All Points Bulletin

Review

by W. Howard Denson III
Editor, FCCJ's "Write Stuff - Electronic News"

Sharon Scholl's latest poetry collection, All Points Bulletin (Closet Books, 91pp), provides the reader with a trip around the world, from Europe to Asia Minor, then Africa, Tibet and Japan, and then the Americas. They provide provocative insights into Amsterdam houseboats, the cemetery at Aya Sophia, or the Pike Street Market in Seattle.The poet, a Professor Emeritus from Jacksonville University, observes without sentimentality or platitudes what appears to make various countries and cities tick. Think Wordsworth's "London Bridge" or the travel essays of V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, and others. The collection opens with a villanelle, "Voyage," with its refrain, "We stand enchanted at the rail,/ figures in relief, cut fragments/ in the art of cloud and sail." Later, rhymed couplets describe how Cologne Cathedral reflects "the load of time." It ends, "I know now why the brave escape,/ how kin define but suffocate." The collections features many unrhymed poems, including "Hard Hat Zone," about how the Germans "built the old world back" after World War II, with their message being clear: "it was not the culture that failed;/ it was the fools that failed the culture."In "Urn Burial, Antalya Museum," she describes: "After death the slight body/ was washed and folded like fine linen,/ knees tucked beneath the chin, robe snug about the feet," to emphasize that "From the beginning they knew/ we are not without destinations."A current theme in any poems, essays, or stories about various locales (with the exception of, say, Disney World or the Mall of the Americas) is the pervasiveness of time. "Altun Ha, Yucatan" touches this base as it describes archeologists "fling[ing] blue tents/ over the limestone cliffs of Temple A." The task isn't going to bring them wealth or fame: "Yet they stay, unable to believe/ a thousand Mayan years/ meant nothing after all."In "Fairbanks to Beaver Creek," Scholl unexpectedly says, "This land is only here because/ it glues Alaska to the Yukon, /a million miles of up and down,/ a dreariness of sideways/ slipping into nowhere."The reader will want to put out an APB to locate a copy of this book that is well worth reading.