NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

In part I of ROTOGRAVURE, Nanora Sweet explains the meaning of the word "rotogravure. She says,

Rotogravure process is an intaglio method of printing, meaning that the pictures, designs and words are engraved into the printing plate or printing cylinder.

With ROTOGRAVURE Nanora Sweet offers a sequence of poems that explore the home ground of memory: a view of growing up in

the urban Midwest, about St. Louis in particular and its people and places.

The book invokes interior weather, and takes the temperature of the times. Sweet shakes the family tree and finds it full of incident. Here is a picture of an ordinary family in an ordinary suburb - but how extraordinary people are if rendered accurately, as in the poem THE JAZZ FLUTE PLAYS:

	that summer that your head had been shaved
	because of scarlet fever and diphtheria, someone
	actually photographed you that way - waiting until
	you could begin to look less frightening.  Or later
	you are happy, locking arms with a handsome brother
	and flashing your brilliant smile.

In the late nineteen forties there was The Park (SCATTERED LAGOONS), but over the years things have changed:

	... To the north
	the balustrades are crumbling.  The River
	of the Fathers surfaces in railyards and then
	borders the city with the white stones of its walls.
	This knowledge begins with a dream.  Even time
	Is controverted when art is the only power.

	On a Sunday, still sleepy, I read old news and turn pages
	heavy with everyone's dreams.  A cat's eyes are naturally
	yellow they say, although a blue-eyed cat walks my chair backs
	and sleeps on the rotogravure.

we've become lost in the pictures and do not want to leave.

In THE STATUE OF SCHILLER IN THE PLAZA, she describes

	The manly German poet

	stands above us with pen
	and book of stone

	... On this Plaza
	a pledge is but a poem in a stone façade and
	slightly foreign tongue. "Even on the day 
	he died," the newspaper said of Gottlieb, "he
	portrayed his death in the language of the poet.

	... For all your reckonings,
	the will you left could only measure out
	the hatred, pity, greed, and love of those
	you left behind.

	... There's room enough in here to store
	this light vocabulary of the nondescript,
	these pennyworths of smile and sigh,
	these small dispersals that come back again.

	We teach before we're taught.  Acquaintances,
	We thrive on rules and rights.  Who'll teach
	Us to be friends, and to befriend?  You learned
	The hard (hard-hearted) way we would not learn.

Part IV is remarkably intense, here are poems of images that blaze as you read. In COUNCIL GROVE, the poet is out for a drive to look at other people's houses -

	They say that, close by Council Grove, Clark took
	more land and planted an estate called Minonma.  His son
	gave it a manor house trimmed in gingerbread.  It lasted
	into the nineteen fifties, which gave it an address
	and tore it down.  I've driven out today, that address
	on my mind.

	history is all a foreshortening

	Priests and cardinals chose well in building a
	Byzantine cathedral for this town.  A simpler
	mosaic takes shape here, asphalt, chat, cement
	lovers, old maids, grandmothers, sisters, heirs.

ROTOGRAVURE takes us back to the landscape of the Midwest, back to the days of childhood, and urban life. Here, the poems are freighted with an extraordinary melancholy, with the poet's knowledge that things don't last. As the voice glides, pauses, then twists and turns, the poet nails down her defining images: parents, cousins, the town, historical figures. Her poems are made out of a few simple elements, a few things that resonate, that matter to her, where a believer in the power of the imagination can redeem them.