PI Issue 13 and 14 by Poetry International

Poetry International 13/14

Poetry International is published annually at San Diego State University The Department of English and Comparative Literature 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182-6020 THE PUBLICATION OF THIS JOURNAL IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A GENEROUS GRANT FROM THE

Edwin Watkins Foundation All the material in this issue is copyright ÂŠ2009 by Poetry International. Requests for permission to reprint or electronically reproduce anything in this issue should be directed to the address above. Unsolicited manuscripts will be considered for publication September 1 through December 30 of each year. Potential contributors should send no more than five poems to the address above. All manuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope or e-mail address. Query first for essays. Books will be considered for review through December 1 of each year. Please send them to the address above. Reviews are assigned. We do not consider unsolicited reviews. If you'd like us to consider you as a reviewer, send query to the e-mail address below, using Word files to attach samples of your work. We do not accept e-mail submissions. phone: fax: e-mail: web site: blog:

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Single issues of Poetry International are $15 for individuals and $20 for institutions. Individual subscriptions: 2 years, $30; 3 years, $45 Institutional subscriptions: 2 years, $40; 3 years, $60 Front cover photography by Hector Gonzalez de Cunco Back cover art by Sara Adlerstein Cover and journal production & design by Tania Baban and Jim Natal www.confluxpress.com ISSN: 103-054-X ISBN: 1-879691-90-6 SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINTED IN CANADA

Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while suffice at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;WALT WHITMAN

FOUNDING EDITOR Fred Moramarco

ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Reed Wilson

EDITOR IN CHIEF & POETRY EDITOR Ilya Kaminsky

SAN DIEGO EDITORIAL BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR & POETRY EDITOR

Sandra Alcosser Marilyn Chin Steve Kowit

B. H. Boston

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Anthony Vasquez Jill Frischhertz Meagan Marshall Rosa Berumen Martin Woodside Taylur Thu Hien Ngo

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Gina Barnard Susan Wiedner Bianca Chapman Mariel Romero-Ocaranza

ASSISTANT TO THE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Meagan Marshall

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD Kim Addonizio Christopher Buckley Michael Collier Billy Collins Rita Dove Carolyn ForchĂŠ Marilyn Hacker Edward Hirsch Major Jackson Robert Kelly Christopher Merrill David Mura Jerome Rothenberg Gary Soto Gerald Stern Mark Strand James Tate Natasha Trethewey C.K.Williams

Sarah Maclay

Poetry International Notable Books, 2007-2008 Rae Armantrout, “Next Life,” Wesleyan Poetry Frank Bidart, “Watching the Spring Festival,” FSG Peg Boyers, “Honey with Tobacco,” University of Chicago Press Jericho Brown, “Please,” New Issues Press Derick Burleson, “Never Night,” Marick Press Henri Cole, “Blackbird and Wolf,” FSG Robert Creeley, “If I Were Writing This,” New Directions Mark Doty, “Fire to Fire,” Harper Collins Katie Ford, “Colosseum,” Graywolf Press Erich Fried, “Selected Poems,” Azul Editions Forrest Gander, “As a Friend,” New Directions Publishers Louise Gluck, “Averno,” FSG Linda Gregg, “All of It Singing,” Graywolf Press Allen Grossman, “Descartes’ Loneliness,” New Direction Publishers Zbegnew Herbert, “The Collected Poems,” tr. Alissa Valles, Ecco Press Selima Hill, “Selected Poems,” Bloodaxe Publishes Edward Hirsch, “Special Orders,” Knopf Jane Hirshfield, “After,” Harper Collins Press Lisa Jarnot, “Night Scenes,” Flood Editions Fady Joudah, “Earth in the Attic,” Yale University Press Daniil Kharms, “Today I Wrote Nothing,” translated by Matvei Yankelevich, Overlook Press August Kleinzahler, “Sleeping it off in Rapid City,” FSG James Longenbach, “The Art of the Poetic Line,” Graywolf Press Thomas Lux, “God Particles,” Houghton Mifflin Anne Marie Macari, She Heads into the Wilderness, Autumn House Press Maurice Manning, “Bucolics,” Harcourt Publishers Davis McCombs, “Dismal Rock,” Tupelo Press W.S. Merwin, “The Shadow of Sirius,” Cooper Canyon Press Malena Morling, “Astoria,” University of Pittsburgh Press Valzhyna Mort, “Factory of Tears,” Cooper Canyon Press Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “At the Drive-In Volcano,” Tupelo Press Alice Notley, “In the Pines,” Penguin George Oppen, “Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers,” University of California Press George Oppen, “New Collected Poems” ed. Michael Davidson, New Directions Robert Pinsky, “Gulf Music,” FSG Kevin Prufer, “National Anthem,” Four Way Books Marilyn Robinson, “Home,” FSG Jamie Sabines, “Tarumba,” tr. Philip Levine and Ernesto Trejo, Sarabande Books Jim Schley, “As When, In Season,” Marick Press Joanna Scott, “Everybody Loves Somebody,” Back Bay Books Tracy K. Smith, “Duende,” Graywolf Press Gerald Stern, “Save the Last Dance,” Norton Susan Stewart, “Red Rover,” University of Chicago Press Jean Valentine, “Nightboat,” Wesleyan University Press Alissa Valles, “Orphan Fire,” Four Way Books G.C. Waldrerp, “Disclamor,” BOA Editions Rosmarie Waldrop, “Curves to the Apple,” New Directions Publishers C.D. Wright, “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” Cooper Canyon Press C. Dale Young, “The Second Person,” Four Way Books

Table of Contents Poems Jane Mead

Solids and Non-Solids

Tim Liardet

The Jigging Season Fantasia on the Snarl Visits to the Opera

Gary Soto

Excuse Me Fruits of the World

Peter Campion

At the Seoul Writers’ Festival Imperium

Derick Burleson

In Her Forest

Mark Irwin

Sunday

Mark Rudman

“Just Seventeen…” Lines Written By Sandrine While Swept Away by the Set Design of Where a Tarp Became Both Sail and Cloud.

Ruth Joynton

All Else Being Equal: A Drive Home Nowadays

James Hoch

Praise

Anne Waldman

Problem-Not-Solving Taxonomy Reverie The Homeric Singer Repeating the Story of the Word—

Eleanor Wilner

Restored to Blue Like, I Really Like That

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Suicide Is for Optimists, Cioran Said

Patricia Fargnoli

Old Fire

Lauren Watel

It’s Cool

Jericho Brown

David

40 6

Bryan Hayter

A Transformation

C. Dale Young

Lyceum, or Romance as in the Roman Paying Attention

Karen Barkan

It Illuminates

Fady Joudah

Pulse 1,3,4,12,13

Garth Greenwell

Harbor Teaching Paradise Lost

Edward Hirsch

Charades To Lethargy

James Longenbach

A Tenancy

Anne Marie Macari

Torso

Alicia Ostriker

A Prisoner

Jim Schley

Her Period After all

Katie Ford

Vessel

Gerald Stern

Donkey Israel Grossman

Cynthia Hogue

Ă&#x2030;tude (on Trust) Midnight Sun

Michael Waters

Beloved Cannibal

D.A. Powell

Unfortunately Typical Song Lyric

Susan Rich

The Usual Mistakes Food for Fallen Angels

Jean Valentine

Earth and the Librarian Then Abraham

Christopher Buckley

Pilgrim

Jeff Friedman

Son of Apollo

Margo Berdeshevsky

On Giving Away the Stone Of Poets’ Kitchens Alone in the Old Poet’s House

Viet Blood

Translations Ngo Tu Lap Translated by Martha Collins with the author

Israel Emiot Translated by Leah Zazulyer

Liliana Ursu

Prayer of a Man in Snow Untitled A Prayer in Nineteen Forty-Three

Translated by Michael Waters and Mihaela Moscaliuc

If I Lift My Eyes Poem with Wicket in Stephen the Great’s Bell Tower

Cvetka Lipuš,

Still Lifes With One or More Persons

Translated by Tom Priestly

Eugenio Montale

from Xenia 4,5,12 Down There

Translated by Pattie M. Wells

Pawel Marcinkiewicz

Flacon

Untitled ID

Greek Blood Nights in Panciu

Translated by Piotr Florczyk

Tadeusz Dą brow s ki Translated by Piotr Florczyk

Radu Andriescu Translated by Adam J. Sorkin with the author

Floarea Ţuţuianu

Metamorphosis

Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti

Abbas Beydoun

White Lie

Tel Aviv Beach, Winter ‘74

Translated by Fady Joudah

Rahel Chalfi Translated by Karen Barkan

Eugenio Montejo

Here Again

Tranlsated by Kirk Nesset

Fayad Jamis

Words

Translated by Kathleen Weaver

Yves Bonnefoy Translated by Hoyt Rogers

The Garden Alberti’s Tomb

Guy Goffette

Biting the Apple

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Patrice de La Tour Du Pin

Psalm 24, 36

Translated by Jennifer Grotz

Celia Dropkin

To My Son Who Gave Me Light Blue Beads

Translated by Yerra Sugarman

FEATURE: Chilean Poetry Today Edited with an introduction by Mariela Griffor Pablo Neruda Translated by Anna Beth Young

Verb The Heavenly Poets

Gabriela Mistral

To See Him Again

116

Translated by Mariela Griffor

Nicanor Parra Translated by Mariela Griffor

Roberto Bolaño Versions by Mariela Griffor and B.H. Boston

Victor Jara

The Pilgrim The Tablets Godzilla in Mexico Lisa Prayer to a Farm Worker

Translated by Mariela Griffor

Renato Martinez

Things

Translated by author

Raúl Zurita Canessa

from “THE SEA”

Translated by William Rowe

Marjorie Agosín Translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa

Cecilia Vicuña

Seventeen Centuries from “Poemas para Papá”

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

from UNUY QUITA The Water Sequence (fragment)

Carmen Berenguer

Premonition

Translated by Mariela Griffor

Oliver Welden Translated by Dave Oliphant

Jorge Etcheverry

Warning Binnacle Fluctuations Tierra del Fuego Let the Band Play On

Translated by Sharon Khan with the author; Edited by Nika Alia Khan

Jorge Teillier Translated by Carolyne Wright

Eugenia Toledo Translated by Carolyne Wright with the author

Bottle in the Sea Farewell to the Führer I The Oven Last Train Disappeared

CHAPBOOKS Paul Celan Translated by David Young

Wooded Shibboleth In Memory of Paul Eluard Decked Out at Night Assisi Where There’s Ice Shining Thinking Back With a Key that Keeps Changing Argumentum E Silentio You Too Speak

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Bob Hicok

Left to My Own Devices Putting a Red Dress on a Gray Day Safe and Restful Essentially the Torn Corner of a Blueprint Psalm of Filling the Rental Car

116 118 119 120 121

Testimony Far A Field of Red Poppies Prayer Family Portrait / Circa 1910 Gavrilo Princip Thinks of His Highness Deposition The Arrival

107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Daniel Simko Introduction by Carolyn Forché

In Memorium Mamhoud Darwish Tribute by Carolyn Forché Translated by Fady Joudah

A Poet Among Us Now…in Exile Happy about Something She Didn’t Come A Longing for Forgetfulness

COMMENTARY & AN ESSAY Margo Berdeshevsky

Commentary: The Quality of Mercy

Chard de Niord

For Each Ecstatic Moment: Impossibility, Unknowing and the Lyric

Book Reviews Lofty Dogmas Edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxine Kumin. Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2005. Reviewed by Sarah Maclay

New Jersey By Betsy Andrews. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Reviewed by Jan Wesley

Broken Hallelujahs By Sean Thomas Dougherty. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007 Beg No Pardon By Lynne Thompson. Florence, MA: Perugia Press, 2007. Reviewed by Lisa Hemminger

Interrogation Palace By David Wojahn. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Reviewed by Lee Rossi

Disclamor By G.C. Waldrep. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. Reviewed by Patty Seyburn

Landscape with Silos By Deborah Bogen. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2006.

The Incognito Body By Cynthia Hogue. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2006. Reviewed by Meredith Davies Hadaway

Reactor By Judith Vollmer, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Lilies Without By Laura Kasischke, Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2007. Reviewed by Reed Wilson

Sinners Welcome By Mary Karr. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2006. Reviewed by Mihaela Moscaliuc

Stubborn By Jean Gallagher. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2006. Reviewed by Louise Mathias

Apparition Wren By Maureen Alsop. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2007. Reviewed by Stephany Prodromides

Sister By Nickole Brown. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007. Reviewed by Lisa Siedlarz

Intaglio By Adriana-sophia M. Kartsonis, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. A Secret Room in Fall By Maria Terrone, Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry Press, 2006. Reviewed by Patricia Crane

Autobiomythography & Gallery By Joe Millar. New York, NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2007. The First Noble Truth By Steve Kowit. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2007. Reviewed by Jim Natal

Carnal Fragrance By Florence Weinberger. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2004. Reviewed by David Oliveira

Land of Stone By Karen Chase. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Reviewed by Lee Romney

Paper Children By Mariana Marin, translated by Adam J. Sorkin. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007. Reviewed by Martin Woodside

The Clean Shirt of It By Paulo Henriques Britto. Translated by Idra Novey. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone By Anne Moschovakis. New York, NY: Turtle Point Press, 2006. Red Studio By Mary Cornish. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2007. Reviewed by Sarah Maclay

Puppet Wardrobe By Daniel Tiffany. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2006. Monochords By Yannis Ritsos. Translated by Paul Merchant. Portland, OR & Hereford, England: Trask House Books and Five Seasons Press, 2007. Reviewed by Jackson Wheeler

the totality for kids By Joshua Clover. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Reviewed by Susan Kelly-De Witt

A Second View The Collected Poems. 1956-1998 By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. New York: Ecco, 2007. Reviewed by Marit MacArthur

Contributorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes

Poems

Solids and Non-Solids Jane Mead The air is solids and non-solids. The person is solids and non-solids: Solids and non-solids all the way down. Halo of leaves. Aura of notes. No kidding. All the way down. Forgotten and not forgotten. Candle. Matches. Needle. Down. The old-fashioned stream remains. Lost. Lost. Loster. The mind saying loster all the way down. Pink down of the barn-owl. Wing crushed in mud. The road ditch.

The Jigging Season Tim Liardet Craneflies hold up a level sky of stagnant water on a hair: lumbered with ungainly incarnation, a convulsed, electrocuted mess of otherwise lifeless limbsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a fit of limbs too slight for the enormity of life-fizz inside it. See how nothing in their cells has yet worked out what glass is, how they thrash a paralysed cortĂ¨ge of legs against the glass as if it were the last obstacle between them and the next world; as if glass were a griddle of six thousand centigrade

making them jig; and from here they could already smell the first frost.

Fantasia on the Snarl Tim Liardet the unity of body, eyes and thought that exchanges its glance with another face. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other Our remote ur-uncles thought that cudgels were words. The one hung up all morning by his braces on the kitchen doorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hook and trying to kick at the universe like a tortoise on its back was lied to by his father. This was not done for his own good. Returned to the ground running, in furious impotence, he set off the long curve of acts by placing the blame in his nephew as if he trapped him there beneath his boot and painted him in vengeance from his head to his toes in scarlet paint. As if then the nephew, deflecting the revenge, painted his brother a shade of pea green. As if the pea green brother, in an impotent fury, held under in the canal the head of his cousin for what must have felt like a day and watched hair swim all around him, painted, like his red face. Poor boys, deep in the past, their oil paints were full of the lead, the chromates, the cadmium, mercury and sulphides that seeped like so much industrial froth into our familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mix, were carried when the level sunk, and entered the water supply. Poor boys, waist-deep in the past, our bellicose forebears, kicking from hook to kitchen hook, ducked and ducking others and breaking out in rashes when the paint was scrubbed off, learned how theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather do it to others than have it done to themselves. Though light bulged into their cameras through the dicky hatch, though their bleached gardens, shadows, their spectral grasses and the wash of their lives barely survive the flash gun, their reach is long; the reach of their hands, the reach of their anguish and their fury is long; the reach of their brush-bristles, loaded with various clods of paint, is long. You were green, brother, you were red, the ghost of the hook was embodied at the top of your spine like a bone spur, hoiking up your vertebrae: 18

at birth, though the midwife could neither see nor wash it away, you woke to find the paint all over your haunches and shoulders as if many fingers worked the rich viridian pigments deeper into your skin and the cruel male-to-male wounds inflicted throughout our family bled through your ankles and wrists. The power brought on the surge in the brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old gramophone and a man, yes, yes it was a man began to sing frailly. He seemed to croak out the laws of revenge but for you the targets they offered led wide of themselves, led wider and wider, and crowded together the offenders into the spaces behind our father whose eyes you thought were stone. So there were too many hands at once held you under while your hair floundered around you, and I see you now, searching the sky which slowly shifts from east to west its freight of altocumuli and throws a stencil of it all across your face so palely as a large bubble breaks at your mouth, two smaller at your nostrils, and your underwater puzzlement seems to ask: why me?

Visits to the Opera Tim Liardet It would have to be a voice of cruelty since cruelty for you might be a sort of revenge and the wire-through-the-tongue of its lisp the taste of margarine and graphite under your tongue: it might have been a case of slick dubbing— you tried to match your mouth to his words but your lips, your tulip-lips, kept losing track. First you had to train your vocal chords to drop a decibel, brother, shaping a creel of muscles as if it were actually shaped around a deeper voice. And you dreamed the more your lips kept up the more your hands might keep up with his hands when he sliced through their necks and took off the heads of his guests so cleanly, and left the artery pumping like a burst main which drained the last of a posthumous blink— you felt it in your own hands when he stored the heads beneath his freezer’s frost-blown lid, at thirty below—triptych of the once-beautiful, the wind-tanned explorers forever held in ice; each mouth slightly ajar in a different way. This is how he got his guests to stay the night and, to be blunt, I knew at times you dreamt of placing what little was left of our family into similar deep flanks of frost, leaving a stump of wires and of flailing stalks 20

to freeze between our mouths and feet, cut through by knife, Chinese cleaver or hack saw depending on your moodâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to leave us locked forever speaking the last truths we were about to throw at you, in the company of those whose lips were full and creviced in frost. And at times it felt the cruelty was wholly inside you, like branches spreading into every part of your body, your groin the root; and even when you perfected the lip-sync, and felt his vowel-sounds were actually in your mouth you knew, in moments of great fever, these were the efforts of a mouth with too few teeth; and your weapons too heavy to lift.

Excuse Me Gary Soto With the sun beyond the ridge Birds surrendered to oak trees. Shadows wavered over the field Of this common state park, And in my brisk walk my pant legs hooked Foxtail, burrs, and thistles, Little latches that will grip Through all three cycles of a hot wash. I stopped, caught my breath, And then heard the laughter Of lovers in grassâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; The top button of her jeans Undone by his teeth, I wondered? I glimpsed this pair Rolling in pleasure. Then I Hurried away, biting my knuckle, And thought of the hill I lay on when I was long-haired And young. Ay, Chihuahua, to be A young man pulverizing the leaves That lay beneath such A fat little beauty.

Fruits of the World Gary Soto Just before lunch, and just because, My mother brought a belt across my legs. Later, I hobbled to the front yard, where at the curb, I wet my wounds with spit and ate a plum. I imagined the sky falling, but first a robinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s egg And peaches with their furry bellies fell, Mulberries with worms at their center, Plus hail, Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s coldest tears. Where was the bearded apostle to save me? Where was a haloed saint with a staff made of sugar? Before dinner, a hanger fell across my arms and legs Just because, and for dessert I was handed A slice of cantaloupe. Where was that Biblical garden? Where was a jolly uncle? I ate my slice sobbing, And walked down the alley until I found myself Under an apricot tree, its limbs thrown up Just like the arms of Jesus on the cross. I climbed the tree. The fruit was ripe, And fell almost noiselessly when I scampered higher, My feet like spurs against the limbs. This only made me sadder. In the next yard, My neighbor was chasing a chicken with a hoe Just because, and two of his children Huddled close to each other on the steps, A pair of watermelon rinds eaten to the green, The sweetness long gone.

At the Seoul Writers’ Festival Peter Campion Riot police hustle in shield formation past the American Embassy while we chat. From the tour bus it seems pure spectacle. We pass round soju in a thermos cap. One row back the Korean student aide prods the Filipino about his girlfriend: “How does she look like?” She cajoles him for a photo. Though on leaflets tomorrow we’ll see the nightsticked demonstrators dripping blood on the pavement. And another aide will tell me, gently: “It’s not you we hate.” Right now, only the tubular glow of the bus. Digital blips on the window. And English: “How does she look like? O.... beautiful.”

Imperium Peter Campion Our largeness. Like an overbearing child or parent. Pixilated brand names and pop stars pleading across the firmament. Which says nothing of fire power. It feels like doing eighty on the freeway as little towns agglomerate and blur: all smallness turns unreal. The neighborhoods are merely stations everyone is leaving. And under the dark trees at the reservoirs lovers still give themselves away all summer. As if some feared departure quickened them they search each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s faces...: such small creatures under the condo gleam and the bleared stars.

In Her Forest Derick Burleson Mosquitoes love her. Wherever she walks in the world they swarm a starving cloud around her, snared in her wild hair like living confetti. Somehow she suffers their little loves, scratches the bites until she bleeds, but never slaps the bugs silly or dead. She must taste really good. Really good. Sometimes they suck too much blood and explode before they can withdraw their pointy proboscises from her sweet flesh, from their blood feast. When she pees out in her forest, out among her spruce trees they flock for her butt with a happy whine of tiny wings. Once I saw her transform into a swallow and, swooping like no bird ever before through that eveningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s air, snatch up every last one of those mosquitoes.

Sunday Mark Irwin Something happened such that now our casual lingering seems almost haunted. Do we seem to wait more on Sundays? The scenery’s much more still, as if someone set glass weights of patience here. How filled with earth that word, and so we walk, stare at the inching leaves, read a book, or ignore those chores on this first day of the week that feels more like the last, perhaps because the past seems easier, as if the big, unread newspaper could fill it, yet sparks of something lie hidden, waiting to ignite into a blaze almost no one would notice. Sunday has no verbs. Perhaps that’s why I recall places, people, or feel again a name separate from life then fill with the air of memory, a dumb balloon, one that sometimes floats, one that I reach up toward and always almost grab, then the stones turn into a kind of language. Perhaps I should call home. I mean the one where now a few ghosts live, for there, too, the world’s a gilded stasis, while secretly the ambulance of my unconcern’s waiting like that cat wiping the robin’s blood from his mouth with one paw, half watching for tomorrow to light upon a branch, feathers in the green fire of limbs opening beyond, for freedom must always be far from death.

“Just Seventeen…” Lines Written by Sandrine While Swept Away by the Set Design of Where a Tarp Became Both Sail and Cloud. Mark Rudman We could have been arrested for fraud. Every time you squeezed between your date and yours truly and after you fixed your full attention on the other girl while I could feel you listen to the rustle of nylon every time I crossed my legs and it wasn’t long before— with a few whiskey sours under our underaged belts and my left calf tucked under my right thigh you’d let your right hand graze the hollows I helped draw it toward the center with some literal sleight of hand and this electric semiillicit tangle sent a thrill—I could see it rise and curve like a horn which the tapered slacks that were the fashion in our late teens did less than nothing to disguise in its folds; and your luck those piano bars we haunted, where we never got carded, required a jacket and a tie while our dates unknowingly became aroused by the charge between us that I once thought could have lit a city and by the time he delivered me to the door and you to her apartment where her parents who were still together had returned from their predicated pleasures, the best you guys could hope to get was a smattering of kisses, a mangled tear at her bra and being brought too close to climax. . . . But by then you’d gained access to 1A, a dream apartment your dad’s business kept for eternally absent “executives”— and the built-in waist-high cold air blasters mocked heaven while we tore off our sweaty, smoky outfits in a bliss reserved for cat burglars who could repeat the perfect crime: is seventeen too young to enter the sublime to live eternity in this transient bliss, perpetual strangeness registered on our changing bodies . . .?—and with your father nonchalant and my habit-addicted trust-drunk parents assuming he was overseeing this natural extension of our unquestioned childhood sleepovers and the midget refrigerator—stocked with Heinekin, club soda, Seven Up, Fresca, and Tab, and the cupboard like a ship’s larder: Ritz Crackers, smoked mussels, and a dizzying

variety of nuts!—and throaty slinky languorous and seductive Allison Steele on The Nightbird at WNEW-FM until the night was gone and a string of bleached low contrast black and white Late night movies so arresting that a patience edged toward your undisguised wish made concrete and the long commercials proved an expert conductor of the slow pace I insisted be the measure of the way it would be between us and, relieved about the outcome—your list of requests masked as questions tossed—we had a chance to recast history, one summer, another, and another—and—yawning and stretching under the starched sheets that smelled of lemon we made ready to hit the street and wished time would stop to be spared: the waking nightmare march of women’s calves straining in heels shuffling over baked pavement to choruses of coughing fits in the puce light and congested air of the unforgiving midsummer urban morning . . .

All Else Being Equal: A Drive Home Ruth Joynton This being the seahorses & the last weekend in September: this being the pole, the pull overboard & seahorse skins serrated as old barn knives dull under thumbs: this being the dream the never-finish, the splinter I can’t get out of my hand. This being night asters blooming roadside & the sunflower’s green necks now brown. This being the logicians gray blue brown or green: tell me, where is my father among them? On the waterless island in space no place to look at your own eyes til they crazy your face— this being a shack without grapefruit the man inside strumming a mandolin while all those selling out stadiums believe he’s dead down in Missipp he sings hey give me red lipstick— this wile being the thighs & knees & the mouth & the wet wet tee I wore blue. This being the ribbon cutting ceremony, the bees: & there are those who spasm those who wait for pollination & there are those whose throats will close at the sting. This being a feet-first birth I would have named him Isaac— this being had I really been expecting rather than just expecting a sum of parts, velvet deer necks & the 50 since Sputnik witch hunt goes deeper 30

than wood so watch your rooftop. This being the jetty run & hot wax on my belly & in darkness the popping of ears. Near here letterbox, Lauren, this being sister this being in awe days do not hang your good head & write her again—this being gin swaddled in wool the red pen used to tattoo your wrist. This being a jam sweet & seedless the sodium lights that stay with you in sleep— This the being This the being night go Now the runaway my own hand I can’t outrun

the bruiseless the 100th missing like the swans. now the relent my own hand my own hand.

Nowadays Ruth Joynton Nowadays no man looks at a woman and says there is my future. He says, we’ll see. He goes home with his two gallons of milk (D) and downloads a woman he’ll never meet. If I see her again. On the spidering scale of lamentables (resurrection of the no souls)(this century’s top gypsies are not working for America) does this even sound a sound? Is it like the wind-up wail of east coast babies, a seat next to nothing, or the one who is howling in Louisiana as the house fills with water? Where is it? Nowadays no man smells of neck sweat, oil, but aftershave, starch, the burn of an iron on sleeves. His squeezebox waits in the big hotel with a god view. On the spidering scale of permissibles (cheek birthmarks) (someone must wash those windows) does this sink, does it buoy belly up? Where is the city made of barn tools, hatchet men, line laundry, bird seed? Look up: every tree here has twelve water snakes in it. It happened once. Once I saw a man kiss a pine tree in plain view of the interstate. That is my future. He says, we’ll see.

Praise James Hoch The sex hurts, but the hurt is real enough I can halve a life out of the sun’s eye, out of the peel of mother’s gaze. Down here, let me say, I can’t feel the wind, except your breath, sour compost, nor hear winter ache, except your rest, lowing weight, mouth sealed by my own, and mine only bitter root and tuft and crass. Like a seed tongued in jest my sorrow has become my furrow; my garden’s my labor and your dark chest.

Problem-Not-Solving Anne Waldman And metal was cast in the dream of the ghetto and metal was forged for cannons 1390 in “ur” in “pre” in the nightmare of ghetto and laboratory of ghetto a metal mentality for it takes a long harm a long arm a long hatching this mentality of force of problem-not-solving your ghetto and in the name of decree and forging a metal mentality with harming arms and where you can live under a low ceiling where you can live and problem-not-solving 5,000 in a crammed room undream it now of your nightmare not allowed into the light of other campos and canals your arms held in not able to reach out across a map a city divided and problem-not-solving. Un-dream, un-dream problem-notsolving the nightmare of ghetto or problem-not-solving your nightmare of ghetto of “ur” time of this ghetto. You want to stretch your human fleshly arms outside the walls toward campos and canals. You want to stretch your rare fleshly arms out of here reach out of here reach out of harm’s way towards campos and canals but you can only live here in this curfew of “ur” time this “pre” time, before the dawn until Napoleon allows you can you can live elsewhere, o please step outside please step aside you say to Palestine, you who were in pre-“ur” pre-dreamtime ghetto astride campos and canals. You are my problem I am not your problem grazie. And under Austrian rule come back inside ghetto and this “ur” nightmare 1797. This “pre” dawn of “state” of arsenal. Of Palestine. Old way back “ur”-Palestine, what of its rip and tears. Its tears and weeping its ghetto. I mark this for you I say this for you (tears and more weeping), carved in stone in metal of poem-time in scripture of 21st century winds. And then the dream of a full fledged fulltime arsenal tears and weeping toward metal what do we do what do we have to or why have we to do air-strikes problem-notsolving 13 dead again in ghetto Palestine when then arsenal of problem-not-solving is long range rocket revenge toward Ashkelon no one hurt in Ashkelon 10 kilometers north of Gaza. O remember Gaza and then revenge in air strikes 13 dead in Gaza, ripped apart in Gaza and the fine elliptical gallery for women only, sit here, my dear downed dead decimated sister my one next to me in this “ur” dream nightmare of ghetto and arsenal and Palestine. Describe the body parts you sifted from the trees down from the scattered trees of Zion of Palestine. Three wells of Zion, the scattered trees of Zion, the miracles and tribulations of Zion of Palestine. The three ways to un-dream the problem. The dear dead body parts. Enter here the dream the nightmare of ghetto and the end of ghetto. And say three times I will not do to them what has been done to me. I will not do to them what has been done to me. I will not do to them what has been done to me. What to do what to do as the merchant stranger Shakespeare ghetto merchant works the Banco Rosso “real and tangible” or other side hits Sderot with Grad rockets from Iran. Hit with metal mentality forged in metal. Hit the word “Sderot” hit the word “Grad” hit with harm your problem-not-solving scary alliances 4 boys between 8 and 12 dear dead body parts east of Jabaliya un-dream the dead take back the word “dead”. Not a jubilee. And more in Gaza and more and more in ghetto Gaza. This is the old “ur” held vision of unsolved Zion and now the guards in the nightmare that is new century inventory of the state of arsenals and the unsolved now divided Palestine building of more arsenals in the arms that harm and reach out and harm human and fleshly. I will sit here I will sit here and sound here and reach out arms human and fleshly.

Taxonomy Reverie Anne Waldman for Gary Snyder & Galway Kinnell Living on the essence of flowers Metabolic rasp or buzz SelfAssured Balance A world in need of pollination to extend to Thinking on the chin of Time I will never forget Cup or petal Stamen or pistil The wonders we came in with Who are we apart from flowers? Wild mind never apart from flowers

The Homeric Singer Repeating the Story of the Wordâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Anne Waldman case 27 terracotta lekythos Greek attic 2nd quarter of 5th century woman tosses up stars woman juggles the infrastructure of words young woman juggles a profound dislocation pulverized wreckage of state & senate objects coalesce from a richly appointed boudoir into a world of (poetically?) tangled hair, my sibyl, dear archival one, a mind buzzes modest in matriotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peplos eyes wide, sleepless small & prophetic hair ornament strokes the night Please put an innocent gaze toward your public & contemplate a wooden cistern fed by an old mystic stream.

Restored to Blue Eleanor Wilner and the famous cloud she wiped away with the wrong solvent…

Inadvertence, when the mind, distracted by sun playing in the leaves, slips, destroys the work. As if the work were meant to stay, the days not on a string that each night cuts, and only memory, which fades, and other bits of matter carrying order in their cells (give or take a broken chain or two, a mutant moment in a copy-cat world)—only these remain. While what we are, the lived-in days, the irreplaceables we love, these—like the famous cloud, though painted by a master’s hand (long gone)—are wiped away by solvent time, an endless surf, a changing shore. So much for restoration’s care, the delicate brush, restraint in the retouching, all the shoring up, the dutifully kept files that one day soon will fill recycle bins—such things are everyday and are not news. So look away, or look: today the sky is cloudless as a canvas used exclusively for blue, and filling in the blanks seems nothing more than sport, a game to leave behind, a way to keep the mind from knowing that the blanks, though time and time filled in, return: a cloudless sky we’re meant to read as happiness, and so we do.

Like, I really like that Eleanor Wilner Beverley said, though you could barely hear her from where we sat, high on the slopes of the local mountain, the snow beginning to give way to spring, absorbing the sound in its softening drifts. An odd place for the premiere of a play, but Bev believed in the mountain, knows it’s in for some fancy erosion, and fancies that—and she wants a vista as part of the plot. Just then, Jon says: I don’t know anything about it, but I know what I like. I think that’s what Beverley meant when she said I really like that, because they were talking about what a Japanese cosmetic company calls Beautiful Human Life, which is what Beverley’s play is about—moving as it does, between pine trees and palmettos, cutting a wide swath across the little planet where we bunk and play musical instruments and torch villages. And this is where I say: consider the heart (though they are attending to the play and pay me no mind) the heart, I return to my subject, is a treadmill in a drawing by Escher, as it moves up and down, in and out, taking us with it—the rooms change, but it is uncertain whether you are going on, or returning where you once began—a problem of perspective and memory. But now Beverley’s play is moving toward its denouement; the chorus is singing like mad, wearing costumes made of rabbit hair and silk, they are praising the great goat of spring, so loud their praise, and with so much heat, that the snow beneath us begins to move, and we are sliding (no way to slow this down) at ever accelerating speeds, along with the tons of snow, it’s all going now, and we’re riding it, all’s a blur, the trees a green fur, a fuzz, the wind a cold blast in your face— but that Beverley! She knows a bad ending when she sees it—and she calls it off:

to hell with the trope, the slope, the whole blessed thing: she is almost shouting now, and hitting her tambourine, and the badgers and marmots that line the path, holding their glowing lanterns against the night, have picked up the beat, and one by one, as we all sing the chorus, they swing their little lights, and the whole hill rocks.

Suicide Is for Optimists, Cioran Said Mihaela Moscaliuc 1985. March. We do not leave the mortuary vault. For three days. Mortuary vault. At night we huddle on spread blankets as we did at the rock concert the summer before. Sixteen and cross, sixteen and heavy with distrust. We drink from plastic bottles, cheap wine, To celebrate the sexy quiver of your lip, the shifty curvature, the ember ghost of each flaunted lisp. Lascivious tongue: oyster slit metaphoring what, you had asked. Ambrosian tongue: changing despairs like workshirts. Viperine tongue: fangs loaded with subversive jokes.

When we blacklist the coward teachers who threaten To fail us if we attend the funeral SUICIDE IS THE ULTIMATE INSULT TO OUR COMMUNIST HARMONIOUS LIFE You wink in approval. We rise on numb toes to kiss your eyelids. We do not leave the mortuary vault for three days that March 1985.

Old Patricia Fargnoli after Po Chu-I’s Rain Since I lived an old woman at Applewood, too many days the soughing ambulance sped in and took away someone who wouldn’t be back. I had nothing to do but cook, and sleep many hours. The dahlias are bending under the rain in the garden beneath the windows, then the sun washes over them. From the village, I hear car doors closing, and someone calling. From a rooftop, I hear one mockingbird’s many songs. The yellow cat with closed eyes curls around himself on his carpeted tower. Blue rain, blue rain again, stipples the air conditioner Sun, rain. Rain, sun. Sleep. Sound. Watching. Every day, these things occur, and nothing more. A strange insect, long as my hand, black with pinchers, clings to the screen.

Fire Patricia Fargnoli On this day there is a great fire, the people gather all their belongings and go out into their village streets and begin to walk away into the countryside. Smoke covers their past lives. Ahead of them, the road is empty to the horizon. In the fields, the sheep bow their heads to the grass as if nothing is the matter. The road is impossibly long, dirt, rutted, full of stones. Nothing can be seen beyond the next mountain. Eventually, the people get tired. Some fall but the mass goes forward, and some of the fallen stand again and struggle on. I have to go down now and mix in, and walk along with them.

It’s Cool Lauren Watel We were driving each other mad again, so we left the highway and found an empty space by the ruins of a house. I stroked your chest and straddled your lap; you kissed me with a low moan, your skin gold in the light; I cupped your face between my palms like an artifact; you moved my hips; and when you pressed your lips to my breast you gasped. There was a man outside the window. “It’s cool,” the man said, “just find another place to do it.” Then he tipped his hat, unimpressed with the exhibition. Our mood now improved dramatically, we waved to the man and drove back to the highway feeling restored, well-loved, glistening like two jewels in a secret trove.

David Jericho Brown How best to hurt you. Fling a pitcher of sweet tea. Leave All the lights on. Phone your mother And threaten cremation. Set fire to your cassettes. Call Hymanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dead moan Effigy. Reply Singing, She died again. How to kiss the first tear. How the hell you say, But I love you, Though Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather hear, Fireplace. How to burn you Alive. How to keep my man Warm.

A Transformation Brian Hayter There are no stars, no light bulbs, and no voices to say “Hello, little one, are you thinking of God?” I run my palm over the top of my arm, and I walk. From a broken streetlight, a sparrow calls, conducting notes that loop above my head. The flicker of a bulb— —off, click, off, click— asks: Tell me, tell me, What is man? A black sheet, the night becomes like night. Air is a wilted daisy. A lizard on the branch of a tree watches my fingers; he curls his tongue around his own feet. I can tell by his attentiveness that he is curious, as I am on this night: What is this place? and What is man? my insides turn in on themselves, transform, but what shape, I cannot tell. If I have black stripes down my chest and stomach, or if I am the fanged beast sleeping behind my breastbone— then, tell me, would I still be man? The eye of the moon salivates her mascara rain— the black fingers of an October limb, a sparrow with a worm in its beak— —among the shrubs and black beetles, in a white puddle, my reflection—ripples of rain.

Lyceum, Or Romance As In the Roman C. Dale Young This tired fire is the same as that tired fire. This midnight is the same as many midnights. You were such a little whore for philosophy and the fine art of poesy. But I wanted you then, wanted to say even one word to soften the expression on your face. One word. Something like “outside” or another common word like “dirt” or “trees.” Ah, the fire. It has long since died down, burned out. See, my spine is now an adamantine spine. I revel now in the nothing-filled body, in the full-bodied nothing. Your many novels, your wordy narratives, for whom are you writing? For whom are you starlight and gunpowder, finger sandwich and game theory? You wanted to bed a poet. You wanted a skull to fill, a chest you could taint, something eroded, worn but still youthful enough that you could apprentice. You wanted to be a god. You were on the verge of being a god, but you couldn’t listen, couldn’t hear anything “outside” of your own sad voice. I said “terns” and the best you could come up with was “rapids.” Oh my famous writer, oh master of the Anglo-Saxons, was this body hard enough for you, was it slim enough to trick you into thinking it could be broken also? No, I won’t flatter you in a flattering poem about the past. I will write about your bad teeth. I will write about the sea.

Paying Attention C. Dale Young I know everything about my God. Can you tell me about your own?

Outside the window, rain. Well, the sound of rain. Why would I start this way? Because my God prefers a preambleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Spool of lightning, Fist of night-blooming jasmine. My God can slice me clean open from head to the arches of my feet, does so easily with a swipe of His index fingernail, a clean slice to show you the back half of me seen from the front. He sometimes puts me back together again. But with my front half gone, He licks the back wall of my throat, His tongue like sweetened gasoline. The sound of rain against my window is louder than expected, is my God reminding me to pay attention. And my God despises inattention and punishes me often for it. He strips me of my clothes and lashes my back with his cat-o-nine-tails. I am quick to cry, so quick to promise humility. I am a liar. I am weak and a liar. And I am punished. What more can I tell you? What can I say to explain my God? He has little tolerance for hatred. He expects undying love and affection. He leaves the large red imprints of his fist against my back, sometimes flowering on my face. He showers me with expectations. He lifts me up to remind of my foolish fear of heights.

It Illuminates Karen Barkan â&#x20AC;&#x201D;after Rahel Chalfi What tenderness is in our body that it abandons us slowly reluctant to hurt us. It is spinning us in small wrinkles of light and of wisdom. How kind of our body it does not change our face at once. How kind of our body it does not break our bones in one strike. It illuminates a network of painted nerves folds our skin at the corners and hardens the spine of us. What tenderness is in our body that it betrays us gradually politely says little by little, hour-hour that it is leaving.

Pulse Fady Joudah 1. It wasn’t over a woman that war began, but it’s better To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so – He was a creep, she Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen, I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed Like a river from the Jabal once. There were elephant pools, alligator Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues, All desiccant names now after an earthquake Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon, I’m assured, since nothing has stopped The birds from migration. All the look-alikes Are already here: the stork, the heron, The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one That aesthetizes you more.

3. Three sizes of firewood, One for the skull, two for the spine. The skull is a woman’s, Pregnant, lactating, or both, The bundle elegant on her head, The neck royal, steady, and sometimes She’s among friends, carrying A child on her back in a cloth sack. The first spine is a donkey’s. But its back Is not long enough. And if The likelihood Of having your donkey robbed, Yourself raped or killed upon venturing Too far, is high, You would have to wait For the camel Owners to come into your market Of the displaced, they already have Taken all your cash – A camel Caravan floating like ocean otters On the desert floor Is a hell of a cadence. The wood they carry is massive.

4. And in no time She was up in the mango tree. He Only demanded that she Descend take off Her dress And walk home down the orchard path Naked. A girl of fourteen Climbed down Stepped out Of her body and gazed at Her mother the first to reach her With a shawl: Whatever they ask Say he never Touched you Whatever happens He never touched you

12. Halimah’s mother did not seem aware Halimah was dying. You should have seen Halimah fight her airlessness Twisting around for a comfortable spot in the world. She would gather all the air she could In an olympic snatch and curl Then turn toward her mother’s breast to suckle, But nothing changed, Neither smell nor taste Of mother’s milk was proof of life. Halimah Died of a failing heart Early this dawn, her mother, with tears now, Was on the road, twenty steps past me Before I turned and found her waiting. We walked back toward each other, we met, we Read verses from the Quran, Our palms open, Elbows upright like surgeons Ready to gown up after scrubbing, the slap Of rubber gloves before we went our separate ways.

13. In paradise, hospital beds Sit under ageless Mahogany and sycamore that bear Every kind of fruit. Hot meals are autumn leaves, Branches are waitress arms And also poles for drips. And birds drop the pills In your mouth from bills Of surgical precision. For Aspirin the swallow. For Benadryl the nightingale. No harm befalls you. The roots will sense your ailment. The flowers will scan your organs. Geranium for the spleen, Poppies for the brain, And where thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a latrine, A jasmine vine will blossom.

Harbor Garth Greenwell Hanging our legs off the edge of the pier, we watched the tiny agitation of the waves as they struck the concrete wall beneath us, crests and troughs tossing the light between them, shimmering as the whole harbor shimmered, sun striding water in the light May wind. You were the first to see it, deep beneath the surface, almost beyond sight, a smudge of translucent color swaying with the tide: a jellyfish, swelling and contracting like a human lung. You’d never seen one; I hadn’t for years, since childhood beaches where mornings found them ugly limp pockets littering the shore, their stingers still primed. In the harbor, neither rising nor sinking, it floated just within sight, forming part of a day we meant to be perfect, sitting in new comfort, among the other couples a couple unremarkable, lounging and swinging our feet together. The harbor was winged with sails, sheets broad to the wind, a Byzantium of ropes and masts skimming the water out toward the Bay. All around us, innumerable, the gulls circled and dipped and cried. We were reading the Phaedrus, the huge Complete Works open between us— the gift you gave to ease beautifully a wrong— and I was talking about the cicadas, the story Socrates tells of men so in love with song they sang without thought for food or drink, who were given then a form fit only for song, who lived past life for art. I couldn’t make it square with the bigger idea, the three-part structure of the soul you liked: two horses pulling—the pure and the depraved— and between them a rider who struggled to steer their rebellions clear of the rocks. You made it part of our story: “Bad horsy,” you’d say when I touched you, wanting sex, as always of the two of us wanting it more—“Bad horsy,” followed by that slow soft roll of a laugh I loved; and then you’d relent or press me away. It was an image of balance, the Charioteer, and I was a creature of extremes; I liked the idea of those men who sacrificed themselves to an ideal, who fled the blurred imperfect world of agency and chance: they chose, and then were changed so that

they never could fail their choice. I wanted to be changed past choice. I wanted to find that middle flight into a realm of human love, livable, untragic, ungrand; but I was the charioteer who lashed himself wholly to a single horse, seeking to become sensation entire or spirit, and never that middle thing that might have found enough in some life with you. Tired of talking, you laid your head in my lap and turned to the sun, and taking my hand where it lay on your chest you fell asleep. Around us, children were running the length of the pier, running and laughing; and beneath, on the surface of the water, there had floated up our bit of color: not a jellyfish at all, but a small, creased plastic bag, something from a tourist shop, pink and wilted, discarded, coughed up by waves. How could we have thought it was anything alive? I watched it: thin, exhausted, a film on the breathing skin of the waterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like anything alive or dead; it was like nothing at all, like the opposite of being.

Teaching Paradise Lost Garth Greenwell At the window, the late April snow turned miserably to rain. The schoolroom after a year was still unrecognizably mine, the gray walls generically mute, the shelves still nude; a few photographs, gifts from students, on the cork boards curled like little vivisections from their pins. In the corner the heater coughed; from above, the clock’s geared hands locked another minute shut. And in my arms—blond, untouchable, athletic, young— the boy stood heaving his tears. He was in love, as I was. Through my shirt I felt the heat of his tears stain the skin of my chest. There was a girl he loved without knowing he loved; by some reflexive self-preserving spasm of cruelty he forced her humiliatingly away; and then he felt, rising through relief at the exorcised glimpse of adult human feeling intricate and pained, remorse so sharp it swept away congenital reticence, embarrassment, shame, and set him in my arms. I had nothing to say. I stood there, feeling his hands grip locked behind my back, feeling him breathe, and felt I held the birth of personhood, that having delivered and received (delivery is receipt) the wound of feeling, he stood severed from the life of needlessness, the green oblivial wholeness of his childhood— and, the terrible wings unfurling at its gates, irremediably alien, he entered the world of parts.

Charades Edward Hirsch We waited on two sides of the subway tracks: you were riding uptown and I was heading downtown to a different apartment, after all these years. We were almost paralyzed, as anxious travelers surged around us in waves, and then you started to pantomime. First, you touched your right eye. Then you palmed your left knee. Finally, you pointed at me. I made of a sign of understanding back to you but the train suddenly roared into the station and you disappeared.

To Lethargy Edward Hirsch You were like a steady low-grade fever, a dull relative from Rochester, a cloudy gray sky in late November. He thought of you as the middle daughter of boredom and the sister of torpor, a close second cousin to fear. Listlessness, you were a passive aggressor who sat on his chest by the hour and oppressed him by the year. Acedia, couch potato, sluggish philosopher, you shined on him like a dead star and suckled him on the breast of despair. But one day he walked away from you, dear, and never looked back from the top stair.

A Tenancy James Longenbach I built a fire as every winter I’ve built fires. I stacked the wood crosswise, Leaving space for air. I dug for bark beneath a cedar at the lake’s edge, made my tea— Then I disappeared. You don’t imagine coming back. Years later, when you do, you walk from room to room Touching things, your body Unfamiliar, unacknowledged by time— The frying pan, A box of paperclips in the drawer— I wouldn’t say this to everyone, but when I wrote In heaven, if you say the word death, nobody understands, I was thinking about paperclips. Buying the box in town, Folding them, bending them in half— The square ones, not oblong, With the center that looks like a heart.

Torso Anne Marie Macari And the silver torso, where the ghost lives. And the torso of gold and mud. Whatever else, all her days missing, all her work gone, the torso and her upturned collar, a span, a bridge, twistedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and the grass around it, and the torso, standing. What makes the spirits come to live here, after all weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve done to them? What makes the grass and brush try to tangle itself in knots and the half-body to rise up, to turn toward us as we come into the field?

A Prisoner Alicia Ostriker The chickadee inside my chest, next to my heart imprisoned, but singing and I, mostly not listeningâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; chickadee, forgive me. Please donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop.

Her Period Jim Schley Her period would arrive like a suitor from the wider society of blood. Awake, as dawnlight inches down the scarred bricks above streets that descend to the harbor from Winter Hill. Her city at the edge of an ocean. Through a bedside window we watched their hide-and-seek, children scattering like seeds then hidden in hedges like eggs. Her gaze, no more real to me now than steam from the morningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bath. Bloodstains on the linen. What a strange reprieve, what a dry, compounded grief.

After All Jim Schley When I’d purged myself of need, funneled off desire to hold her, even scraped from my mind the scent and weight of that body on mine; convinced any memory was imaginary I thought I could speak carelessly, no hope of more—maybe a postcard, or silence for months. But still, after all, her voice will drill through me. Today when she called the telephone was carved of ice. I know she said, no. I heard her say, no. Like Archilochus who lost his shield, I say fuck it, I’ll find another.

Vessel Katie Ford We were hardly vessels what we took in could not be and so we spat it out as dogs spit out the wretched fish the only meat we were not mules though we put stores on our backs half-finished stories thin mothers in frames we were never vessels but I wanted so much to be and swallow and carry and bear and not have a mind to mind nor a mouth to spit nor a heart to tear into strips of weed from the sea.

Donkey Gerald Stern How God in three religions rode on his back and one there was a festival and one he dragged his feet on the ground until the dust filled his sandals; and what we say is the mane is hogged and you can fold your fingers around and through and there are stripes that make him a zebra though they are muted and he is a Chevy mostly with a slant V6 and a tufted tail and a strip in the center of the windshield which since it was a type of truck it carried two enormous pouches and died suddenly after a hundred thousand miles or after a lifetime of burdens as a donkey does, first looking up for it was his last piece of affection and he wanted something more than he got though he was grateful, and dying they both look up with grass in their teeth or filthy handkerchiefs in their round metal mouths.

Israel Grossman Gerald Stern Roses are mostly used on goat meat and daisies on a piece of horse is finally out of the question for who can fool whom while sitting both either in or out though it was sitting out I spilled my flower over my horsemeat and dug into my frites and there was sunshine partout and I stared into the sun without my glasses on my nose and with my eyes open รก la Huxley who was teaching us how not to go blind while living in California with other English who were still that year strewing roses; it was the anno Domino 1955 and it was my cousin Israel Grossman who for a flower went to the stalls for lavender, preaching Huxley.

Étude (on Trust) Cynthia Hogue An hour you crouch with your transAtlantic friends at an intersection cafe framed by a crossroads X. Cars zoom past like spite. Our Lady’s dome still ringed with tourists, shadows cast on lurid gargoyles. The river winds below them, swallows skimming dusk’s gloire (up close, trash bits of what-not). You have drinks with salt, neat, tell all while–hell– hearing the lowdown (that gossip comforts recent research confirms): With friends what you’ve revealed goes nowhere you don’t want it to; and you in turn their secrets keep. Now’s telling’s last night. You rise as the table wobbles to sway along the river’s gloam. Going home uncomforts you–that truth, which is scuttled–by fraud, light as froth: which is seethrough.

Midnight Sun Cynthia Hogue Light fends the sky's teal, sun haloing the domed opera house. Foreigners meander past not looking up but sideways, talking, pulling open the door of a cafĂŠ lit in ghostly fluorescents. They gather for a bad meal they call good: To cluster around the horseshoe table with mottled formica and sleek, plastic seats makes them happy. Bump elbows. Feel silly. The waiter watching their mouths order nods an understanding he does not possess: Aliens loudly eating, chewing like cows, food unswallowed as they talk, gesticulate. Since the revolution the waiter has observed with exacting scrutiny the conduct of the rich who visit his newly visitable country. Unawareness crinkles through their money, their bluest eyes lined in kohl or arched in white fur like, what do they call him, Old Stick? They fork words. The waiter dabs a linen napkin each time he fills a glass. One is thinking, Follow music into sense. A second, Happiness is not a justified response to life. The third, Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Her face in the mirror smiles

to see blue bags beneath her eyes disappear in the act of smiling. The waiter reads droplets in her glass, amethyst or violet, clips, No more. We close. Good night. To him we are coffins.

Beloved Michael Waters Romania 1989

She cradles the rag-swathed, 40-watt bulb Like a hand-painted egg in woolen gloves With holes scissored at forefinger and thumb For turning pages in the icy nook. The library looms beyond gritty drifts, Past blood-soaked slats and the empty, grease-glossed Hooks beckoning from butcher shop windows. Last week she began reading Ethan Frome, A donated copy—some Fulbright prof’s— And felt that New England snowscape her own, But the volume’s vanished between visits. She hopes Ethan chose love over duty. Still, she can’t bring herself to steal a book; Ceauşescu won’t be shot until Christmas. She scours shelves for American novels— Overhead bulbs fizzled out years ago— Then finds the harrowing tale of a slave That makes her bulb seem to surge with power Hour after hour in the cold cubicle. (A decade later she’ll meet the author.) Sixteen now, she can’t anticipate much, Except to be loved as she loves these books. for Mihaela

Cannibal Michael Waters for Mihaela

Among the survivors of the Donner Party—idiom’s black sense of humor— Who developed a secret taste for flesh Flaked between the fluted bones of the wrist? Who for organs: charcoaled tongue or poached heart? Years later, in San Raphael, who wept At night for a morsel of human cheek, For one finger to gnaw himself to sleep? In the next century, Jeffrey Dahmer Ladles a young man’s head into a pot, The water simmering, lightly salted, New potatoes, leeks, and scrawny carrot Floating past eyes uplifted toward Heaven. Chestnut hair flutters slightly like eelgrass— Who can fathom such inexplicable Hunger? How my mouth covets your body, Teeth grazing buttocks, shoulders, each nipple. How I want to cradle you inside me As you clasp me within, to celebrate Our secular, primeval communion. What can I do but inscribe this desire Bite mark by bite mark across sweat-glossed skin? What can I do but write these poems for you? Ribbon worms know no language but hunger, So lacking all food will feed on themselves.

unfortunately typical song lyric D.A. Powell iron carbide permeates my sleep razor against strop the metallic screech of brakes at each shingled whistlestop and the iron horse careens through the night like a bullet from a pistol shot if I were a train, I’d shuttle back and forth between you and the boy I love if I were a train, I’d smash through the wall of your bedroom and the firetrucks would have to come to put us both out electric lights compete for my attention they pulse on and off like the chopping blade of a Cuisinart food processor that wants to break me apart and stretch me like the glutens in winter wheat if you think you’ll knead me then just press “start” and if you think you’ll eat me then have a piece of my heart and if I were a quilt, I’d cover more than one man: I’d be on you and the boy I love if I were a brush, I’d smother your face with shaving cream and the barberchair would pump you up and up close enough to feel the blade there are atoms smashing in my brain they refuse to stop until the mushroom cloud begins to rise in my bikini crotch and the sand on the beach is a smelting pot this little atoll is getting hot

and if I were a nurse, I’d attend to you and I’d sponge your body like you’re the boy I love if I were a clerk, I’d wait on you hand and foot and chest and thigh and I’d wrap your clothes in parcels of the finest butcher paper if I were in love, I’d be in love with you and one or two others who’d substitute when you and I had had enough of the smell of each other’s soap and “no more tears” shampoo ooo, ooo, oooo —for Jascha. & at least one other

The Usual Mistakes Susan Rich If the conflict lasts more than three months you should expect problems with hips and knees ~ surgeries, fireworks, friends all of your relationships … He discusses the war as easily as he reviews the football scores, or his daughter’s coincidental green card. Before the war I never coughed, he said ~ now instead of summers by the sea, I vacation at hospital in Germany. The body remembers, he tells me. The body is trouble he makes me repeat.

—Bosnia and Herzegovina

Food for Fallen Angels Susan Rich If food be the music of love, play on ~ Twelfth Night, misremembered

If they can remember living at all, it is the food they miss: a plate of goji berries, lavender pepper, gorgonzola prawns dressed on a bed of miniature thyme, a spoon glistening with pomegranate seeds, Russian black bread lavished with July cherries so sweet, it was dangerous to revive; to slide slowly above the lips, flick and swallow–almost, but not quite. Perhaps more like this summer night: lobsters in the lemon grove a picnicker’s trick of moonlight and platters; the table dressed in gold kissed glass, napkins spread smooth as dark chocolate. If they sample a pastry–glazed Florentine, praline hearts– heaven is lost. It’s the cinnamon and salt our souls return for– rocket on the tongue, the clove of garlic: fresh and flirtatious.

Earth and the Librarian Jean Valentine At the library she passed a tray with little books of baked earth on itâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Take one, and eat it; It is sweet, and it is shed for you. How can I live? said Earthâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Then Abraham Jean Valentine Then an old man came down out of the thicket, with an axe on his shoulder, and with him two people made out of light â&#x20AC;&#x201D;one a blameless son, the other like a Vermeer girl, on their way back down with the old man. Still, all the history of the world happens at once: In the rain, a young man holds out a blue cloth to caress her head at the landing-pier of the new bride. You canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get beauty. (Still, in its longing it flies to you.)

Pilgrim Christopher Buckley Hermits do no celebrate God, they worry about clouds passing like memory beyond the hills— they keep their old stories in the cellar like onions, the dry layers peeling off toward a plain, eventual dust. But who can afford to sit back and see how things turn out? The wind comes by and carries off the anger of the poor, the grand ambitions of the merchant class, and where are you? The wind places its hands before the sky where little is decided, where the stars for their infinitesimal help appear out of the air singing their names in an unknowable code we have come to recognize, vague as the road ahead. You roll the dice a few times, think you’re making choices, and begin to show up for work on time. And who is as poor then as that soul on the street corner lighting up a smoke and missing the bus, a grey bouquet of flowers scattered across the sky— the trees worried as far as he can see down the avenue where too soon it is always autumn.

Early on, the tide lines unveiled my travel plans back and forth, and I know enough not to stand alone in rain, in moonlight. I have come all this way with little more than the daylight’s blue prayer— my wishes tumbling with the waves, washing away—only to be allied with clouds, enshrined in the salt air of home.

Son of Apollo Jeff Friedman At the bar, my father pounds booze with buyers, boasting about his new line of sportswear that flies off the hangers at Marshall Fields. They toast him: “Here’s to your health and wealth,” then go to dinner, bowing to plates of steak and prime rib, bloody. Later he drives through the suburbs like some kind of woozy king, running lights and swearing at the fat, white moon. He floors the gas pedal and watches smoke rise in the rear view and smells hot rubber on tar. He breaks the sound barrier. Sonic booms shake the houses loose from hills. The sun ignites trees. His car rips a hole in space, burning up the world.

On Giving Away the Stone Margo Berdeshevsky i. I had a stone.

The book of common armor slams

speaker-stone, it is no protector, shhhh,

it is no

ptuiii,

I gave away my open mouth, to my elder poet so he'd love it for meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;love me for itâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;here, godfather, put him in your garden. Old one, see how he is stone and living? See how his natural beak is

wide for saying?

whisper new speeches, as you age,

here is what the ibis

sounds like wading in white morning,

Let him

her down-curved beak

shut. Here is my suitcase of old Eden, its contents spilled like milk. I wanted to give him one gift. Solemnly, I'd wrapped it in a moist leaf so it would never be thirsty, and gladly, I gave the stone.

ii When I lifted the barn-owl's wing, the distant stone's gift,

it stroked the faith I'd lost. Small rain, massing

between grasses, the lamb's miniature knees were buckling,

her effort to stand as her species.

When I lifted the silken thing of brown feathers, fingering it, smelling the blood-body of it— I stroked my own face with it. Breeze that had been bath-warm all summer chilled the maronnier catching flame. And the old man whose house I was sleeping in,

goldilocks, god-child-woman,

would return next

week and I wouldn't be there, would he die there island

when the minute came

or on our

don't die don't die. His owl—

—or mine, shifted feet on its twig.

In new rocks new insects are sitting With the lights off — from "Whenever I Go There" —W. S. Merwin

Of Poets' Kitchens Margo Berdeshevsky Echo & echo of the sheep's sloe eye blue like a fragility of bat flights torn out of barns, gray lace, at last possible light. I had begged his gardener not to mow don't shatter the spells. Begged the candle on the poet's kitchen round wood to pray. His framed quilt on the left says over & over Remember me, a sampler, red stitches faded still say The fear of the Lord is the beginning of our love & teach me O Lord the way of Thy statutes & I shall keep it unto the end. His modern clock above it ticks at the new sky, no wrens sing yet, it's dawn. His valley dreamt in mists, white mists into white there, there a first, a second start, there digits of branches pointing bones at their sky where once the old man once a black haired boy watercolor-sketched himself cape-flying past a cloud to reach the castle towers, clouds as above, below. That miniature on his French farmhouse wall is dated long before he wrote of white hair, & vixens, & witch fires. I remember after Prague's Vaclav Havel had served his last hours, he said he'd always wanted to be the boy storming a castle to save his people, now he knew he couldn't save,

who savesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;he was glad at last to leave the tower that had been home of his government, its velvet revolutionary gloves. He wanted to return to a kitchen, to his writing, to stir white mists of words to warm milk.

Alone in the Old Poet's House Margo Berdeshevsky A hay round bulging in the complinelight, swallow-cries' medieval memory— your pale blue doors and shutters unlatch my hand,

all children push at all secret

gardens, touching everything: a cream rose open as a woman's thighs, after. A salamander, changing colors. A plain wooden headboard passion must have strained at, love must have polished—hand after hand I'm touching everything you've made here careful not to leave jam-prints, only joy bulging naked-soled following the bee to her fig, the smell of wet pebbles to their mossed cistern. Verdigris in the shade. Jade velvets in sunset's death. Below, valleyed in seven greens, I'm counting, a hamlet's umber roofs any piper could lead children up to, any troubadour—lute for—what raven woman waiting at her needles—what other plain wood headboard waiting for thrusts, and the polish of marriage no church needs to sanctify? In Upper Quercy hills, late air is an angel's windstorm, coming rain sanctifies too many plums, the apples bursting, hay—packed like a fat woman impregnated with the country. Autumn lambs are birthing in dark purple blood, a season for a middle-aged woman falling in love with ghosts on the landscape. Troubadours luting her greened prayer into its starved mouth.

The Quality of Mercy: A Commentary Margo Berdeshevsky

From The Merchant of Venice Act 4, Scene 1 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God's When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That, in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much To mitigate the justice of thy plea; Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

In G.B. Shaw's Saint Joan, Saint Joan’s speech to her holy accusers was my first heartburst attraction to unrhymed verse, in language that adored nature, passion, and begged mercy. I was thirteen when I read"... Bread has no sorrow for me and water no affliction. But to shut me out from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers..." But the copyright law for those lines in toto—won't free them until 2019. Still, through the poetry of dramatic monologue, I fell in love, first, with poetry. Theatre and poetry were one, for me. Then, I remembered lines I've been trying to know and understand, since I first read them —a year later. (Favorite is not the right word.) At fourteen, they lured me. They remained with me, for life. They say—they adore mercy, they say—they adore life. They plead for humanity, not vengeance, or any society's or individual's so-called sense of righteousness. I wanted to trust them. Struggled then, and yet, with their knife-twisting sense of conscience. They plead for mercy, not politics. A plea that one desperately wishes were heard again in our human desert—

how long after Shakespeare gave those words to his wily Portia? As with so many of his words —we've heard them and heard them, and still, I know how we need to hear and have our many hearts burst from them. Still. We return to them. Sometimes the individual speeches, as this one, are masterpieces in themselves, but profoundly upsetting in the context of the plays they live in. Such is the moral ache of this one. The contextual racism is chilling. Often, I've wanted poetry, gentle as the rain, to change my world. "The" world. The greatest anti-war play written, so I've believed, was Henry V; but how many performances does it take for us to know it, and to act? Could Portia's words, placed elsewhere—re-shape the vengeance that bleeds across today's Middle East? On every front? Oh, I wish. (Continent after continent.) Twenty-two unrhymed iambic lines. And a haunting repetition of the "s" sounds—like an urgent hiss of wind. (Mercy. Strained. Blesseth. Sceptre. Kings. Seasons. Justice. Deeds.) ... My ear heeds all the inner music. And a recipe for a better humanity that takes no more effort than nature's rain. Why should he be merciful, our (collective) Shylock asks. Because it's gentle. Because it's easy, Portia offers. (It's not easy. But it could be, I mull. Unstrained as the light, and the sights and inner (angel) voices that my teenage Saint Joan chose fire for, rather than perpetual imprisonment and her society's so-called justice.) Two moments of dramatic poetry, I mull. (One, publication laws won't allow into public domain for more than another decade. But I find Saint Joan, and re-read it.) Recall how two women spoke to me at once, when I was very young—who plead in language that could and should change the world and the heart. And was the fictional Portia successful? In my mature readings, I understood that the push-button racism of the play and the speech, is all that could be seen, by many. I continued to re-read it, and to try to understand it. Even as a cry worth all the re-readings, for the needed kind of mercy, in our haunted times. Even as the many cry "no justice, no peace." I wish the quality of poetry were not strained. I return and return to the bard—to listen how. I call him a saint, quietly. For his many poet's miracles. Even for his Portia's cry for mercy, were it spoken today—to the stone minds of power—and to those who lack power, utterly. (Repeated and repeated.)

This piece by Margo Berdeshevesky was presented in slightly different form by Poetry Daily (http://www.poems.com), as part of its April 2008 National Poetry Month celebration."

Paul Celan: a chapbook of poems Translated by David Young

WOODED Wooded, by deer who made music, the word now crowds around the world, word that lingered on the lips, that glowed through summer’s term. They lifted it up and you follow it, you follow it and stumble– you sense how a wind, which you’d trusted so long, bends your arm around the heather: who came here from sleep, and turned toward sleep, allowed to cradle what is enchanted. You cradle it down to the waters, there where the kingfisher mirrored itself, near the nests of nowhere. You cradle it down to the clearing, that deep in the tree-glow thirsts for snow, you cradle it there to the word, which gives a name to whatever is already white in you.

SHIBBOLETH Together with my stones, which had grown great with weeping behind the bars, they dragged me into the middle of the market, there, where the flag is unfurled, the one I never swore allegiance to. Flute, double flute of night: think of the dark redness, twinned, Vienna and Madrid. Fly your flag at half-mast, memory. Half-mast today, and always. Heart, make yourself known here too here, in the middle of the market. Cry out the Shibboleth into the distant homeland: February. No pasarĂĄn. Unicorn: you know about the stones, you know about the waters; come, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll lead you away toward the voices of Estremadura.

IN MEMORY OF PAUL ELUARD Put the words in the dead man’s grave, the words he spoke in order to live. Cradle his head among them let him feel the tongues of longing, the tongs. Put the word on the dead man’s eyelid, the word he refused to speak to the one who said “thou” to him, the word his heart’s blood rushed past when a hand bare as his own knotted the one who said “thou” to him into the trees of the future. Put that word on his eyelid: maybe his eye, still blue, takes on a second, stranger blue, a second blue, and the one who said “thou” to him dreams with him: we.

DECKED OUT AT NIGHT For Hannah and Hermann Lenz Decked out at night, the lips of the flowers; trunks of the spruce, crossed and entwined; moss turned gray, stone shaken; roused to endless flight, jackdaws over the glacier: this is the region where the ones we have caught up with stop to rest: they will not name the hour nor count the flakes nor follow the water to the weir. They stand apart in this world, each one with his night, each one with his death, morose, bareheaded, hoarfrost-covered by all that is near and far. They are repaying the guilt which gave a soul to their origins, they repay it to a word that exists unjustly, as summer. A word–you know: a corpse. Let’s wash it. let’s comb it, and let’s turn its eye heaven-wards.

ASSISI Umbrian night. Umbrian night with the silver of bell and olive leaf. Umbrian night with the stone that you carried here. Umbrian night with the stone. Dumb, what climbed into life, dumb. Fill each jug, come. Earthenware jug. Earthenware jug which the potter’s hand grew into. Earthenware jug which a shadow’s hand closed forever. Earthenware jug with the seal of the shadow. Stone all around you, stone. Let the gray animal in. Animal trotting. Animal trotting in snow spread by the most naked hand. Animal trotting before the word that was locked like a door. Animal trotting and gobbling sleep from your hand. Brightness that gives no comfort, brightness. The dead—the dead are still begging, Francis.

WHERE THERE’S ICE Where there’s ice, it’s cool for two. For two: so I let you come. You still had a breath as of fire around you— You came here from the rose. I asked: what were you called there? You told it to me, that name: a glow of ashes lay over it– From the rose you came here. Where there’s ice, it’s cool for two: I gave you a double name. You opened your eye beneath it– A glitter surrounded the hole in the ice. I finish now, and say what I think– : Take this word that my eye speaks to yours! Take it, repeat it after me, speak slowly and lengthen it out, and your eye–keep it open the while!

SHINING Your body silent, lie down beside me in the sand, stars overhead. ................ Did a ray of light break through over to me, here on this side? Or is it the staff they broke against us, passing judgment, that gives off so much light?

THINKING BACK May the heart be nourished by figs, in which the hour is giving thought to the almond-shaped eye of the dead one. Fig-nourished. Rugged, in the sea wind, the shipwrecked forehead, the cliffâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sister. And around your white hair the fleece augments the summering cloud.

WITH A KEY THAT KEEPS CHANGING With a key that keeps changing you unlock the house—inside: the snowdrifts of what’s never spoken. The key changes in keeping with the blood that wells up from eye or mouth or ear . If your key changes, the word changes, allowed to drift with the snowflakes. Depending on the wind that pushes you away, the snow packs round your word.

ARGUMENTUM E SILENTIO For René Char In chains between gold and forgetting: the night. Both reached out for it. Both had their way. Lay it down, you too, lay it down there, what wants to dawn along with the days: the word that stars fly over, word that the sea washes over. To each, his word. To each, his word, that sang to him as the pack attacked him from the rear– To each his word, the one that sang and froze. To it, the night, stars flying over, sea flowing over, silenced word whose blood wouldn’t curdle when the poison fang pierced its syllables. To it, the silenced word. Against the others, who soon, beset by ravaging ears, will climb on time and the seasons, the word will bear witness last, will speak when only the chains are heard clinking, bear witness to Night, still lying there, between gold and forgetting, related to them forever– Tell me, then, where the word is going to dawn if it isn’t there with Night in the riverbed of tears, seed exposed to the setting sun again and again and again?

YOU TOO SPEAK You too speak: you speak last, say your word. Speakâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; but never split No off from Yes. Give your word a meaning: give it the shade. Give it enough shade, give it as much shade as you know is parceled around you between midnight and noon and midnight. Look around: how everything comes aliveâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; In the presence of death! Alive! whoever speaks shade speaks truth. Now, though, the shade where you stand is shrinking: Where now, shade-stripped? Upward. Grope your way up. You grow thinner, less perceptible, finer. Finer: a thread a star would like to slide down on: to be able to swim down there where it observes itself glimmering: in the flow of drifting words.

Daniel Simko: a chapbook of poems Introduction by Carolyn ForchĂŠ

Photo by Joseph Koudelka

A Stone for Svetko A remembrance of the poet Svetozar Daniel Simko, 1959-2004 Yesterday, in the bronze light of late afternoon, in a wild March wind I walked from West to East Berlin, retracing the steps I took eighteen years ago with the poet Daniel Simko, through a city at once delirious and hesitant with joy, where could be heard in the streets both the quiet of disbelief and the uplifting strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. Somewhere here, just here or was it a few hundred meters away?—sections of The Wall still stood at that time amidst its rubble, and while it was still necessary to pass through Checkpoint Charlie, even that had become a formal relic of a shattered State. But now it seemed impossible to tell East from West, except for a path of small stones marking where the wall and been here and there, and so I found myself in the windy expanse of Alexanderplatz—in front of its glass arcade and atomic clock— before I knew that I had gone from one world to another, from past to present. Only Alexanderplatz looked familiar, but its surroundings were as crystalline as the new century. You wouldn’t believe this, Svetko, I whispered to my now dead, ever-present friend, but you would be happy in your disbelief. This is the short story of a friendship between poets, which began so serendipitously, and is now marked in memory by a path of moments. We met in 1976 in Iowa City, and again in New York a few years later. During our friendship of almost thirty years, we shared poems, books, an extended family, houses and apartments here and there, travels and a passion for literary art. He was from former Czechslovakia, as was my father’s family. That, in the beginning, drew us together, but what carried us further had to do with poetry, and then with all else. In 1985, when my husband, the photographer Harry Mattison, was often in South Africa documenting what would become the last years of the apartheid regime, I welcomed the chance for camaraderie in what had become an oasis of Czechoslovakia on East 27th street—Daniel Simko’s studio apartment, whose shelves groaned with double-stacked books but for the wall where a painting hung, and the closet kitchen, and the alcove study where he wrote his poems and translated, in those days, Friedrich Hölderlin. I remember that we drove my little car down to

Greenwich St., where Harry and I lived in a loft in an old spice warehouse that still smelled faintly of spices when it rained. I do remember Daniel and his friend James Reidel taking turns holding a wedding band by a strand of my hair over my pregnant belly. If a boy, the band would swing back and forth, it was said by the old wives, and if a girl, the band would move in a circle, but over and over, it swung back and forth, and about seven months later, I gave birth to my son in Paris, where we were to spend the year 1986 beginning with the summer of the Paris bombings. When our Sean was a few months’ old, Daniel arrived to stay with us while working on his translations of the twentieth-century Austrian poet, Georg Trakl. In the months before I had joined Harry in Johannesburg, sometimes Daniel and I spoke by telephone—Johannesburg to New York—and he discerned, in my silences and hesitancies, the caution one feels when under surveillance—which as foreigners in South Africa—we were. Daniel would joke then that our halting conversations reminded him of “the old country,” the Czechoslovakia of his childhood, then still under Soviet domination. As it happened, we had to leave South Africa precipitously, having been accused by our landlady, formerly of “Rhodesia,” of breaking apartheid laws. That is how it happened that we arrived in Paris as I was entering my ninth month of pregnancy. We moved into an atelier overlooking Cimitière Montparnasse, at 11 rue Schoelcher, beside Simone de Beauvoir’s atelier at 11 bis. She would die that April, and be laid to rest in a grave that I could almost see from the window of our loggia. After she died, mourners came to rue Schoelcher and tossed flowers through our open windows, mistaking one atelier for another. At the end of those days, I would bring the bouquets to her grave and add them to the mounds of wilting flowers. When Daniel wasn’t working on Trakl at the café around the corner, we would walk together with my newborn son, Sean in his carriage through the cemetery, reasoning that the bombs going off in metro stations and stores would never be planted among the graves. Daniel smoked his Turkish cigarettes as we walked, and between smokes, held Sean up to see the tomb sculptures and pigeon flocks. Once we did hear an explosion, and it turned out to be a bomb hidden in a baby carriage, detonated in a department store, but our cemetery was always left undisturbed, and in my memory, Daniel and I are often walking there, from one grave to another. In a few hours of peace and wind, we could visit Tristan Tzara and Charles Baudelaire, and then make our way over to composers Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, and before leaving

pause at the graves of Julio Cortázar and Jean-Paul Sartre. As we walked, Daniel recited his versions of Trakl to me, asking if one word might be better than another and then, one afternoon, he came back to the atelier in a dark mood and announced “I am becoming Trakl.” I tried to reassure him that becoming Trakl might be necessary to the work of translating him. A translator of poetry must enter the language of another as closely as possible to the moment of its making. But entering Trakl carried a special risk, and Daniel knew this. His poet had been attached to a field hospital as a lieutenant pharmacist on Austria-Hungary’s Galician Front facing the Russians. There he witnessed the Battle of Grodek and Rawa-Ruska during September, 1914. Responsible for many critically wounded soldiers housed in a barn, and without an attending physician or drugs to relieve their pain, Trakl announced he could no longer bear to live and fled to shoot himself only to be disarmed. Under the pretext of a transfer to a military hospital in Krakow, he was placed under psychiatric observation and shared a room with a fellow officer suffering from delirium tremens. The windows were barred like a jail and Trakl had to wear hospital pajamas resembling a prison uniform. His publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, saw the brutality of the hospital and its screaming patients and attempted unsuccessfully to have Trakl released. Knowing of his prewar bohemian days as a drug addict, von Ficker asked Trakl if he had drugs in his possession. The poet is said to have replied, “Would I be alive otherwise?” One of Vienna’s most promising young expressionist poets, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, was his close friend, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an avid reader of his work. Trakl began to write again, but died on the third of November from a selfadministered overdose of cocaine. These circumstances certainly interested Daniel, but it was the lucidity of Trakl’s lyric response to war experience that drew him to the work, along with his fluid imagery, mutable figures, and mysterious vision. He was drawn as well to the nearprophetic poems written before his war experience, and to Trakl’s referential density, lyric consciousness, and capacity to sustain almost infinite ambiguity without diminishing the poetry’s expressive force. Trakl was inarguably among the twentieth-century’s genuine poets, but there may have been other reasons for Daniel’s elective affinity, having to do with Trakl’s youth, when he was viewed as a bit strange, perhaps as Daniel himself may have sensed himself viewed as a young immigrant in Ohio. It was said, for example, that Trakl sniffed chloroform from a flask and dipped his cigarettes in opium. Later, as a poète maudit , emulating Charles Baudelaire,

he took morphine, Veronal and cocaine, dressed as a flaneur, drank prodigiously and otherwise transported himself, but always seemed to his friends “more awake” than others. Daniel was certainly himself “more awake,” more observant and attentive, with a formidable knowledge of European history and literature, against which he read his “new Americans.” On the night I met him in July 1978, he was sitting alone on a couch in the living room of a poet’s house in Iowa City, as an after-reading party swirled around him. Although I was very young, I had been that night’s reader, and wishing to escape the confusing social mélange, sat down on the couch as well. After a time, he introduced himself, and I heard a familiar accent (perhaps barely perceptible to others), that I hadn’t heard since childhood. He was from Bratislava, Slovakia, also the birthplace of my father’s family, and so we talked for several hours about his life, “the old country,” and European poets. I didn’t see him again for several years, until the night the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University chartered a Circle Line boat for a starlight cruise around Manhattan. After we disembarked, Daniel invited my husband and I back to his then nearly empty apartment on East 27th Street, and so our enduring friendship began. Although he studied with me at Columbia for a semester or two, I never thought of myself as his teacher, but perhaps the sister and friend he more deeply needed. Over the years, we spent time together in Paris, Provincetown, Vermont, and then in the spring of 1990, after the “Velvet Revolution” liberated former-Czechoslovakia, we traveled together to Bratislava, where I joined him in a family attic, searching for the jazz records and books he had left behind when he fled in early 1969. We drove then to Prague, still quiet that spring, still gothic and dark, and not yet crowded with tourists. Most nights, we walked back and forth across Charles Bridge by ourselves, occasionally encountering clusters of students talking, singing and playing guitars. In Wenceslas Square, thronged only months before with tens of thousands of Czechs demanding the government’s capitulation, we could still find the jingle bells rung in celebration of newly won freedom, and rippling candle-wax memorials to the revolution’s martyrs. We visited my great-aunt in Brno, then living in an apartment given to her by the Jewish Council for her work on behalf of Jews during the occupation and Shoah. There is much more to say about our time with her, but the conversation would not have been possible without Daniel’s fluency in Slovak and sensitivity to her special circumstances.

From Prague we drove to Dresden, where the ruins of the fire-bombing were still visible, and then on to Berlin, where the wall was being jubilantly dismantled. We stayed in the East, near Alexanderplatz, crossing through the still-active Checkpoint Charlie several times a day. We took walks in the neighborhood where Daniel lived years earlier with his love, Tania Taubes, daughter of philosopher Jacob Taubes, one of the founders of Berlin’s Freie Universität. During these walks, Daniel grew pensive and melancholy, but always retained his sharp wit, as well as a certain gravitas. He knew where we were and “what time it was,” as we picked scraps of the wall from the ground and chose which ones to bring home with us. Behind the soot-blackened Reichstag, vendors had spread blankets with Russian war medals, particularly artful examples of wall graffiti, dog-fur hats and Soviet mementos. My friend, the late Charles Newman, captured this flea market of history perfectly. Thinking of a museum, he wrote: “Grim History proceeds painstakingly and openly from room to room, until the last very small one (devoted to the near present) where it dribbles away into a meaningless collage of artifacts; a sword from the RussoJapanese War, a bust of Stalin, a cosmonaut, a photo of an expedition to Antarctica, a Chinese vase inlaid with Brezhnev’s visage and some Gorby buttons—all in no particular order, and without explanation. It’s as if—‘here are the pieces’—you figure it out.” Throughout our journey that spring, Daniel was painstakingly and contemplatively “figuring it out.” He showed me where he had lived and gone to school, the abandoned castle in Bratislava where he played as a boy, and in the musty attic of his aunt’s house, with its old wooden trunks, dove nests and broken chairs, he showed himself that it was impossible to be more than the ghost in a country that was no longer his. There wasn’t very much in that attic that he wanted to bring back. During the next fourteen years, he lived in New York, earning a degree in Library Science and working for the New York Public Library. He continued to write, but grew less and less interested in publishing his poems, other than in the books he made himself, and in his “manuscriptions” of notes, aperçus and versets, all privately distributed among his friends. He sent out translations, yes, but not his own poems—and although he offered reasons having to do with a contempt for “literary politics,” it seemed to me his reticence had deeper roots. Perhaps parting with his lover, Tania, had inflicted a decisive wound, held open by his vigil over his mother’s long illness. Dr. Mary Simko had suffered from a rare blood disease and died in 2003,

only ten months before her son. Perhaps his reluctance to publish could be attributed to some other cause, but the mode of his poetry in those years was decidedly European. In boyhood he had fled his country, but only in adulthood did he become an exile, and not only from Slovakia. He lived in a realm of exilic being. He wrote in English but he often seemed, in so doing, to be translating himself—not his language—himself. It seems to me now that in his youth, he was attempting that rarely accomplished feat, full assimilation. He didn’t “lose” his Slovak accent. He learned to mimic American speech. His humor and youthful carryings-on were attempts to fit in, to be accepted by his peers. The humor, the indulgences, even his invented language “Tanto,” in which he sometimes wrote his letters and experimental poems, were partially in the service of this acceptance. In his later years, I believe he realized what he had lost—not only Tania and his mother—but his own past. He had to watch “The Velvet Revolution” from a distance, and he was desperate in its aftermath to return to Czechoslovakia. In the last months of his life he was attempting to have his Slovak citizenship restored, and I am told by his friend, Zuzana Andreánska, that in his last days, drifting in and out of consciousness, he spoke only his mother tongue. That is why, throughout his later years, it seemed that when one stepped into his apartment on East 27th Street, one was stepping into an oasis of Central Europe. Whenever I came to visit him there, he met me at the top of the stairs in Penn Station, elegantly dressed in overcoat and silk scarf, an umbrella on his arm, a valise over his shoulder, and we went back to his apartment to sit and talk, share passages from our reading, poems in draft, and moments of quiet laced with his cigarette smoke. Always he had arranged a vase of roses on the table, and a plate of fruit and biscuits, and later we would go to dinner at Mocca, a Hungarian restaurant on Second Avenue, for wiener schnitzel and goulash, or else to the nearby bistro Les Halles, and then take long walks into the night, usually through Gramercy Park and Union Square, and sometimes as far south as Greenwich St., where my husband and I had first lived. On every trip, we visited the Strand bookstore where Daniel once worked and where he still seemed to know everyone. Usually we also went to the Museum of Modern Art, but during most of our time together we stayed in his apartment refuge, talking and writing, revising and reading to each other. It was there we argued our way through selections for Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Throughout those years, Daniel lived quietly, worked diligently, smoked prodigiously, and if he drank heavily, never did he seem inebriated. I knew, in his last years, that he was ill, and should have realized how gravely ill he was, but his comportment obscured his suffering until it was too late. He once told me that he preferred to die rather than endure medical treatment. I thought the remark an odd instance of his dark wit, but as it turned out, he was serious. Throughout what must have been a long ordeal, he insisted that everything was “fine.” Vyborne , he said often in Slovak. Fine. When I offered to help him assemble a manuscript, he made his usual excuses: the poems weren’t “ready,” the work was “in-progress,” there was “more to come.” We used to joke with each other that whoever died first would have to cope with the other’s library and papers, and I added to this the threat that eventually he would publish a book, even if I had to assemble it when he was gone. So, I said, you had best now make your revisions and selections. Despite my failure to persuade him to let his poetry into the world, it is to Daniel that I owe my own reemergence as a poet in the late 1980’s. Had it not been for him, I may have remained in self-protective seclusion myself, saving my poems in boxes and manila folders for someone else to find one day. Daniel had been given a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in 1987, and as we had returned en famille from Paris to the United States with as-yet no definite home, I moved with Sean to a winter beach house in Provincetown’s West End, and Harry commuted from Georgetown University to join us on weekends until a suitable residence could be found for us all. Daniel lived on the East End, and would visit us after writing for most of the day. In those days, we shared poems with each other, or rather I listened to Daniel’s drafts, and we shared a little supper most evenings. Daniel worried that I hadn’t allowed myself time to write in the aftermath of the publication of my controversial second book, The Country Between Us. I had become, he thought, wary and reclusive—a bit too much like himself—and that I had understandably retreated into motherhood so determinedly that I might never publish poetry again. Not while I’m alive, I used to joke with him. “This must not happen,” he had said, and he offered to take Sean in his carriage to the East End for two hours every day, as long as I wrote while he was away, and he demanded to see the pages upon his return, so that I wouldn’t use the time for domestic chores. I would wave

goodbye to them and close the little gate, taking in a breath of sea: beyond us was the bay, and on the horizon, shore clouds; below my windows, drying kelp and bladder wrack, and above, herring gulls holding their black-tipped wings rigid on the wind. I would go back into the house and, trying not to pick up toys, move toward the desk—to typewriter, ink and paper—as if this were a piano that hadn’t been played in years. I set to work, filling five pages with notes in an unfamiliar form, and in what seemed only minutes, I would hear the creak of the gate. After placing the sleeping baby in his crib, I dutifully showed Daniel my pages, asking him please not to read them, but only confirm that something had been written. That is how my third book, The Angel of History, was made possible, and it would be some years before I would let it go into the world, after much back-and-forth with Daniel and at his urging. Otherwise I may not have brought myself to write for others again. Daniel had always wanted to make a pilgrimage to Krakow but never had done so. I was in Krakow when I learned of his death in a dawn telephone call from my husband. My son and I were staying in Hotel Logos. For an hour before I knew that he was dead, I listened to the bells of a far off church and made notes of the kind I had made in Provincetown that winter, and imagined showing them to Daniel when I next visited New York. When I hung up the phone, I opened the casements and let the morning wind into the room. In my soul Daniel waved goodbye, and turned to walk away through the fog on Charles Bridge in Prague. Our Svetko was gone, and I don’t remember the rest of that morning well. A few days after his death, my son and I walked through the wards of the military psychiatric hospital, to the room where Trakl was kept at the end of his life. The room has been turned into a small museum. It is only by chance that I was offered to see it, by someone who knew nothing of my history with Daniel nor his with Trakl. The hospital patients were still wearing striped pajamas, and the windows were still barred. I remember speaking very deliberately in my heart to my friend at that moment: This, at last, is your visit to Krakow. I have come here for both of us. And now, from the new Berlin, I send a postcard made of light and hope to Svetko, telling him that his poetry will be published in an American edition by Four Way Books, to be read at last in his adopted country, as it has been, posthumously, in the new Slovak Republic, and in the coming months I will place a stone on his grave in Bratislava, that he, as well as his poems, will

not be forgotten. Carolyn ForchĂŠ Berlin, March 2008 An earlier version of this tribute was published in Slovak in Kritika & Kontext, edited by Samuel AbrahĂĄm, No. 36, Volume XIII. Bratislava, Slovak Republic, 2008.

TESTIMONY Go on and on. It is a fact that now you understand the music. The kind that is played quickly, and in terror. The one whose skull you last saw sunning itself. Yet it is important to carry on, to continue speaking in the arrested voice you once used in a different language. To simply continue speaking. The one whose skull you last saw sunning itself. It is bothersome to exorcise history. It is just a flat row of wheat, a cut poplar. As for trees, they always remain singular. What else is there to say, and how many ways to say it You, being the I.

FAR Bells coming in, a mile off. The North Star reticent against the Danube bridge, phrases falling on the cold metal. The same bare poplar, the lonely spruce, weave in the late October wind. Or as I imagine them now, looking at them from the promenade, years younger, the same mildly uncertain expression spreading over my face. I have come to love this city, this one thing I could not keep. The groves and vineyards that forgive me for leaving, and the people who do not And if this is a poem of childhood, then it's also the darkness within a glove. Or in a trumpet that the man playing the circus all night finally puts down.

A FIELD OF RED POPPIES I can see them now, I think, bowing against absence, and trusting us. They are, what my friend calls, a mind's glove. Small death's head, small bodies that are not there. It is all right to think of them in a photograph, or in a dream. It is all right that they assume their sinister bend. What else can you say about poppies? How they remind you of your childhood, or of someone who is not there. That's all. And yet, this is a field where they were throwing people once. That's the story. And it still matters. Because it is voiced.

PRAYER It is so. It touches the clothes with the rustle of leaves under a naked back, And to sleep a little less now is a small compassion. That darkness you see, a land of darkness, is darkness itself. To be mad is to be like this. Prayer is like this: to live on nothing. Even I, the judicious failed scholar find no reason for this. Tomorrow, if I remember, I will continue to repeat the same. The way a face is pure. The way fear is pure. How simple it all becomes. Thy deed is done.

FAMILY PORTRAIT/CIRCA 1910 I did not know any of them. I do not remember the simple grin on my grandfather's face. The blind girl across the street is seated behind her piano, and even now, after her chords have typed themselves into my memory I remember nothing of the incident. I suppose they gathered to share contents of irrelevant tragedies, or simply, dress for the photograph, and have tea. If this is the atrium, then their faces are acid. Negatives, lost by wars and fear. Perhaps now water will grow still in cups, and not even the Ohio, and its mud and misery, can be kind. If I place before me a photograph, any photograph, will I remain the same? Can I follow the grief? Something about the loneliness of hands, or the apples, those small fists which will fill them soon. This is why the face is inconsolable.

GAVRILO PRINCIP THINKS OF HIS HIGHNESS A few words are enough even for the dead. I have not been assassinated yet. Simply put, I rose above myself. It was still dawn. It was still dark. Impeccably dressed, it seems, the Sir in black has something to say. Odd to hear it now. And why should I ask for forgiveness? They are burning the clothes of the dead beggars again. It is early morning. I have spread out my Sunday best over a chair. But I know, the Bosnia is burning through my clothes, and my lover is still asleep. To wake her now, I would have to be hungry and cold. But I am almost happy. Sarajevo is in my pocket.

DEPOSITION Yes, I know. It seems I have been talking for a long time without making much sense. I have mentioned fists, and departures, the choreography of the blind. Some incentive, I suppose. In the photograph, presented under dubious circumstances you appear to be waving, I mean, holding your hands up. And that fist of ice, the knife-blade, and broken glass, are all a rude joke. But of course you didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know the dogs, the snow coming down on our bodies which weigh nothing. Which are grievances. As for the address, there is none. What was I saying? All right. Continue.

THE ARRIVAL after a photograph almost taken in Berlin Wet slate roofs. Pigeons. A light. A leaf on the sidewalk. The shadows slipping between cobblestones. It is already dusk when you arrive from Paris, smoke rising from the Diesel as you step out with your black hair untied. I am almost always turning into that smoke, into the pigeons landing on the glass roof. Or I wake up and you come with a shawl black with stars. Paris, 1980

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Bob Hicok: a chapbook of poems

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Left to My Own Devices The floor's level now. It was as easy as moving a red handle, as buying a jack, as cutting a hole in the floor, as being born, as translating Rilke badly but with the exhilaration of one who loved flipping the pages of two dictionaries simultaneously. Not the panther poem but some other Austrian lyricism I've forgotten, how many of my moments are contrails, bold, white slashes against a blue background that are gone the next time you look up from your turkey sandwich? You and your box lunches. I suspect jets are really a means for the birth of contrails, that forgetting is a form of life, just as knowing for certain where the keys are should have a species name. No matter. I'll never be six foot tall so I hop a lot, and at the top of the hop, I'm probably six two, six three, so I write that down on forms that want to know how tall I am, as if a blank space is really curious. The form is not specific about durationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;how tall are you and how long have you been that tallâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;so the question is either demure or badly phrased. The difference between the thought of the thing and the thing goes away for Caroline when she gathers and staples her skin. There's just the pain. It's not a word or a ball of sunlight, it's this very specific attempt not to scream so her husband won't know what she's doing to the thigh he doesn't visit much these days. Is there a point, you might be asking, and I might be telling you no, not beyond the shape of a god up ahead as we're walking, which when we get to it, is not a god but a naked piece of stone. The days have stacked into who I am but if I met one of them again, out on the street, I doubt I'd recognize it. It could ask me the time and I wouldn't know it was my past, the irony of this would be lost on me, it would float off wherever forsaken irony goes, and someone in an official smock would trip the "we're running low on irony siren" but it wouldn't work, thus increasing our stock of irony, praise the Lord. I'd be sad if trees stopped telling the truth. I mean really, really sad, like rusted lug nut sad, you out on the highway with your flat, beating what won't let go with the lug wrench, then sitting there with bits of bottles thrown from cars, sorting shatter

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by color and shape.

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Putting a Red Dress on a Gray Day Fog and I go walking with simple words for the smell of baking bread. I can be in New York anywhere, or this tree I've erased so often it's immortal. That pink snow in my mind below the easel of rubbing hard without tearing the paper, still a cloud of what was there before, only now, the gestures defend their right to privacy more persuasively. An open mouth on the far side of clarity, telling it "no, that's not it," like the wet voice of failure behind the Emperor's ear on the chariot of praise. To which mouth the mountain shrugs, "but I clearly am a risen thing," my days strung as wash between these poles to dry. Asking becomes with a pause "as king," as king I command my letting go to hold on, my holding on to go as a cyclops among the villagers. In the middle, no middle. The child of euphony and noise that suave banging of the word night against the unlistening dark. I can be no more specific. The ship wreck gives such lovely wood to our fires to burn the voyages down. Come morning, the chance to build a smaller craft from scraps of open water.

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Safe and Restful Awaken by the ticking of the registers, I misread British Trust for Ornithology News as news about the faith the British place in ornithology. I don't know why the registers tick. It's not a large sound, not bones breaking or crows trapping owls in a cave, but once awake, I attend to falling dust. Now a picture in my head of where deer sleep in winter grass, the bowls of their dreaming what I'd extend to you, whoever you are and whenever we meet, more than the elbows my words tend to throw. There's a story of forty eight years behind this regret I won't whine my way through at four in the morning, I guess it's more interesting to ask, what kind of name is Boria Sax? I won't contextualize the question, can't contextualize myself. You know what that's like, the feeling you've worn the wrong scrotum to the sales meeting, that everyone else remembers the primary exports of Belize. What is baxalt anyway, why weren't we asked to memorize Belizian metaphors of love or South Korean songs of the harvest or Kenyan imitations of the giraffe, the sway of their necks as they run? None of my training prepares me for waking into the conviction my life is shit, that's why I practice practice practice. The difference between literal and figurative shit isn't as great as I'd like, nor has the sun arrived with its paint to lie about the fresh start. Say something good: the cover of the bird book's simple, mostly black, some red at the top, and vultures are pretty, and Icarus was right.

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Essentially the Torn Corner of a Blueprint We applied a few of the handles from the box of handles to the box of handles. Glue, she had some, always in her pocket that I kissed once when it was inside out, the bottom where lint gathers, clings, she is lovely with her two bellybuttons looking at me like eyes where her pants stop. Or start, yes, another measure of optimism, the glass is half-way across the room, I am half-way to Spain when I realize I left the coffee on, I tell the stewardess, "you sense by now this is an extended act of figuration." She does, that's why she's put me in the jump seat, away from the others, so my chattering won't do them any harm. All I had when I started this walk was a feeling of warmth for the trinkets, a sense that I should put some doorknobs or latch keys before my eyes and touch them and let you touch them with me, a group absorption of texture and the implication of story inherent to our baubles, that have of course been manufactured and carried and thrown from a moving car because he said the thing about your mother one too many times, and even though you agree, only you are allowed to say it. I am stuck, right here in this breath, as I have been for a century, wanting the notion of the hologram to be real, that each bit replicates the whole, or roses to change how I write an l in cursive, or the genuine to be clear about what it will share and what I'll never overhear as I walk through spring. Since I was a boy carrying river home in a jar, I've wanted to ask whatever holds things together, what holds you together? The life force probably feels alone. Wakes up, looks around, notices how busy everything is being itself, the sun in its arrogant kindle not ever saying thank you, and even if it did, who believes praise anymore?

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Psalm of Filling the Rental Car For the director of music. To the tune of static. Man eating from a dumpster at a BP off Middlebelt in Romulus. From an apple core, then a burger first wiped against the dumpster, to remove ants, maybe, maybe maggots. Early March, grime-snow lines the roads. Jets drop from the east, the air is paper, torn. He never looks up, he is dilligent, he is fed. I do not forget the mouth of Your promise. How servant my eyes, pitfalls of hope. Who will bring us to the fortified city? I fail greatly. My soul faints like smoke.

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In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish A Special Feature

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A Poet Among Us On a winter night in Beirut twenty-two years ago, a physician working among Palestinians in southern Lebanon whispered to me that I had arrived too late, that the poets had left Beirut the year before, Mahmoud Darwish among them, and in the darkness of a black-out he spoke of how unsettling it was for the people to know that the poets were no longer there, most especially Darwish— whose work was beloved by millions in the Arab world and beyond, whose lyrics were sung by heart, set to the music of their ancient oud, whose poetry readings filled stadiums. Having survived a life of imprisonment, house arrest and exile, he wrote of love, survival and our common humanity. Now Mahmoud Darwish is no longer among us, this poet who made of his language a homeland, who dwelled in exilic being—this solitary, private man who became the voice of a people, and who, in a language of fig trees, olives and flute music, exile and longing, re-built in poetry the four hundred and seventeen invisible villages of Palestine, such as Al-Birweh—which he was forced to flee as a boy—the village to which his empty, symbolic coffin was carried to be set among the stones of what may have once been his house, near a prickly pear bush, in a dry wind. At that same moment in Ramallah, tens of thousands attended his state funeral and laid him to rest on a hillside with Jerusalem visible in the distance. Those who carried the second coffin to AlBirweh knew that their poet had to be buried twice, once for his presence and once for his absence. Almost twenty years after Beirut, I came to know Mahmoud Darwish as one of his collaborative translators and then as his friend, and would come to understand why the people of that besieged city were so bereft at his loss. No other poet of his time gave voice to an entire people, no other poet was so beloved, and yet he also cleaved to his art, and carried within himself the solitude it demanded. He seemed to know and accept his destiny, and desired only to finish the work under his pen. A year before his death, we were together at Struga in Macedonia, the oldest poetry festival in the world, and as he stood on a bridge over the River Drim, he read his poems to the thousands who crowded its banks and drew their flotilla of boats as close as they could to him beneath the bridge. During the festival, the sky flowered with fireworks in his honor, torches were lit, songs sung, and he was presented with the Golden Wreath Award, one of the highest honors given to a poet. A few days later, we were taken by boat across a spring-fed pool near Lake Ohrid. There was no

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sound but that of the oar rising and falling. Mahmoud was pensive as he leaned over to touch the water, while telling me very quietly that his heart was giving way. I didn’t understand at the time that he was saying goodbye, and now I must say goodbye to him, who realized his wish to be a candle in the darkness of the times in which he lived, and by whose poetry, memory and light we must now find our way. —Carolyn Forché

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Now…in Exile Now, in exile…yes, in the house, in the sixties of a swift age they light up the candles for you. Rejoice, but with utmost calmness, because a reckless death has lost its way in the heavy crowds…and deferred you. A curious moon on the ruins laughs like a buffoon. Don’t believe that it approaches to accept you. It has, in its ancient task, as the new March, given back to the trees the names of longing and ignored you. So celebrate with your friends the shattered chalice. In your sixties, you won’t have the remaining tomorrow to carry on the shoulders of anthem…and it won’t carry you. Tell Life, in a manner becoming of a seasoned poet: Walk leisurely as women who are confident of their magic and schemes walk. Each one has a hidden call: I am yours / you are beautiful. Walk leisurely, Life, so I can see all of your faults around me. I have often forgotten you in your vastness while looking for the both of us (and whenever I realized one of your secrets you callously said: How ignorant you are!)… And tell absence: You lack me, yet I am present…to make you whole.

Translated by Fady Joudah

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Happy about Something Happy about some hidden thing, I used to embrace the morning with the strength of song, walk confident of my steps and my vision. Some kind of revelation would call to me: Come here! As if it were a magical gesture, a dream dismounting to coach me its secrets. And I would become the master of my star at night, reliant on my language. I would become my dream. My mother’s mother in vision, my father’s father, and my son. Happy with some hidden thing, it used to carry me on its stringed instrument. It used to polish me and polish me like the diamond of an eastern princess. What isn’t sung now on this morning will never be sung. O love, give us your overflow so we can plunge into the noble war of romantic folk. The weather is optimal, and the sun sharpens our weapons in the morning. Love! our only goal is defeat in your wars…triumph, and listen to your victims eulogize you: Blessed are your hands. Come back safely to us…we the losers! Happy with some hidden thing, I used to walk dreaming of a blue poem of two lines… about a lighthearted happiness, visible and concealed at once. Whoever doesn’t love now on this morning will never love.

Translated by Fady Joudah

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She Didn’t Come She didn’t come. I said: And she won’t…so let me rearrange the evening with what suits my failure and her absence: I put out the flame of her candles, I turned on the electric lights, drank her wine then broke the glass and switched the music: from the swift violins to Persian songs. I said: She won’t come. So I loosened my elegant necktie (to relax more) and put on my blue pajama. I could walk barefoot if I want. And sit cross-legged, sagging on her sofa, to forget her and forget all the things of absence. Then I put back in the drawers what I had prepared for our party. I opened the windows and pulled back the curtains. I stood in front of the night, my body holding no secret other than what I waited for and lost… and I mocked my obsession with purifying the air for her (I had sprayed rose and lemon water). She won’t come…I will move the orchid from the right to the left to punish her forgetfulness… I will cover up the mirror with a coat, I don’t want to see her radiant image…and add to my regret. I said: Forget what you have chosen for her of ancient love lines, she doesn’t even deserve a plagiarized poem… Then I forgot her, ate my quick meal standing, and read a chapter in a school book about our distant planets, and wrote, to overlook her harm, a poem, this poem.

Translated by Fady Joudah

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A LONGING FOR FORGETFULNESS Darkness. I fell off the bed deranged by a question: Where am I? I looked for my body and felt it looking for me. I looked for the light switch but couldn’t find it. I tripped on a chair, it fell and I fell on I don’t know what. Like a blind man who sees with his fingers I looked for a wall to lean on, I slammed into the closet. I opened it…I felt some clothes, smelled them and recognized my scent. I realized I was in some part of the world that concerns me, and that I have split from it or it from me. I kept on looking for the light switch to ascertain this insight. I found it: Here is my bed, there is my book, and this is my suitcase, and the one in my pajamas resembles me. I opened the window and heard dogs barking in the wadi: But when did I get back? I don’t remember standing on the bridge. I thought I was dreaming that I was here and not here. I washed my face with cold water, made sure of my wakefulness. In the kitchen I found fresh fruits, unwashed dishes that tell of a dinner I had here. When did this happen? I checked my passport: it seems I arrived today, without remembering that I had traveled. Did a schism occur in my memory? Has my psyche split from my physical being? I was frightened. I called a friend at this late hour: I think I suffer from an illness of memory…where am I? He said: You’re in Ramallah. When did I arrive? I asked. Today, he said, and we spent the afternoon together in the garden. Why don’t I remember then? Do you think I am sick or something? He said: Well, such things happen to the patients of longing-for-forgetfulness.

Translated by Fady Joudah

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Translations

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Ngo Tu Lap was born in 1962 and spent his childhood in Vinh Phu, about sixty miles from Hanoi. He studied navigation in the former U.S.S.R., became a navy captain, graduated from law school, and then began a career as a literary editor. He received a fellowship to study literature in Paris in 1995, and in 2006 completed a PhD at Illinois State University, where he also served as a Publishing Assistant for Dalkey Archive Press. In Vietnam, he has published three books of poems, four collections of short stories, three collections of essays, and translations from Russian, French, and English. He has won seven prizes in Vietnam for his writing. He now teaches film theory and criticism at Vietnam National University in Hanoi.

Viet Blood Ngo Tu Lap for Dao Sometimes it rises, excited, on the lips As red as the sun of Vietnam Sometimes it flows silently Like mud, dark in the veins While I travel this vast land, these long rivers Clouds spread white mist through the border sky My sweat flows into deep chasms Water is clear, my face invisible I pass the ruins of citadels An image of Con Son in the dust of deserted dunes It didn’t choose me, I didn’t choose it Viet blood flows With the scent of rice, bird droppings, fish sauce This color of skin, in this wind and sun— My mother rocked me in cloudless June The Viet language is poor, but beautiful as a small stream It didn’t choose me, I didn’t choose it Viet blood Is like life, love, death Sometimes hardening into resin Green leaves keep flowing down the hill Where my friend has fallen Translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins with the author 133

Israel Emiot, poet and prose writer, was born in Poland, near Warsaw, in 1909, and died in Rochester, New York. He came from a distinguished Hasidic family and studied at a renown yeshiva. In 1939, he fled to Russia because of the Nazi invasion of Poland and became a journalist. Ultimately he was sent to Kahzikstan, as were many other refugees. After a period in Moscow's literary circles, he was sent by the Soviet Joint Anti-Fascist Committee to Birobidjhan. During Stalin's purge of Jewish artists and intellectuals, he was sent to a labor camp in Siberia. He eventually came to the USA in 1958. In Rochester, he was the first writer in residence at a Jewish Community Center in this country. He edited a tri-lingual journal called ROOTS. He knew several languages but wrote in Yiddish. Prayer of a Man in Snow Israel Emiot Today there is no bloodstain on the snow; nobody was shot; there's just snow and snow around you—snow in you snow—white on white. O protect me God from snowy Words: You have been weighed and found wanting. God has numbered thy kingdom and finished it. The face of the village: snow. The sky that has nowhere to fall— and sinks into snow. The little gates swinging in the wind— so much to say and only saying: snow. For the village face—snow; for morning prayers—snow, added prayers—snow, sunset prayers—snow, for east, west, north, south—snow, a man in snow a dog in snow a horse in show. This dear little day counts like a child up to two: one—snow two—snow, snow, snow. Translated from the Yiddish by Leah Zazulyer

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Untitled Israel Emiot I will trade the bread for a small box of tobacco, already accustomed, already resigned to a day without bread; what shall I do?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;for even in the Yabbok book such a death, such woe, couldn't be read. Fed up, the everlasting march in a line, march in a line, and it's a blessing to be dead, with your feet to the door; I have already forgotten if I should walk on two all the time or completely crawl like a beast on all fours.

Translated from the Yiddish by Leah Zazulyer

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A Prayer in Nineteen Forty-Three Israel Emiot Good God, look I'm poor, and trip over myself, and my child wears shoes three times his size, and plays with children, falls, and runs crying to me, as I to you—with and without a reason. I know all prayers crown you in gold and address the most exquisite words to you; still, don't insult the prayer of a child, who just wants his own bed, and has to sleep fourth on the ground. Your song—the day—I read and admire daily; I still marvel at your last verse—your sunset, but when I want to praise you my hands fail me! Oh do not punish me, even my shirt is borrowed. Wisdom tells me man is insignificant, and earth the least of all your spheres; still, do not punish me; listen to the lament of a child who sleeps fourth on the ground. For H. Lang {Kazakhstan, war years}

Translated from the Yiddish by Leah Zazulyer

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Liliana Ursu has published eight books of poetry in Romanian. Her most recent volume in English translation is Goldsmith Market (Tr. Sean Cotter, Zephyr, 2003). Ursu was a Fulbright Lecturer at Penn State, a visiting professor at the University of Louisville, and more recently, a Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University.

If I Lift My Eyes Liliana Ursu From where I lie in bed, I watch a dirt road winged with poplar trees: recent summers’ “royal path” connecting one village to one monastery. And there are also the roadside white poppies brushing Sister Evlampia’s dark habits near the sluice where children love to play, near the house of the recluse who cultivates only stars in his little garden on the slope along the river. It’s summer up there, no, autumn, for I see grape pickers hanging perfectly from this last thread of light that threatens to descend upon my poem and die, so I stop writing lest I lose it. From where I lie in bed in this American room if only I lift my eyes I see the monastery in vespers light and young Sister Agripina

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whose palms still bear the imprint of the knellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rope. Translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

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Poem with Wicket in Stephen the Great's Bell Tower Liliana Ursu To Gheorghe Lazar din Şuşag To fall asleep with your head On a bed of wild strawberries, The sky above— An incensed prayer. The hermit’s body—thurible Amid his brothers, the pine trees. In the bell tower, Lazarus of Şuşag, the Barefoot, Illuminates the ice between his fingers. In his hand, the candle Lights itself. Translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

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Cvetka Lipuš, born in Eisenkappel/ Železna Kapla (Austria), studied Slavic languages and comparative literature at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria). She writes in Slovenian and sometimes in German. For several years, she worked for a publishing house specializing in the literature of Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia. In 1995, she moved to Pittsburgh, PA and is currently employed as a librarian. She is the author of five poetry collections: Pragovi dneva– (Thresholds of the Day; Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt, Austria 1989), Doba temnjenja (Time of Darkening; Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt 1993), Geografija bližine (Cartography of Closeness; Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt 2000), Spregatev milosti (Conjugating Mercy; Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2003). Her fifth collection Obleganje sreče (Siege of Happiness; Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana 2008) is forthcoming. Her poems have been translated into German, Italian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Italian, French, and Hungarian and published in numerous Slovenian and German literary magazines. Still lifes with one or more persons Cvetka Lipuš They come visiting. They lay their coats down on the bed, they put their gifts on the table in the hallway. In cellophane --flowers, in paper bags—bottles, distillations of future meetings. They pass around the dewy silver, porcelain, glass. In front of the copper engravings of tropical birds, they peel themselves, layer by layer, chattering. Even before the coming of the late hour words are gnawed down to the bone. Beginnings are used for various continuations, for selfish ends. Their anxiety, like rising underground water, they cautiously fill with light. Wounds glisten, say the surgeons. When, clothed in furry phrases, they kiss each other on the cheek, somebody whispers: the soul of the other—a movable target.

Translated from the Slovenian by Tom Priestly

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Eugenio Montale was born October 12, 1896 in Genoa, Italy. He is considered one of the most original and influential Italian poets since Leopardi. His works served as intellectual opposition to Fascism during in the 1930’s and during WWII. He became a literary critic and editor for Italy’s leading newspaper Il Corriere della Sera in 1948. He also wrote stories, travel writings, literary and music criticism and translations from English, French and Spanish. Two volumes of poetry were published before WWII, Ossi di sepia in 1925 and Le occasioni in 1939. His book, La bufera e altro, published in 1956, included poems written during WWII. The poems in Xenia were written as elegies to his wife, Drusilla Tanzi, a Jewish woman nicknamed Mosca, after her death. He published several more volumes in his later years including Satura in 1971, Diario del ’71 in 1973 and Altri versi in 1981. He was awarded honorary degrees from the Universities of Milan (1961), Cambridge (1967), and Rome (1974). Giuseppi Saragat, the president of the Republic of Italy, awarded Montale life membership in the Italian senate in 1967, a rare honor. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975. On September 12, 1981, he died in Milan, Italy. From Xenia Eugenio Montale 4. We had studied for the afterlife a sign of recognition, a whistle. I’m trying to modulate it in the hope that all of us are already dead without knowing it.

Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells

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From Xenia Eugenio Montale 5. I never understood whether I was your faithful and distempered dog, or you mine. But not to others, for them you were a myopic insect lost in the twaddle of high society. Those clever ingenious ones did not know they were your laughing stock: you could see even in the darkness and shock them with your infallible sense of smellâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and your batâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s radar.

Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells

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From Xenia Eugenio Montale 12. Spring emerges with the pace of a mole. Never again will I hear you talk of poisonous antibiotics, of the nail in your femur, or the patrimony plucked from you. Spring advances with its dense fog, its long daylight and unbearable hours. No longer will I hear you wrestle with the backwash of time, of ghosts, or the logistical problems of summer.

Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells

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Down There Eugenio Montale The earth will be supervised from platforms in space Slaughter will be more probable or less Prophets and prophecies will vanish if ever they existed The “I”, “You”, “We”, will disappear from use To say birth, death, beginning and end, will all be one To say yesterday tomorrow an abuse To hope—a booming voice understood by no one. The creator will have little to do if anything The saints will only be found among dogs Angels will remain indelible misprints

Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells

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Paw el Marcin k iew icz (b. 1969) is a poet and translator who lives in Opole where he lectures at the University of Opole. He has published four volumes of poetry and numerous translations from the English, including works by John Ashbery, James Tate, Anne Carson, Henri Cole, and Mary Jo Bang. Among his many honors is the CzesĹ&#x201A;aw MiĹ&#x201A;osz Prize (2000). His new volume of poetry, Days, Passages, is forthcoming. In his spare time, he likes to participate in marathon races and work on his web site, www.marcinkiewicz.net.pl which also features his own work in English translation. Flacon Paw el Mar cinkiewicz The morning of your birthday I went to the perfumery around the corner to get you that flacon. The girl in a sleeveless dress asked sleepily how she could help, then led me between the scent of woodbine and lavender. In the bright light I saw her velvety calves, the play of back muscles under the skin. She had a soft voice, and her lips held the promise of nine suns. After I paid, she gave me the change, gently grazing her nails on my hand and wrist. I will love you always.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

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Tad eu s z D ąb row sk i (b. 1979) is the author of four volumes of poetry (including Te Deum, 2005), an anthology of new Polish poetry, and he edits the bimonthly journal Topos. His work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, and it has been translated into English, German, Swedish, Russian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, and Czech. Among his honors are fellowships from the Minister of Culture (2007), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (2006), Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship (2005), and the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (Visby, 2004). In 2006, Tadeusz Różewicz presented him with the Award of the Foundation for Polish Culture. His most recent award is the 2008 Hubert Burda Prize (Germany) given to poets from Central and Eastern Europe. He lives in Gdańsk. U n titled T adeus z D ąbr ows ki This is verse one. This verse has no meaning. And this is verse two, in which you’re no longer yourself, i.e., you’re not the man from verse one, and now you’re not even the one you were in verse two and three, and four, or still in verse five. This poem is life, I do everything to be myself in every verse, to have each verse miraculously bend my way, while you, willy-nilly, must outlive this life, and in the last verse, as close to the end as possible, you must dare an opinion, the subject of which will be you. You’ll survive only if you decide this poem speaks about God. The last verse will arrive yet much faster than

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

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ID T adeus z D Ä&#x2026;br ows ki He who helps mom carry the groceries, and he who bums on a bench sipping beer. He who tells his parents goodnight with a kiss and is loved for his research grant by a fantastic mulatto from an escort service. A Catholic, who dreams during the Elevation of elevating the skirt of a married woman kneeling in front of him. He who frequents porn sites, and he who sends to e-heaven a few of his painfully exposed college girlfriends. If they ran into each other in a store, cinema or elevator, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be frightened to death. Luckily, the world is much-too-small for that, and with each hour, minute, or second, it allegedly continues to shrink.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florcyzk

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Radu Andriescu has authored six books of poetry: Mirror Against the Wall (1992), which won the Poesis Prize for a debut volume; The Back Door (1994); The End of the Road, the Beginning of the Journey (1998), awarded the poetry prize of the Iaşi Writers Association; Some Friends and Me (2000); The Stalinskaya Bridges (2004); The Catalan Within, a collection of his poems in translations with Adam J. Sorkin, appeared from Longleaf Press (2007) and The Metallurgical Forest (2008).

Greek Blood Radu Andriescu Badge believed he had Greek blood in his veins and in consequence the whole of the world was a fishing boat and the whole of the sky a bottle of rum the night was balmy and Hellenic, you could pass through it in just a shirt Badge walked the streets of Iaşi in shirt sleeves while the frost bit fiercely one night while music was dissipating hazily between the two undivided rooms of his garret digs while I was befriending a vicious runty dog his fur half mangy more than ugly Badge broke the landlady’s sink with an empty bottle of Russian vodka the bottle had to get broken, the bottle as with the Greeks his Greek blood drained from his body to the rotten wood of the staircase the cur G.G. sniffed and licked it outside the cold was doing its utmost and not until much later did he come to learn it had only been through marriage, do you catch the drift? only through marriage anyway his short Greek life had been wonderful

Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with the author

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Nights in Panciu Radu Andriescu On a collective farm in Panciu I climbed with a turkey hen to the roof of the canteen we looked around, it was fantastic, I was chortling she was clucking, a bit frightened she was a white turkey hen we could hear voices songs loud curses from the dining hall the long dormitories next door oozed silence on all sides only grapevines, I clutched her to my breast she was frightened she was like a book you open for the first time I took her to the canteen, I placed her in front of the singers her shy movements were more graceful than a ballerinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in her whitest tutu I took her into the dormitories, I swallowed the protests she was whiter than the bed sheets from the roof of the canteen weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d seen the world together

Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with the author

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Floarea Ţuţuianu graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of the Fine Arts in Bucharest and is now a member of both the Romanian Artists’ Union and Writers’ Union. She has published four books of poetry, The Fish Woman (1996), Libresse oblige (1998), The Lion Mark (2000), and a collected volume with new poems, The Art of Seduction (2002). Ţuţuianu works as a graphic designer at the Romanian Cultural Institute Publishing House in Bucharest.

Metamorphosis Floarea Ţuţuianu I sharpen myself and come to a crisis like class struggle Short hairy legs support a swollen body ending in knotty hands I move with difficulty I’m a large insect that climbs walls Colors like dried bird droppings block the doorway The floor is heaped with crumpled paper “This is my letter to the world That never wrote to me—” From the ceiling Franz looks puny, bent over his writing desk Emily takes smaller and smaller steps between bed and window Today’s the day I pluck the hairs that sprout from my chin The birth of a line is foretold every time by a stench I’ve grown a multitude of breasts instead of drawers Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti

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Abbas Beydoun was born in 1945 in southern Lebanon. He is the author of one novel and more than eight books of poetry. Beydoun is the cultural editor of Al-Safir, a daily newspaper in Beirut. This poem is forthcoming in the Anthology: Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar (Norton).

White Lie Abbas Beydoun The truth is also blood. And it might be a piece of tongue or something severed from us. We might find it in semen or in dust if these two things are not simply appearances and if the blood does not suddenly vanish or whiten as a lie. Should we let the roses or the strokes against the chest consume those who lost their truth as they fought their lies? Is it the alarm clockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fault or do we not permit our clocks such precise appointments? The sun is our tryst and we do not know what it gathers now. We are the meeting of strangers and we do not ask why love drives free souls and then abandons them, to scatter, beneath the heavy rain.

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

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Rahel Chalfi was born in Tel Aviv, where she lives and works. She completed her MA in English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later studied theater at Berkeley as well as film at the American Film Institute in Hollywood. Raquel Chalfi has worked as a journalist and film maker and has taught film at Tel Aviv University. Chalfi published her first book of poetry, Underwater and Other Poems, in 1975. Since then, she has published seven more collections of poetry. She is the recipient of several literary awards, among which the Ashman Prize (1999) and the Bialik Prize for Poetry (2006). Tel Aviv Beach, Winter ‘74 Rahel Chalfi Cloud-crocodile has swallowed cloud-cloud. Everything is dense, and where did the war go? The pier is painted red and yellow and written on it “TEL-AVIV.” The drums from the deep are indifferent. In the sky there are dark forms that slowly lose control. A wrestling arena without end at the speed of a slow-motion camera. A crane juts above the SuperHilton hotel. And where did the war go? Cloud-crocodile has swallowed. Where went the war? Above voluptuous clouds and airplanes make love, air fills lungs sharp salt and laughter, and the sun is a faded photograph. Birds peck in the sand greyly. The sea—its muscles groan. A sole woman wears a plastic kerchief on her head. What is she compared to a lightning storm? And the diving board is painted orange. An old woman, her lips attempt: he was an angel he was an angel

Translated from the Hebrew by Karen Barkan

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Eugenio Montejo is the author of ten books of poetry, including Algunas Palabras, Muerte y Memoria, Terredad, Adiós al Siglo XX, and Élegos; numerous volumes of his selected poems have appeared to date as anthologies in Venezuela as well as abroad. He also published five heteronymic works in book form (comprised of prose or verse, or both, including Guitarra del Horizonte and El Cuaderno de Blas Coll) and two books of essays. He worked for years in Caracas as a literary editor and served, too, as Venezuela’s Advisor for Cultural Affairs in Lisbon. He received Venezuela’s National Literature Prize in 1998 and stands among his nation’s canonized poets—nineteenth century poets Andrés Bello and Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde and early twentieth century poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre. In 2004, he was awarded the International Octavio Paz Prize for Poetry and Essay, the highest honor a poet writing in Spanish can receive short of receiving the Nobel. He died on June 5, 2008. Here Again Eugenio Montejo Here again the blue wheel of cosmos and these acacias shadow me over. The remaining light trembles in leaves and soundless voices in which the wind repeats its old lonely atheism. Two or three thoughts circling still— and in the depths of shadow something that sings. Believing or not believing won’t alter the wheel’s perseverance, its unceasing turning. The song from out there comes from so far it hardly fits the small feathered body. And yet at this hour if something’s left of God we hear it in birds.

Translated from the Spanish by Kirk Nesset

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Fayad Jamís (1930-1987) Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, he grew up in rural Cuba where his Lebanese father worked as an itinerant farm laborer. In 1949, he began studying painting in Havana, eventually traveling to Paris where he lived for five years, returning to Havana when the Cuban Revolution came to power in 1959. One of Cuba’s most cosmopolitan intellectuals, he held many cultural posts, including serving for over a decade as Cuban cultural attaché to Mexico. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and a recipient in 1962 of the Casa de las Americas prize for poetry. His work has been translated into some twenty languages, including Chinese and Ukrainian, and his paintings have been displayed in over one hundred individual and group exhibits in Cuba and abroad. These poems have been printed by permission of the late poet and of CENDA, Cuban Center for Author Rights. Words Fayad Jamís Twilight swimming with fish oh bricklayer oh beggar the columns will all fall down mouthfuls of smoke congressional speeches But love but the trees but Charlie Chaplin’s shoes will thrill in eyes as they are born Airplanes will circle the earth in the blink of an eye will write red words on the sky words like children’s drawings words for animals and men Oh beggar oh bricklayer oh poet our comrades in the future will have glass bones. Translated from the Spanish by Kathleen Weaver 154

Yves Bonnefoy is generally considered to be France’s greatest living poet. His collections include Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, Hier régnant désert, Pierre écrite, Dans le leurre du seuil, Ce qui fut sans lumière, Début et fin de la neige, La vie errante, Les planches courbes, and La longue Chaîne de l’ancre. He is also noted for his numerous books on literature and art, as well as his translations of Shakespeare and Yeats. The recipient of many honors, including the European Prize for Poetry, he succeeded Roland Barthes at the Collège de France in the Chair of Comparative Poetics. He has taught and lectured throughout the world. The Garden Yves Bonnefoy It's snowing. Under the flakes a door opens at last on the garden beyond the world. I set forth. But my scarf gets caught on a rusty nail, and the stuff of my dreams is torn.

Translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers

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Alberti’s Tomb Yves Bonnefoy Did he dream of this façade as his tomb? In the stone, he had an inkling of a harp: He wanted the sound of these arcatures To turn to poetry, to immaterial gold. Don’t change a thing, He told his builder, or else the numbers Will be ravaged by death, and you’ll destroy “All this music,” our life. The façade is unfinished, like every life: But the numbers there are simply children, playing At being gold, in the water where they splash. They tussle, they roughhouse, they shout, They splatter each other with light–and then At nightfall, laughing, they say good-bye.

Translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers

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Guy Goffette is the author of six books of poems, most recently Adieu au lisières. Un manteau de fortune (Gallimard 2001), received the Grand Prix de Poésie of the Académie Française. He’s also the author of Elle, par bonheur et toujours nue, an imaginative essay/memoir about Bonnard, Verlaine d’ardoise et de pluie, a similar book on Verlaine, and L‘oeil de la baleine, an imaginative encounter with Auden, as well as two novels. He is from the Belgian Ardennes (b. 1946), but now lives in Paris where he is an editor at Gallimard. A bilingual collection of his poems and Marilyn Hacker’s translations entitled Charlestown Blues was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Biting the Apple Guy Goffette Centuries of talk, investigations by learned doctors of theology not having determined if the apple of paradise was ripe or still too green to justify the rage of Grand-Father, his condemnation of the thieves, it has continued to roll on its merry way down the primrose path since the Fall of our Papa and Mama onto the pavement of history where we still walk today clumsy and maladroit as wingless birds sucked up by the hole, the greedy mouth of the fire. Still there are only a scant few who cut across the field, shorten the road before having snatched, if just a taste, at Jeanne’s, at Ben’s, of the fruit over which a young seminarian blushed as he pronounced: On my tongue, my beloved’s fruit is sweet, sings the girl of the Song of Songs, and his banner set over me is Love. Love! There it is, that word, but no more than on the apple’s subject did Newton, less even than Montaigne have a word to say on its form, its content, its color, if it only exists as a semantic treasure scattered over the field of the poem, or as a tight rosebud surprised in the morning, or as the cardiac machine which suddenly shifts into high gear, begins beating, beating like the drum

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of the rain because a Beauty’s passing and because it’s she, as surely as I’m here, and seated on the earth as it turns and I’ve lost my breath and lost my tongue and I fall out of myself, of time, of space (Saint Weightlessness, please don’t forget my chair in this transporting. Love is so fragile my vertebrae even more delicate than my illusions: one catches fire so easily when uncomfortably seated). Maya, the name they give in India to the real, but the Mahatma Gandhi reversed, turned inside out like an old sock the affirmation of the Christians God is Love into Love is God, concept which gives man back to himself, the sentiment to the universe, freeing the apple in one swift stroke from its mendacious peel. Green, yellow or red, the fruit is a verb henceforth absolute and personal, which Mozart, Raphaël, Auden conjugate as actively as any pimply boy sobbing in his bedroom as he repeats My love, my love, or as the eyes of a centenarian at the moment of the great leap pressing in his hand the hand of his darling already like a leaf in the wind. And everything is pardoned, all, infidelity, insult, discord, all washed clean in that unpronounceable I love you. Charge me with sentimental ravings, good for a ticket-puncher of lilacs, say my arguments aren’t worth the crow-bar of an urgent hard-on which enters, enjoys, withdraws, so much the worse. A gambler in me who wins each time I lose, and urges me to bid more than I owe, also urges me to deny all love that’s not pushed to folly: a sordid exchange or fruit grown for the marketplace. Casanova himself made a big deal out of it, a matter of life and death. Loved to perdition and forgot himself for the other’s pleasure, risked everything 158

and his tears always took the shape of his grief. As for romance, with its delightful orange blossoms, violins, what of it: snow makes the mountain look more beautiful. the climber more determined. But to shrink the ocean to a few waves, and music to a clothesline one stretches out and which vibrates, wind to the rumpling of dresses, love to a game of contracts more or less (and the less isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rare) flatteringly arranged on a seducerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skin, would be lacking in audacity and breadth if living is a madness just as mad as hitching up the sky to an old nag made of stone to make it gallop, if love, as, remember, Rimb said once must still be reinvented

Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

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Patrice de La Tour Du Pin (1911-1975) was best known in France for the three-volume multi-genred work entitled Une somme de poésie, and several shorter books of poetry, including Psaumes de tous mes temps, which collects the psalms he wrote and revised throughout his life.

Psalm 24 Patrice de La Tour Du Pin I’ve always felt something like a weight just beneath my awareness— whenever I want to dance, I can feel it. It lowers me not only to the ground but deep into an earth-sized secret—where I have a field. How I love to lie down in this field—in myself: myself in hiding, then disappearing. Into a night vaster than my own, sinking into it like a miniscule seed. Everything can start over, I tell the Lord, for there, I speak to God in familiar terms. How to grow and how to increase be relearned— the grace of your gravity presses me to discover. A secret heavier than my own weighs upon me, it seeps out of my soil, I can’t keep it. From utter darkness a glimmering begins, the kind of glimmer your daylight will later contain. No one could count me among the visionaries! Nothing in this dimness allows itself to be seen. I make my poems the way an ash tree makes leaves— not light, that’s not for an ash tree to do. Before you take me back entirely, Lord, I ask you kindly: dapple light upon my leaves. Translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz 160

Psalm 36 Patrice de La Tour Du Pin My demon has turned surly again, he torments me like a sex-starved adolescent, twists me in ways my flesh has never been perverted. Age doesn’t make him yield, nor this pursuit: he only surfaces more violently during long self-restraint, seizing me only to undo my intelligence. I took one step too far—and into what a trap! I was searching for names to call you: and what should I call you who always seems to want me self-divided? Like a trapped animal, I tear at myself— blasphemy foaming between my teeth— while I defend myself over each drop of blood. Come back to me: in my heart there is room for two. . . Who speaks this, me or my God? May it be my voice answering his! Come back to me: in your heart there is room for everything! drop by drop my blood drains and carries me away, drains and refreshes in your kingdom below. That’s it: this blood-sap rushes to thought’s surface and flows back down into the heart to announce other names for my God. Of life’s great kingdoms, yours is the scorned one, at the bottom, last to be heard with your hidden Christ: my cry of revolt becomes a lover’s. . .

Translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz

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Celia Dropkin was born in 1888 in what is today the independent country of Belarus. She studied and taught in Warsaw and Kiev. After her husband was forced to flee from the tsarist police, she immigrated to the United States in 1912. She wrote in Russian until about 1917 then she began to work in her other mother tongue, Yiddish, becoming one of the important immigrant poets who transformed it into a modern poetic language. She wrote some short stories and painted, but she is primarily known as a poet and innovator of erotic modernist love poetry in Yiddish, publishing much of her poetry in American Yiddish literary magazines. A volume of her poems, In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind), was published in 1935, and, under the same title, expanded by her children into a book of her collected work in 1959. Dropkin died in 1956.

To My Son Who Gave Me Light Blue Beads Celia Dropkin Your beads cool me, And I feel weirdly young; I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know if I would ever want To be young again. But it seems to me, I can still please A nineteen-year-old boy, like you, Like this, the way I wear these beads With a smile of light blue calm. 1931

Translated from Yiddish by Yerra Sugarman

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Featured Section: Chilean Poetry Today Edited with an introduction by Mariela Griffor

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New Age in Chilean Poetry Mariela Griffor Poetry is charged with the unconscious. It involves the constant search for a new language–to bring the unconscious forth in a world composed of words. But if the language we seek no longer exists, how do we express such vital truths on paper? How do we construct the language we need? To construct such a language has been the most important challenge in Chilean poetry in the last thirty years. Why such a challenge? Disruptive events, like economic disasters and political and military repression, isolation from the world and dislocation inside one’s own parameters of identity, create issues that are not easily resolved in language. In Spain, it took at least thirty years since the end of Franco’s regime for Spaniards to define and discover a new language of expression, one capable of articulating the experiences left by Franco and his government. It took so long not only because the language prior to Franco was old, passé and unprepared for such a task, but also because considerable time was required to heal that part of the language that had been injured. That injury was initially manifested as the inability of individual poets to adequately express their experience of the horrors and repression from the years under the oppressive regime. In Chile, the situation was even more complicated. The methods of repression were somewhat more sophisticated than those of Franco’s. In Chile, too, people were killed, their bodies disappearing without a trace. Many were tortured, and fear became the one pervasive truth endured by those who survived. One in three families in Chile had a relative in compulsory military service, and these families were segregated from the civilian elite. Despite the first months of violence after the coup d’état, Chileans rather quickly returned to some mean approximation of normalcy, and life continued superficially as it was before. Perhaps it is not without a reason that the rest of Latin America calls Chileans the English of Latin America. However, many Chileans were not able to accept or adapt to these changes. The writers, began to scavenge the ruined soul of the language for alternative sources of inspiration: Elicura Chihuailaf and Cecilia Vicuña searched for their roots in Mapundung; Elicura Chihuailaf found his source of inspiration in the universe of memory and in his own history as a child. *

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When the old definitions of poetry no longer worked, poets began to define things by their opposites. Nicanor Parra is famous for creating “Anti-Poetry.” Later, another poet, such as Cecilia Vicuña, attempted to create “precarious works”—ephemeral installations in nature, cities and museums—as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” The poem is the animal Sinking its mouth in the stream. This work of re-definition continues today. For example, while the work of a poet such as Chihuailaf comes from the consideration of family experiences, the outcome of his considerations is different from the typical confessional poem on family matters so prevalent in the U.S.A. today. Chihuailaf heard what was hidden in the whispers of adults. He paid attention to what was happening in the rest of the country, far away from the safety of his native city of Cunco. He remembered what his elders had said as they sat around the fireplace drinking mate. Since he had been told as a child that poetry is worthless, he began to invent a language that gave his writing new value and meaning, uniting oral tradition with an original conception of the world where the essence of his experience could be resuscitated as elegy: Poetry is good for nothing I am told And in the forest the trees caress each other with blue roots and wave their branches in the air greeting with birds the Southern Cross Poetry is the profound whispering of the murdered ones the rumor of leaves in the fall sadness for the boy who preserves the language but has lost his soul *

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The Chilean poet’s understanding that “who preserves the language … has lost his soul” is a feeling perhaps not unusual for writers from countries under repression. Reading these words one is immediately reminded of Brecht’s famous guilt for having survived as a German in World War Two. But the tragedies of Chile happened before our very own eyes: people disappeared, books were banned and burned in front of our eyes, while at the same time we became blinded and deafened and muted by technology, by movies and TV melodramas and video games, all of which radically altered what remained of reality. The possibility of impartiality was somehow obliterated. The ability to understand, to create a powerful language, to bring the life of the unconscious into poetry, and to be consumed and transformed by the fire of individual suffering and truth had been snuffed out, “for the boy who / preserves the language / has lost his soul.” * Compiling this anthology has been a very personal experience for me. As the only member of my family in exile with no possibility of reentering the country for ten years, I experienced many of my family’s most important moments only through videos they had taken at weddings, communions and the like. One of my most painful experiences with poetry happened a few years ago. My family had sent me a video of a poetry reading. Two poets, one old and one young, both used the word motherfucker in their poems. As a kind of experiment, I watched the video with the sound off. Whenever the older poet said the word, I could feel his pain, anger and hate, all reflected in his eyes, in his body. Every time he came up against an unspeakably harsh experience, the word motherfucker appeared, as it often appears between couples before they divorce; they scream at each other; then they swear at each other. They are completely consumed by pain and desperation until finally they can’t talk anymore. They can no longer find a way to express their feelings in words. What has happened to them? The younger poet, on the other hand, used the word motherfucker as simply a literary resource, a stylistic element, without hate or anger. I did research on both poets. They had both been in jail, and the old one was tortured, as were many known and unknown poets of my country. The word motherfucker revealed in him a darker, deeper secret: the loss of the language as a tool of expression of his unconscious mind. The language was not enough. The time had come for inventing new ways of expressing our dark experiences during the time under dictatorship.

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Poets say that rhythm in poetry is comparable to three bodily functions: the beat of the heart, oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s manner of walking, and oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s way of breathing. I would say that rhythm is one of the aspects of language that Chilean poetry uses to bring forth the unconscious. If any of the pieces of the bridge is broken (or missing), then we need to reestablish a common language to repair it. This is the challenge of this anthology: To show the variety and the commonality that has been achieved in contemporary Chilean poetry. To help its readers understand the ways poets in Chile and outside of Chile are reinventing themselves and finding their own identity through a common language, if not, through a common experience.

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Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre and Neruda founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesĂŽa in 1935. Neruda went on to write many books of poetry, including Espana en el corazon (1937) and Canto general (1950). Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Verb Pablo Neruda I'm going to wrinkle this word, I'm going to twist it, yes, it is too smooth, as if a large dog or a large lake had passed its tongue or water over it, over it, for years. Years. I need ferrous salt in the word, I want the desdentada of land, iron salt in the word, the blood of those who have spoken and those who have not spoken. I want to spit the thirst inside the syllables: I want to lick the fire in the sound: I want to hear the darkness in the cry. I want to spit the words, words stone as virgins. Translated by Anna Beth Young

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The Heavenly Poets Pablo Neruda What have you done you intellectualists? Rilkistas? you fucked up mystifiers, fake witches? existential poppies shining on a tomb? you pale grubs in the capitalist cheese? What did you do about this dark human being? about this head submerged in shit? this essence of raw life? You didn't do anything but run: you sold piles of debris you looked for heavenly hairs cowardly plants, broken fingernails "Pure Beauty" "Spell". Your works were those of the poor and terrified trying to keep your eyes from looking trying to protect their delicate tangle of pupils so you could make for your living a plate of dirty scraps which the masters flung at you. Without seeing that the stones are in agony, without defending, in the cemetery when the rain soaks the motionless rotten flowers on the grave.

Translated by Anna Beth Young

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Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), pseudonym for Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, was born in Vicuña, Chile. The love poems in memory of the dead, Sonetos de la muerte (1914), made her known throughout Latin America, but her first great collection of poems, Desolación [Despair], was not published until 1922. In 1924 appeared Ternura [Tenderness], a volume of poetry dominated by the theme of childhood; the same theme, linked with that of maternity, plays a significant role in Tala, poems published in 1938. Her complete poetry was published in 1958. Mistral won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945. To See Him Again Gabriela Mistral And never, never again? Not on nights packed with a few stars, or in mornings’ first slender sun or afternoons sacrificed to afternoons? Or at the edge of a pale road that surrounds the farm fields, or a rim of a trembling fountain, whitened by a moon? Or beneath the forest's lush poplars where, yelling at him, I was overtaken by the night? Not in the grotto that returns the echo of my words? No. To see him again -it does not matter where -in heaven's dead water or inside the boiling hole or still moon or in bloodless fright! To be with him. To be every springtime and winter, united in one pained knot around his bloody neck!

Translated by Mariela Griffor

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Nicanor Parra, a mathematician and poet born in 1914, is often considered to be the most influential poet Chile has produced since Neruda. He describes himself as an “antipoet,” due to his distaste for poetic pomp and function. Cited as an inspiration by Allen Ginsberg and numerous other authors around the world, Parra has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Pilgrim Nicanor Parra Your attention, ladies and gentleman, your attention for one second: Turn your heads for a moment to this part of the republic. Forget for one night your personal affairs, Let pleasure and pain wait at the door: Hear the voice from this part of the republic. Your attention, ladies and gentlemen! Your attention for one second! A soul that has been bottled up for years In a sort of sexual and intellectual hole, Feeding itself most inadequately through the nose, Yearns to be heard. I’d like to figure out a few things, I need a little light, the garden’s swarming with flies, My mind’s a disaster, I work things out in my own peculiar way, As I say these words I see a bicycle leaning against a wall, I see a bridge And the official car disappearing between buildings. You part your hair, that’s true, you walk in the public parks, Under your skins you have other skins, You have a seventh sense Which lets you in and out automatically. But I’m a child calling for its mother from behind rocks, I’m a pilgrim who makes stones jump high as his nose, A tree crying out to be smothered in leaves.

Translated by Mariela Griffor

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The Tablets Nicanor Parra I dreamed I was in a desert I was sick of myself And I started beating a woman. It was devilish cold, I had to do something, To shoot someone, take a little exercise; I had a headache, I was tired, All I wanted to do was sleep, die. My shirt drenched with blood And between my toes were hairs— The hair of my poor mother— "Why do you hurt your mother," a stone asked, A stone covered with dust, "Why do you abuse that woman?" I couldn't tell where these voices came from, they gave me the shivers, I looked at my nails, I bit them, I tried to think of something but without success, All I saw around me was a desert And the image of that idol My god who watched me do these things. Then came a few birds. And at the same moment, in the dark, I discovered some slabs of rock. With a supreme effort I managed to make out the tablets of the law: "We are the tablets of the law," they said, "Why do you abuse your mother?” “You see those birds that have come to perch on us” “They are here to record your crimes." I yawn, I am bored with these admonitions. "Get rid of those birds," I said aloud. "No," replied a stone, "They represent your different sins,” “They are there to look” So I turned back again to my lady And started to let her have it harder than before. I had to do something to keep awake. I was under obligation to act Or I would have fallen asleep among those rocks And those birds. So I took a box of matches out of one of my pockets And decided to set fire to the bust of the god. I was dreadfully cold, I had to get warm, But that blaze only lasted a few seconds. In desperation, I looked for the tablets again But they were gone: and the rocks, the rocks were gone.

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My mother had abandoned me. I beat my brow. But There was nothing more I could do.

Translated by Mariela Griffor

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Roberto Bolaño, born in Chile in 1953, is an acclaimed novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Romulo Gallegos Prize for his work. In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño died. Before his death, Bolaño’s fellow Latin American novelists and poets hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at the international conference he attended in Seville.

Godzilla in Mexico Roberto Bolaño Hear me, my son: bombs were falling over Mexico City but no one noticed. The air spread poison through the streets and open windows. You'd just finished breakfast and were watching cartoons on TV. I was reading in the next room when I knew we were going to die. Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself to the kitchen and found you on the floor. We hugged. You asked what was happening and I didn't tell you we were on death's telethon but I whispered: we are going on a journey, you and I, together, don’t be afraid. When it left, death didn't even close our eyes. What are we? you asked a week a year later, ants, bees, wrong numbers in the big spoiled soup of chance? We're human beings, my son, nearly birds, public heroes and secrets.

Version by B. H. Boston

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Lisa Roberto Bolaño When Lisa told me she had made love with another, in the eternal telephone booth of life in the market in Tepeyac, I thought the world ended. A tall thin man with long hair and a long cock, didn’t wait even one night to penetrate her to the core. It’s nothing serious, she said, but it is the best way of getting you out of my life. Parmenides Garcia Saldana had long hair and could have been Lisa’s lover, but some years later I saw he’d died in a mental hospital or committed suicide. Lisa didn’t want to lie any longer with losers. Sometimes I dream of her and see her happy and cold in Mexico designed by Lovecraft: We listen to music (Canned Heat, one of Parmenides Garcia Saldana’s favorite groups) and then we make love three times. The first time he comes inside of me. The second time inside my mouth, the third, hardly a thread of water, a short fishing line, between my breasts. And all of that in two hours, Lisa said. The two worst hours of my life, I said from the other end of the line.

Translated by Mariela Griffor and B. H. Boston

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Victor Jara was a Chilean teacher, theater director, political activist, and poet. He has also played a pivotal role among the neo-folkloric artists who established the New Chilean Song movement. Shortly after the U.S.-backed September 11, 1973 Chilean coup, he was arrested, tortured and ultimately machine-gunned to death.

Prayer to a Farm Worker Victor Jara Rise up and look at the mountain, from where the wind, the sun, the water arrive. Thou, who determines the course of rivers, thou who scatters the flight of your soul. Rise up. Look at your hands. Join hands with your brothers, together in blood we go. Now is the time that can be tomorrow. Tomorrow. Deliver us from the men of misery. Take us to your kingdom of justice and justice. Blow like the wind the gorgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flower. Clean the fire in the barrel of my gun. Thy will be done here on Earth. Give us your strength and your courage in combat. Blow like the wind the fieldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daffodil. Clean fire in the barrel of my gun. Rise up and look at your hands. Join hands with your brothers, together in blood we live, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. We live. Amen.

Translated by Mariela Griffor

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Renato Martinez, was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1943. He moved to the U.S. in 1978 as a consequence of the 1973 coup dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ĂŠtat in his country. He studied at the University of Chile first and then at the University of California in San Diego, where he obtained a Ph. D. in Literature. He is presently an instructor at the City College of Fresno, California, and he has published poetry and critical articles in different magazines and books. Things Renato Martinez These small things covering our house walls our furnitureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nakedness Copper from my land black ceramics from Pomaire and Oaxaca Pieces of the day picked up on passing through the roads Small things avoiding our sight from dusty corners Remains of an impossible present that once thought of is already gone They are fragments of our lives that go into forgetfulness before we go Small things without a soul that stop talking to us because their past has abandoned them just like in ourselves things that once happened become unvoiced and one day they turn unto the final silence

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Raúl Zurita Canessa was born in Santiago de Chile in 1951, and he is now considered one of the most important Chilean poets. When on September 11, 1973 Chile’s socialist’s government was overthrown by a military coup, Raúl Zurita was arrested and detained with almost one thousand others in the hold of a ship. This was a traumatic experience for the then 22-years-old. Zurita spent four years earning his living as a computer salesman during a period of financial hardship. In 1984 Raúl Zurita was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and he was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize in 1989. In 1990, Zurita lectured as visiting professor at the Universidad de Chile, and the same year he was made his country’s cultural attaché to Rome by Chile’s democratic government under President Patricio Aylwin. In 2000, he received Chile's national prize for literature. from “THE SEA” Raúl Zurita Canessa strange baits rain from the sky. Surprising bait falls upon the sea. Down below the ocean, up above unusual clouds on a clear day. Surprising baits rain on the sea. There was a love raining, there was a clear day that’s raining now on the sea. They are shadows, bait for fishes. A clear day is raining, a love that was never said. Love, ah yes, love, amazing baits are raining from the sky on the shadow of fishes in the sea. Clear days fall. Some strange baits with clear days stuck to them, with loves that were never said. The sea, it says the sea. It says baits that rain and clear days stuck to them, it says unfinished loves, clear and unfinished days that rain for the fish in the sea. You can hear whole days sinking, strange sunny mornings, unfinished loves, goodbyes cut short that sink into the sea. You can hear surprising baits that rain with sunny days stuck to them, loves cut short, goodbyes that not any more. Baits are told of, that rain for the fish in the sea. The blue brilliant sea. You can hear shoals of fish devouring baits stuck with words that not, days and news that not, loves that not any more. It is told of shoals of fish that leap, of whole whirlwinds of fish that leap. You can hear the sky. It is told that amazing baits rain down with pieces of sky stuck to them upon the sea.

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Viviana cries. Viviana heard whirlwinds of fishes rise up in the air fighting for mouthfuls of a goodbye cut short, of a prayer not heard, of a love not said. Viviana is on the beach. Viviana today is Chile. People rain down and fall in strange positions like rare fruit of a strange harvest. Viviana hears surprising human baits raining down, amazing human fruit harvested in strange fields. Viviana is now Chile. She hears human fruit raining down like golden suns exploding on the waters. Ploughed fields, sacred lands rain from the sky with broken backs, pieces of necks that weren’t there any more, unexpected clouds of unending spring. They were thrown. They rain down. Amazing harvests of men come down as food for the fish in the sea. Viviana hears sacred lands rain down, hears her son fall like a cloud onto the unclouded cross of the Pacific. Crosses made of fish for the Christs. The arch of the Chilean sky falls on the bloody tombs of Christ for the fishes. That’s your mother, there. That’s your son. Shadows fall on the sea. Strange human baits fall on the crosses of fish in the sea. Viviana wants to cradle fishes in her arms, wants to hear that clear day, that love cut short, that fixed sky. Viviana is now Chile. She cradles fish under the sky that shouts hosanna. Surprising Christs fall in strange positions onto the crosses of the sea. Surprising baits rain from the sky: a last prayer rains, a last passion, a last day under the sky’s hosannas. Infinite skies fall in strange positions onto the sea. Infinite skies fall, infinite skies of broken legs, of arms bent against the neck, of heads wrenched against backs. Skies weep downwards falling in broken poses, in clouds of broken backs and broken skies. They fall, they sing. That’s your mother, there. That’s your son. That’s your son. Viviana hears the arches of eyebrows incredibly raised, hears eyes endlessly open falling from the sky’s eyebrows. Hears the nails sinking into the cross of the ocean. The whole Chilean sea is the cross. Infinite plains sing from the sky the hosanna of the cross which is the sea, of the food which falls like plains, like pieces of bread into the sacred stomach of the fish. Viviana hears infinite sacred shoals emerging, infinite fish singing with a voice taken from the sky. The sea is holy, holy the wide plains of human fruits that fall, the fish holy. I heard infinite days falling, bodies that fell with skies, with fields glimpsed between them, with trees like a chorus of crosses that sang out in song-sung waters.

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Viviana cradles the holy sea. Viviana says somewhere in these sacred waters is her son. Were thrown. Heavy with strange seed, ploughed fields cover the sea.

Translated by William Rowe

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Marjorie Agosín is a professor at Wellesley College where she teaches Spanish language courses and Latin American literature. She has been a member of the faculty since 1982. Marjorie Agosín is a well-known spokesperson for the plight and priorities of women in Third World countries and her concern for women in Chile has also been the focus feature articles in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, and the Barnard Occasional Papers on Women's Issues.

Seventeen Centuries Marjorie Agosín I learn to make love In an ancient language That for seventeen centuries nobody used To make love Today the alphabet goes bare In my tongue While I love you I learn to decipher God’s words as they used to do it In the Sidur Facing a darkened synagogue filled with dark men I learn to make love in the light Your mouth teaches me new words Joyfully, I repeat them just as you repeat a kiss The skin exhausted after desire We speak in Hebrew As if it were God’s will And I learn to name the stars The signs of pleasure My body is a crimson alphabet You take it in your hands You write with me I am your word

Translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa

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from “Poemas para Papá” Marjorie Agosín I. More than believing in God, My father believed in men and in the word That he shared with humble nobility He was sparse in his words And generous in his loves The day of his death Hebrew prayers were with him His body turned to stone Or memory Maybe he concluded his wanderings and diasporas He returned to the root of language Clear seed in the diaphanous roundness of the earth

Translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa

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Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and visual artist. She performs & exhibits her work widely. The author of 18 poetry books, her most recent titles include: Sabor a Mí, Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2007; Palabrarmas, RIL, 2005; I tu, Tsé Tsé, Buenos Aires 2004; and Instan, Kelsey St. Press, Berkeley 2002. She recently co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. www.ceciliavicuna.org From UNUY QUITA The Water Sequence (fragment) Cecilia Vicuña The poem is the animal Sinking its mouth in the stream.

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

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Carmen Berenguer is a Chilean poet born in Santiago, Chile in 1946. Her work includes Poesía Territorio Actual (Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1993); Mujeres Poetas de Chile (Linda Irene Koski, Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998); Une Antologie (Henry Deluy, Editions Fárrago, 2004); Poesía Chilena Desclasificada (1973-1990) (Gonzalo Contreras, 2006); Antología Nueva Poesía Hispanoamericano (Leo Zelada, editor, Lord Byron Ediciones, 2005-2006). She was editor of Hoja X Ojo, 1984, and Al Margen, 1986. Her work is translated into English, Swedish, French, and Persian. In 1997, she was awarded a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In November 2008 she received the IberoAmerican Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. Premonition Carmen Berenguer The crows are coming black wings under full sail from sail to sail flying ships deadly polen in the claws scratching: The sky with black chalk.

Translated by Mariela Griffor

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Oliver Welden (Santiago de Chile, 1946) author of Anhista (1965); Perro del amor (1970); English translation by Dave Oliphant as Love Hound (2006); Fábulas Ocultas (2006); and Oscura Palabra (2008). He is a member of the Society of Chilean Writers. Winner of the 2007 New York Book Festival Poetry Award, he received an honorable mention in 2007 from Benjamin Franklin Poetry Awards. He was the editor of Tebaida–Chilepoesía Review (1968–1973) and currently resides in Memphis, Tennessee.

Warning Oliver Welden He was a loner, too much so; when seated in the bathtub he let the water run to hear its sound; in his postal office he conversed with the letters and in dreams visited /the addressees. He died just this past spring: they adjusted the coffin handles /from the inside so that that morning he could cart himself to the graveyard.

Translated by Dave Oliphant

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Binnacle Oliver Welden I love the apple core you ate down to, stuck in the ashtray, with my cigarette butts, its seeds and stem left behind simply so I may look at them and remember that where you are isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t far, though Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll never know the way.

Translated by Dave Oliphant

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Fluctuations Oliver Welden It may be that too much time has passed, more than enough, but I figure itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s necessary to keep waiting for the tide to go out in order to tie my body to the half-submerged rock, to close my eyes and open my mouth and wait, once more, for the surf to rise.

Translated by Dave Oliphant

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Tierra del Fuego Oliver Welden for quite some time nobody reads in this city books burned in fantastic pyres and when confronted with the written word the citizens lowered their eyes filled with confusion and shame Omar Lara The next day Wednesday September 12th 1973 we burned books in a large hole dug with a shovel and at dawn of Thursday 13th and at noon of Friday 14th with care in the back yard so as not to raise a column of smoke in Spring that could be seen from the hills: soldiers/binoculars with care that the sun had already risen so the fire would go unseen with care that the sun had already set so the fire of the books we burned would go unseen

Translated by Dave Oliphant

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Jorge Etcheverry is an ex-member of the School of Santiago and Grupo América from the Chilean sixties. He lives in Canada, and he has poetry, prose, criticism and diverse articles in various countries. His poetry books are The Escape Artist, Ottawa (1981); La Calle, Chile (1986); The Witch, Ottawa (1986); Tánger, Chile (1991); A vuelo de Pájaro, Ottawa (1998); Vitral con Pájaros, Ottawa (2002); and Reflexión hacia el Sur, Sakatoon (2004).

Let the Band Play On Jorge Etcheverry It doesn’t matter Let the band play on even if the musicians are tired even if everyone’s distracted even if no one gives a damn let it play on Let the musicians wipe away the sweat even if no one gives them any wine even if no one gives them a glass of water with all this heat Let them go on even if they’re starving even if their stomachs are growling “We’re artists after all” one of them says even if no one laughs at their jokes that are a bit stale anyway We have to go on Come on boys, get up We have to keep on playing even if they’re a bunch of losers Let’s go let’s go on let the band play on let it play on Translated by Sharon Khan with the author; edited by Nika Alia Khan

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Jorge Teillier was born in 1935 in the small town of Lautaro in the South of Chile, in the same region where Pablo Neruda had spent his boyhood a generation earlier. Teillier spent most of his adult life in Santiago and died in 1996 at the age of sixty. His first book of poetry, Para Ángeles y Gorriones, appeared in 1956. Others soon followed: El Cielo Cae con las Hojas (1958); El Árbol de la Memoria (1961), which won both the Gabriela Mistral and the Santiago Municipal Prizes; Poemas del País de Nunca Jamás (1963); Los Trenes de la Noche y Otras Poemas (1964); Crónica del Forastero (1968), which won the Crav Prize; Muertes y Maravillas (1971), a volume of new and selected poems; Para un Pueblo Fantasma (1978); and Cartas para Reinas de Otras Primaveras (1985). In English translation, his poetry appeared in many literary magazines and in the collection, From the Country of Nevermore (Wesleyan U Press) by Mary Crow. A more comprehensive volume, In Order to Talk with the Dead: Selected Poems of Jorge Teillier (U of Texas Press, 1993) with translations by Carolyne Wright, won the National Translation Award in 1994 from the American Literary Translators Award. The poems featured here have not appeared before in English translation. Bottle in the Sea Jorge Teillier And you want to hear, you want to understand. And I Tell you: forget what you hear, read or write. What I write is not for you, nor for me, nor for the initiates. It is for the girl whom no one asks to dance, it is for the brothers who confront their drunkenness and for the ones who scorn those who think themselves saints, prophets, or power mongers.

Translated by Carolyne Wright

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Farewell to the Führer Jorge Teillier Farewell to the Führer, farewell to all Führers who have been or who will be. Farewell to all Führers true or false, good night, I say, good night, with an intimate reactionary sadness. Farewell to the Führer who gobbled Black Forest cake while his tanks fed upon the roads of Europe. Farewell to all Führers who love Wagner or the Giovinezza be they clean-shaven, bearded or sporting a big moustache. Farewell to the Führer who fled to Buenos Aires in a submarine after killing Eva and Blondi, her faithful dog. From the snows Miguel Serrano hears him call but neither by sea nor by land can they find him. Farewell to every Führer who orders us to bury ourselves with him after contemplating how the ruins of his Empire burn, and in the meantime he doesn’t let anyone sleep in peace even though we haven’t raped, or robbed, or murdered. Farewell to every Führer who compels the poets to censor their manuscripts or keep them secret under threat of sending them to his Island or Archipelago or to cut cane under the Utopian sun. Farewell to the Führer of Antipoetry even though he sometimes preaches better than the Christ of Elqui. It’s better to teach no dogma at all, even if it’s ecological, When one can’t take off for Chillán on a bicycle. Farewell to the Molina kid, cruel Führer of Lo Gallardo, where he wrote Steppenwolf ahead of Hermann Hesse, even though O. L. Jesus Christ died for him, according to what Anguita says, and farewell for those who want us to say yes when we love No. Farewell to all Führers to whom losing forty or forty thousand men doesn’t matter as long as they invade islands populated by sheep, and after the defeat take refuge in a general retirement to listen to the tango “Silence in the night, and all is calm.” Farewell to him who was for a time our secret Führer and recommended abstinence to us, bottle of whiskey in his hand, and with scorn abandoned his Bunker in front of the hill to conquer Venezuela as his ancestors had.

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Farewell to the rogue who aspired to be Martin Bormann: Enrique Lafourcade, count of La Fourchette. They’ll see him walking a ridiculous little dog not able to get even as far as the Parque Forestal. They’ll see him feed himself, ruddy phantom, on pale and fragile nocturnal doves. They’ll see him swing through the most godforsaken towns looking to sign autographs for Mayors and grade-school teachers. They’ll see him sob, thinking of his days off the Diet with pig’s feet in Los Buenos Muchachos. They’ll see him spill a furtive and invalid tear while he sings I am the King, thinking himself to be Pedro Vargas. And there won’t be anyone left from the Generation of 1950 To sing I had a comrade in unison. Farewell to every Führer who would give it to us hard with a stick and also with a rope thinking that like him we’re hardly sensitive. And good night friends, good night, until one day we meet again in the arrogant and maddened hour of skeletons.

Written in Mulato Gil de Castro Square, in Santiago, on the evening of December 2, 1981, date of the launching of the novel with homonymous title by Enrique Lafourcade.

Translated by Carolyne Wright Note: Extensive notes on “Farewell to the Führer” have not been printed here. Please visit the Poetry International blog at http://pionline.wordpress.com.

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Eugenia Toledo was born in Temuco, Chile. She came to the U. S. in 1975 to pursue a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at the University of Washington, married and remained in Seattle with her husband and son. She has published eight texts and two manuals for Adult Education (Ministry of Education, OEA, Chile, 1986); a book about the Spanish writer Fray Luis de León (Editorial Cíclope, Santiago, 1986); two books of poetry: Arquitectura de Ausencias / Architecture of Absences (Editorial Torremozas, España, 2006); Tiempo de Metales y Volcanes / Time of Metals and Volcanoes (Editorial 400 Elefantes, Nicaragua, 2007); and a chapbook, Leaf of Glass, which won an Artella contest in 2005. Eugenia teaches, writes literary articles, and creates “book-objects,” combining words and graphic materials. She is a member of Mujeres Entre Letras, a Seattle women writer’s group, and of the International Association of Hispanic Feminine Literature. The poems here are from Life Diary—September I Eugenia Toledo September 11, In Chile. The night sky Is made of human skin. It leaves the fingers stained With blackened blood.

Translated by Carolyne Wright with the author

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The Oven Eugenia Toledo (to the city of Temuco) Every night we heard the shots On Ñielol peak and the surrounding countryside. It was a winged sound collapsing As in a poem or a movie about war. Parrots, copihue flowers, and ants Were dying of fear Right in the center of Temuco Surrealistically marked. Through these beloved streets Neruda, Mistral, Teillier and others Had walked writing their verses. Meanwhile, students were killing themselves with grief Or they showed up already dead In the doorways of their houses. It was the start of the scattering. The universities dismantled The radio’s daily summonses to present ourselves at the cuartel Set our nerves on edge. No book to cling to. They outlawed The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, Broad and Alien is the World by Ciro Alegría, Muriátegui, Cortázar, Manuel Rojas and other writers Expunged from my classes. That year even spring fled from Temuco And letters were delayed who knows how long in arriving. Ñielol peak had only one deity: the fall. To go on living was a kind of agony, A gradual dying of inhaled gas.

Translated by Carolyne Wright with the author

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Last Train Eugenia Toledo Where did this train come from And why was it there in the station? A phantom whimpering from another time, We boarded it in silence that morning. It was the last freight train from somewhere, a fugitive. The passengers seated on their wooden benches, Were traveling by happenstance, Gazing through grubby windows of the kitchen car At a landscape empty and unforgettable, Deserted highways and fields of silence. “Where are we going? To Concepción?” murmured one passenger. “What will I do with my books?” another one thought aloud, While the one farthest away embraced a wrapped-up wheel of cheese. The woman in black seemed to dwell among the dead, The student closed her eyes on the uncertainty And horrific images: machine gun fire, the ambulance, Tanks in the streets, mothers and children fleeing. Date: September 11, Nine Eleven. The rails resisted screeching. They seemed to stretch out instead of shortening. Would there be any station for this emergency? The conductor appeared to give an order: “There will be only one stop, Everyone will have to deboard there and Present yourselves to the Armed Forces To have your documents and luggage searched. If you are innocent, then you are clear and free To go home. There is a curfew and you could Be shot by mistake. If you are guilty you must go with them In their green transport vehicles. I wish you good luck.” He said this and disappeared, like a phantom, Through the door into the locomotive. Translated by Carolyne Wright with the author

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Disappeared Eugenia Toledo You turned the corner and disappeared. They reported you missing before my very own eyes. Two agents of the secret service grabbed you And took you away from your office at the university. More than thirty years have passed And you left naked what you said before, With some flavor of the divine. After all, you were a priest, You murmured: â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is it.â&#x20AC;? I wish I could have given you, as a gift, a white stole embroidered with red Chilean copihues. But instead you left me trembling in shadows.

Translated by Carolyne Wright with the author

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Featured Essay

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For Each Ecstatic Moment: Impossibility, Unknowing and the Lyric an essay on poetry by Chard de Niord In one of her most memorable epiphanies, Simone Weil declares that “human life is impossible.” Her reasons for making this Sisyphean claim serve as an eloquent apology for the lyric. Everything we want contradicts the conditions of the consequences attached to it, every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation, all our feelings are mixed up with their opposites. It’s because we are a contradiction…We are beings with the faculty of knowing, willing, and loving, and as soon as we turn our attention toward the objects of knowledge, will and love, we receive evidence that there is not one which is not impossible (GG, 139, 141).1 It is precisely this notion of impossibility that challenges the lyric poet to witness the tension that instills human experience with the contradictory emotions and thoughts that appear, like atoms, to be in opposition to each other, while actually functioning in a complementary way. The lyric achieves an experiential sense that we, the reader, apprehend as ingenious, sensual, and true. By stretching her strings between knowing and unknowing, the lyric poet plays a song that is paradoxical. The question for the poet, who, unlike the philosopher, aspires to memorable, spare language as well as wisdom, is just where to place her fingers on the strings. Without uncertainty, the poet’s lyre is only half strung. The strings are as good as broken, hanging detached, and loose from their tuning machine. Each poet needs to discover her own unknowing and impossibility in order to string her instrument. While craft, grammar, technique and strategy can be taught, the essential unknowing of lyric poetry, which finds its way mysteriously into original syntax, emanates from the genius of the poet’s voice. Emily Dickinson described this venture into unknowing as a terrifyingly solitary enterprise in her poem #378. “And I alone/ A speck upon a ball/ Went out upon circumference,/ beyond the dip of bell.” The lyric poet is resigned to the inherent brokenness of her expression. In going “out upon circumference,” she can never hope to complete her arc. “In the interval between reach and grasp,” Anne Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet, “the absent presence of desire comes alive.” The poet learns how to play around the broken keys, creating a music in which the ghosts of the missing notes mingle with those that sound. The distant and close-up, the

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present and missing, work antiphonally in the lyric in such a way that high emotional voltage courses between absence and presence, loss and attainment, knowing and unknowing, the possible and the impossible. The strong lyric hangs in the balance, growing seemingly impossibly like an epiphyte. The limits of the lyric define the finite boundaries of mortalityfeeling and knowing-while simultaneously aspiring toward an essential sensual and emotional awareness that transcend them. As the essential language of emotional and sensual experience, the lyric has thrived as a poetic obsession since its earliest religious days 4500 years ago in ancient Sumeria, evolving into new forms and aesthetic approaches, while adhering steadfastly to the same emotional and sensual content. In his superb book Greek Lyric Poetry, Sherod Santos reminds us in his introduction of the lyric poet’s timeless link to the legacy of lyric poetry. In Plato’s Phaedo, the elder recalls: ‘I composed these poems…because I wanted to test the meaning of certain dreams I had.’ Since we are in some inevitable way a historical and cultural projection (however contested that projection may be) of the meaning the ancient poets dreamed, we might rightly assume we have something to gain by returning to the poems that were their test.2 (GLP, 27) By returning to the poems that tested the dreams of our ancient and not so ancient forefathers and foremothers, we gain invaluable knowledge of the lyric tradition, as well as concomitant courage to proceed innovatively in our own time with new forms, new language, but old subjects. I will discuss three tireless subjects of the lyric-death, pathos, exile, and ecstasy-in this essay that have recurred since the provenance of lyric poetry, focusing with particular but unresolved curiosity on the inherent agon of unknowing and impossibility that has sustained the lyric’s bittersweet legacy. I have chosen two twentieth century poems and one nineteenth century that address the above subjects in irreducible ways: Emily’s Dickinson #280 in which death is the muse of everything and nothing, Hayden Carruth’s “The Poet” in which pathos conjures the transpersonal self through empathy and sympathy, and D. H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” in which ecstasy is the unifying rebus of disparate things. These poems exemplify only three subjects that have recurred as obsessive topics of the lyric throughout history. There are, of course, dozens of other “flood subjects” (Emily Dickinson) that comprise the desultory range of human emotion and experience, but like the lyric, which is more about broken music-a point that Theodore Roethke celebrates in his poem “In the Evening Air”-than completion or 199

wholeness, this essay strives merely to focus on a few particular subjects from the lyric tradition for the purpose of intonating wholeness without at the same time suggesting it can ever be attained. Indeed, it is the lyric’s “broken music” that betrays its paradox, the fact that its charged, evocative parts add up to more than a whole. What that mysterious lyrical entity is that lies beyond the whole-the unfinished finished poem-remains ineffable, serving always as the verbal seed for the next lyric. Death To begin with the most inscrutable of lyrical topics, I turn first to Emily Dickinson’s #280 (“I Felt a Funeral in my Brain”) as a lyric obsessed with impossibility, unknowing, brokenness, and what Nietzsche claimed was at the deepest level of all religious systems: cruelty. In her obsession with death, Dickinson juxtaposes everything with nothing in this poem, beginning with everything, which, in her metaphysical mind, is reason, the mortal entity that apprehends and makes sense of the world, and then nothing, the precipitous demise of reason. 280 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and from Kept treading-treading-till it seemed That Sense was breaking throughAnd when they all were seated, A Service, like a DrumKept beating-beating-till I thought My mind was going numbAnd then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, 200

Then Space-began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, hereAnd then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and downAnd hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing-thenThis subversive, oxymoronic elegy to the cruel end of knowing, told as a posthumous monologue, resonates with such terror and foreboding that only the coldest eye could have apprehended the depth of darkness and human alienation that emanates from its lines. Death functions as a muse for Dickinson in this poem. She, however, remains ambiguous about what has died. Her memory? Her soul? Her happiness? Her sanity? She feels a funeral, rather than observing it. It’s palpable, internal, vivid. With Keatsian brio, she enters an interior uncertainty and never exits. The poem’s structure and voice are ingeniously deceptive; it’s a false narrative in hymn-like quatrains with an auto-elegiac speaker and cast of cerebral players-mourners as thinly disguised extras of the self-who perform a terrifying drama of mental extinguishment. Beginning with a surreal funeral march that proceeds with moribund formality in the first three stanzas, Dickinson shifts cognitively in the last two stanzas to the speaker’s metaphysical graveside, where she, or her soul, stands “wrecked” and “solitary,” unfolding a proleptic vision in which she drops through worlds, until she has “Finished knowing-then.” Dickinson concludes the funeral ritual at the end of the third stanza in order to concentrate on describing her disembodied self as “but an Ear.” She goes on then to decry the annihilation of her mind by co-opting a well known religious image of her day, the plank of faith (from Holmes and Barber’s Religious Allegories published in 1848), and altering it to the “Plank of reason,” only to break it over the same abyss “the Christian” traverses successfully on the plank of faith, with Bible in hand. She decides in mid poem to

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shift from describing an internal obsequy to chronicling her last conscious moments, turning from the funeral in her brain to a fall-by-fall, posthumous account of her actual demise. Just as Whitman celebrates himself as a transpersonal self, down to those specific irrational atoms that “as good belong” to his reader as himself, Dickinson celebrates the courageous expedition of the lyric that goes diffidently out upon circumference, beyond the last vestige of apprehension. Her dashes and blanks are no accident, betraying the void that lies beyond the precipice of each of her line endings. The poem becomes so brutally metaphysical at this point in its transition from the opening symbolic funeral to the speaker’s self-conscious musing on her identity as a partner only to silence, that one tends to miss Dickinson’s subtle shift away from runic narrative to lyrical fugue. All narrative scaffolding falls away into parataxis in the last two stanzas. Her last thoughts string together in a series of self-deprecating, metaphysical conceits that subvert all conventional thinking about the afterlife and faith with a searing indictment of earthly existence as no less than a hell of terrifying isolation. “As all the Heavens were a Bell,/ And Being, but an Ear/ And I, and Silence, some strange Race/ Wrecked, solitary, here-.” If Dickinson is writing about the imagined afterlife here, as some critics have suggested, the difference is moot, since death sentences reason to oblivion in both earthly and heavenly realms in Dickinson’s thinking. Dickinson laments the demise of her conscious vessel, her “Brain,” which is her life, aware that such lamentation in her interior uncertainty is a lyrical requirement for the life of her poetry. Oblivion inspires a dark but heroic lyricism in many of Dickinson’s poems, but none conclude with more of a desolate conclusion than #280. In her descent into mere unknowing, Dickinson avoids conventional protestant theology in the guise of a funeral ceremony, supplanting any notion of double predestination with her own sermon, which concludes in a chasm rather than heaven or hell. Her fall into this inscrutable void curiously resembles the descent of Inanna in Sumerian mythology, where she, too, drops “down, and down,” hitting worlds as she goes, removing garments along the way until she arrives naked and unknowing before her sister, Erishkegal, in the underworld. Although there is no direct evidence that Dickinson knew this myth, she intuits its archetypal pattern with startling accuracy. She also echoes Christ’s cry of utter abandonment on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” in her assertion that the mind, even in its most visionary mode, is only capable in the end of apprehending its falling away from sense and reason, which at best either merely “seem” or 202

“break.” Dickinson’s unabashed choice to move from one conceit to another in this poem betrays her poetic hallmark of abandoning narrative coherence and inchoate metaphors in favor of divining multiple revelations within the same poem, rather than settling for one, even if it means resorting to the mercurial strategy of moving from one metaphor to the next in the context of her over-arching flood subject, immortality. She is both lyrically restless and fiercely intellectual, choosing to eulogize her last moments of ratiocination over submitting to any unthinking notion of ascendant faith. Unlike Anne Bradstreet, she unabashedly opts for a heretical strategy that imbues her lines with bold inversions of orthodox belief and even condescension toward stock religious images of her day. Death is indeed her impossible muse, conjuring an ultimate void, but creating in the poem’s interim a lyrical self-elegy that mourns the loss of knowing, the ultimate brokenness of her most vital tool for constructing poems, namely her “Reason,” which is everything, but also finally the end of knowing, which is, for all intents and purposes with regard to this speaker, nothing. Pathos Such intense, mortal self-consciousness as Dickinson expresses in #280 emanates perforce from an ability to apprehend pathos, whether her own or another’s. The lyric poet’s emotional acumen for feeling with (compassion) or for (sympathy) another instills her with the mixed blessing of compound feeling. Hayden Carruth, in his poem “The Poet,” captures with stunning economy the unavoidable double suffering that is inherent in pathos. The Poet All night his window shines in the woods shadowed under the hills where the gray owl is hinting. He hears the woodmouse screamso small a sound 203

in the great darkness entering his pain. For he is all and all of pain, attracting every new injury to be taken and borne as he must take and bear it. He is nothing: he is his admiration. So they seem almost to know-the woodmouse and the roving owl, the woods and hills. All night they move around the stillness of the poet’s light. Carruth mines stillness in this poem as a compassionate avatar of “every new injury,” equating the role of the biblical suffering servant with that of the poet. The speaker’s Christlike identification with the poet as shamanistic witness to the pain of the smallest creature, a wounded wood mouse, betrays the unique value of lyric poetry’s redemptive labor. This poem conveys more about the act of genuine compassion and human sensitivity to suffering than any doctrine or creed ever could through its vivid imagery, its Zen-like awareness of the self as ultimately nothing without another, no matter how small, and its cognizance of the poet’s vantage point as the axis mundi. The poem’s short, mostly enjambed lines plummet down the page with swift velocity, leaving an indelible trail of fresh thought that ventures out to the limits of the self-to that point “beyond the dip of bell” (Dickinson) where the self

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leaves off and the other begins, a woodmouse in this case. Like Habbakuk on the run, Carruth alerts the reader in “The Poet” to the spiritual necessity of hearing anew over merely reciting liturgical mantras, “admiring” over ignoring. The speaker’s selfless identification with the injured woodmouse leads him to a humbling conclusion that is nonetheless revelatory: the poet is both “nothing” and “his admiration.” But how can the poet be both these things at once? John Keats provided a memorable answer to this question in an 1819 letter to Richard Woodhouse. The poet has no identity-he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. When I am my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself; but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me that I am in very little time annihilated-not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children. 3 (SPAL, 279, 280) In the spirit of Keats’ poetic selflessness and essential “disinterestedness,” Carruth claims in “the Poet” that the world resides in the smallest thing, like the woodmouse, which, when injured, speaks for the world if one is willing to hear its cry. When one does, she apprehends a sound that resonates with profound otherness. Like Aunt Consuelo in Elizabeth Bishops’ “In the Waiting Room,” one experiences a momentary spiritual depersonalization that affords a view of the self as other. Carruth depicts his poet as a witness who listens and waits, like the six year old speaker in “In the Waiting Room,” until his waiting turns to writing at that point when he feels ready to transform his intense listening to the smallest cries into a lyrical expression. But it is only with the awareness of his human limits that he is ironically able to move from listening to erasing all differences between himself and his subject. In this transpersonal act of becoming his subject, he allows it-in this case a woodmouse-to speak for him as if all he were was the voice for its pain. Both “nothing and his admiration” for getting down the pain in poetry. Ecstasy In turning from pathos to ecstasy, one finds that the subject of an ecstatic poem often transforms remarkably into something entirely different from what it literally is, while remaining itself at the same time. D.H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” provides a mythic example of an ecstatic poem that combines joy and madness, obsession and transcendence, in both form and content, without ever losing sight of the flower that lights the speaker’s 205

way to hell. Beginning with a traditional iambic pentameter line, Lawrence quickly abandons blank verse in favor of a prosaic style that is consistently irregular. The poem unravels as a rich mix of metrical variation, shifting back and forth between primarily spondees, anapests and iambs. This mercurial meter conjures both the heavy steps of the speakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s descent into hell and the leaden darkness of the underworld, as if to say, with ecstatic shamelessness, there are no received forms in the of â&#x20AC;&#x153;hall of Dis,â&#x20AC;? only stumbling and irregular feet that spur rhapsodic speech. Bavarian Gentians Not every man has gentians in his house in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas. Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom, ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze, black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue, giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light, lead me then, lead me the way. Reach me a gentian, give me a torch let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness. even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and groom.

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Lawrence begins this poem on the plangent, autumnal note of the rarity of gentians in men’s houses at Michelmas, the feast day of Saint Michael the archangel. This poem plumbs the depths of hell from the grieving groom’s perspective. Unlike Demeter, Persephone’s mother, who is left bereft and helpless on earth, the uncelebrated beloved descends into hell with his “torch-like” gentians. Since Lawrence’s groom plays no transformative role in his infernal descent, as Demeter does in her creation of the seasons, Lawrence’s groom disappears into the lost history of heart-broken lovers. Lawrence immortalizes Persephone’s beloved here as a psychopomp, an Orphic character bearing gentians instead of a lyre, though he is no less lyrical than Orpheus in his song. Unlike Demeter, he is able to divine the passage to hell on his own. Lighting his way are his Bavarian gentians, aglow with the “smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom.” As the instrument of his ironic light in hell, the gentians illuminate hell itself. Lawrence obsesses on the gentians throughout the poem as both a trope of discerning blindness in the underworld and beautiful earthly flowers. With melodic, insistent repetition, he allows the gentians to serve as his guide, trusting them implicitly to lead him to his beloved. “Let me guide myself with the blue,” he instructs himself, “forked torch of this flower/ down the darker and darker stairs.” The poetic mantra of the gentian’s color, “a burning dark blue,” and the shape of their physical appearance, “ribbed” and “flattening into points,” pierce hell itself. The groom’s descent into the underworld becomes increasingly ecstatic with each new description of the gentians, as if Lawrence’s emphatic repetition of their color were oxygen to their flames. And yet, there is a limit to the groom’s descent as well that celebrates the profligate, demonic nature of his love. He is after all descending into hell in true ecstatic fashion, configuring a psychic out-of-the-body body (the literal definition of ecstasy) for the purpose of traveling in a fictional yet spiritually real tableau. His irrational, utterly romantic scenario defies convention in the guise of convention, a wedding ceremony. What a sepulcher the damned couple end up in “among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness.” In an obvious inversion of Milton’s famous conceit for the light of hell, “darkness visible,” Lawrence describes darkness as “invisible,” leaving his reader in an infernal basement at a futile wedding. Yet he has seduced his reader with an infernal, ecstatic conceit that is nonetheless universal. By the end of the poem the gentians have become palpable darkness itself, both invisible and bright with burning blue. Only in the paradoxical realm of this ecstatic state can such a contradiction work. The gentians transport the reader 207

and lover alike into a darkness that is hardly sanguine, yet irresistible for its allure and strange familiarity, its haunting lyrical depiction of Eros’s depths and terrors. By the end of the poem, the groom has retrieved his bride from Pluto, but unlike Orpheus, is doomed to remain in the “arms Plutonic,” which is his ecstatic choice, the ultimate limit and unknowing of his love. As we have seen in these three enduring poems, the lyric strives to betray the central conceit of life’s impossibility, revealing an inherent metaphysical secret about “the things of this world,” namely that more, whatever it is-the end of knowing, a wounded woodmouse, the beloved in hell. The question that challenges poets in every age is simply how to remain human in the midst of increasing intractable inhumanity. This question looms especially large today as rampant jingoism, fundamentalism, nationalism and theory-driven ideologies threaten to marginalize lyric poetry to the outer fringes of cultural significance. Enduring lyric poetry has always been threatened by popular ideas and trends, seeming irrelevant or out of vogue in each new epoch of literary history. The lyric catches us at our impossibilities, at our conspiring multitudes that transform and enlarge us through a transpersonal self that initiates reconciliations with those things we view in our everyday outlooks as separate and utterly different from us. In these reconciliations we come to apprehend the irreducible nature of our beings. But how to get this down? The lyric attempt to capture a semblance of our fleeting apprehension of ourselves at those irrational yet emotional moments when we feel most deeply. How few of these expressions endure as memorable poems. But those that do resonate like the lyre’s strings, vibrating across a void that spans the unknown and impossible. 1

GG: Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1992) GLP: Greek Lyric Poetry, Sherod Santos (New York, W.W. Norton, 2005) 3 SPAL: Selected Poems and Letters, John Keats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952) 2

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Book Reviews

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Book Reviews Lofty Dogmas Edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxine Kumin. Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2005. Reviewed by Sarah Maclay

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Graced with a cover as tongue-in-cheek as its title, this book took a while to get to me, and I like to think it was because it made a lot of stops along the way where readers, like me, didn’t want to let it go. The image is a homey variation on Pegasus: not flying horse, but flying dog—a dog, aloft. Inside, it is yelpingly good, and infinitely companionable. In one place, one volume—one you could practically stick in your purse—there are roughly 100 essays and excerpts and letters and interviews on poetics (plus a few poems) penned by practicing poets over the centuries, divided handily into sections on inspiration (“Musing”), crafting (“Making”) and the role of the poet (“Mapping,” because, as the editors put it, “poetry plays many opposing roles at once: to confound, to illuminate, to help keep us alive, and to reconcile us with death. Perhaps the embrace of such oppositions is the best way for poetry to offer a map of our condition”). Many of these essays, of course, can be found elsewhere, but usually ghettoized by period or country or both. The genius of this book is that they’re all under one roof. And it’s one that can be carried without causing a hernia! (Thanks to the David Ferry’s spry translation of Horace’s famous Ars Poetica, I can now be certain of a flogging for so badly mangling and mixing these metaphors, but oh well!) Part anthology, part teaching compendium, another benefit of this volume is its head notes, juicy and accessible enough for an intro to poetry student, brief enough to be useful for a quick, pre-class review, yet thorough enough to give poets, teachers and students of all levels an adequate context and grounding for the poetics that follow. In every case we get a sense of the poets as human beings as well as sensibilities, and the essays range gloriously across period and palette, arranged conversationally, so that, for instance, Lorca’s ever-astonishing lecture on duende, delivered in 1930 Havana, is followed by Hirsch’s discussion of the power of duende in the work of poets who are trying to keep it under wraps—doing their level best, like Anthony Hecht, to fend it off, as it presses against their defenses, causing a palpable creative tension in their work. Meanwhile, Fulton, on fractals, is followed by musings on margins by Heather McHugh. Lehman talks prose poems, Bogan, form; there’s Kumin on endings, Hejinian, then, on rejection of closure. Crane, Valery, Stevens, Stein, Hugo and Harjo and Basho and Sappho, Wordsworth and Williams, Pound and Pope and Poe, Bradstreet and Brooks, Fanny and Frost, Hughes and Hass, J. Keats and J. Graham, Rilke and Rich—they’re all here, and finally Milosz brings the party to a close, reminding us that “all who are here, both the speaker and you who listen, are no more than links between the past and the future.” These remarkable, infamous, famous remarks are not only classic, but key—there’s Keats on negative capability, yes, but also on Beauty and Truth, and Hopkins on the finer points of his sprung rhythm. The wide embrace allows us, as Richard Silberg would have it, to “read the sphere” as these poets call and respond across eras, ethnicities and points of view. Kudos to Maxine Kumin, Annie Finch and Deborah Brown for pulling this off. It’s an incredibly nourishing resource for teaching and study: to assign from, to read from, discuss and apply. But as a poet, I want it, quite frankly, at my bedside—as a source of inspiration, as a solace, as a prod. Already it’s become a collection of Lofty dog-eared Dogmas. New Jersey By Betsy Andrews. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

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Reviewed by Jan Wesley Fasten your seat belts and climb in for a wild ride in Betsy Andrews’ book-length poem titled New Jersey, a hallucinogenic trip careening down The Turnpike, “a bottleneck / bursting like locusts…a cherry bomb dropped on a denuded hill,” on which Andrews pumps out an exhausting wake of illuminations addressing the brokenness of America. Streams of language in listing style are relentless with cumulative effect as natural worlds languish roadside and synthetic worlds of the new century guide bodies and spirits via military and corporate might. Influenced by the radio, interpretative-internal dialogue and snippets of history, she paints rapid-fire impressions of a country failing its people. Andrews makes seemingly impossible connections from outside the automobile (never mentioned) to worlds of malfeasance throughout America, as her book leaves no doubt she is disillusioned and furious at what we are neglecting to rant and rail against. With gear-grinding imagery and little punctuation in a “universe that looks like a multicar wreck,” Andrews generates lines and phrases that roil up as we are “humping along…. on little devil paws,” and repetitions of associative words and imagery stutter our psyches into juxtapositions such as “piston machine made out of humans” and “enormous white geese lifting off…from the unseemly crash.” Her minimal use of first or second person allows suburban and animal imagery, as well as mechanical and military imagery to drive her titleless, section-less poems. Broken by pages, “words falling out like fillings,” Andrews propels us with historical references from Whitman to Lincoln to Edison, through omnipresent ATMs and fast-food restaurants, and into a “vastness cluttered with private rockets.” It is a bleak landscape, metaphor used with abandon in this diatribe against military power, against pollution, against “a shit-flinging gravitas that makes generals quiver.” Besides the Turnpike as “a constant snapping apart / a constant pounding together,” there are people “beyond reproach in Mount Misery, Double Trouble / taking the Turnpike, deformed and immortal, for an uncanny herald of great global conflict…” In one of her sparsely used yet effective quotations, a homeowner states, “the Turnpike is an elephant,” and this lumbering animal is the second most dominant metaphor in the book. America is the elephant in the room most of the time, “pricked with a sharp stick so she jumps on her chains / looking fearsome,” and insistence on this analogy creates associations like “something in my trunk / dog like cat…encoded toll ticket…. notion of isolationism.” Everything is “rendered unknown” as warehouses, motels and airports roll by, nothing escaping taintedness in this “new prison atop an old prison” where “a four-year old in the driveway repeats to herself, you’re okay, you’re okay.” The journey is a powerful examination in close-ups and panoramic perspectives and in monumental contrasts of what races outside our windows and too much out of our control. Towns, fields and creeks change with the weight of becoming man-mangled towns “where nobody tends to the stalls, where nobody moves in the alleys,” where a moment of existence is “the meeting of people who can’t pay their bills, a blemish sprouting on a cheek.” This book is a summary through impressionism rather than through narration or linear design. It is a random universe where what “a pilot whale has in common with the national defense system: / [is] neither of them can distinguish a Mylar balloon from appropriate targets,” where “buildings look like candy…like passport stamps” and where Andrews will not let us remain at a distance from the discomfort of it all. She keeps us very close, “lying inside the circular argument” where we cannot exit this “skirt of serpents” until the very last page where she admits that “love storms my middle-aged lips…the bleachers like bellows breathing with the breath of the breathing people / light thrown off in all directions. ” And 212

if we are willing to take this trip, we are in “the dream of the dream of the dream of a driver” and we can gaze at our own fears, whether they be “terror / terrorist / terrorists” (etcetera) or “a naked smack in the face of the bandit who crosses the highway too soon,” unable to veer from Andrews’ alert that if only we would take notice of the “next unfortunate village,” perhaps we might take pause on this “night-shriek Turnpike” and change the course of this very dangerous trip. Broken Hallelujahs By Sean Thomas Dougherty. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. Beg No Pardon By Lynne Thompson. Florence, MA: Perugia Press, 2007. By Lisa Hemminger Doing a quick paratextual survey of Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Broken Hallelujahs reveals several things for new readers. Dougherty’s artist’s photo displays his performance poetry roots; he isn’t ruminating, as are many poets in their photograph –he is gesticulating before a microphone, hand up as if delivering a missive, no book in sight. The front cover is a graffiti-ed cityscape with an audience of dew-ragged listeners atop a roof across the street from an accordion player, easily a caricature of Dougherty. A former factory worker and nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Dougherty put in his early stage time with slam poets from Syracuse in the mid-90s. As musicality is integral to the best performance poetry, so is it integral to Dougherty’s work; he has successfully channeled that music to the page. In fact, he employs music in every application imaginable. He writes about musicians, dead and alive; music as an art form; poetry as conceptual music; music as dance; and music itself. And his technique, especially diction and syntax, reflects poetry’s singular song. The deft rhyme inherent in street performance juxtaposed against the objectivism and chaos of street life resonate in the structural and aural balance of lines from “Canzone Sprayed with Graffiti”: Of limbs. This rising. Asphalt forgotten. For bread loves Goya’s black paint. Basquiat’s slashed face. For what is moonlight on a battlefield. Love: let there be Open hydrants splashing summer day foot-shine…. Dougherty handles form and experiment with the same touch: honoring provenance while adding his signature. Play and change is key to his work. “The Long Waiting,” for example, dedicated to his grandfather, was published earlier as a canzone. Here he has collapsed the piece into a prose poem. Through the re-telling of a re-told tale of his grandfather’s arduous death, the poet repeats and creates anew with the homonyms “Hungary” and “hungry.” Dougherty eases the path for readers in this poem, one of the most emotionally difficult poems, by allowing the inherent comic relief of rhyme and repetition to sporadically light down. He loves a poetic bender: “Pas de Deux” lists more

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than 50 dances from across the globe, all capitalized as if standing up and voting for themselves. When not at play, much of Broken Hallelujahs explores his family history through a lens on his grandfather, “Poppa” Kriesler. But that is not to say that the subject matter is static. Dougherty takes readers everywhere with his self, locale, and familial examination—bobbing through the philosophy of Hélène Cixous and Martin Scorsese characters to the rebellion of sidewalk chalking and break dancing. Though much of the book comes across as a shout—of emotion, feeling, ethnicity, and humanity— Dougherty also knows how to whisper. He writes from the canon of the public memory, the collective unconscious through which we all “dance.” That dance is, as he writes in “Hades,” …the way willows Sigh, The way swallows swoop In endless loops? The circle of serious play continually loops through Broken Hallelujahs, begging multiple visits. * The title of Lynne Thompson’s first book, Beg No Pardon, vibrates with meaning— evoking politics of manner, imperatives of independence, insertion of jangle into tired cliché. The overriding theme of the book is equally as dense. It is about the nature of communication—and its effectiveness (or lack thereof) in art, heritage, and language. Thompson is especially keen to uncover “language” disguises; she uncovers the punctuation of tools, the rumble of an absence. Thompson writes about absence with clarity and sans sap. She can tap out a perfect tone of learned wisdom from the imagined remains of an anonymous mother or the imminent disappearance of all experience. She provides salient clues as to how workaday activities can translate to salvation. As she writes in “Daddy Toolkit,” His favorite child was the garage where he dissolved into nail, screw, nut, and bolt; where he became the personalities of a wrench: combination, adjustable, chain. She hears her ancestry in the “fume of coconuts and allspice, /…blue maize, dance of the sun…”; she hears the mouthing of hope in the Grand Canyon where the speaker “looked up and there / was the lip of the world and I grabbed on.” She brings us people who express through action (“Jazz,” “Elegy for the Red Dress”); people who communicate but don’t speak any more (“Imperfect Ghazal for an Unknown Mother,” “Joe”). Thompson’s souls communicate effectively if not eloquently (“She, Named P____ at Birth, Speaks to Me, Says,” “Half-brother Holler”).

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But Thompson also loves language uncovered; she is well aware of its power and her poetry reflects that intimacy. Take this close-up of “Scissors”: Many things just can’t be said any other way: toothache or mercurochrome or 1951. So, when I say it’s over, I don’t mean interlude or maybe. Or, how after looking for cures, palliatives, and change, she writes: “…so it’s come to this: Lynne, a desk, a pencil.… / negative capability /and the slender curve /of a comma — / its stiletto stuck / in my throat.” (from “Curves. Rapture.”) Other themes are crucial here. They revolve around the world of privilege, and ethnicity and culture. These issues had to be examined (given the title of the book), but Thompson knows they are more electric and, in a strategy that makes sense for a first book, tells them slant. In “Raffia,” she passes on ancient wisdom of the Igbo, filtered through her experience of writer Chris Abani. She utilizes one of Abani’s lines, “weaving” it into her poetry: “like the weave of this raffia hat, we intertwine— / the lock of your blond hair braided with my /dark lock, your breathing identical to mine…” My favorite of the book, “Back Seat,” balances perfectly the tension of a Civil Rightsaffected childhood and matters of pride and propriety. After the bus the poem’s speaker is riding in is hit by a “car (that) sure wants to hit us” she explains how “it’s been that way / ever since: collision, broken bodies, and nothing, nothing to be done.” Great stuff in few words. Interrogation Palace By David Wojahn. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Reviewed by Lee Rossi In a recent article entitled “The Fate of Political Poetry” David Wojahn laments the disappearance of the impulse “to combine the quest for social justice with the search for personal authenticity.” A difficult project in any era, it was simply abandoned by American poets after the mid-70’s; as a result, American poetry has become “overwhelmingly subjective and hermetic.” To shake us from our lethargy, argues Wojahn, we need to “formulate a well-crafted and merciless poetry of invective against oppression and political injustice,” and to create poems which employ “ambiguity, generative vagueness and destabilizing inquiry” (26) to explore the interlacing of personal history and social biology. Interrogation Palace, which adds some terrific new poems to the best pieces from six earlier books, shows us a poet who has learned to do both. A learned poet, Wojahn’s breadth of cultural and literary reference is focused by a temperament attuned to ruefulness and cruelty. Whatever a poem’s occasion, the underlying theme will probably be downbeat: the loss of love and the beloved, the cruelty of fate, the

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brutality of politics, or the mendacity of contemporary American culture. And yet, we observe other elements – a restless formal mastery, a penetrating sense of the complications of human desire, a love of beauty in all of its compellingly evanescent formations – which counterbalance the negative and contribute to a unique eminence among contemporary poets. He has been called an elegiac poet, yet he is rarely satisfied with poetry’s ordinary consolations. Consider for example a poem entitled “The Art of Poetry” from the late book Spirit Cabinet. With its self-conscious title this piece might have been an occasion for humor or celebration, but what Wojahn gives us is a complex and difficult meditation on the limits of poetic solace. He takes as his test case the crew of the HMS Endurance, marooned in 1914 in the Antarctic. Stranded with their three-book library, they read from Britannica N-O and arrive at: world-making Nyx, of whose breath the earth & firmament were formed, whose realm is All Things Of the Night, born of Chaos & Mother of Aether, is a goddess most fearsome, even by Zeus revered. A more sobering encounter with Nothingness is hard to imagine. Wojahn’s best poetry is probably the most recent. While in the earlier books his formal strategies sometimes strain to accommodate their multi-dimensional subject matter, the crown of sonnets entitled “Stalin’s Library Card” (from Spirit Cabinet) shows him at the top of his form, as do two recent elegies, “Scrabble with Matthews” and “Homage to Blind Willie Johnson.” Personal revelation has been a staple of Wojahn’s poetry from the beginning, but as we read through Interrogation Palace, we sense a deepening awareness of his own complicity in his sorrows. In “After Propertius,” for instance, he imagines a confrontation with the ghost of his late wife, the poet Lynda Hull, in which she berates him for exploiting her death as a subject for his own poems: “How goes the poetry, loverboy? Did I give / good subject matter? / / Don’t think I haven’t heard your three-year keening, & now it’s given you – I’ve given you – another little book.” What makes this such liberating drama is not just the interplay of literary and demotic but its willingness to engage in probing self-assessment. It may be too early to declare David Wojahn a major poet, but his passionate humanism will make him a valuable entry point into the poetry of this age for years to come. Works cited: Wojahn, David. “Maggie’s Farm No More: The Fate of Political Poetry.” The Writer’s Chronicle (Vol. 39, Number 6). Disclamor By G.C. Waldrep. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. Reviewed by Patty Seyburn In the May/Summer 2008 issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Reginald Shepherd wrote an article titled “On Difficulty in Poetry.” On balance, the article eloquently praises difficulty,

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with support from various literary luminaries—critic Vernon Shetley (alright, I hadn't heard of him, but he sounds very smart) and critic David Crystal (ditto), and poets Howard Nemerov and Marianne Moore (yes, heard of them, yes, read them, yes, admire them). Curiously enough, Nemerov comes down in favor of the challenge, while Moore sits on the fence, though Moore is usually considered a more difficult poet than Nemerov. The reader's relationship with difficulty comes into play when reading G.C. Waldrep's new collection, Disclamor. Best hold fast your OED. One can start with the title: a “nonce coinage” that riffs on the notion of the disclaimer and connects said repudiation or denial of responsibility to a desperate sort of struggling noise. For what it's worth, the title perfectly fits the collection, which—surprise!—is a challenging read, addresses issues related to war, and imports and employs diverse voices, from the poet and other sources. To discuss this book one must mention its central project, a sequence of nine poems collectively titled “The Batteries,” though the individual poems are titled for each of the gun emplacements in what had been Forts Barry and Cronkhite overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Waldrep's notes tell us that two of the batteries … “were nuclear missile launch sites during the Cold War. The other batteries contained conventional armaments, were constructed between 1898 and 1944, and were decommissioned immediately following World War II.” Of course, the success of this book rests on how well these poems work, individually and collectively, and how they connect with the rest of the collection. Let's cut to the chase: for the most part, the central poems are riveting, curious mixtures of varying syntax and diction, carefully splattered (oxymoron?) across the pages so the reader must constantly pause, consider, evaluate. The spacing of the poems helps them, contributing to a necessary degree of transparency. The use of on-site graffiti, most of it garden-variety you-love-me (with some considerably more idiosyncratic, the strange personal codes of the mind) almost functions as a Greek chorus, upper-case commentary often contradicting the identity of these sites as violent spaces. How difficult it is to write a political poem, these days: not to preach to the converted, not to preach at all, but to perform something more important than the barrage of reportage. Remarkably, these poems are not didactic: informative and descriptive, interwoven with bits of narrative, supposition and perception, they tell a slanted truth, to be sure, without any fistpumping rhetoric, without the brand of pathos that alienates the reader from suffering rather than inviting empathy. It would be simplistic to identify this complicated work as anti-war poetry, though the battery poems function, in part, as odes to the fallen. Waldrep's complicated lexicon requires that the reader be highly conscious throughout the poem, as he/she confronts obscure, archaic, technical and newly minted words; in this way, his linguistic strategy is reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his more meditative, deceptively linear moments, his poems sound a little like the Robert Hass of Praise: intelligent and philosophical, moving ably between subject, image and idea. Despite the dominant mode of this book, a number of the shorter poems that separate “The Batteries” feel more personal and, at times, more vital. Poems such as “Bishopville,” “Jeanette Cemetery,” “Transubstantiation Rag,” “The Resurrection: Sweden” and “Hall of Ancestors” offer the reader a narrator who seems more willing to talk, desiring connection. A few other poems, such as “Execuy in the Second Mode,” resist connection, and do not help the book's project. A funeral rite, ceremony or procession need not involve a hearse, but it's hard to chronicle any sort of progression within the poem. And what of the degree of difficulty? Could the book communicate its ideas in terms and forms more accessible to a wider variety of readers? Perhaps, at times. Nonetheless, 217

Waldrop's ambitions and strategies provide something akin to both tonic and adrenalin, inviting the reader into an arena where answers are contingent, unsatisfactory and unresolved, responding to the kind of questions that merit and demand asking. Landscape with Silos By Deborah Bogen. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2006. The Incognito Body By Cynthia Hogue. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2006. Reviewed by Meredith Davies Hadaway Landscape with Silos is Deborah Bogen’s modern day version of an illuminated manuscript. She takes the artist’s measure of a dark scene, locates the tiniest detail and burnishes it until it gleams like the rim of the milk pail in the moonlight in a Nebraskan barnyard. “A few white words” provide light we can read by within the shadows that engulf Bogen’s world. Shadows so omnipresent they have become mundane, like the missile silos that loom beside the peach pits and eggshells, tainting even the diner food with insidious darkness: “… missiles so big / we didn’t even dream about them. / They didn’t scare us, those missiles, // not the men either who rose like bankers, / sat calmly at the counter, starched and pressed. / Keys jingled on their belts. / They ordered root beer and blackbottom pie.” Against this ominous and undreamable backdrop, Bogen demonstrates again and again the glittering power of language to show us what shines in the dark. And the dark is dark. There in killing fields, children’s cemeteries, mental hospitals and hopeless political scenarios, Bogen places the poem, with its oracular power to conjure and illuminate the living and the dead and those who dwell somewhere in between: “ghosts of cloudstained women, shadows of railroad men,” the visitants who return from old home movies and family photos with stories to tell, all brought into “moon-lit glory” by Bogen’s curious night vision: “Some say the moon makes things / look strange. I think it lets us see how strange things are, scarecrows in / their wedding clothes, the way light / snows on trees.” The strange light is intensely focused but also wide-ranging. In a section entitled “The Poem Ventures Out,” Bogen lets the poem take us on a joyride through modern culture with its challenges and opportunities—television news, GRE’s, a chance to sit in with the band— the poem at the wheel, the events caught in its headlights. It’s a world careening out of control except for the poem’s calming reassurance: “Relax, the poem told me, / remember these are words—// something you can alter, // later.” Bogen’s unflinching vision brings no easy consolation but rather arms us with “razors of light” against advancing darkness. The kind of flash that alters everything in the blink of an eye emanates from the tiniest detail, locating us within a re-envisioned world. This emblazoning is, after all, a holy act, a calling, as Bogen reminds us in “The Poem Goes to the Kitchen to Empty the Dishwasher But Ends Up Praying,” a vision inspired by sunlight streaking the kitchen floor: Let me move through it, this door, let me see the monk bent over the table, his brushes of camel’s hair 218

and mink, his window stabbed by sun, a lance that leaves a wound of gold. Transfiguration: marked change, a sudden emanation. A page. Linoleum. * In The Incognito Body, Cynthia Hogue takes us on a journey through pain and recovery, exploring the attendant dislocation and even dis-locution in a series of powerfully crafted poems. The poems enact a transition from the known world, with its foreshadowing of change, through the complete disorientation that occurs when illness (in Hogue’s case, rheumatoid arthritis) makes one’s own body a stranger, dividing self from self, world from spirit, fracturing thought and language and, at times, confounding art as a refuge. We do not make this journey alone. Embedded in the poems are diverse voices from the artistic, scholarly and medical communities who inspire, inform or comment on the poems: Robert Duncan, Andrei Tarkovsky, Odysseus Elytis, Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov, Virginia Woolf, John Webster and Paul Bowles join forces with Elaine Scarry, Albert Einstein and Zen teacher Joan Halifax to provide a kind of kaleidoscopic vision of art and pain that is both personal and universal, literal and metaphorical. Hogue finds a natural kinship with Dickinson’s “great pain, ” paying tribute in “Hour of Lead” and “Nerves Like Tombs” with sonnets that attempt to contain and control the most direct description of pain. But in the course of the long title sequence, we watch the breakdown of language as pain eclipses the ability to think or respond to anything but its own stimulus, refusing the constraints of individual words. The simultaneous narration of the medical voice, represented by excerpts from an anthropological treatise on rheumatoid arthritis alongside the broken diction and strange typography indicate the gulf between the observer and the participant, heightening both the irony and the sense of helplessness. Capitalization shows us words that hide within other words (“beLIEve”) like a hidden betrayal with Os crying out (“gOing”) to give pain a voice. There is no cure, we’re told. Nor is illness limited to the interior landscape. Towers fall. Fathers and sons are buried in the fields of Kosovo. We breathe the uranium-laced air of Los Alamos and experience the disintegrating power of anger when a fellow traveler becomes enraged at the security line in an airport: It’s all right I hushed, at last to notice bodies trembled in shocked air atoms cracked open ions hurtling toward the cosmos of others to what end when fury spread particulate to his wife waiting down the hall as their children 219

bleated back and forth between? But Hogue does offer us some consolation in the mosaic of consciousness where “souls / together clasp: a continuously jeopardized. / a feeling that love is: not anonymous not dead.” The empathy we find in traveling across Hogue’s fractured landscape puts us back together again at the end. Having come through the onslaught of constant derangement, we arrive together. If our empathic journey has not brought us understanding, it has provided a kind of enlightenment. As Hogue (with assistance from Virginia Woolf) suggests: It may be that though we change, flying one after another, so quick, so quick, we’re somehow continuous we human beings and show the light through. Reactor By Judith Vollmer, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Lilies Without By Laura Kasischke, Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2007. Reviewed by Reed Wilson While reading Judith Vollmer’s Reactor, I was reminded often of Coleridge, especially his concept of the “esemplastic imagination,” which might “shape into one” the elements of a disordered and disordering world. Consider how the young poet transformed her brothers’ tabletop model of a nuclear reactor into a “pleasure dome” with its own homegrown Alph: the Connecticut river ran beside it, we saw a movie on summer vacation. Pipes big as tunnels shined plain satin steel. Something flowed out of the tower and into the cold river and over the bright scales of fish. Tower with slippery sides, dome without windows. . .. Reactor is, if nothing else, both a reckoning of and elegy for the twentieth century, “reacting” to its castoffs and detritus even as it converts, like a nuclear reactor, that matter into the energy of vision and song. In the prose poem “Spoil Islands” for example, these “waste fills off the Atlantic shoreline” give rise not only to biological renewal— “cattails, velvet columns marking the temples of the shallows” and “young sea-oats splaying their gold straw”—but also to imaginative renewal and transformation: “Great translucence, however long 10,000 years or 10 times that, great silt, great ourselves, little depots of grit and shifting light.”

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Of course such poems might be accused of aestheticizing the byproducts of our wastefulness, and a poem like “Installation” takes this one step further. Homeless men on a bridge, marooned by our post-industrial culture, become an “installation” to the poet’s gaze, “boys glazed hard & bleached out,” a confusion of signs: “This is all a show / this is no show.” She finds herself, in that confusion, behaving like any good American liberal—on the one hand attempting to ignore these men with “holes in them,” and on the other directing her compassion toward their dogs, “lean and ragged” precisely because they are, unlike those of us who pass quickly by such human suffering, “up all night / keeping guard over these boys who feed them / run them ragged.” We may live in hell, but so does Persephone, at least part time, and that queen of the underworld serves twice in this book as the poet’s companion spirit. In “U1A Tunnel: Persephone’s Story,” she guides us through an underground complex at the Nevada Test Site: See, this new room painted cottage red isn’t landfill or tomb—it’s a lab, future for the nation, which turned, momentarily, to Poetry, the Pope, Bono, etc. after the last rupture. . . . The twentieth century was certainly one long series of such “ruptures,” and though “Poetry, the Pope, Bono” might seem an absurd Holy Trinity, it might be the best we can hope for post- Trinity Site. “I have everything I need,” Persephone tells the poet, “but you— / don’t drink the water— . . ..” Later in the book though, in “Persephone Returns,” she offers springtime refreshment, arriving with a distinctive “atmosphere, dense, wet, / a field-lake let loose.” The poet has difficult questions: “is there world before self-consciousness binds us up?” / I’m still trying to be—say it— / the person making.” Coleridge’s imaginative self as Aeolian harp doesn’t play easily in our late modern age. Nevertheless, in lines separated by wide white space through which blow the breath and breadth of the poet’s song, When I can’t hear myself think I watch for your comings & goings. I bring the outside in. Moon for light. White birchbark for sleeves. * The persona of most poems in Laura Kasischke’s Lilies Without is, by nature, reflective, contemplative, even reclusive—what used to be called “introverted.” Most of us too often confuse introverts with obsessives and neurotics, and they can of course be those. They can also, however, be visionaries—the only ones capable of figuring out a way past the obsessive

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mass delusion of our consumer culture. Indeed, such “figuring” is a primary project of this volume, in which, for example, a lilac becomes “the suburb’s lyric poem.” In an actual poem like “The Thigh,” careful gazing generates a distinctive voice, here given to that body part of the poem’s title: “I am simply your thigh, and proof / that underneath the world lies / a warm pool of water overflowing / with drowned blue butterflies.” That pool soon overflows as well with other associative figures: “The calm milked cows in a field of clover. The long / white fish in a bath. Cellular / shadow on the forest floor” even as the thigh becomes “your life, in flesh and hours, statement / and tone, meat and weather / wrapped around a bone.” But for all this impressive distillation of figurative energy, the poet’s dissatisfied with mere imaginative looking. Even in adolescence, she yearned for seeing beyond corporeal limitation. In “The Punishment,” the young speaker recalls being enjoined to “Go / out there and think about what you’ve done,” which meant not only to “spend a lifetime trying to trace / the veins of a maple leaf,” but also to find herself momentarily “between / consciousness and nothing, selfhood / and infinity.” In that place she sees, “clearly, my parents’ dream: / their single body cleaved, / finding itself whole / but imperfect again in me.” Thankfully, such intuitions of “imperfection” are something we outgrow. “O moral and spiritual emptiness, remember me. / I will never be / such a girl again,” she declares in “The Punishment,” and the volume as a whole explores a third option (beside “selfhood / and infinity”)—a mature faith in “eternity.” “The Bad Teacher,” in the poem of that title, “all thistled cursive and miscounted nickels,” tells the poet’s son that “Mice are spontaneously / generated by garbage,” that “ The size of the skull is the size of the mind,” and, most vilely, that “Everything your mother told you about eternity was a lie.” Of course this poet and good teacher-mother tells us the difficult truth about eternity, often by revealing what it is not: the promise of a “New Dress” (title of three separate poems) which tempts us to purchase, at great expense, only “an era of deafness and imminent error.” Or the world we inhabit with such false selves as those absurd beauty queen runners-up presented in such poems as “Miss Brevity,” “Miss Estrogen,” and “Miss Post-Apocalypse.” The only way to shuck such tired trappings, the only way we discover who we truly are, is through “prayer”—not old-time, one-way, Sunday school imprecation, but dynamic conversation with this world, all others, and, most importantly, our truest Self. In “Warehouse of Prayer,” the long poem that centers this book, that warehouse or “wherehouse” becomes the poem itself, even this one, where Suddenly God answers me! I am made of the same thing you are, after all, and you are made of me: Some darkness, a supplication, a moral silence breezing over the glassy stubble in a vacant field. Sinners Welcome

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By Mary Karr. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2006. Reviewed by Mihaela Moscaliuc “Like poetry, prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: ‘true’ and ‘beautiful,’” Mary Karr writes in the “Afterword” to her most recent work, Sinners Welcome, a collection of poems that record and, in the process, annotate and examine the poet’s midlife conversion to Catholicism. Compelling as it may be, Karr’s belief translates into a limiting narrative and poetic template—one that shapes the volume’s distinctive voice but also calls attention to its predictable trajectory. As defined by the prominent British American clergyman Thomas Hooker (1586 -1647), the conversion process comprised Contrition, Humiliation, Vocation, Implantation, Confession and Possession. Rather than follow a strict sequential order, these various stages intertwine and clash in Karr’s poems, infusing them with dramatic tension and recharging their verve. In “Waiting for God: Self-Portrait as Skeleton,” for instance, self-deprecating scrutiny and bitterness jostle with the speaker’s struggle to acknowledge her despair and need for salvation. The disarmingly harsh diction in which the speaker recalls her mother’s life and expresses filial affection mirrors the stark grief and defensive resistance with which she turns to God: The winter Mother’s ashes came in a Ziploc bag, all skin was scorched from me, and my skull was a hard helmet I wore to pray with my middle finger bone aimed at the light fixture—Come out, You fuck, I’d say, then wait for God to finish me where I knelt; or for my dead mother to assemble in clouds of the Aquanet hairspray she’d used abundantly in her bleach blond Flashdance phase at sixty when she’d phone all slurry and sequined with disco playing to weep so I’d send cash. … The poems of Sinners Welcome read as extensions of one riveting and inevitably convoluted quest for antidotes and spiritual sustenance. “My new aesthetic struggle is to accommodate joy as part of my literary enterprise, but I still tend to be a gloomy and serotonin-challenged bitch,” the poet declares, and while there is nothing wrong with a book spending “way more time on crucifixion than resurrection,” the exalted diction of its crucifixions anticipates the resurrections a bit too fast, too soon. In “Descending Theology: The Crucifixion,” … The man on the cross under massed thunderheads feels his soul leak away, then surge. Some wind sucks him into the light stream in the rent sky, and he’s snatched back, held close.

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Sacramental experiences are often raised to the level of the devotional, and the mundane is filtered and reckoned with through theological lenses. In one elegiac piece, a wire coat hanger—that, according to the speaker, may have been used by her mother with the intent of aborting her—becomes “a halo to crown [her] son’s head.” In another, a tomcat’s “offering” of fish (that he has “scooped from the neighbor’s pond”) makes the speaker feel “how Christ might,” as she kneels “weeping in the dark / over the usual maladies: love and its lack”; when the tomcat surrenders to cancer, the speaker prays that she goes the same way, unafraid of “the embrace that seeks to still [her].” In “Meditatio,” the common metaphor of a sailboat guided by a “weightless hand” gives way to the provoking image of the sun pouring “its golden sap” to preserve the speaker “like His precious insect.” Fortunately, irreverent forays and humorous juxtapositions compensate for the bathos of many of these poems. In “Disgraceland,” the speaker sees herself as “first formed” in God’s womb “small as a bite of burger.” When, “eventually,” she “lurch[es] out to kiss the wrong mouths, / get stewed, and sulk around,” Christ is always there, standing “to one side with a glass of water.” The speaker’s optimism, even when camouflaged in abrasive cynicism, often surfaces in the poems’ denouement. A poem that ends, “and the soft clay crawled back to form my face” is followed by another urging, “Praise / Him, whose earth is green.” Other poems conclude with the speaker being freed from her ribcage, or with a fish “being reeled to the burnished floor / of Heaven.” In the title poem, a Ulysses-cum-God “enter[s]” the speaker and “joy / sprouts from us as from a split seed.” Karr chronicles her journey with nervy specificity and self-lacerating humor, but the poems’ reiterative morphology of conversion dampens their oomph. The articulative urgency of this undisguised conversion narrative is both compelling and exhausting, its diction refreshing but also unevenly crafted. Stubborn By Jean Gallagher. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2006. Reviewed by Louise Mathias Jean Gallagher’s Stubborn is a book of lyrically charged and rigorously intelligent ekphrastic poems, based on medieval religious artwork. But the poems transcend their source material; they are thoroughly modern, containing such contemporary contraptions as helicopter blades, slide projectors, circuit breakers and telephones. Perhaps that’s why the poem “Stigmata,” quoted in its entirety below, could just as easily be about a contemporary teenager, hell bent on self-injury, as it could a mystical or religious phenomenon. V. Stigmata What I want and therefore am not beats in my chest trapped bird. Desire says open the skin

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The poem is from a series entitled “The Catherine Cycle,” based on artwork by Giovanni di Paolo, ca. 1460, which depicts Catherine of Siena, a cult figure who claimed to experience trances and to have married Christ. These poems are amongst the most compelling in the collection, nuanced and layered in tones that range from matter-of-fact and challenging (“I can handle these elements can you catch them”) to elegant concessions to beauty: “to follow the electric road of my touch / lighting every halo along the way.” This dichotomy, that of intermittent, almost belligerent questioning—“Faith is the silver fish-hook / I had to tear out”—coupled with a luxurious giving in to the lyrically sublime, is the central tension of this work, as in the following poem: Any Idea (Crown of Thorns) Let’s face it: how much easier to love what disappears into idea, a sweet gold smoke clearing off, leaving just the delicious lightheadedness of belief. But you are the stubborn, homely animal in the middle of the only road; the scratchy gold sweater that’s all I have to wear. Do you have any idea how tiring a chronic physical god is, how it permeates everything like a red glue, stopping up the spaces of sleep, holding together even the trashy crown I wove from my life’s old wire and metal scraps: all I can offer in exchange for your ubiquitous needle, unerring thread. Here, the “scratchy gold sweater” becomes a symbol for the speaker’s relationship to the very nature of belief. It’s scratchy, yes, but it’s also knit of gold, and is “all I have to wear.” Throughout the collection, Gallagher captures the wrestling match that is modern spiritual inquiry. “God is the doorway / I keep walking through / how many place are there to hide here / how many ways to be found.” She smartly avoids veering towards the didactic or the political, in part because she retains a conversational tone, perhaps especially at those moments most transcendent: Oh man, that light came down like a hammer on the gong of the entire sky, and there I was, flat on the ground, stuttering something about permanent housing, fireproof walls. -Apostles’ Dreams I Such lines sound more like something a construction worker might say, after seeing a lightning storm out back of his worksite, than one of the Apostles, after witnessing Christ transfigured on a mountain. This skillful melding of the casual, almost off-the-cuff with the religious subject matter allows even a non-believer to follow the speaker in her “difficult / worthy agenda.” Authoritative and smart, these poems set the reader “Falling off the high wire into / doubt’s life-long, unresisting blue.” 225

Apparition Wren By Maureen Alsop. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2007. Reviewed by Stephany Prodromides The speakers in Maureen Alsop’s debut collection, like birds, trace a semi-conscious lyric territory “as if circling / guides like a compass to what matters.” By turns delicately atmospheric, by turns almost alarmed by what they witness, these poems are united by their unflinching look at the limen between beauty and the grotesque, at the potential of surrender when the two become one. Resisting the simpler answer, these poems prefer to “circle [their] own tracks,” tracing ever widening or tightening circumferences in the observance of that moment, “poised / at the edge of beauty.” And the moment is sacred territory for Alsop. She praises stillness in the moment in “After the Race: Donegal’s Arc”: ... You raced the length of those reins, sweat foaming, life stilling down to nothing but steam... What happens to the stilled life, the life that evaporates when it ceases to circle? Perhaps this is the moment of surrender. Ascension. Apparition. And the poet admonishes herself: “be without faith, be ready,” because Not even a reckless horse, flung into darkness, knows her own heat, knows, when the landscape shimmers, before death, the moment. There is an old-world syntactic formality in many of Alsop’s poems that lends them a hymn-like quality, and this is brilliantly contrasted in poems like “Autobiography of Fresh Oil,” where the speaker seems almost to be speaking in tongues: The road is too long for me. I pretend myself lost. I repeat, I sd: how can I get clean get IT clean get CLEAN into it. Take aim I sd. Take arm. Against me. Against me... Alsop’s language seduces anew with each successive poem, and nowhere is this more the case than in “The Butcher’s Wife.” The speaker in this poem resists the strange seduction of the grotesque, the literal embrace of her offensive husband, and this resistance creates an electric tension in the poem from its opening lines:

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I ached for his bookkeeper brother. But my voice narrow like the slit lids of those pigs with missing eyes. And later: So I hid upstairs beneath blankets until noon... lest his burnt-gravy voice slice back of my neck. Here is the vernacular of revulsion, of the compelled, its words jumped together and leapt over. It is a syntax akin to a CAT scan, that cross-sections what it observes. The repulsion, the hesitating reluctance to birth each successive word on the page never relents, transmitting discomfort to the reader, and giving the poem enormous resonance. The very words resist each other across line breaks, across stanzas, and nearly seem to clench their teeth in the white space. Meat juice looms his pores—his clenched teeth grind like bones of that bull who dent kicked the abattoirs’ truck every time I fuck him. Intimacy with her husband and his attendant “excrement, piss & dry saliva” haunt the speaker, and, like the bull who kicks a dent into the slaughterhouse truck, she resists. The surrounding poems, and Alsop’s masterful use of craft suggest that the speaker is pinned between “know[ing] / nothing / of [her]self,” and being her own “body’s white flag.” Capitulation unthinkable, the inevitable dissonance shivers back up the poem’s spine in the last few lines: Yesterday, I heard from the heifer’s ribs a heartbeat —still—even as the crimson waters ran off her like sap.

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Again, the moment of stillness and surrender appears, and flits away, elusive as the apparition wren of the title poem. In this collection of extravagant lyric gestures, Alsop’s poems reward the reader with “places / reached by saying yes.” This is a rare and weird collection. Here is a poet to watch. Sister By Nickole Brown. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007. Reviewed by Lisa Siedlarz Nickole Brown’s debut is a disturbing and moving collection of poems that explores the destructiveness of sexual abuse, told by a significantly older sister who is molested by her stepfather. When the stepfather and biological mother have a daughter, the narrator is unable to bond with the child, though she desperately wants to. In the first poem, we learn of the speaker’s own beginnings: an early spring Tornado, a still, yellow sky, Nuns who said must have felt better going in than it does coming out as they gave her A hot compress and dimmed the lights for pain. She was half my age now, sweet Sixteen and barely healed When God smacked half the trees Under a mattress In an empty bathtub In an empty apartment, A newborn suckling The tips of her fingers. We learn that the speaker was born out of wedlock to a mother who was young, poor, catholic, and alone and, later in the poem, that her uneducated mother pulled her out of her own womb by the feet, causing permanent damage to the speaker’s legs. “How She Conceived” sets the tone of the relationship between the two sisters. The first part frames the older sister’s conception, where the mother is a “giggling, cigarette sneak, miniskirt-hike girl,” who would lie with a man “where somebody could hear, or barely hear: a custodial closet, knocking / splash of mop water running gray, / a velvet movie seat, hinges up / and creaking, or my choice: / an empty baptismal font / hidden behind stained glass, / strong sun spilling / blue and red and orange and / blue across my daddy’s back.” In part two, the sister’s conception was “done respectably”: “imagine bright rods of moonlight,” mother’s “panties . . . folded and cotton . . .”

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The speaker is conflicted between love and hate. At the root of her anger is not only a feeling of neglect, of wanting “a mother to notice I was gone, to call and call / after me,” but also the sexual abuse that made her feel dirty. In the first hint of something amiss, the speaker, six, looks at her stepfather’s pornographic magazines, and then is caught by him as she unzips an album cover to look at a man in his underwear. It’s a subtle suggestion when the stepfather “crouched down asked / want to see more?” The suggestion becomes definitive when, after entertaining the girl with magic tricks, “he then showered, and smelling of fresh cigarettes and / / blue soap, asked before entering, stopped / when I cried hurt.” Later in the poem, he tells her, “I just wanted to give you / a sneak peek, a head start.” We really begin to understand the speaker's pain with “What I Did IV.” After getting her first period, she lies naked in a stagnant green pool, pretending to be drowned, hoping a monster would “drag me under and seal my legs / shut into one glamorous tail, to cover / the worst part of me with scales.” In later poems, the speaker becomes her mother by giving “the best of my body’s / new beauty to boys / in basement bedrooms.” The first two sections of the book take us through the hell of this life, the third, into the hell of regrets. These poems, collectively, are an apology to a younger sister for cruelties, rejection, and abandonment. Through them, we feel the depth of the speaker’s regret, though we will never know if there will be forgiveness. But the collection ends with a hint of hope. In “Invitation,” the speaker extends a casual invitation to her sister. She promises not to “say, yes, it’s true, your father,” but instead, “warm / silence here, a smile, a gesture. I’ll say, / pass the popcorn, dork-o, and you’ll smile.” Intaglio By Adriana-sophia M. Kartsonis, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. A Secret Room in Fall By Maria Terrone, Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry Press, 2006. Reviewed by Patricia Crane Intaglio, an art form and a process defined by what has been removed, is an apt title for this collection of poems that contend with “the art of losing just enough.” From the perspectives of place, heritage and the complicated bonds between mothers and daughters, Kartsonis reveals how an identity, generations of identities, can be formed by the negative spaces carved out by loss. How “you are what you are not / an image in relief,” relief as art and emotion: poetry and reprieve. If the speaker’s grandmother is the intaglio’s engraved surface, then the speaker is the grandmother’s reverse imprint, both being made from “a composite of loss.” The grandmother, “widow to so much” when she “married misery buttoned-up,” is bereft of romantic love, a life fully lived, and ultimately her sanity. And the speaker is bereft of a grandmother who dies two separate deaths: a spiritual/emotional one, then the physical one much later. These poems inhabit the contrast between suffering and beauty, the one giving the other contour, where cancer is an unwanted paramour, a flamenco dancer with “his fingers spidering down my spine” and where the signature of a student who tragically dies turns

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magical, a “bitter abracadabra.” Kartsonis conflates image and emotion in a way that intensifies as well as softens the pain: I ache therefore I am. From lyrical to colloquial—from “there is this heron in a hush of lift / and my eyes are filled with it” to that which “bitch-slaps the heart”—and from spare to rich excess, there are no arguments with language’s inadequacies. On the contrary, Kartsonis embraces its shortcomings by layering and accruing images and her responses to them until the languagepicture holds, as with the “suede-bodied…half-honey colored” men of Turkey whose eyes are “like gold-lit-afternoon-lichen-mossy-forests.” One gets the sense of a speaker wholly in love with language, trusting it as both trigger and guide, where words are bridges of sound she crosses to find her way from playful experimentation to deeper meaning: “erosion eros broken down / to its elemental grind…erose one bite mark / shaped like a bitter moon;” or “Cisterna: “Well / Sister / there / will / be / water…. This body of yours is mostly water. / This body, Sister, / is called a field. This field, Sister, / has known floods and fires.” Living the full, wide-awake life her grandmother forsook, the speaker pushes through her own resistances (“I don’t really want to talk about her death”) using poetry, her process and her art, to maybe find relief: “Inside there is a chaos of sound, a crowd / of hateful voices… But in the heaven I’d invent for you there is silence.” But even the dead are given voice, in the forms of Marina Tsvetayeva and her daughter Ariadna, whose complicated relationship deepens this intaglio’d study, as when the mother who took her own life says to the child: “I tried to leave you the way / dew leaves the olive leaves.” Intaglio, an impression which “by design yields a cameo afloat,” hovering like the body’s final sigh, a bridge over which survivors walk hand in hand with the doomed, “through beauty so / sharp it sighs /--and we sigh back.” In relief. Or “re-leaf what a good tree does.” * Through the lenses of history and art, Maria Terrone’s A Secret Room in Fall looks at what we have made of the world, in the process reminding us how accountable we are for what we turn away from or allow ourselves to forget. In many of the poems, time telescopes inward, so the past is surrounded by and conflated with the present. In “Blood Oranges,” the immediacy of the fruit’s “uncanny sweetness” is intensified by the thwarted expectation that “a thousand years of conquest” would “produce a bitter taste,” such deep-red flesh like “blood spilled / and dried in history’s shadow.” And in “Forum Romanus,” “obelisks, arches, columns, etched / with the names of gods and emperors” are the infrastructure for the less solid image of a speaker pondering her own journey juxtaposed with that of her immigrant forbears: an ocean crossing amid “the souls of slaves / who once chiseled, hauled and hefted // each slab onto the next,” but whose spirits “now roam free.” Ekphrastic in both the contemporary and classical sense, these poems derive not only from works of art—a Steichen photograph, a still life by Picasso, a thirteenth century illuminated manuscript—but also from things, people, experiences, memories, and even ideas—a curbside telephone, a remembered scene inside a doll factory, an alternate perspective on String Theory. With painterly precision, a musical ear, and a refusal to look away from society’s darker side, Terrone stretches her vision toward new vantage points. In “Glass and Pitcher,” she turns Picasso’s still life into anything but: the “lurid violet” of a bruised morning in 1944 Paris where “the pitcher salutes with its handle” and outside the

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door “commandants of the Third Reich / snap to life in cafes, / demanding their bread and knives.” An undercurrent of female strength moves through this collection—women staring down convention and resisting expectation—from an escape-artist Egyptian queen who “gives death the slip” to a modern-day Rapunzel who responds to a prince’s desire to free her with “I am free”; to Pilate’s wife, Cassandra, who confides: “He ruled, but I had his ear.” Terrone doesn’t elegize the dispossessed, unheard, unheralded, uprooted, or oppressed so much as pay homage to their collective resilience. Like the ‘Immigrant Seamstress’ in “Artist ‘Anon’” “whom steerage nearly tore to tatters” and for whom “all doors are locked and exits blocked,” who nonetheless sees, instead of the thousands of tiny dark beads she must stitch onto an opera-goer’s black cloak, a flock of starlings swooping over her homeland fields. Or the exiled, fallen-down drunk sailor in “Etcher of Scrimshaw,” who overcomes his loneliness by carving an image of his wife and son on bone—“amazing, / how the homesick heart/ can guide the improbable hand.” Terrone’s “secret room” is a place of retreat where ex-pats offer tea and advice, along with “the keys to your own concealment.” Where summer has ended and the turning inward begins. A place from which to look out at the world and think about what is concealed from us, what we conceal from each other and ourselves. It’s a roomful of voices filtered through a single one taking stock of this “dense, resplendent cargo” we call the here and now. Autobiomythography & Gallery By Joe Millar. New York, NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2007. The First Noble Truth By Steve Kowit. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2007. Reviewed by Jim Natal Joe Millar’s Autobiomythography & Gallery is two books in one: the former a full-length poetry collection (Millar’s first), with the latter effectively an attached chapbook of a long sequence read by turning the book horizontally. Millar’s work is an intriguing and wondrous cabinet of poetic curiosities that was short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets prize, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. At times lyrical and philosophical, other times dense and occasionally obscure, it is always marvelously inventive and worth any effort it may take to unravel it. The poetry in the main “Autobiomythography” section is ripe with thing-ness beyond metaphor. “The smell of an orange blossom gives voice to the blossom,” Millar writes in “Labor Under Curse: For Jason.” The poet’s cat “folds up and sleeps in the opulence of brain…Seeming both the pattern / and the thing itself, he is even more / than that, being also an idea…” Or this in “Listen:Conch”: “That growing-into thing, motion. How it relies on / everything else around in order to be itself, dragging us about, / as if that-which-it-is, so as to become that-which-it-will-be / needs no instruction other than resistance.” Millar’s intense pondering of existence becomes the reader’s, in some instances forcing the poems to be put on pause while the full implications of what has just been asserted are weighed. Consider: “Imagination may one day prove to be the last religion”; “It is easy to forget you have to do something wrong to be forgiven.”; “Nature’s mistake was creating /

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its own weaknesses, and all things are made in the likeness of that divorce.”; “Reality is just Time slipping / on a skin.”; and “We are the idea of ourselves driven into being. / Our bodies fit to form as we create the patterns. / All mirrors are wrong. There is no such thing as imitation.” Millar, who grew up along the Space Coast of Florida, brings to his poetry the diverse sensory swirl of that environment. This is poetry of place drawn with a native’s keen vision and deep appreciation, as this from “Memory of the Body (V)”: Because there is still music, in the brush, along the bends of Turkey Creek, where I was married. Within the hollow docks of Eau Gallie, the rock jetty of Sebastian Inlet, the days of rain and how the ocean swifts over the beaches, the swamps and marshes of the lower basins, and within the memory of each, and sometimes on the phone, and sometimes in bad weather. Lovely little gems of observation and insight are sown into the poems here like the tomato seeds in “On that Brief Happy Sorrow”: All day I’ve been pushing tomato seeds under the blackred dirt with my thumb knowing that the morning rain will draw them upward with a kind of antigravity and leave them to die bare in the sun. I continue pushing them down. It is enough to imagine that the seeds take hold of the few deep drops and make unto themselves, themselves. In other poems “birds rise from chorus to afterimage,” “Stars loiter like pennies in a well,” tobacco smolders with “a streamlined, hysterical blue wing of smoke,” a hurricane “begins by blowing sandpipers sideways…rain plowing roads with the opposite of nihilism,” the moon is “the flashing bottom of a pail in darkness,” a river runs “the color of cheap liquor,” and hopes are “like inchworms in the creases of my palm.” Such is the richness to be found in Millar’s often extended lines. References to other poets and writers shimmer like bonefish in the flats: there’s Wallace Stevens’ Key West; William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow becomes a red pickup truck “that jumps the curb, / careening headlong through a chickenwire fence”; “Ode from an Apprentice” and “Brunch With Mrs. Edwards” recall “Positively 4th Street/Like a Rolling Stone”-era Bob Dylan putdowns, yet also a Browning portrait; “Change again. Do it again. / You must lose your lives / to live one” echoes Rilke (and Beckett); and the title poem “Autobiomythography” reads like a condensed neo-noirish James Sallis or Elmore Leonard novel. But Millar’s voice is most definitely his own, as is his “heart made of words.”

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* Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover—at least by the cover art selected for it. Gracing the front of Steve Kowit’s new collection The First Noble Truth, winner of the Tampa Poetry Prize, is a sumi-e brush painting of a Zen monk patriarch leaning against a tiger. Both monk and tiger are seemingly asleep, but within each resides a powerful potentiality that full wakefulness will bring. And that concept—the beauty and danger of being awake and alert, of living in each moment of this “one brief season on Earth” with which we are gifted—is Kowit’s strongest message here. “The world is opulent, / indifferent, undeceitful,” he writes in “The Bridge.” “Still & all, its latter purposes / elude us.” Kowit paces these poems like a temple monk wielding a bamboo stick, reminding harried and distracted readers with the whack of a sharp line to focus on this world, this existence. “Wake up!” scolds a raven as the poet walks in reverie through the chaparral-covered hills surrounding his home near the California-Mexico border. Kowit responds with an apology and a prayer; “Forgive me, / sweet earth, for not being shaken more often / out of the heavy sleep of the self.” Don’t get the impression, though, that all of the poems in this collection revolve around serious life lessons, although many do impart mature, reflective wisdom. Some pieces here, for example “The Grammar Lesson” and “The Erased” (for poets Dorianne Laux and W.S. Merwin, respectively), are literally poetry lessons, echoing Kowit’s well-respected teaching manual, In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. The contemplative “Snapshot,” intentionally verbose “Invocation to My Muses,” and sly “Translator’s Note” can’t help but bring a smile to anyone who’s ever attempted writing poetry in any language. The poems in the collection are peopled with immensely disparate characters, among them Eurydice, Bishop Berkeley, harried Dagwood Bumstead, and jazz greats Ella Fitzgerald and Dexter Gordon. In “Personality Parade,” Richard and Pat Nixon “pas-de-deux into the bedroom, / popping their heads out once through the doorway / by way of a finale,” and “The Girls of Malibu” on X-Rated Las Vegas hotel-room TV breathlessly assert that they’d do “I mean, well, almost anything.” And there’s a lovely reminiscence, too, of a soon-to-belost love named Marilyn that’s braided in time with the death of a more famous Marilyn, “who had swallowed pills & killed herself. / Everything became at once immensely vivid, the way it feels / when you step from a darkened theater into the astonishing / glare of an ordinary afternoon . . .” Using almost conversational language, Kowit travels from the Brooklyn of his youth, to Florida, the Arizona desert, and south to Ecuador (“Pomasqui. / Directly on the equator. Latitude zero.”). He slips from still-troubling moments of his past to, particularly in the final section of the book, epiphanies of his present. And as for that “First Noble Truth” of the title? When it—and its promise of future suffering—is revealed to Kowit’s young students, they exhibit a classic range of responses, from uneasy acceptance to outraged denial circumscribed by the classroom clock, which eventually will “release the slew of us back / into this piercingly rapturous, inexplicably marvelous world—world / that is everywhere freighted with sorrow.” Carnal Fragrance By Florence Weinberger. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2004.

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Reviewed by David Oliveira Florence Weinberger’s Carnal Fragrance is a smart and important book. The reader is caught first, and foremost, by the tone of these poems. The language is direct and spare, without play to sentiment or pity. This is all the more remarkable because the subject is the poet’s reflections surrounding the decease of her husband, Ted, of cancer. Though the living and dead husband is addressed in almost all these poems, the poems are, in fact, exquisite soliloquies in which the poet severely examines her every attitude and response to the circumstances of his illness and death with candid, often surprising, insight—the husband’s death comes barely a third of the way into the text, leaving some forty pages in which to ponder the hauntingly universal and ultimate question, “How did this happen, my love?” Arranged chronologically, the poems begin with the troubling sign of a “button the color of dirty blood” on the husband’s thigh and end with a poem that commemorates the anniversary of his death. Despite the subject matter, it would be a mistake to relegate this book to the shelf of tractates on the throes of death and dying. Death, like love, is certainly the province of poetry, and neither shelf is likely to break under the weight any time soon. However, it is also within poetry’s mandate to offer illumination, wisdom, guidance, comfort and transcendence, and it is on these shelves which this book deservedly belongs. Most books about the death of a loved one follow a recognizable, if not predictable, course. This is to say, the elegiac sentimentality with which the beloved is swathed in dignity and courage often renders the corpse unrecognizable to all save the family pet. That Weinberger avoids the impulse to idealize her husband in death is as much a tribute to her artistry as to her fierce honesty. For example, the poem, “Pain in the Morning” begins with the eloquently gorgeous line, “You said the pain is sweetest at dawn,” then confronts the thin boundary between reportage and artifice in the next stanza: . . . You say none of these things. They are not even my dream, they are made-up lines, as if the pain is mine to play with. I can smooth your face. I can take the chronic ache in my right hip And move it around . . . Love is also here, to be sure, though it is not the love that would be recognized easily by a generation whose every argument over whether to put anchovies on the pizza might end up in a divorce court. This is the long term love of the long time married, the worn vocabulary of affection often sounding more like bicker than “I love you.” In the starkly frank poem “It Began,” Weinberger recounts the couple’s wrangle over going to see the doctor: “ . . . One denies, one badgers. One postpones, / one shrugs. Both are afraid.” The poet’s skills are on full display in this book: words, carefully chosen; rhythms, elegant; puns, clever; rhymes, subtle; allusions, sensual. These are poems written by someone in full command of her craft as well as her subject. Yet it is the poet’s courageous decision to bare her own failings and culpability that makes these poems praiseworthy and valuable. Time and again the poet thwarts expectation to take us to a new complexity of understanding. That both the author and reader are left bereft is the genius of this book. What makes Carnal Fragrance so extraordinary is that it will be remembered long after the reading.

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Land of Stone By Karen Chase. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Reviewed by Lee Romney “The mute heart of this work is metaphor,” Karen Chase notes of her collaborative poetry sessions with mentally ill patients on locked psychiatric wards: And it is through metaphor that her compelling narrative unfolds. Recently bereaved by the death of her mother, Chase begins a two-year duet with a strikingly handsome nearly-mute young man at Rosedale, a large psychiatric hospital outside New York City where she spent a decade as poet-in-residence. Land of Stone is the story of Ben’s slow emergence from a protective prison of silence. Theirs is a ritual of sameness, granting safety through the rhythm of habit. They sit on the same porch weekly, handing the same lined pad of paper back and forth. Chase writes a line; Ben writes a line; Chase writes a line; Ben writes a line. Key to the process is a firewall that Chase constructs between the poetic process and the therapeutic one. In the hospital, Ben and other patients are relentlessly pressed to recount personal experience, just as Chase has been pressed to “talk” about her own mother’s death. But in an increasingly confessional culture, talk is not what either Ben nor Chase are seeking. Through poetry, Chase grants Ben privacy and dignity—a rare commodity for the pathologized mentally ill—teaching him to express himself behind the “veil of metaphor.” She and Ben riff together like jazz musicians on “the third thing”—an object or concept she often introduces as a launching point for their sessions. “I am a stone (K) / a stone is good (B) / it sits on a field (K) / it never worries (B) / it never dreams (K) / it always comes through (B) / in any weather (K) / everything is always fine with it (B),” their first collaboration, begun with a stone from Chase’s pocket, reads, each line’s initials denoting its author. Over time, we see a flowering as Ben moves from the stiff harbor of the present tense toward the past and future and a semblance of storytelling, complete with personal pronouns and changing landscapes. Weather and color are his central metaphors as he navigates internal storms toward “the talking world.” As his writing progresses, he begins to speak, replacing his monotone lexicon of “No,” “Yes, “Everything’s fine,” with a more descriptive truly collaborative style of dialogue. In their last session together, they write: “There are moments / when everything goes slow. (B) / We have held on to that pace (K) / huge spans of time occur (B) / like bridges (K) / when the sun sets it takes a long time (B) / to disappear (K).” Chase, too, unfolds before us. Her pull toward the statuesque Ben, she discovers to her own surprise, is informed by a largely repressed personal trauma—of paralysis from polio as a girl and her long subsequent hospitalization. Ben is frozen mentally, while Chase experienced a physical freezing. Fully five years after their collaboration she realizes that she, too, was writing behind the veil. For herself as for Ben, poetry was “the alchemist,” Chase observes, embodying what Donald Hall called “the whole of experience—because it combines in the same syllables abstract thought, historical allusion, dream, recollection, thigh and mouth.” Through this alchemy, Ben and Chase transform before us. Their voices are no longer solitary—or, as one Rosedale patient told Chase, when one’s poems are read by others, one is no longer “a small purple light going on and off in the snow that no one sees.”

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Paper Children By Mariana Marin, translated by Adam J. Sorkin. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007. Reviewed by Martin Woodside The repressive tenure of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu resulted in decades of brutal poverty and isolation for the Romanian people; ironically, these same bleak years represented something of a golden era for the nation’s poetry. Mariana Marin stood out as one the most promising among a group of young poets who emerged in 1980s Romania, publishing a pair of books before Ceauşescu’s fall in 1989 and two more afterwards. Paper Children, with translations by the prolific Adam Sorkin (and occasional collaborators), collects much of Marin’s later work, including many poems that were suppressed during Ceaşescu’s regime, and it represents the first book length collection of her work in English. One of the strongest entries in Ugly Duckling’s Eastern European Poets series, Paper Children serves as a powerful introduction to Marin’s lean, bruising lyricism. Her language is precise and keen, stripped free of pretension or excess, and her voice nurses a fierce energy, suffusing the lyrics here with a spectral power. Marin’s strongest work is often her starkest, distilling complex emotional dynamics with compacted intensity. This is especially true of the elegies collected in the book’s middle section. Pared down to their narrative core, these brief lyrics confront love and death without any sense of sentimentality, assessing loss and longing with brute honesty and willful defiance. In Elegy XIX, the speaker asks, How can you say you know nothing, remember nothing about the needle in the heart, the damp sawdust of the mornings when you still existed, when you stubbornly kept on existing? Marin’s voice persists, fighting through these elegies, gaining strength and resolution from the desperation and fear saturating this bleak emotional landscape. She confronts uncertainty with insight and verve, as seen in the dark eroticism of Elegy XII: All night long death lay between my breasts. But between you and me (so to speak) will forever be a Europe or Red Sea. The Language in which I conceive the word death is not the language in which I receive the word love. The speaker in these poems commits to language as a lifeline, using it to live through, to write and wait through, the rough seasons. The poems collected here are haunted with seasons, with memory and loss, and they feed off these emotions, off the power of imagination to sustain and endure. In “The Chess Match,” Marin uses the titular metaphor

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to summon a compelling vision of emotional stasis, “All that torrid summer / we would wait for the return of the language written under the eyelids,” and the refrain returns later, “All that torrid summer / I would dream of a suicidal corrida.” The music ebbs and flows through these verses, as the speaker wills herself forward: a frozen intensity thawing slowly and brilliantly before the reader’s eyes. After Ceauşescu’s fall, Marin split her time between Paris and Bucharest. These were unhappy years, punctuated by the poet’s struggle with alcoholism and tuberculosis. Despite these troubles, the poet continued writing and publishing until her premature death in 2003. In “Nachtlied,” she invokes one of her poetic influences, clinging stubbornly again to the power of language and imagination to nurture and sustain. From time to time I remember the trees on which Mandelstam wrote his poems the last year of his life. How did they regain their vegetal rhythm after the poet’s death? What kind of leaves did they grow? And the writing, that writing, how has it preserved through all the winters? The Clean Shirt of It By Paulo Henriques Britto. Translated by Idra Novey. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone By Anne Moschovakis. New York, NY: Turtle Point Press, 2006. Red Studio By Mary Cornish. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2007. Reviewed by Sarah Maclay “Night is careful with its accomplices,” writes Paulo Henriques Britto in a poem simply titled “Sonnet.” “Like an enormous complacent courtesan / it welcomes insomnia and understands / all kinds of urges, every sort of fraudulence.” These are lines that stop me in my tracks. “Death waits in the insignificance of a plum tart” is his opening volley, the first line of “Prior Evening,” gateway to all that follows in The Clean Shirt of It, Britto’s first book to appear in English translation, brought to us hand-in-glove by translator Idra Novey. Writing often in sonnets and “quasi-sonnets,” Britto gives us poems of gargantuan openness, small as a compact, swirling into occasional sestinas or longer sectioned poems. A glance at the facing Spanish versions makes clear that these poems quite often rhyme, but for quite some time it didn’t occur to me that something might be afoot beyond an entirely striking free verse. This is in part due to the slant and subtlety of the chosen English counterpart rhymes but also, I think, because, line to line, the progress of these poems is so arresting that the attention must stay on what is being said and the way each successive moment modifies it. Here’s an example from “Nocturne”:

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In sleep, the night grows clear. (Outside, the furniture creaks, circumspect.) There is a letter. Somebody makes a gesture —but no, this wasn’t the gesture, and the face opposite is no longer what it was. These are poems I find I want to memorize, and they could be, fairly easily. They’re brief enough, sectioned enough, short-lined enough, and, as I’ve discovered, often have their own sonic mnemonics. And yet, even memorized, they’d not give up their mystery, since “Even the world doesn’t fit / within the slender space / consigned to it.” The heart of these poems lies below both words and objects in a way that could easily bear out that old Taoist notion: “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao,” though perhaps this inflection of necessary silence comes more to Britto through Stoicism: “In every object: a dark nook. / In every nook: an emptiness.” In every case, “Between the word and the thing / a leap over nothing.” These are poems that quiet me. They make me laugh. But then the light changes, or the hour deepens, and they’re very serious. Even tender. They unfold like origami. They are deft. And as in origami, it’s only a fold or two that can change everything. Their gestures hinge exactly on these folds: Pastoral The tuba player wrings a grimy and crusted music from the intestines of the metal. The trees, unaccustomed, all shiver at the guttural sound. (So virginal are they.) With the brusque gesture of its shoulders, the sky, blue and perfectly clean, repels the hoarse notes lifting weakly into flight, and the notes crash, corpulent vultures struck from the air. Indifferent, the tuba player stops, spits, and plays on.

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Even the expectation gap between the title and the first line is a cause for the celebration of irony. I’m reminded that, in Latin, “verse” derives from “turn.” But the turn, beyond the volta we’d expect to occur in a sonnet about two thirds of the way through, or perhaps at the moment of a heroic couplet, is a multiple force in these poems—most of them turn not just once or twice but at every line, mirroring a constantly alert attention, mining, as here, the possibilities for surprise and play that are given in the slight visual delays of enjambment. Even the book as a whole is put together like origami, organized in a series of turns, each new fold of the paper revealing more slyly what animal it is that’s actually in our presence. The mind of these poems is wide-ranging but the diction is simple; therefore, they seem to be simple, but are not. In fact, the phrase “deceptively simple” could have been invented as a response to these poems. Everything about the presentation here is modest, unassuming —Britto gazes at us like some Brazilian Gerard Depardieu, with a wan/wry smile, simply direct, neither overwhelmingly extroverted or shy, in a t-shirt. Every gesture this book makes resists hype, down to its design. Rather than blurbs on the back, there is an excerpt from Novey’s intro. We learn of Britto’s lack of affiliation with any particular movement and of his discovery, in the states, of Whitman and Dickinson. Rock—for instance, Jim Morrison— and the political schisms of the 60s and 70s also paved the way for these poems, as did his extensive reading and translation. The embrace of both abstraction and play may be a bow to Stevens; the sense of moment-to-moment inclusiveness, to Ashbery; size and occasional riddling may recall Emily D., and in their deft willingness to subtly converge with some underlying form, perhaps there’s an echo of Bishop finding her own long way to a villanelle. But none of this comes near to penetrating the curious power of these poems—the power they have to floor us—which is like the power of a seashell as its darkness curves and opens into a point of origin we’ll never know. Here’s what I do know: these poems are trustworthy, perfectly unsettling, quietly confident in their acrobatic ability to turn a moment on its head, to shift no less than everything. * “Heroes, typically, are drunk. Drunk on logs and floral dresses and on mud.” So begins the first in a series of “Thought Experiments” in Anna Moschovakis’s insouciant and daring debut, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone. Each of the five prose-poetic experiments begins with a title referencing a footnote that might (or might not) be explanatory, but will certainly be, at least, amusing, as it encourages the illusion of helpful explanation just before dropping us into enough self-befuddlement to question the custom of looking for explanation. There’s also good advice: “Stop counting,” she says, in her second of six “Preparations,” “There are no billionaires / of sensation.” Moschovakis begins as a playful and brilliant practitioner of logopoeia, what Pound called “the dance of the intellect among words.” A dance of logic may sound oxymoronic. But with Anna Moschovakis, logopoeia meets Gene Kelly. And also George and Jack: Day 1 Enter George looking like an engraving 239

Enter Jack who looks like Hell People take things so literally want them pinned to the wall George with his fine penmanship Jack with his bottle One said God I am your midwife One said God I am your wife The scholars are climbing walls and tearing out their hair You’re going to hell, said George Location, location, location Said Jack. Even without knowing that the George and Jack are based on poets flung across centuries into the same poem, this is typically playful, refreshing, and “high concept” (as one would say in Hollywood). The George and Jack in question turn out to be Herbert and Spicer— surreally well suited as a couple for this mental dance form and also as foils against and between and beyond which Moschovakis can test her aesthetics. Embedded in this wackiness are serious existential quandaries geared toward forcing a new take, largely through the use of non sequitur. In “The Blue Book,” each serial entry a set of roughly twenty-six declarative, end-stopped sentences that could be true or false, Moschovakis splices phrases and themes to disrupt coherence and further enlarge context. Sex, and questions about, are thematic, and gather particular humor and weight when skewed with seemingly off-topic partners: Sex is a noun that can be both active and descriptive. A view of sunlight filtering through trees can seem corny or kitsch. Sex seems to retain the ability to be experienced non-ironically. This may be due to the doubling inherent in sex with another person. The choreography is extended through such topics as dreaming, chess, and the concepts of progress, narrative and character (“It is tempting to see human behavior in terms of character”), with reprises reserved for such phrases as “sunlight filtering through trees.” The result is a series of concepts in conversation with one another, proving themselves true or false to greater or lesser degrees depending on what statement happens to jostle them next. But humor turns toward something much more visceral. “Preparations” ends with the words “Let go.” From “Dependence Day Parade” on, the poems do just that, enacting, even

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more radically, the way “They say / Experience is fragmented / These days” while critiquing, in bursts of rushed observation, (A Brief History of American Dependence: one touchy subject led to another touchy subject and we talked about it while sitting on our hands). While not entirely abandoning humor as a strategy, “The Dead Man Looks Into His Own Dead Ear,” a cri de coeur which would make for a surreal call and response with Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, reads as a generational warning, demanding from anyone not yet dead a different kind of listening—not just to the poem but to an array of experiences feeding a sense of genuine emergency and urgency. “Winter Songs” continue in this vein. How this feels: it’s as though all of the brightly colored triangular flags suspended merrily over a used car lot have suddenly been caught in a hurricane and are being shredded, in unstopping wind, across both land- and sky-scapes. The systematic working of logic and its intentional skewing has been allowed to give way to something more like passion so intense that it defies coherence, though not momentary coherences. The movement of this book is from laughter to gasp, even as the clouds “remain at a rubbery remove.” “Uniqueness,” says Moschovakis, “has lost its uniqueness,” but her work here proves that notion false by logic of exception and example: it is utterly unique. * I have not yet quite adjusted to the gorgeousness of this book: aptly and suggestively named Red Studio, it comports itself in imagery as saturated, as vivid as a Matisse—if Matisse had painted silk, if silk had been his paint. It is also vibrantly brave. In the same breath, debuting author Mary Cornish’s exercise of restraint at key moments is a reminder of why, as Jon Anderson put it, “the secret of poetry is cruelty”—by this, meaning the discipline to subtract, so that what remains, haunts: Conversations with Death Often, you don’t speak at all, the surfaces of the days are cool as mirrors. Then, your face stitched to a linen shroud sees me brushing my hair, says Look at my curls. Once a woman rode my husband like a bull. Still I feel the whip of her breasts, his need for ruin.

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Stone bird, you sharpen your beak, one claw in me, the other on a wheel that rolls— My children reached the wall of the world and couldn’t enter. Always, their songs are cradles. Your voice says Look at my lips. Cornish is a poet of steep beauty who has learned that if she wants “the blooms to last,” she needs to “scald the stems / of roses, hold an orange poppy to a match / until the milk burns in the flame.” She’s learned, like masters of “The Laws of Japanese Painting,” that “A stroke has the strength of a cliff / when painting the cliff.” But she has also learned to abandon the more rigid of these laws if, say, a high-contrast hue juxtaposition, a la the Impressionists, is better for her art. If “The nude is never painted,” it is all the more startling to find, in the very next poem (“The Lane”), how Left alone with his dead body, I took off my husband’s socks, put my face on his feet. Unbuttoned his shirt, pulled down his pants, stroked and kissed the legs, chest, penis. There was nothing I did not want to hold, although in death his body had let go, the way I’d heard it did if a man were hanged. There was nothing that did not smell human. . . . The use of high contrast continues in “Lotus Feet,” as we see how far a lover will go to keep “the way a silken helplessness arrives, ripe / as a plum . . .” when the ritual of foot-binding, if that’s what it takes to maintain allure, nearly erodes any other kind of transport: “my feet are hooks / the delicate hooves of deer.” Paint and painting pervade this book, in image, in metaphor. But as the poet learns “how God enters,” not as a gentle benediction but “When the Arno broke its banks, / God entered as a river, left His mark high / above the altar,” we come to understand that this is also a metaphor for the force of death, for having to accept the lingering aftereffects. And so even though the book itself is a project of “Restoration,” even the experience of color comes into question. “Red isn’t always red / the way the bottom of a boat / is red, especially where it meets / a green lake.” Nothing is conventional about the mourning we witness in this book. It’s as though, instead, the need to grieve has been pushed under the soil, like a seed, so that it could emerge as a field of lush and fiercely purple iris, wild in its elegance and deeply hued. Framed in the rich experience of a practicing artist, borrowing from Egyptian and Asian rituals of death, ferocious in its willingness not to run from the strength of the erotic connection that defines the relationship with the once-living husband, the poems in this collection are as suffused as this “Tattoo”:

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All night, ink blooms while I sleep. The needle sings. It’s making a garden under my skin. On either thigh, a peony, its heavy head like yours between my legs. A flush of pink along the petals, my body aroused. For years I knew you like this. And still, the bond continues. “There’s an arc / between the living and the dead.” It is not marked by a ring but by something closer to a piercing, present as “Light rain: the grass a kind of bride, / breathless against the earth.”

Puppet Wardrobe Daniel Tiffany. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2006.

Monochords By Yannis Ritsos. Translated by Paul Merchant. Portland, OR & Hereford, England: Trask House Books and Five Seasons Press, 2007. Reviewed by Jackson Wheeler In the last twenty years some poets have emerged and gained deserved attention for what I call, for lack of a better phrase, “beautiful writing.” Among those poets I count David St. John, Mark Doty, and Elena Karina Byrne, writers for whom poetry becomes the raw material which is then woven, hammered, sculpted, spun, and made, through alchemy, into unexpected beauty. I add Daniel Tiffany to the list after having read his collection, Puppet Wardrobe. This is a poet with an unimpeachable ear, exquisitely honed by his knowledge of Greek, French and Italian; (Tiffany has published translations of Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and Cesare Pavese) and a vivid imagination. Mr. Tiffany’s poems delight the eye, the mind’s eye, and the ear. The poems in the book are in different named sections: “Arcade Model,” “Hard Nicknamey System,” “Shivaree” and “Blow Book.” His juxtaposition of words and phrases invite the reader into what might at first be a private joke, perhaps in the title of the section or the individual poem, and yet hold the reader at bay with obscure and fantastical references: a cushion is “merganserfilled and vaguely Russian.” Small waves lap on a “shingle beach.” The reader is asked to imagine a great many things, given the titles of the poems: “Nothing But Bonfires,” “Werewolf In Selvage,” “A Pretty Echo From the Ruin,” “Milk Mustache,” and “Sappho’s Tantrum,” to name a few – and sometimes, just sometimes, I believed I had made the 243

connection between title and poem, although more than once I returned to the poem mystified. For example, the poem “Flash, Etc” from the “Hard Nicknamey System” section of the book which I include in its entirety: Way back in the back he found the last bit of human cargo: tin-lipped and pale as the living dust on a moth’s wing, a busted zenith, god all over the floor. This poem continues to mystify. I was drawn to the slang of “a busted zenith, god / all over the floor.” I then realized, rightly or wrongly (I have not consulted Mr. Tiffany) that the busted zenith might very well be an old television and “god all over the floor” is simply the exasperation of finding something in a mess; and there in this very brief poem the image of the dust, the “living dust on a moth’s wing.” The beauty of that image summoned all sorts of thoughts and associations and immediately swept me into a memory of the wonder of the experience of holding a moth and being astonished at the delicate powder on my hands. Tiffany replicates this poetic sleight of hand time and time again, much to my delight. Many of the poems in the “Shivaree” section are composed as though they might be lines in a play, with lines assigned to a variety of voices, from Lord Byron to characters named Old Sultan, Flower-de-Luce, Tragic Mulatto, 20471120, and the funny Upset Kitty, Plank o wude and Vague Adam. Eventually the speakers of the poems are reduced in number and to representation by letters only; Lord Byron becomes LB and Flower-de-Luce becomes FDL. They are the voices of the last poem, “Fume Terre,” in the “Shivaree” section. I found these poems to be the most obscure and for me the least satisfying although individual lines emerged which clung to memory like the words to a childhood rhyme, “Old Sultan: He never traveled but in a map” or “Old Sultan: I have often lingered a minute on the stile / to hear the wood pigeons clapping their wings / among the dark oaks.” The format seems to be a series of non-sequiturs, which compels the reader to consider each line carefully, and perhaps that is point, to learn to hang onto the every word. Throughout the collection there are both obvious and subtle references to magic, fantastical creatures, magicians, and a palpable eroticism all pulled together in the last section of Puppet Wardrobe, “Blow Book,” by the shimmery glaze of Georges Bataille’s fascination with a darker experience of sexuality involving prostitutes and pornography where, in “White Dialogues de Mundo,” “ the magical ‘perforated strap’ / leant by Aphrodite to be worn talking / trash and get him bridled seen… for I have known people who: / + take hot or cold baths / + pinch themselves.” And again in “Fairy Chasm,” “–it takes hours / to waste its sweetness on the desert air / and hours before your body consents / to be touched, or touched again, / and so coaxed / to knife the pilot, / to queer the flight.…” Fittingly, the last poem in the collection is entitled “The New Pornography.” This is beauty of a difficult type. It is a beauty which astonishes with unexpected visual images and word juxtapositions; it is the beauty words possess in the hands of a real maker. * This slim volume, translated by Paul Merchant, is a love letter, in much the same fashion that Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a love letter which introduces a 244

great master of lovemaking to his/her apprentice. In the succinct, scholarly introduction Paul Merchant establishes Ritsos’ place in the pantheon of great modernist poets, and links him to the singular voice of Constantine Cavafy. Monochords is a collection of three hundred thirty-six one line poetic statements which were written, approximately ten per day, during a single month in 1979. From the Greek these one line poems become, at times, two and three sentences in English, containing whole worlds. Each numbered utterance stands alone and if there is any link it is a link the reader must forge with the observed world: #3 “A white horse in a yellow field.” #33 “Sunshine. The café. A Bicycle. Broken windows.” Others take on the tone of aphorisms, saws, wise sayings, and platitudes. For example: #39 “They sing better with their eyes closed.” #44 “And who ever sang well with their mouths closed?” #158 “To find the past, you have to go ahead a long way;” and finally #54 “Even in the depth of the abyss, gratitude.” Others take on a more surreal tone: #1 “With a bird for a pillow, I lie awake night after night.” #14 “In their shoes banana skins and aspirins.” #125 “He breathes lovingly into the rose’s ear.” #209 “A pale sleepwalker, wearing a red chrysanthemum.” Others appear to be a code for the years of surveillance, imprisonment, and exile: #23 “The heroes pissed on the corner of the street under the thin moon.” #25 “I mistook this tree for a man. I didn’t laugh.” #41 “A good mask, myth, in troubled times.” #60 “Blood in the foundations of every bridge.” #78 “Later the strip search of the corpses begins.” #123 “Did you see the freed prisoner’s bundle on the garden chair?” #269 “You who know what is hidden between statues and words, should bear witness some day.” Others are hymns to poetry, a recurring topic: #4 “The words left out of the poem are scared.” #16 “I saw you, and remembered poems.” #65 “How can the flag and the poem be twins?” After a while the reader begins to make combinations, to link these lines—like an exercise in Found Poetry, where the associations exist either on the page or in the mind of the reader who connects and assembles throughout this 66 page book, or perhaps by suggestion of Ritsos himself who salutes an early influence: #180 “In the field I found Yesenin’s cow observing a small cloud,” and a fellow contemporary, #200 “Poetry. A lost pleasure-craft, says Elytis.” Finally, Ritsos reveals his own metaphor, which adds another layer of complexity, “So you’ll know—these monochords are my keys. Take them” (#336). This little book is an elegant and eloquent introduction to this giant of modern Greek poetry and inside the book, if one is willing to accept Ritsos’ challenge, are 336 keys, and with each key something perhaps to unlock.

the totality for kids Joshua Clover. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Susan Kelly-De Witt Joshua Clover’s Totality for Kids attempts for our time what Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil attempted for his: They explore “totality”—by definition, “wholeness” but also “the state of total eclipse.”

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The self in this collection is the Individual as Society, a secret and not-so-secret club; it is also Society as Individual, Global Village—the contradictions here taken as a whole, which is to say a complete part made up of fragments, in an age when old systems are dead and we are lost among the arcades of western consumerism. In Clover’s poems spectacle has become equated with totality. The poems happen within the cities of our own making, and we hear Sartre’s clear echo here: No Exit. Using modern Paris, the city and its deconstructionist spreadsheet grids, Clover’s collection plays and replays old forms tweaked in new ways; the poems scratch the records, rev the static: poet/artist/philosopher/entertainer among the arcades of language, which is the arcade of history—everything that is, that is, that is likely adding up to isn’t. Feral Floats The Form In Heaven And Of Light The famous and the dead have learned to fall between our eyes And their forms in heaven: a philosophical eclipse Which edged them in light, like bodies in the nineteenth-century Photo plates enwrapped in their emanations and pale shrouds. They have their own cities called Necropolis and New York Built of what they are said to have said, the famous and the dead. In your gleaming imitations where the density of things Howls through the evening’s blue precincts you hurry home To practice passing drinks from mouth to mouth, you the mere, The living, lit only by a faint electricity whose mind is elsewhere. You wrote of them often, kissed one once, there is a picture Of you in your chair at the end of the century, thinking their cities Until an aura and awfulness surrounded you, a motion appearing As no motion at all, the inverse of a wave, a demonology— But there’s hope in Clover’s title. “Kids” are after all not grownups—yet. They still possess the spirit of play, the idea of the world as possibility. They’re flexible enough to invent new forms. And so Clover’s poems poke fun at themselves; they laugh, though sadly as they wander through the labyrinthine boulevards of Now: “just a few felicities / Make a movement; the kind that really should have its own comic book…And so the crowd promenaded, lacking a manifesto.” Under these poems’ urban surface, an elegiac love poem blooms. A Second View The Collected Poems. 1956-1998 By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. New York: Ecco, 2007. Reviewed by Marit MacArthur The publication of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems in English should raise the profile of a superlative 20th century Polish poet, indisputably the equal of Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. Yet longtime readers of Herbert are startled that—with 246

the exception of 71 poems translated by Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott—the volume was translated by Alissa Valles, a young and relatively unknown poet and editor. John and Bogdana Carpenter, who first brought much of Herbert’s writing into English, had no part in the project. I need not reiterate arguments for Herbert’s importance inside and outside Poland, made by, among others, Charles Simic in The New York Review of Books, Helen Vendler in The New Republic and Valles herself in The Boston Review. What no prominent reviews have done, however, is to compare the new translations to the original Polish. In Poetry, Michael Hofmann condemned Valles’s work so vociferously that other reviewers felt obliged to grant some credence to his judgment. A fine translator of German, Hofmann admits his ignorance of Polish as a “caveat,” yet—strangely for a translator—implies that such knowledge is irrelevant in passing judgment. He is attached to the Carpenters’ versions of Herbert, and feels that “there actually isn't room for different competing versions.” Except economically, this makes little sense. Paul Celan, a poet as rich and complex as Herbert, has attracted many translators in English, surely enriching our appreciation of his poetry through distinctive approaches. It is evident, without reference to the original Polish, that Valles is guilty of the occasional unidiomatic phrase in English—a regrettable flaw, given that Herbert’s Polish, in stark contrast to Miłosz’s, is very conversational—but the Carpenters are no less so. In their version of the famous “Report from a Besieged City,” the Carpenters generate such phrases as “the beginning of a plague” and “a normal hesitation of moods.” Valles improves on them with “plague broke out” and “ordinary mood swings.” And what do we find when we return to Herbert in the original Polish? That, too frequently, the Carpenters take needless liberties with his tropes and patterns in word choice, and—even allowing for the syntactic inflexibility of English compared with Polish—with his all-important syntax. The effect is distortion of Herbert’s aesthetic and semantic effects. Valles frequently remedies these flaws. Here I have space for just a few examples from “The Envoi of Mr. Cogito.” A didactic poem, it alludes to the legend of the golden fleece. In the Argonautica, the siblings Phrixus and Helle are rescued from their murderous stepmother by a flying golden ram. Helles falls off his back and dies (into the Hellespont, named for her), but Phrixus survives, lands at Colchis, and marries a king’s daughter. The ram is sacrificed, his golden fleece preserved and guarded by a dragon, until Jason—who, as an infant, barely escaped murder by a despotic king—claims it, after a long and difficult quest. For some scholars, the golden fleece is an emblem of rightful rule. Here are some lines from the Polish: Idź dokąd poszli tamci do ciemnego kresu po złote runo nicości twoją ostatnią nagrodę (ll. 1-2) --ocalałes nie po to aby życ masz mało czasu trzeba dać świadectwo bądź odważny gdy rozum zawodi bądź odważny w ostatecznym rachunku jedynie to się liczy a Gniew twój bezsilny niech będzie jak morze 247

ilekroć usłyszysz głos poniżonych i bitych (ll. 5-10) --a nagrodzą cię za to tym mają pod ręka (li. 31) --do grona twoich przodków: Gilgamesza Hektora Rolanda obrońców królestwa bez kresu i miasta popiołów Bądź wierny Idź (li. 34-36) Valles: Go where the others went before to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness your last reward --you have survived not so that you might live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when reason fails you be courageous in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts and your helpless Anger—may it be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten --for they will reward you with what they have at hand --to the company of your forefathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland the defenders of the kingdom without bounds and the city of ashes Be faithful Go The Carpenters: Go where those others went to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize --you were saved not in order to live in the final account only that is important be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous in the final reckoning only this is important and let your helpless Anger be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten --and they will reward you with what they have at hand 248

--the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes Be faithful Go In line one, Valles’s “the others” is more idiomatic than the Carpenters’ “those others,” and her addition of “before” emphasizes the sense of following a tradition of seeking liberation from foreign oppressors—important for Poles, for whom the triumph of Solidarity is tied to a poignant history of noble, tragic failures, from the 18 th century Partitions to the Warsaw Uprising. In line 34, Valles translates “przodków” as “forefathers” rather than “ancestors”; the prefix “prz” is akin to “fore” in English, and echoes “the others [who] went before” in the first line. (As a rule, Valles favors Germanic, Anglo-Saxon diction, closer to poetic idiom in English than the Latinate diction typical of the Carpenters’ translations.) The word “kresu” from line one (“limit,” “edge,” “border,” “boundary”) is also repeated in line 35. Valles closely echoes that with “bounds,” while the Carpenters’ use of “limits” obscures the sense of national borders and removes the closing repetition. Given the extreme challenges of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece, and the irony of his eventual death (he is crushed by his rotten ship, the Argo, as punishment for betraying Medea, who crucially aided him in his quest), Valles’s choices of “reward’ in the first line and “survived” in the fifth—rather than the Carpenters’ “prize” and the more passive “saved”— seem more suitable. Similarly, the noun “nagrodę” (“reward” or “prize”) from line two is echoed in line 31 with the verb “nagrodzą.” Valles preserves that ironic echo (“you” are to be punished, not rewarded) by using “reward” in both lines; the Carpenters do not. In line seven, Valles’s phrase, “reasons fails you” is both more idiomatic and a more literal translation of the Polish, “rozum zawodi.” In line eight, “rachunku” is literarily “check,” the word used for a restaurant bill, and so “account” seems apt, yet the important reflexive closing verb, “się liczy,” means “count” or “tally.” Using “account” and “count” in the same line is not an option. Rhythmically and semantically, the verb carries the weight of the line, and Valles preserves that in English with “count,” while the Carpenters replace it with the weak, wordy phrase, “only this is important.” In line nine, Valles honors Herbert’s syntax as much as possible in English; with the word order preserved, the line literarily translates as “and Anger your powerless it be like the sea.” The Carpenters’ rearrangement de-emphasizes anger, sustaining the parallel anaphora of previous lines, but in the original, Herbert’s deviation from that pattern emphasizes anger. Valles’s version carries that effect into English; the Carpenters’ does not. The Carpenters deserve tremendous credit for their work on Herbert. But in significant ways, Valles improves on their translations. In “The Envoi of Mr. Cogito” and many other poems, she is more faithful to patterns in Herbert’s word choices and their figurative subtleties, and to his syntax. Those who read Valles with an open mind—ideally, making comparisons to the original Polish—will recognize that hers is often a more authentic rendering of Herbert’s voice.

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Ad Art and Title: Contributors Notes

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Karen Barkan earned a M.F.A. in creative writing from San Diego State University in 2007. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Margo Berdeshkevsky’s collection of poetry, But a Passage in Wilderness, was published by The Sheep Meadow Press (December 2007). Her Tsunami Notebook of documentary photographs and poems was made following a journey to Sumatra in Spring 2005 to work in a survivors' clinic in Aceh. Her poetic novel, Vagrant, is next at the gate (Red Hen Press), to be followed by her illustrated short story collection, Beautiful Soon Enough. B. H. Boston work has appeared in numerous magazine and anthologies. A book of his poems, Only the Living, was published by Helix Press. Boston is currently managing editor of Poetry International at San Diego State University. A new collection of his poems, By All Lights, is forthcoming from Tebot Bach. Jericho Brown worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego. His first book is Please (New Issues, 2007). Christopher Buckley's 16th book of poetry, Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 is just out from Tupelo Press. Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California, edited with Gary Young, was published spring 2008 by Alcatraz Editions. Buckley is the 2008 recipient of the James Dickey Prize from Five Points Magazine, and he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007-2008. He teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. Derick Burleson’s latest book is Never Night (Marick Press, 2008). His first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers. Peter Campion is the author of two books of poems, Other People (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and The Lions (University of Chicago Press, 2009.) He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Civitella Ranieri Individual Artist’s Fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The editor of Literary Imagination, he is an assistant professor at Auburn University. Martha Collins’ book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006) received an AnisfieldWolf Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember” by the New York Public Library. Collins has also published four collections of poetry, a chapbook, and two volumes of co-translated poems by Vietnamese poets. A second chapbook, Sheer, is forthcoming from Barnwood in 2008.

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Patty Crane’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Kalliope, RUNES, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, and West Branch. She is currently writing in Sweden. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), a Palestinian, was the preeminent Arab poet of his time, internationally acclaimed and celebrated the world over. His most recent poetry in English is collected in The Butterfly’s Burden from Copper Canyon Press. A new collection of his work will appear from FSG in 2010. Chard de Niord is the author of three books of poetry, Night Mowing (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990). His poems and essays have appeared recently in The Pushcart Prize, New England Review, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Iowa Review. He is an associate professor of English at Providence College and lives in Putney, Vermont. Piotr Florczyk is a poet and translator originally from Krakow, Poland, currently teaching at the University of Delaware and Cecil College. He is a recipient of the 2008 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators and the 2008 Delaware Division of the Arts Invididual Artist Fellowship. His book of translations of the poetry of Julian Kornhauser, an acclaimed Polish poet and critic, is forthcoming from Marick Press in late 2008. Jeff Friedman's fourth collection of poetry, Black Threads, was recently published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poems and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, 5 AM, New England Review, Agni Online, North American Review, The Forward, and The New Republic. He is a core faculty member in the M.F.A. program in Poetry Writing at New England College.

Patricia Fargnoli is the current New Hampshire Poet Laureate. She has published five collections of poetry. Her latest book, Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005), won the Jane Kenyon Literary Award for an Outstanding Book of Poetry. Necessary Light (Utah State University Press, 2000) won the May Swenson Book Award. She has been a MacDowell Fellow and is on the residence faculty of The Frost Place. Her recent work is in Margie, Mid-American Review, Cimarron Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Her new book, Cold River Season, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2009. Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (Harper Collins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems with Munir Akash (2003), Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with 252

William Kulik, 1991). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Forché’s Darwish piece first appeared in Saudi Aramco World, November/ December issue, 2008. Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and a chapbook, Storm. Her second full collection, Coliseum, will be published in June, 2008. Individual poems have appeared in the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. She has received awards and grants from the Lannan Foundation, Academy of American Poets, and the Pen American Center, and she is the Poetry Editor of the New Orleans Review. Irma Giannetti grew up in Kolozsvár (the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca to Romanians), speaking Hungarian and Romanian. She was a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Penn State and now works in technology support at the university. Her co-translations with Adam J. Sorkin have appeared widely in literary magazines as well as in two of his anthologies. Garth Greenwell has recently published poetry and prose in Salmagundi, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Parnassus. He is a Mellon Fellow at Harvard University where he studies English literature. He is currently teaching at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mariela Griffor (Santiago de Chile). Exiliana (2007); House (2007). She is founder of The Detroit Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States. She resides in Detroit, Michigan. Jennifer Grotz is the author of Cusp. Her translations of La Tour du Pin have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Antioch Review, Tri-Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Marilyn Hacker was distinguished with the first ever Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Hacker has published numerous volumes of her translations of poets Venus KhouryGhata, Claire Malroux, Emmanuel Moses, Guy Goffette, and Marie Etienne from French, several of which have appeared in previous volumes of Two Lines: World Writing in Translation. Also the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Essays on Departure and Desesperanto, Hacker has been a recipient of the National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hacker's numerous honors include the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of Fishing Secrets of the Dead (Word Press, 2005). She is a senior administrator at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

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Brian Hayter has published poems in Massachusetts Review, Borderlands, Seattle Review, Hayden’s Ferry, and others. He is currently at work on his first book, titled Selkie Groom. He is assistant editor at Spillway Poetry Journal. Lisa Hemminger has served as a poet-in-residence through The Poetry Center of Chicago, lectured at Columbia College, and taught performance poetry at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, IL. A longtime editor for and contributor to SCREEN magazine, she is currently a M.F.A. candidate at San Diego State University. Bob Hicok’s most recent collection, This Clumsy Living, received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He is a Guggenheim and NEA Fellow this year. Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981. Since then, he has published Lay Back the Darkness (2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); and the National bestseller, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999). Most recently, he published Poet’s Choice (Harcourt, 2007) which collects two years’ worth of his weekly essay-letters running in the Washington Post “Book World.” James Hoch was dishwasher, cook, dockworker, social worker, and shepherd prior to teaching. His poems have appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. His book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in March 2003 by Silverfish Review Press. His second book, Miscreants, appeared in June from W.W. Norton. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Conferences, St. Albans School for Boys, Summer Literary Seminars, and he will be the 2008 Resident Poet at The Frost Place. He resides with his wife and son in Nyack, NY and teaches at Ramapo College. Cynthia Hogue has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Incognito Body (Red Hen Press 2006), and has co-edited Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2006), and the first edition of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea, by Delia Alton (University Press of Florida, 2007). She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. Mark Irwin’s sixth collection of poetry, TALL IF, will appear from New Issues in October of 2008. He teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Recent work appears in APR, CONJUNCTIONS WEB, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden won the United Kingdom's Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize for translation in 2008.

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Ruth Joynton is a first-year poetry student at Purdue University. This is her first publication. She sends a shout out to rhapsodist Lil’ Wayne for all his poise, and her parents for all their love. Ruth looks forward to going home to Texas for the summer. Susan Kelly-De Witt is the author of The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008). Her articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Poetry Flash, Perihelion, Small Press Review, and The Sacramento Bee. Sharon Khan, who currently lives in Canada, has worked in the public sector as a legal adviser, editor, writer, translator and researcher. Tim Liardet is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and has produced five collections of poetry. His third collection Competing with the Piano Tuner was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998 and his fourth, To the God of Rain, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. The Blood Choir, his fifth collection, won an Arts Council England Writer’s Award as a collection-in-progress in 2003, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006, and was shortlisted for the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize. James Longenbach is the author, most recently, of Draft of a Letter, a collection of poems, and The Art of the Poetic Line. He teaches at the University of Rochester and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program. Marit MacArthur is assistant professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield. Her first book is The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop and Ashbery: The House Abandoned (Palgrave Macmillian, 2008). In fall of 2008, she translated post-Communist Polish poetry as a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Lodz in Poland. Anne Marie Macari’s third book, She Heads Into The Wilderness, will be out in 2008 with Autumn House Press. She won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000 for Ivory Cradle, chosen by Robert Creeley, and she is also the author of Gloryland, published by Alice James Books. Sarah Maclay is the author of The White Bride and Whore (both, U of Tampa). Her poems have appeared recently in APR, FIELD, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, and The Best American Erotic Poetry: 1800 to the Present (Scribner). She is a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University. Louise Mathias is the author of Lark Apprentice (New Issues Press, 2004). Recent poems appear in Massachusetts Review, Triquarterly, and The Laurel Review. She splits her time between Southern California and South Bend, Indiana and works as a fundraising consultant.

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Jane Mead is the author of The Usable Field (Alice James, 2008), House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001), and The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996). Her poems appear regularly in literary journals such as Poetry and American Poetry Review and have been included in many anthologies. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. For many years the Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages a vineyard in Northern California. Mihaela Moscaliuc’s co-translations have appeared in Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, and elsewhere. She has published poems in New Letters, Subtropics, Meridians, Crab Orchard Review; reviews in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner; and articles in Soundings and Interculturality and Translation. Laura Rocha Nakazawa, a native of Montevideo, Uruguay, is a Spanish translator and interpreter working in the Boston area. She has translated some of the poetry of Marjorie Agosin into English, in particular Among the Angels of Memory. Jim Natal, teacher and co-founder of Conflux Press, is the author of two poetry collections, In the Bee Trees and Talking Back to the Rocks (both, Archer). His poems have appeared recently in the Bellingham Review, Runes, and Paterson Literary Review. Kirk Nesset’s selected translated anthology of Montejo’s poetry and prose, Alphabet of the World (University of Oklahoma Press) will appear in the fall of 2009. He is author of Paradise Road (short stories, University of Pittsburgh Press), St X. (poems, Lewis Clark Press, forthcoming), and The Stories of Raymond Carver (nonfiction, Ohio University Press). Dave Oliphant is a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches English and has edited a scholarly journal. He has written extensively on music, including his historical study Texan Jazz in 1996, and has published several volumes of his own poetry as well as translations of Latin American poetry. David Oliveira is the author of A Little Travel Story (Harbor Mountain Press, 2008); his poems appear in The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place. Co-editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, publisher-editor of Mille Grazie Press, and longtime co-editor of Solo, he currently teaches in Cambodia. Alicia Ostriker has been nominated twice for a National Book Award. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven (2005). She is also the author of Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Her most recent critical book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic. Her poetry and essays have been translated into French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic. Ostriker has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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D. A. Powell is the author of Tea (Wesleyan, 1998), Lunch (Wesleyan, 2000), and Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004). The latter was a finalist for the PEN West and the National Book Critics' Circle Awards. Powell teaches in the English Department at University of San Francisco. Tom Priestly was born in Uganda, raised in England, and has lived in Canada since 1966. He is now retired from a position in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Alberta. He has published translations of Slovene poetry from the 19th-century classics through contemporary poets. Stephany Prodromides has published poems in The Laurel Review, Barn Owl Review, and CRATE. Her manuscript Fishnet was a finalist for the 2008 Center for Book Arts chapbook competition and a semi-finalist for the 2008 Concrete Wolf chapbook competition. She co-hosts the Redondo Poets reading in Redondo Beach, CA. Susan Rich is author of Cures Include Travel, (White Pine Press, 2006) and The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, and the Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Poetry Book. Her poems were recently translated into Slovenian. New work appears in the The Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, and New England Review. Hoyt Rogers’ translations of Bonnefoy have previously appeared in Europäische Hefte, AGNI, the Harvard Review, the Cumberland Poetry Review, Nimrod, The Partisan Review, Tin House, The Southern Humanities Review, New York Poetry, and Poetry. Lee Romney is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, covering Northern California news out of San Francisco. Her poetry has been published in the Squaw Review. Lee Rossi, author of Ghost Diary (2003), has published poems in The Sun, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry East. His reviews and interviews have appeared in ~88~ and Pedestal Magazine. A computer programmer, he lives in San Francisco, California. William Rowe is author of The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths (Salt Publications, 2007), Three Lyric Poets: Harwood, Torrance and MacSweeney (Writers and Their Work, 2009), Contemporary Poets of Latin America: History and the Inner Life (Oxford University Press, 2000). Rowe is a professor at University of London. Mark Rudman’s books of poetry include the five volumes of The Rider Quintet, beginning with Rider which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, all published by Wesleyan. The Motel En Route to Life Out There: Selections from the Rider Quintet (SALT) and The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination (Northwestern/FSG) will both appear in 2008. Jim Schley has been co-editor of the literary quarterly New England Review, production editor for University Press of New England, editor-in-chief of Chelsea Green Publishing

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Company, and he has edited more than a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects. He is an associate of the journalists’ collective Homelands Research Group (homelands.org), and he is now executive director of The Frost Place (frostplace.org), a museum and poetry conference center at Robert Frost’s former home in Franconia, New Hampshire. He is author of a poetry chapbook One Another (Chapiteau Press, 1999) and the forthcoming book As When, In Season (Marick Press, 2008). Patty Seyburn recently received the Green Rose Prize for Hilarity. She is also the author of Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State UP, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach, and coedits POOL: A Journal of Poetry based in Los Angeles. Lisa Siedlarz, winner of the 2006 John Holmes and 2007 Leo Connellan poetry awards, has had poems published in Calyx, Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, and Main Street Rag. She edits the Connecticut River Review and works at Southern Connecticut State University. Adam J. Sorkin’s recent translations include three 2006 books: Magda Cârneci’s Chaosmos (White Pine, translated with Cârneci); Mihai Ursachi’s The March to the Stars (Vinea Press, mostly with Ursachi); and Mariana Marin’s Paper Children (Ugly Duckling, with various co-translators). Sorkin won the Translation Prize of The Poetry Society, London, for Marin Sorescu’s, The Bridge. Gary Soto is the author of ten poetry collections for adults, most notably New and Selected Poems. He has received the Discovery/ The Nation Prize, the U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum, The California Library Association's John and Patricia Beatty Award (twice) in addition to fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), and the California Arts Council. In 1999, he received the Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the AuthorIllustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, and the PEN Center West Book Award for Petty Crimes. Gerald Stern is a United States poet. His work was widely recognized after the 1977 publication of Lucky Life and a series of essays on writing poetry in American Poetry Review. He has been given many prestigious awards for his writing, including a National Book Award for poetry in 1998. He is the author of many books of poetry, including This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), winner of the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Two Long Poems (1990); Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); The Red Coal (1981), winner of the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of American; Lucky Life (1977), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen as the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection; The Naming of Beasts and Other Poems (1973); and Rejoicings (1973). For many years Stern taught poetry writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He retired in 1995.

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Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first book, Forms of Gone, published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published in January 2008, also by Sheep Meadow. She is the recipient of a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, and most recently, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. She received a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers. Her poems, translations, and articles have appeared widely. She currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University and is Writerin-Residence at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. Jean Valentine is the author of Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 19652003, which was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is Little Boat (Wesleyan, 2007). Anne Waldman has received numerous awards and honors for her poetry, including The Dylan Thomas Memorial Award, The Poets Foundation Award, The National Literary Anthology Award, and The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. She has published over forty books of poetry, including: In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2003 (Coffee House Press, 2003), Dark Arcana / Afterimage or Glow (2003), Vow to Poetry (2001), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), Kill or Cure (1994), Iovis: All is Full of Love (1993), Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected Poems 1966-1988 (1989), Fast Speaking Woman (1974), and Baby Breakdown (1970). Currently Waldman is the director of the M.F.A. Writing and Poetics Program at the Naropa Institute. She divides her time between Boulder, Colorado and Greenwich Village, New York City. Lauren Watel has fiction and poetry publications forthcoming in Ploughshares, Triquarterly, and Five Points. She lives with her son in Decatur, Georgia. Michael Waters’ books of poetry include Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001), and Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997) from BOA Editions, Bountiful (1992), The Burden Lifters (1989), and Anniversary of the Air (1985) from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His several edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, along with four Pushcart Prizes, he teaches at Salisbury University in Maryland and in the New England College M.F.A. Program. Kathleen Weaver’s poetry translations from Spanish have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Field, and many other publications. Her book, Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal with Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Penn State University Press. She lives in Berkeley and is now working on a book of her own poems. Her translations from Spanish include Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry by Nancy Morejón (Black Scholar), Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, Omar Cabezas (Crown Publishers), and Nicaraguan Sketches, Julio Cortázar (Norton). She is also coeditor of Penguin Book of Women Poets.

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Eliot Weinberger was born in 1949 in New York City. He is the primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. His anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993) was a bestseller in Mexico, and his edition of Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (1999) received the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. In 1992, he was given PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United States, and, in 2000, he was the first American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico. Eliot Weinberger's most recent publications are the collection of essays Karmic Traces: 1993-1999 and a translation of Bei Dao's Unlock (with Iona ManCheong), both published by New Directions in 2000. He is the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003). Pattie M. Wells is a poet, translator, and fiction author. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in San Diego City Works, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Wisconsin Review, Parnassus Literary Journal, Acorn Review, and ZYZZYVA. Jan Wesley is the author of Living in Freefall (Main Street Rag, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review, Pool, Rattle, and Psychological Perspectives. She has taught at the University of Redlands and Austin City College, and she currently lives in Los Angeles. Jackson Wheeler, host of the Arcade Poetry Series at the Oxnard Carnegie Art Museum, is the author of Swimming Past Iceland (Mille Gracie Press, 1993) and A Near Country: Poems of Loss (Solo Press, 1999). He is also a social worker residing in Oxnard, CA. Eleanor Wilner (nĂŠe Rand) was born in Ohio in 1937 and holds an interdepartmental Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She has published six collections of poems, most recently, The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004); Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (1998); and Otherwise (University of Chicago, 1993). Her other works include a verse translation of Euripides's Medea (Penn Greek Series, 1998) and a book on visionary imagination, Gathering the Winds (Johns Hopkins Press, 1975). Her work has appeared in over thirty anthologies, including Best American Poetry (1990) and The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Fourth Edition). Formerly the editor of The American Poetry Review, She is currently on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia. Reed Wilson directs the Undergraduate Research Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UCLA, and he teaches poetry writing in the UCLA English Department. His poems have appeared most recently in The Chattahoochee Review and Natural Bridge. Martin Woodsideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Thought, Limestone, The Hazmat Review, Poetry Motel, The Connecticut River Review, and Guernica.

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Carolyne Wright’s eight books and chapbooks of poetry include Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (EWUP/Lynx House Books, 2nd edition 2005), which won the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award; and A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), winner of the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Award in Poetry (Bronze Award).. Anna Beth Young is a poet and translator living in Potsdam, NY. C. Dale Young is the author of The Second Person (Four Way Books 2007) and The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001). He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. The poems included here are from a new book manuscript, TORN. David Young is the author of Black Lab (Knopf, 2006) and Six Modernist Moments in Poetry (Iowa, 2006). His translations from the German include poems by Rilke, Günter Eich, and Hölderlin. Leah Zazulyer writes poetry and prose, translates Yiddish poetry, and she has also been a special education teacher, consultant, school psychologist, and mediator. She has received grants from the Constance Saltonstall Arts Foundation, The New York State Council on the Arts, and The New York State Foundation on the Arts, and other prizes. Her publications include two poetry chapbooks: The World Is a Wedding; Round Trip Year, the full length poetry book; Songs the Zazulya Sang; and Siberia, a book of translations.

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