period and that is Michael Czarnecki of
Foothills Press. If there are other poet/printers out there, I would love to hear about them.

I used to be a handset printer, so I respect the craft. It takes patience and skill. You have to put
together the type with individual metal type, upside down and backwards, print the pages, and start
all over again by taking apart the type and composing another page of type. It is the Zen of printing.
You really have to care about the poems in order to spend some much labor-intensive time when
offset or computers are so much faster. Because I am old school myself, I appreciate and respect
this press and its editor. I think it is also important that he is a writer and a damn good writer, which
makes me crave to be published by him. Then there is the man, Gary Metras, who has been
publishing since 1974 with 14 collections to his credit.   

Francis d’Assisi is a long poem about the saint and his life. You do not have to know the story of St.
Francis or believe in his sainthood in order to understand this poem. You can be a non-believer and
you can still enjoy this odyssey of Francis. Francis was known for ability to communicate with
animals (section 2), but this poem is concerned with his quest to convert the non-believer into
Christianity (sections 3, 5, 6, 7). It deals with Francis concern for his large following and how he
developed rules for his followers and lists three of those twelve rules (section 8).  The poem
continues beyond his death to modern times of I-pod( section III).  It continues to the crowds trying to
visit St. Frances’ tomb:


Someone is speaking from far away
he says, Death will breed in the gardens of poets (VII, Section 2)

This poem is about the movement of spirit, long after the person is dead, and how people still
speak of St. Francis’s life like it was a miracle. There are still believers in a world where believers
become less in number every year.

Gary Metras was chosen for Pudding House’s “Greatest Hits” series. This is an honor since it is by
invitation only. His book, Gary Metras, Greatest Hits – 1980-2006, is part biography, part
explanation of his poems in this collection, and the poems themselves. It is hard to find something
new to say a person’s poem when they tell you exactly what their poems mean.  
The words are gifts from an accomplished poet, sure of his words and his mission to deliver his
words carefully measured and assured. He might be comparing the emptiness of death within his
grandmother’s body compared to the see-through rosary: “The beads were clear cut glass”
(“Grandmother’s Wake”); or, his wife cross-stitching their wedding pillow: “so old it’s not in any
book” (“The Engagement”). These represent what he considers his best poems and I have to
agree. So read this book and see a good writer at work.

In Susan Edwards Richmond’s, Purgatory Chasm, she explore more than the geology of a chasm,
she explores how it relates to the need to explore and what we find if we do, and then compares it
to Purgatory. In her poem, “The Earth Opened, A Story” she explains how the chasm got its name
from a man found it accidently while hunting, after an earthquake: “Shouldering his musket, taking/
his keen-nosed bluetick hound for luck.” I have a wonderful visual image of this early American with
his musket and a hunting dog, searching the woods for game. She imagines him finding the gorge,
“where none had been before. Or so he swore.” This image feels told by a good storyteller/ forest
ranger guide. In her second section, she explains how different geological formations like “Lover’s
Leap”, “Devil’s Coffin”, and “Devil’s Pulpit” got their name which she uses as titles to her poems.
The last two names are appropriate to a place called Purgatory Chasm. In The third and last
section she takes us around the chasm loop: “These aren’t the circles of hell/ but they could be”
(“Circles”).  

Mary Jane White’s translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s long elegy, New Year’s: an elegy for Rilke, is
considered a modern classic in Russian literature. It is a poem that summarizes the many letters
she exchanged with Rilke: “My first letter to you from the Past/where, without you, I languish”.
Languish is an interesting choice word. In a writer’s workshop they should tell you to choose good
words, and here is an example. It is a good word to describe the slow depression. When Marina
gets going into the poem, she becomes like a shaman, and her words become rushed out
excitement:  

(I’m prepared to attend even some awful mass-rally with you---
Should I admit that?) Not to mention the other places!
                                   Or the month!
Or the weeks! Or the rainy, un-peopled
Suburbs! Or the mornings! Or altogether everything else
Not yet broken into by nightingales!

In Ed Orchester’s, The Republic of Lies, he has a poem about writing at a poetry workshop (Writer’
s Colony) in which the writers are “chattering like sparrows/ about the bright sun on the snow”. It is
about the absurdity at being at a writer’s workshop and how it can be a noisy event. I believe I have
been at workshops like this one. There is so many of these experiences in these poems. Like the
people who saved money just to go to Fred Astaire movie for escapism from their boring lives
(Fred Astaire); or the unfairness of his son-in-law making more money than him (My Son-In-Law).

At the end of everyone one of the Adastra Press books, there is an editor’s listening of the type,
style, and size of the letters; and the information regarding the paper. He ends with a comment of
what was happening during the printing of the book, and sometimes it is a review of his latest fly-
fishing experiences. Here is a man who loves the craft as much as the adventure of catching fish.
Gary Metras, Poet, Publisher, and Printer
  Review by: Martin Willitts, Jr.
Gary Metras