Praise for Your Infidel Eyes by Brant Lyon

 Reprinted from At the Inkwell, Book Reviews, Jan. 20, 2017

Not Grenades, but Pomegranates

by Mark Fogarty

Your Infidel Eyes 
by Brant Lyon
Poets Wear Prada ($12)

Poetry can be a very ephemeral business. That’s why it is a pleasure to see a tenth anniversary edition of Brant Lyon’s chapbook Your Infidel Eyes from Poets Wear Prada.

It is also quite poignant, since Lyon died in 2012, after putting out another fine poetry collection called You Are White Inside. He was also an influential poet and editor on the New York City scene, helping to launch several anthologies for Uphook Press and to start the group Great Weather for Media.

He was an excellent poet, too, as can be seen by the 14 poems in Your Infidel Eyes, and quite a traveler, as this chapbook has poems set in Mexico, India and Egypt. The poem “Illusion” actually describes himself as starting out as a prisoner of a “stupid” jailer. When he swipes the jailer’s keys and frees himself, he opens the way to go traveling, both physically and metaphysically.

I’m not sure Lyon would relish being called a romantic poet, since the book describes many of the aspects of pain in “I Ching” and compares truth to a spoiled child in the opening poem, “Truth.” And the rain in Mumbai (in “Homesick”) is “poison and its own antidote / As pain is to love, and love to pain.”

Yet You Are White Inside ends with quite a romantic deus ex machina, and I was on the lookout for a similar one here. Even the poisoned rain in India is leavened by the sweet flute music of “a blue skinned god / (who) learned compassion for every living thing.” In “Quang Tri” he remembers that a sick friend’s sketchbook contains images “not (of) grenades but pomegranates.”

There is a poem at the end of this book that give me the romantic denouement I’ve been looking for. It is called “An Outlaw Sura” and it is an exceptional poem, starting “Mine is not a book free / of doubt and involution.” And he realizes in it that while he has made “my devotional obligations” he will always be an infidel, in both physical and metaphysical ways, even though “I have not denied / but been led astray / obeying the forbidden / dictates of my heart.”

And this poem of self-realization, faith and hope ends “In the name of ever-merciful love / I have come to cherish love’s / most benevolent blasphemies.”

Now that’s romantic. And I think there are very few poets who aren’t filled by “doubt and involution” and wouldn’t love to think that by going through the process they might end up with “ever-merciful love.”

So it is a mercy, a tender mercy perhaps, that Poets Wear Prada has chosen to re-issue Lyon’s first book (and, their own first book). A world of pomegranates is infinitely preferable to a world of grenades, and the words of someone who thought so are well worth preserving.

---

Mark Fogarty’s poetry has been published in Hawaii Review, Viet Nam Generation, Journal of NJ Poets, Exit 13, Unrorean, Eclectic Literary Forum, Cokefishing in Alpha Beat Soup, Footwork, The Brownstone Poets Anthology, The TEA Newsletter, Gallery and The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow. Mark, also a musician, is the author of three poetry collections from White Chickens Press, Myshkin’s Blues, Peninsula and Phantom Engineer.

Poems Published in Literary Anthology Celebrating William Carlos Williams

I am pleased to announce that 3 of my poems "Life With Clocks," "The Family Tree," "The Pursuit of Progeny" appear in the 4th edition of the The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow.  The literary journal also includes 6 poems and an excellent essay by John J. Trause, author of Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada, 2007) and several poems by Brant Lyon, author of  Your Infidel Eyes (Poets Wear Prada, 2006).

The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, No.4 - 2011 reflects a diversity of voices and styles rarely combined in one book. The fourth annual edition of the literary journal was published last month by the Red Wheelbarrow Poets.  A open call to poets connected with the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative Reading of South Bergen County, past features including guest poets from the Tri-State region and regulars open mic readers, as well as participants of the peer-to-peer poetry workshops at the GainVille Learning Center and Café. Thirty poets are featured: John Barrale, Céline Beaulieu, Sondra Singer Beaulieu, Marian Calabro, the late George de Gregorio, Milton P. Ehrlich, Mark Fogarty, Thomas Fucaloro, Davidson Garrett, Elissa Gordon, Roxanne Hoffman, Jim Klein, Melanie Klein, Janet Kolstein, Kathy Kuenzle, Brant Lyon, Zorida Mohammed, Rick Mullin, Mike O’Brien, Jane Ormerod, George Pereny, S. Gili Post, Tony Puma, Dan Saxon, Claudia Serea, Francesca Sphynx, Madeline Tiger, John J. Trause, Dorinda Wegener and Don Zirilli.


In addition to the poetry, four essays give insight into the life and work of the Rutherford doctor/poet: "William Carlos Williams and the Baroness" by John J. Trause; "The Poetry Reading" by Madeline Tiger; "Friendship and ‘The Figure 5’" by Marian Calabro and "Medicine, Languages, a River and the American Muses in the Work of William Carlos Williams" by Céline Beaulieu. Noted poet Jim Klein, who leads the Gainville poetry workshop, shares his thoughts on creating a painting in "Don’t Talk Unless You Can Improve the Silence," and Mark Fogarty gives a preview of his novel in excerpts from "It’s So Easy to Fall in Love."


The journal was launched on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 7PM at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey.  Copies are available online at Lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/content/10922431) and will be available through Amazon.com by the end of the year. For more information and mailorders contact the Editors.

Peter Chelnik's "Prairie Fire Jazz Poetry" Sun, Aug 8 at 6 p.m.

Next Prairie Fire Reading Sunday August 8

SUNDAY 8/8 - 6pm (sign up 5:30pm)

Peter Chelnik's "Prairie Fire Jazz Poetry"

~features~

Brant Lyon (poet/jazz keyboard)

&

Ronnie Norpel (poet/writer)


&

Bob Feldman (sax)


&

Host PETER CHELNIK (poetry)

&

The Open Mic

@
AMERICAN THEATRE OF ACTORS
314 W. 54th St. (bet. 8th & 9th Aves.)
Hell's Kitchen, NYC 10019
Beckman Theater 2nd Floor
(212) 581-3044
www.appleboxdesign.com/ATA/ata.html


By Subway: C or E to West 50th Street
Walk north to West 54th Street, west to theatre


Admission: $5

Brant Lyon writes poetry, prose, and music. His anthologies include “A Cautionary Tale: Seven New York Performing Poets” (Uphook Press, 2008), Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me” (Logochrysalis Productions, 2008), “The Company We Keep” (Poet Warrior Productions, 2003). His journals include Big City Lit, Lullwater Review, Rattle, Rogue Scholars. He is an editor of Uphook Press, contributing editor of BigCityLit, and curator of the poetry and music reading series, Hydrogen Jukebox, in NYC. For more information, go to logochrysalis.com.


Ronnie Norpel is a performance poet, actor, photographer and jock with a deep passion for the Phillies, where she spent seven seasons as a ballgirl and fan accommodation manager. In New York, “Ronnie G” was the muse and collaborator of Warhol Factory superstar Gerard Malanga, whose phot of Ronnie, “Marble of Light,” was included for the exhibition and catalogue, Artists of the Warhol Circle Then & Now. She studied acting in Hollywood and worked at the Zero One Gallery. Today, Ronnie reads monthly in NYC with the Upper Left Side Writers and Poets. Other readings include the Lower East Side Festival, the SynonymUS collective at Nuyorican Poets Café, and the Wild Angels at St. John the Divine.

Brant Lyon | Your Infidel Eyes

Brant Lyon recites "Hash House Blues" in NYC at Bowery Poetry Club on New Year's Day 2006





YOUR INFIDEL EYES
by Brant Lyon
soft cover/saddle stitch/12 pp.
$6.25 (+ $1.50 S&H)

Photo Credit: D. Cloherty

Not to be confused with the championship bicycle racer from Canada with the same name, BRANT LYON has for more than a decade tirelessly pedaled his words and music throughout New York City’s poetry circuit and beyond. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, Bowery Poetry Club, The Cornelia Street Café, Galapagos Art Space, and elsewhere in New York City, in the Catskills, as well
as in his native New Jersey. Brant currently curates “Hydrogen Jukebox,” a ‘jazzoetry’ series where the recombinant DNA of word, rhythm, and tone metamorphoses in improvisatory chrysalises and re-emerges as musical logo-imagoes. His poetry has most recently appeared in print and online in Rattle, Big City Lit, Lullwater Review, The Long Islander, Medicinal Purposes, Rogue Scholars Collective and one cheesy anthology best forgotten. Once a clinical social worker and an administrator of juvenile justice, for now, he leaves it to others to work out their problems, as he frequently bounds out the door for adventure in far-flung places. For the past eight years he has tracked the digital revolution in Egypt, where he and his partner have just opened an internet café in a neighborhood of greater Cairo so obscure only a homing pigeon could find. He otherwise resides in Brooklyn, New York.

THE PECKING ORDER ON SHARIA AS-SOUQ, ASWAN At dusk, when the market simmers down, then cools--a pot brought back to boil by noon next day--what won't be thrown into that pot is tossed onto a heap in the middle of Sharia as-Souq that nightly grows then disappears: Bone and gristle from the butcher shop, soggy mint leaves from the corner café, a crate of tomatoes trampled by a donkey cart, rotten lemons not even the careless or desperate would buy... Donkeys lower their muzzles into the pile and are led away; sheep and goats, a few stray dogs and cats, pick over the trash and take their fill; next ducks, chickens, and geese furiously peck. Finally, the mound is set on fire. Flames feed, in turn, licking air.