Breaking Cover
Review by Michael Escoubas,
Quill and Parchment
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal. This review was originally posted on Quill and Parchment.
Posted December 1, 2022
Breaking Cover: Poems
by Michael Maul
85 poems ~ 126 pages
Format: 6’’ x 9” ~ Perfect Bound
Price: $15.00
Publisher: Amazon Books
ISBN: 9798831760415
To Order: amazon.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
Among the richest of childhood experiences were hunting trips with my father. An expert hunter and bird dog trainer, Dad skillfully worked Lady, our German Weimaraner setter around brush piles in our pasture. He had a good sense about where to find pheasants and quail. Dad cautioned us boys not to panic when our quarry “broke cover.” As Lady went on point, in icy air still as death, Sunday dinner exploded from the brush. 12-gauge shot did its predictable damage. Home, we trudged, with Lady carrying a bird in her tight jaws.
I recalled those hunting trips the moment I read Michael Maul’s title Breaking Cover.
In this review I want to showcase certain poems which “broke my cover.” Poems which startled me, causing a hiccup in my life. The best poets know how to make readers think.
A Word about Style and Format
Maul’s style is conversational. He writes as if he were talking with a friend enjoying soup and biscuits at Panera’s. Each of the four “books” contains either 15 or 16 poems. However, the individual books do not adhere to strict divisions of theme or content. Many poems rhyme. While I’m not a big fan of rhyme, I like the way this poet uses internal and end-rhyme. He does so without betraying, “Oh, now I have to think up an ending rhyme because, after all, I’m committed to rhyming no matter what.” Observant to a fault, virtually nothing escapes this poet's notice that cannot be made into a poem. Titles! Maul is good with titles. Who wouldn’t want to read “On Seeing a Teen Girlfriend’s Blouse Displayed in a Vintage Clothing Shop”? Or “Things I Have Heard About You”? Or “To Chinese Hackers Who Stole My Poems”? To readers, I say, “Buckle up for a wild ride!!”
Breaking Cover: Book One
I was enchanted with the 7-line poem “Few Finer Things”:
There was a time
when I could image
few finer things
than storks and angels
coming and going,
beginning and ending
our lives with wings.
Poets say familiar things, but they say them in fresh ways, as if it were the first time they were ever said. Here beginnings and endings, alphas and omegas are seen, ascending on the wings of words. Note: “things,” “going,” “ending,” “wings.” Each word knowing where it belongs.
Breaking Cover: Book Two
“I Know There Are People” broke my cover in a lovely poem which sheds light on the human condition. From selected stanzas:
I know there are people
who are largely invisible to me.
I don’t know their names,
or where they stay;
I know they are not
who I see on TV.
The poem identifies them as sharing similar life values. But they share them without drawing undue attention to themselves. They know:
We will all be sick, we will all be loved,
we will all doubt ourselves.
We will be given riches unearned.
Knowing joy, knowing sadness.
And when we hate each other,
we will be hating ourselves.
Yes, and yes again, this poem breaks my cover with its truth.
Breaking Cover: Book Three
I am stopped “dead in my tracks” by “She Carried Me Just So.” This tender poem chronicles the poet’s mother who had miscarried three times before Michael was born. Ravaged by tuberculosis, she was so proud of her one surviving child, that:
In all the early childhood photos,
including some not far
from the birthing suite,
my mother was always pictured carrying me
strapped to her chest somewhat perilously
with me world-facing out.
Maul writes about his mother regarding him as a special gift to her:
Which is why when we went out
she suspended me from her chest
like a gift
she brought to show the world.
But she was, of course,
the world’s gift to me.
Fighting through years of mother-to-be
then decades of devotion.
I'm "broken" by this poem because it brings to mind longings for my own mother who suffered, too.
Breaking Cover: Book Four
“New Widow in One Chair on the Porch” transported me to a time I dread to face. That time when either me or my wife will put away one chair the other always occupied:
She still sits there
in the shade
hearing sidewalk walkers talk.
But you can see shadows
formed around her eyes,
like the stains on concrete
where, for years,
his matching chair long sat.
This poem, and so many others, broke my cover, like a covey of quail rousted out from the underbrush. Can’t think of anything better for my personal growth than that.
New Release: Breaking Cover
Talkin’ Bout Michael Maul
Bookstore1 Zoom PoetryMic
February 6, 2022
Palm Sunday, 1954
The first Palm Sunday I recall
I scrubbed with pumice stones
until my young hands bled.
My brother said a Palm Sunday was when
the palms of parish boys were by clergy read
then in church announced the names
of who would be eternal-damned
and those who would be saved.
That night, Palm Sunday eve,
I laid in bed and wondered
which path my life would take:
among those who Jesus chose,
or becoming who He forsakes?
So I prayed all night through repentant tears
for petty regrets from limited years,
that I would be allowed
to keep my soul and family first,
then after that, whatever else
I could take.
_______________________________________________________________________
Nature and Environmental Poetry Journal Includes “Spring Cuttings”
Today,The Avocet #434, a weekly nature-focused poetry journal, includes my poem “Spring Cuttings”. The Avocet is based in Arizona/USA. Many, many thanks to editor Charles Portolano.
________________________________________________________________________
International Poetry Anthology to include two Michael Maul Poems in 2021 Edition
In 2021 Poems From the Heron Clan VIII, a long-established and venerated International poetry anthology, will include two poems by Michael Maul. The new works are “Digesting a Poem” and “The Night Punk Life Came to Littleton”. Thank you to the editorial staff, and especially to poet and publisher Doug Stuber!
_________________________________________________________________________
Denver-based Literary Site Publishes Maul Poem
This month From Whispers to Roars, a Denver-based arts and literary magazine, has announced it is publishing a new Michael Maul poem. "Pollywogs in Spoons" will be posted soon on the publication’s website and, once up, can be read it online at www.fromwhisperstoroars.com
Thank you to editor Rachel Noall.
_______________________________________________________________________
The Voices Project Publishes New Poem
On November 2 The Voices Project published my poem "Preparing Our Daughter for College". You can read it online at http://www.thevoicesproject.org/poetry-library/preparing-our-daughter-for-college-by-michael-maul
Thank you to all the good people at The Voices Project!
_______________________________________________________________________
Listen to This…
Today I’m posting a reading of my poem, "Husbands Lost in Florida", from my collection Dancing Naked in Front of Dogs. You can listen to it by clicking on the “Poetry Readings” navigation button.
_______________________________________________________________________
Congrats and Thanks to ToHo Journal
Yesterday I enjoyed kicking off a release party for the Vol.2 Issue 1 of Toho Journal Zooming into Philadelphia live from Florida to share a poem set in Mexico. Dizzying! Thank you Toho Publishing and Toho Journal, plus all of the amazing artists who participated in the event.
You can see & hear my reading and many others at the following Zoom recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/ztECSEv9AbPTBZMwgE2-_A1PK4-PU_5DwIcTn_Hv4UMV8E56X8OT70O_8RXQaH9M.GRrdbxdg-gdtSODN
Passcode: L5%fgNY5
_______________________________________________________________________
Writer’s License Milestone Coming
Next summer will mark my thirty year anniversary of becoming a card-carrying poet. I was licensed in 1991 in California at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Where I attended under free tuition, accommodations, airfare, and stipend for the winning piece I wrote. Life-changing. To all who helped back then: Thanks. I’ve hung in there.
Moving Words
For years and many miles this magnetic letter poem traveled with me on the gas tank of my 1970 BMW R75/5 motorcycle. One-by-one the words were reclaimed by the wind and the road. Now they’re all lost in time but so be it. Apparently they were only on loan. Fair enough.