BOOKS AND AUTHORS / ORANGE COUNTY : Poets Paint Different Portraits of Human Connectedness

Veteran Orange County poets Lee Mallory and Julian Palley are making the rounds of poetry readings and bookstores to promote their recently published new collections, in which they both return to familiar themes.

Ask Mallory what the title of his new book, “Full Moon, Empty Hands,” means, and the poet in Mallory kicks in.

“You walk out on a beautiful night,” he says, “and there’s a full moon, and there’s a warm wind stirring on your flanks, and the sound of soft music is rippling on the air, and you have no one . . .”

His evocative word picture lingers only as long as a stolen kiss. Then the teacher in Mallory takes over.

“In other words,” he says, “the idyllic scene is set for romance, but the real world intrudes. It’s what I’ve said for years and years: We’re coming up empty-handed because we’re losing our connectedness as human beings, and that’s also true between the sexes.”

Mallory says none of the 51 poems in “Full Moon, Empty Hands” (Lightning Publications, Fullerton; $12.95) embodies the title, “but there are plenty of poems of sorrow and losses, which are the ‘empty hands,’ and there are plenty of poems that equate to the ‘full moon,’ the positive side” of relationships.

Mallory, who teaches poetry at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, says his book is roughly divided into thirds: new poems, poems that have been previously published but never gathered into a collection, and reader-favorites from his 1990 book, now out of print, “I Write Your Name.”

But more than half of the poems in “Full Moon, Empty Hands,” his fifth book of poetry, deal with love. Indeed, Mallory isn’t called “the Love Poet” for nothing.

“I think that’s kind of schlocky,” he says of the “Love Poet” designation. “It sounds like the name of a disk jockey on one of those call-in radio shows. But in a way, as I look at my work, it’s probably pretty factual, because I’m fascinated with the interplay between the sexes more than just in a visceral, sensual way.”

As a poet, Mallory is known for not only understanding “the depth of the feminine mystery”--as poet Lisa Rafel has put it--but for understanding both sides of the male/female equation.

“The strongest people in my life have always been female, so it’s not accidental that my writing seeks to bring them onto my plane or that I use writing to reach out to that other side,” Mallory says. “I agonize over the fact that as a writer and as a poet I can never fully understand the female side, her reality. Man, for example, will never understand the mystery of childbirth, and the male writer who tries to be the master of all experience feels that gap.”

Mallory, a 30-year resident of Newport Beach, will be the featured reader at the Factory Readings gathering at 8 p.m. Monday in a new venue, Koo’s Arts Cafe, 1505 N. Main St., Santa Ana. He’ll also sign copies of his book, which is available at Barnes & Noble in Costa Mesa, Brentano’s in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, and Barnes & Noble in MainPlace/Santa Ana.

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Palley says “Family Portraits” (The Inevitable Press, Laguna Beach; $10) is more introspective than his three previous collections.

His 1987 book, “Bestiary,” for example, “is largely visual,” he says. “Here, I think there’s a different tone, perhaps you could call it more mature or reflective.”

The poems in the new book mirror how he was feeling during the time he wrote them--1989 to 1993--but, he says, “it also is a product of experience, of writing and living.”

Palley, who recently retired from the Spanish department at UC Irvine, where he taught Spanish literature and comparative literature for 27 years, says the family portrait on the book’s cover shows his mother in 1909 at the age of 13 with her two younger sisters, and his poem “Anne Palley, with Sisters, 1909” is “kind of a meditation on that photo and my mother.”

Only a couple of the poems in the book, however, deal directly with his family. The title poem is his reflection on family portraits, those graying pictures of bygone relatives who, as he writes, whisper from walls and mantels to their progeny that “we also loved & suffered as you do now. . .”

Palley, in fact, views the title “Family Portraits” in a much broader sense. As the book’s dedication indicates, he says, “I consider all animals and people to be part of one family, one human and animal family.”

Indeed, the book includes poems about vultures, suburban coyotes, a red-tail hawk. Animals are a recurring subject in his poems.

“I think living in Orange County since 1966 has really influenced my poetry, and much of it is inspired by the nature of this area,” he says, noting that his book, “Bestiary,” is mostly about birds found in Irvine and along the coast. And, he says, “in my third book, ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ there are a great many poems that relate to the bird life and animal life of Orange County, so I sort of discovered nature here in a meaningful way.”

Palley’s poetry is perhaps best summed up by Jack Foley, editor of Poetry/USA, an Oakland-based poetry journal.

Writes Foley, referring to an earlier Palley poem about an owl: “Often as you look, it looks: ‘The intensity of his gaze/went down to my shoes.’ ” The poems, Foley continues, “seem poised between mind and other, arriving at insight by means of the interplay between the two: ‘Living/things spoke to me as never before.’ ”

Says Palley: “That’s very pertinent about nearly all of my poetry. When I write about a person or thing it’s always two-way: The thing observed always looks back at me and speaks in some way.”

Some of the other poems in the collection grew out of Palley’s travels to southern India, Italy and Mexico. “I have a long love affair with Mexico,” he says. “Massacre of the Innocents” is about the massacre of students in Mexico City in 1991.

Palley, an Irvine resident who has lived in Orange County since 1966, has been writing poetry since high school.

Why he writes it is, he says, “a very complicated question.”

It’s partly a matter of having an experience that he would like to remember or to communicate to others, he says.

“But writing poems is also a process of self-discovery,” he says. “You discover who you are and what you can do and insights about the subject in the process of writing, so that, more than an attempt at communication, it’s an attempt at self-discovery. And as you may know, poems usually write themselves. The poet just helps them along.”

With a laugh, he adds: “at least that’s my experience, and it’s the experience of a lot of other poets.”

Palley, along with poet Maurya Simon, will read from “Family Portraits” at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Real Bookstore, 17350 E. 17th St., Tustin. His book is available at the UCI bookstore, Upchurch-Brown Booksellers in Laguna Beach and will be available at the Real Bookstore.