Paul Elisha (right) interviews Djelloul Marbrook about Brushstrokes and glances, his second book of poems, for Bard's Eye View, a series originating at WAMC, Albany, for Northeastern Public Radio. The interview will be aired later this winter. The book will be published by Deerbrook Editions in December.

Autumn News

Deerbrook Editions has a new web site. you can buy books there now, and leave donations. It is a new format with a similar look to the old site, and will be upgraded periodically with new features. I have to spend some time attending to promoting and getting reviews for our new book Brushstrokes and glances by Djelloul Marbrook, the prize winning author. The title of this post links to our new site with most of the information about the book and author, with new things happening everyday, there will be more to come, if I can keep up with it all. Further down is the foreword to the book.

Two new poetry collections are in the works. One, Brushstrokes and glances by Djelloul Marbrook, is already in print and headed for market. The author is an exceptional writer from Germantown, NY, and has gotten attention for his first prize winning book, Far from Algiers.

More for Djelloul Marbrook.

“Djelloul Marbrook sounds like no one else.”
—Barbara Louise Ungar, Celaan

Djelloul Marbrook - poems and interview on From the Fishouse.

I know that Djelloul Marbrook is an exceptional writer, as anyone can see that visits his blog and web site. I cannot say anything better about the book than does Lucy Bowditch, author of the foreword to Brushstrokes and glances, which I will post here:

Djelloul Marbrook’s poems unflinchingly celebrate and chide. With his literary brushstrokes and glances, he insightfully considers artists, critics, curators, viewers, and the works themselves. Unlike the art historian who might analyze, dissect, and uncover meaning by deploying a legalistic claim, the poet surrenders to direct feeling uncovering experiential truths that parallel the truth of art itself. As Horace reminds us, ut pictura poesis.

The poems are kaleidoscopic: the narrator’s position constantly shifts, as does the time period considered. Sometimes we are looking at a painter’s process. Another moment, we are situated within a painting itself, a detail of the composition. Next, the style or the artist’s biography becomes a metaphor for a human condition or desire.

In Lucian Freud and my mother, Marbrook captures the opportunistic, ruthless quality of that particular bird of prey—the painter—for whom all is fair game. By contrast, Georges Seurat (Studies for A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte) is a gentle appreciation the artist’s fleeting Symbolist preparatory drawings for the large signature pointillist work now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Undersides of leaves, a poem evoking the late, photography-inspired work of Corot, describes the shimmering halation of moving leaves from the perspective of one of the leaves integrated in Corot’s largely monochromatic composition. In Shabtis (The Brooklyn Museum), Marbrook playfully identifies with an ancient Egyptian burial figurine that performs chores in the afterlife for Queen Nefertiti and escapes the burden of quotidian temporal existence.

Praise, admonishment, and acceptance inform Marbrook’s agile narrative voice. Making an unexpected analogy between an ineffectual government and Caravaggio’s force of character, Marbrook champions the artist in A government like Caravaggio. At times a poem takes on a reprimanding tone as in The critic speaks, which could refer to the poet’s view of the critic or the critic’s view of the world. A pale of words, a sweet description of a sixth century BCE grave stele representing a little girl and her youthful departed older brother, sadly reflects art’s limited but significant ability to withstand profound human loss.

Djelloul Marbrook’s poems unexpectedly animate the visual arts due to the multiple fanciful perspectives and succinct identifications of art- related realities. In My mother dying, Marbrook, at high personal cost no doubt, recognizes the desire of an artist to, on one hand, remain childlike and thus have access to all that primary process material, and, on the other, marshal skills to transform experience into art allowing one to live for a thousand years. After all, life is short. Art is long.

Brushstrokes and Glances is as well a welcome companion to anyone interested in poetry and its role as a sister art to a broad history of visual art. Marbrook ranges from contemporary artists to anonymous ancient Egyptian sculptors. His vision invokes the delight of promiscuous wandering in New York’s best museums, the Metropolitan, the Frick or the Brooklyn Museum. Nothing remains static in this merry-go-round of the senses where, “The eye is best that distrusts the mind.”

Lucy L. Bowditch
Associate Professor of Art History
The College of Saint Rose

Praise for Dawn Potter

There is a new look to deerbrookeditions.blogspot.com as well as deerbrookeditions.com. If only I could figure out which merchant system by which to offer sales on line. I found one, MerchantWarehouse.com, that proudly flaunts its ratings, but the best thing might be to move to a new host that can offer the package deal with a comparable merchant account.

To all visitors, Dawn Potter's new book of poems How the Crimes Happened from CavanKerry Press is a remarkably good book, and you must read it, you won't be sorry. This book is moving and full of engaging poems, fresh language, and skillful images that build glimpses of the world almost cinematic in color.

The title link to this post takes you to Dawn's blog.

You may know that Deerbrook Editions published Dawn's first book Boy Land & Other Poems, in 2004, one of the first manuscripts to appear in my P.O. Box. Boy Land, which I suggested we make Boy Land & Other Poems, and Dawn agreed only with slight reluctance, was interesting and well crafted. How the Crimes Happened exhibits even more skill, nuance, and language, that carries the reader on a true symphony. I recommend this book, as on the cover Ellen Dudley puts it, "Fearless . . . these poems sing service to love, loss, pity, and hope. . . . her (poet's) authority clear."

News besides that I'd like to get a new keyboard

Deerbrook Editions has now become a member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses, or clmp. There logo with a link is now on our pages. The clmp web site has limited access to the public, but enough information is available to learn something about what they are all about.


I believe that there are many more talented, deserving writers and artists in the world than ever find a publisher or gallery that will present their work. So far my catchy phrase that makes an introduction sound bite for Deerbrook Editions is:

DESERVING AUTHORS • GOOD BOOKS

This is not meant as a judgment of exclusion but as a dream to include, that by making good books, even beautiful books of little known or emerging authors of poetry and prose, we are making a difference in the lives of writers and in the experience of readers.

I think I might add:
In ordinary places you can find extraordinary things.

We want to expand our editorial scope and find innovative, experimental, as well as more traditional forms of literature. By providing books of works that seem relevant and stimulating, books that are often first books for the authors, we hope to enable and empower the authors to continue working and growing, by giving them a greater audience, and hopefully give readers a new experience through literature.

After operating for eight years publishing mostly poetry, and essentially at little or no profit, it seems apparent that growth is necessary, and making more books is part of that growth. My hope is that CLMP can help guide at least by being informational. Currently the plan is to apply for non-profit status to improve the opportunities of finding foundation grants or fellowships. With increased operating capital, more marketing and promotion can be done for a growing list of titles.

Increased earning power means being able to find qualified volunteers or staff and advisers to share the work load, find and implement new ideas and ways of being successful presenting the kind of books we do now, and expand into new areas such as limited editions of fine press books. Such help would allow us to include an educational outreach program. This program could include facilitating workshops in writing, book arts, the importance of libraries, as well as finding venues for authors to read and present their work and experience. I do some of this now, in a team effort with all authors, but this is the vision for growth beyond what one or even two individuals might be able to do. The work, more work, begins every day, now, and tomorrow. I really hope that clmp and their information and listserves will make it easier to focus and direct the press moving forward.

In some upcoming posts; new projects will be discussed, and hopefully some interesting articles about design and the internet.

The Last Island goes to San Francisco

Next week Mimi White will read from her book The Last Island, Deerbrook Editions 2008, in San Francisco, CA, May 28th, at Cover to Cover, a friendly community oriented bookstore, 1307 Castro Street.

The Last Island received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry from the New Hampshire Writers Project in 2009. Here are two favorite poems from the book.

Mimi white also received the Philbrick Poetry Award in 2000, and this is what Robert Creeley said about her winning chapbook, " These are poems of a deceptive quiet and simplicity, just that they make, together, a landscape of painful, almost surreal insistence."

Mimi will also be reading at the Ogunquit Art Museum, Ogunquit, Maine, July 27 @ 7 PM.





In the Mineral Dark


In the cold petals of sleep,
without fear or trepidation,
angels fly. Fastened to whiteness,
fugitive stars guide them
to my empty meadows.

They brush my eyes
with their heated bodies
and forests rise from stone,
the radiant flux of history
written in flecks and swirls.

They trace the mineral dark
with their soft wings
and leaf by leaf trees root
in the freshet of the night.
Blackbird by blackbird,

branches feather
the unfurnished dream.
A small stream rises,
ample, impossibly clear.








Schoodic Peninsula


When the moon hung its nail
at the end of the world
we turned off the lights
and let the stars
replace what we had been saying.
Then a deer (which was once
darkness) stepped
across the road
and became forest
again. If I practice
walking I am footsteps
on the lively fungus.
When I gaze at the white
lichen I am the moon.
When blackberries
print seeds on my lips
I am the sweet season
that houses summer,
fragrant, waiting to close.

Reprise & Overture

“Reprise & Overture,” a program of poems and music by Martin Steingesser and friends for the publication of the second edition of his book Brothers of Morning will be presented at Longfellow Books, One Monument Way, Portland, Maine, on Thursday, May 20, at 7 pm.

Poets, musicians and friends of Martin Steingesser will join to read poems from his book Brothers of Morning, followed by a presentation of new poems by the author. Readers include flutists Carl Dimow and Judy Cormier, singer, guitarist and composer Con Fullam, poet Bruce Spang, co-manager-owner of Longfellow Books Chris Bowe and performer Judy Tierney. The ensemble also will be joined by percussionist Rick Cormier.

Martin Steingesser “is a musician and acrobat, his book Brothers of Morning, ablaze with imagination," says poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar. “A burning, tender voice,” said former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser. Individual poems have appeared in the national magazines The Sun, The Progressive and the Humanist, and in literary publications like American Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, Rattle, The Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal, Inkwell Journal, The Beloit Poetry Journal and Poetry East (forthcoming). His poems have received a number of awards, including First Place in Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2008 Maine Literary Awards. They are represented in several anthologies, such as Four Seasons, edited by Wesley McNair (Downeast Books: 2010), The Maine Poets, edited by Wesley McNair (Down East Books: 2003); Motion: American Sports Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2001); Poetry Comes Up Where It Can: Poems from The Amicus Journal, 1900-2000 (University of Utah Press, 2000); Speaking of New England (North Country Press: Belfast, ME, 1993); Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books, St. Louis, MO, 2007); and Naming the World (Heinemann Publishers: Portsmouth, NH, 2006).

He is Portland, Maine’s first Poet Laureate (2007-09).

Brothers of Morning was originally published by Deerbrook Editions, of Cumberland, Maine, in 2002. The second edition, with revisions by the author, was re-issued by Deerbrook this April.

Sometimes a Poem
Ripens in Me,

and I think I’ll split my
skin
if I don’t have a plate
on which to offer
it,
some altar from which to sing.
Interminable are the days, months,
years my poems wander
searching a page
you might turn to find them.
All morning
I’ve worked on and off on one,
stumbling over new gifts,
as if words,
phrases, images, were windfall apples,
this old heart among them
glad as a fawn
again.

—Martin Steingesser

For Additional Information Contact
Longfellow Books; One Monument Way, Portland; 207-772-4045;
Martin Steingesser, Author & Participating Poet; 207-828-9937;

The latest in marketing practices

We have not gotten to this point, yet. Still sending out post cards and fliers, sometimes email, though not sure if that practice gets any response. In fact, there was a time when we sponsored a jazz show on MPBN that had 9 second credit lines before and after the show. It was a good show and felt like it must be finding some ears. We had to stop though as our budget couldn't allow us to continue, and for the dollar amount of underwriting, we could not measure what the return was. Kind of like keeping horses, lots of work with not much return. Well that sounds cold (mostly in winter) because the rewards of having a horse or two if you can, is measured in beauty and their special kind of interaction, especially if you ride.
We are currently working to develop to further market and promote our authors beyond the blogs we try to keep up with, mailings, etc., and to keep up with the distributor. Many think that having a distributor solves all the problems, and there is great opportunity in having one, but it requires increased sales and marketing to try to reach readers and buyers nation wide to keep up with distributor fees. That is why we decided to offer subscriptions. Members receive all books at a 40% discount. Details are on our printable order from at the Deerbrook web page (basically about $90.00 for all books currently in print). And now there is a new feature, the url www.deerbrookeditions.com, if typed into a browser leads directly to Deerbrook Editions web page, small steps with hopes for more exposure. The next step is to have purchasing capability added to the web page so that visitors will be able to buy books right there, through a merchant link perhaps, but better for us as much as we like amazon, right.
We are also developing toward becoming a non profit press to allow for the possibility of applying for grants and fellowships and there by afford to do more of everything.
Cartoon from Funny Times: credit www.leeKinginc.com.