My reviews for WOOFUS TAKES and THE BEALLSVILLE CALENDAR

In my ongoing efforts to support alliterative poets in the Modern Alliterative Revival, I just added online reviews for two more poets: Michael Helsem (aka, "Graywyvern") and Jeff Sypeck. These are below, but if you'd like to support the revivalist, click on the reviews below and "upvote" them ... it's very handy for the algorithms!

• Lancelot Schaubert (The Greenwood Poet): my Amazon review and my Goodreads review .
• Adam Bolivar (Ballads for the Witching Hour): my Amazon review and my Goodreads review .
• Amit Majmudar (Dothead): my Amazon review and my Goodreads review
• Mary Thaler (Ulfhidr): my Amazon review and my Goodreads review
• Zach Weinersmith (Bea Wolf): my Amazon review and this Goodreads review

Now for Helsem and Sypeck!

GRAYWYVERN (my Goodreads review and Amazon Review for Woofus Takes)

Although there's several obvious indicators that this is a self-published book (i.e., AI-generated artwork; lack of page numbers; and some iffy formatting), I would still have to recommend WOOFUS TAKES because it shows a lot of metrically masterful poems in the Old English and Norse alliterative meters.

One of the more memorable poems is "A Drápa for Roxy." A drápa is an Old Norse skaldic praise poem with a refrain, and it's about a friend of Graywyvern's driving through West Texas. If you know the form of skaldic verse, it's EXTREMELY complex with alliteration, internal full rhymes, and internal rhymes, but several phrases stick out to me in particular, such as "Enter the world wanting .... The stir-echo trek shift / Old wars in the ire zone / this illness called building." Old wars in the ire zone: what a wonderful phrase. Besides the meter, the whole poem is filled with references ranging from Coleridge and George Meredith to the country music guitarist Chet Atkins, and it's a great example of one can do by reviving an old meter.

There's lots of other alliterative meters, too, including Old English and ljóðaháttr, and if you're looking for a book full of occasional poems marked by virtuosic metrics, this might be a good one for you.

JEFF SYPECK (my Goodreads review of The Beallsville Calendar)

I admit that I unabashedly loved The Beallsville Calendar. The book’s central conceit was to use the Old English alliterative meter to describe the poet’s life in their new surroundings in a small place off the Potomac River in Maryland; each of Sypeck’s twelves “books” was written during his first twelve months there. It’s in direct imitation of a Carolingian calendar poem (which the poet, a medievalist, has studied), but Sypeck’s book is a wonderfully modern example of its kind.

For example, although nature poetry wasn’t exactly common in the old Germanic alliterative traditions, The Beallsville Calendar falls squarely with a number of similar poems within the Modern Alliterative Revival. I’m thinking especially of Mary Agner’s “The Eightfold Year,” the seventh book in John Heath-Stubbs’s Artorius, and Rahul Gupta’s “Arthuriad” … all of which can be found in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. However, whereas those other poems have their own relatively European slants – Agner is pagan; Heath-Stubbs is modernist and classical; Gupta is Arthurian and folkloric – there is something … well, especially American and Walden-esque about The Beallsville Calendar.

It's a reflective, melodious book of alliterative verse, and I found myself constantly impressed with how Sypeck describes his rural Maryland surroundings. He meditates deeply on images and scenes of nature, and he’s especially facile with changing his poem’s pacing in order to maximize the poetic effect. There’s too many specific instances to cite, so I’ll just emphasize part of the section that left the strongest impression on me, “May.” Here’s a snippet:

It’s easy out here to feel utterly trifling,
A blade on the edge of an infinite plan.
But nothing is nothing; you know what you mean
When a hummingbird sees you. He sees what you’re doing
And knows who you are, not the name others gave you
Or novels you read, but the role you fulfill
In his fidgety soul, the father of nectar
And giver of zing ….
… we’re never the thing we think we are
And always the witness that others demand. (p. 47)

Like original Old English poetry, there’s nothing particularly difficult about this poetry (or intrusive about its alliterative patterning), but Sypeck carries you away with his rhythm and his decentering of anthropocentric perspectives.

And although probably only people like me care about the specifics of alliterative poetics, I want to mention one Modern English innovation on OE meter that works particularly well. In general, Sypeck follows the traditional OE rules except for softening his caesuras and using excessive anacrusis. The one thing you’re NOT supposed to do in Old English, though, is alliterate using an xa/ax pattern. Well, Sypeck does this a lot …. but it works. A few examples appear in the passage I quoted above, but here are some more:

Now pray we BLESS the BLETTED mess—”
“Of course they ROT, then RIPEN at last—”
I strained to re-MEM-ber my MEDlar song. (p. 26)

It works, I think, because you’re always supposed to alliterative the heaviest “content” words in each verse, and Sypeck often succeeds in doing just that with his xa/ax patterns. It stops the alliterative patterning from becoming too mechanical, making it more of a subconscious effect upon the reader, and it creates that up-and-down “seesaw” rhythm natural to Old English verse but which Sypeck would otherwise have lost because of suppressing Old English caesuras. All in all, I highly recommend.