F. de Sales Meyers has written a redoubtable collection of tales about a fictional Western Maryland town that comes across as so true-to-life that the reader would swear there is such a place. The small Appalachian town in the shadow of Big Savage Mountain is peopled with diverse characters whose stories are such that once the reader has had a taste of a few of the tales they will want to read more.
The town is divided by the “slow creek” of the title story and many of the people of the town have been touched in some way by the coal mining industry that brought both prosperity and blight to Appalachia. The rocks in the stream are discolored by acid from the mines and one of the best known features of the town is the “Asthma Bench” downtown where retired miners attempt to catch their breath with lungs damaged by the coaldust and spend their last days on the bench. This makes the collection sound dour and doomy but it is anything but. All of the characters in this collection contribute to a memorable portrait of a mountain town, expertly described by Mr. F. de Sales Meyers. No surprise to learn that the author is originally from such a small town in the mountains of Allegheny County, Maryland. For many years he worked both as a freelance writer and in the information office of the Maryland Department of Mental Hygiene. What is surprising is that this is his first collection... like a diamond from the coalmine, as it were!
Readers will be moved by such stories as “Taps for Mister Reidler” told in the first person by the narrator, a young pupil of the drunken lard tub of a man named George Reidler who lives up on Scotch Hill. The man is excoriated by the folk of the town because years ago he killed a man and spent time in the Penitentiary in Baltimore. Yet he can play a trumpet so sweetly that he brings both his pupil and himself to tears. The story revolves around the death of a friend of Reidler’s, Ike Stakem, and who will be the unseen person on the hillside to play Taps for funeral of the dead man.
Many of the tales in the collection have to do with outsiders who land up in town. One of the most amusing is “Peter Mark Roget Comes to Town” about an upcoming local appearance by the famed author of Roget’s Thesaurus that Doc Harris suspects has to be a “con” because the author of the dictionary has been dead for over a century. Still he goes along with the joke because he hears that the person who arranged the author appearance is none other than Betty Martha Walton, an egotistical woman whom everyone in town thinks “has got it coming to her.”
Tragic tales are here as well and each of them will enrich the reader to just read and absorb the stories and their implications. Following are a few examples. Each of these stories has its own plot twists and surprises but these outlines will give you an idea of what is on offer. “Tomorrow” is about a simple man named Toddy Duncan who does odd jobs around town and lives in a converted chicken coop behind his parents’ former home. He is befriended by a small boy who always says to him, “Tomorrow” anticipating the slow-thinking man’s return. . . “Ethridge, the Coal Picker” tells the story of a man whose father was a miner but who himself earns his living picking coal from the slag heaps on the mountain side, a task he enjoys with the sun on his back and the calling of crows from the trees. A shopgirl named Clara in Miss Markey’s wallpaper store sets her eyes on him, and eventually finagles a way to get him to come down to the cellar of the shop and eventually get him to marry her... Then there’s a story about “The Asthma Bench”, mentioned earlier, which involves Joker Thomas, one of those old, damaged miners too ill to carry on with his occupation. He is harrassed on the bench by a drunken man named Ding Beall who accuses Joker of having killed his father with the use of his miner’s pick. How will the confrontation between the ailing Joker and the strong but drink-besodden Ding Beall be resolved? Again, the reader is captivated by the circumstances of one more story in which the characters and town come so vividly to life. This may be fiction but it is expertly wrought fiction. A highly recommended collection of tales!

Here’s a novel about Jack the Ripper which right away shows its literary aspirations. The first section of the novel, which pitches the reader immediately into the poor districts of London of the day where the Ripper murders occurred, is titled, “The Morlocks.” Astute readers will recognize that title as a nod to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine---and in fact Wells himself appears as a character in this novel. Immediately below that allusive title is an appropriate quote from Shelley: “Hell is a city much like London, a populous and smoky city.” And the opening line of the novel may remind many of T. S. Eliot’s opening to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when Mr. Nicastro opens with: “The guts of London are laid out as if on a surgeon’s table.”
From there on in, the novel is all Nick Nicastro as the London of 1888 is well evoked by the novelist, the author of five previous historical novels on various topics. The writer tells us that his aim in writing The Passion of the Ripper was to create “a different kind of Ripper story: not a whodunit, but a naturalistic exploration of the man, his city, and his times. It tells this well-known story from the inside out, from the points of view of the killer, the cops, and his final victim. It is the result of extensive research on the subject, but the aim is a kind of truth beneath and beyond the facts.”
It is not too forthcoming to reveal that the Ripper of the story is identified pretty early on in the novel when the scene shifts from London to Poland and we get a glimpse of the early life of an assistant surgeon named Severin Klosowski, who would later emigrate to London to work as a barber (being unable to qualify for licensure as a medical man), taking the name George Chapman. While in his native Poland, the suspect is portrayed as a man with strange sexual proclivities in the presence of an icon of the Black Madonna of Czestochowska—whose bloody-cheeked image is featured on the cover of Nicastro’s novel.
George Chapman is not a mainstream candidate for the unknown murderer of 1888 that we know today as Jack the Ripper. The infamous serial killer either gave himself the name or else possibly he received it—for better or worst and for all time—from an enterprising London journalist desiring to “hype” up the stories by writing the “Ripper letters” written to the authorities in which the writer claimed to be the bloody murderer.
Chapman was ultimately arrested for the poisoning murder of several common-law wives and was hanged in 1903. Although the main detective on the 1888 case, Scotland Yard’s famed Chief Inspector George Frederick George Abberline, by 1903 retired, supposedly said to his former subordinate, Inspector George Godley, “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!”, most experts on the Ripper case point out the large gulf in nature between the types of crimes attributed to Chapman and those of the Ripper: Chapman’s disposal of his “wives” secretive and duplicitous and the Ripper crimes bloody murders and mutilations done on the public streets of the East End of London; the Chapman crimes done to women the murderer knew and lived with, and the Ripper crimes done to street prostitutes that the killer probably did not know beforehand.
Nick Nicastro expertly captures the passion of the moment of the murders and the psychology of the man who committed them. Whether the barber Polish barber was Jack the Ripper or not, the novel makes for an enthralling and informative read. The book is available through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Frank Prem’s on-line persona is “Frank Faust” which might give you a hint at the tongue-in-cheek and witty nature of much of his poetry. Frank explains: “The choice of by-line came about a few years ago when I first gave in to writing seriously, as a vocation, and decided to seek an audience willing to read and critique my scribblings. I made a deal with the devil to write my soul in return for the reward of being read.”
Whether Frank bartered his soul in writing Memoir of a Dog remains to be seen. The title of the large format (9 ¾ inch by 7 inch) chapbook is a little bit misleading—it might imply that it is written from the perspective of a dog. Rather, it is a poignant cycle of poems written by a dog owner. Prem has written an appealing series of 23 poems about the life and death of a standard poodle named Sparky. The poet’s partner, Leanne Murphy, has provided attractive sketches to go with Prem’s sensitive and entertaining poetry.
As related in a poem near the beginning of the book, the poet, his wife and two sons set out to get a small dog. The following poem is typical of Prem’s relaxed and personal style:

Virginia Bates’ Palette of Life represents a feast of poetry by an accomplished Maryland poet. This is the veteran poet’s life work, and it is well worth a read. No white space here—the collection is packed full of the poet’s entertaining and informed musings on everything around her. And she is not afraid to tackle some difficult and prickly issues with wit and intelligence:

The poet can be unapologetically sentimental and realistic at the same time, as in this one about her late husband:

Older readers might well appreciate how in a number of her works the poet evokes the stars of the silver screen from Hollywood’s heyday—as well as, here, recalls a landmark Baltimore movie house:

While Virginia Bates’ verse will never challenge that of Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson for its erudition, still her homespun and attractive verse has its place. A recommended read.

Grant D. McLeman lives on Clydeside in the Glasgow area of Scotland but prefers not to be thought of as a “Scottish poet.” Rather, he has sought through the Internet to make an international poetry connection through the Poetry Kit e-mail list run by Merseyside performance poet Jim Bennett, through appearances at the White House Poetry Revival in Limerick City, Ireland, and planned collaborations with poets who write in Arabic, Farsi, and Spanish.
Street Magic is McLeman’s first chapbook, and a welcome collection of the poet’s views on modern life it proves.
Interestingly, given the poet’s wish to connect with other poets internationally a number of his poems are about travel, on the earth and beyond:

A bit late with this review but Loch Raven Review readers should know about this fine anthology from the Harford Poetry and Literary Society. Manorborn: The Water Issue contains writing and photography on the theme of water by such accomplished writers as Rafael Alvarez, Vonnie Crist, Daniela Gioseffi, Clarinda Harriss, Niels Hav, Ellaraine Lockie, Katharyn Howd Machan, Gregg Mosson, Doug Ramspeck, Tad Richards, Michael Salcman, Elizabeth Spires, Afaa Michael Weaver, Colleen Webster, Warren Woessner, MiMi Zannino, and others. Many of these writers have featured in Loch Raven Review and the wealth of talent shows.
Here are some examples of the fare on offer:

Manorborn: The Water Issue contains a treasury of such excellent pieces. I must confess that my personal favorite in the volume might be the witty essay by Baltimore activist and political satirist Alan Barysh who puts aside his usual political objectives to give us “Streams of Consciousness.” I’ve read the piece a number of times and it always makes me chuckle. Splish-splash.