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Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter

Source: the poet
Paperback, 41 pgs.
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Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter, a homage to “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by Katsushika Hoskusai, is a collection of sonnets exploring life, death, love, and being an artist.

In the opening sonnet, “Cathedral and Artisan,” the poet reflects on a life as a sculptor at the National Cathedral in D.C., or so it seems, and while the art seems impervious to age, the artist is weary and aging. It is a sonnet in homage to the artist and his work. “Too soon, we souls who built you will be gone,/But through the centuries you’ll sing our song!” There’s a sense of nostalgia in this poem and in the one that follows, but there also is the feeling that what is in the past is okay as part of the past.

As a reader of poetry, I understand the appeal of the sonnet and its familiar rhythms and rhymes, but for me, it feels forced on some occasions in this collection, but not in a way that is jarring or takes you out of the poem. You just get the sense that the poet has had to work hard to create the verse, maybe a little too hard.

The more personal poems work best for me in this collection, though the ones based on art or art work are nice additions to the forms discussed. One of my favorites in the collection is “Last Resort”:

Last Resort (pg. 25)

My lady loves to navigate the planet
While I would vegetate where I was born,
But when she lights the flame to go, I fan it --

And later in the poem:

And here we stew, awash in Pilgrim slime;
Regret is how I mark the passing time.

We can all understand these feelings of regret born of adventure gone astray, and we all feel the passage of time. Sometimes more acutely than we would like. Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter is collection of sonnets exploring the human condition with an artist’s eye.

RATING: Tercet

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

Jay Hall Carpenter is an author and artist living in Maryland. His written works include plays, musicals, children’s books, and poetry. For several years he published The ACE Occasionally, a small literary humor magazine. “Dark and Light” is his first collection of poetry.

Carpenter’s career in the visual arts spans forty years and began at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where he designed 520 of the Cathedral’s sculptural embellishments, including gargoyles and angels. His public sculptures, monuments, smaller bronzes, and drawings can be found throughout the United States and at JayHallCarpenter.com.

Mailbox Monday #719

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter for review.

Jay Hall Carpenter’s homage to “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by Katsushika Hoskusai. These Shakespearean sonnets discuss family, nostalgia, love, death, and more.

Dispatches from Frontier Schools by Sarah Beddow for review.

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities, and beauty, of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children—while being pulled apart by a system that doesn’t support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.

Her Whole Bright Life by Courtney LeBlanc for review.

A collection that weaves together the trauma and exhaustion of life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father.

What did you receive?

Model Home by Jay Hall Carpenter

Source: GBF
Paperback, 61 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Model Home by Jay Hall Carpenter is a collection reflecting on the homes we build, beginning with the landscape of “Common Ground,” in which the inside of a home may not be tenable but the land around it may be familiar and a place to start when building connections.

One of my favorite poems in this collection also speaks to connection, but in a way that kids and the kids within us will understand — the moments of our days. “Like Kids” explores the spontaneity and the curiosity of childhood, allowing us to shrug off adulthood and its responsibilities to run with the kids after the ice cream headache. These moments are fleeting, and as the string of our kites breaks and the kite drifts off into the air, we are made aware of the past and the present all at once. It is hopeful yet saddening.

“Model Home” speaks to the surface seen by others, but opens the doors wide to expose the fissures of family and the imperfections that we house. Carpenter has a deft hand in these poems, and even as many of them rhyme (something I don’t prefer as a reader), I was captivated. His ability to rhyme without distracting me as a reader was a welcomed surprise (though I have read a children’s manuscript he wrote and that rhymed, so I’m not sure why I should be surprised).

You’ll want to take your time touring Jay Hall Carpenter’s Model Home, scrutinizing the decor, exploring the dark corners, sledding down the snowy hills, examining the model home we, as America, pretend to be for the rest of the world. Our home may not be as perfect as we market it to be.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Jay Hall Carpenter is an author and artist living in Maryland. His written works include plays, musicals, children’s books, and poetry. For several years he published The ACE Occasionally, a small literary humor magazine. “Dark and Light” is his first collection of poetry.

Carpenter’s career in the visual arts spans forty years and began at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where he designed 520 of the Cathedral’s sculptural embellishments, including gargoyles and angels. His public sculptures, monuments, smaller bronzes, and drawings can be found throughout the United States and at JayHallCarpenter.com.