PI Issue 15 and 16

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

special double issue

15 16

2010

t h e S a n D i e g o S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y P r e ss

Photo by Margo Berdeshevsky

Poetry International is published annually at San Diego State University The Department of English and Comparative Literature 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182-8140 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 ©2010 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:

619. 594. 1522 619. 594. 4998 poetry.international@yahoo.com https://poetryinternational. sdsu. edu

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 Cover photographs: John Bullock Cover and journal design: Patricia Cué ISSN: 1093-054-X ISBN: 1-879691-93-0 THE SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINTED IN CANADA

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

—W. H. Auden

EDITOR IN CHIEF Ilya Kaminsky POETRY EDITORS Ilya Kaminsky & B. H. Boston MANAGING EDITOR Jenny Minniti-Shippey CONSULTING MANAGING EDITOR B. H. Boston FOUNDING EDITOR Fred Moramarco

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Gina Barnard Rosie Berumen Lisa Grove Susan Wiedner Monika Zobel EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Amy Ebersole Andrea Galvez Taylor Katz Alicia Nichols Dean Robertson Mariel Romero-Ocaranza BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Sarah Maclay ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Reed Wilson ART DIRECTOR Patricia Cué

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

Photo by Bruce H. Boston

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Annelies Zijderveld Patrick Donnelly

SAN DIEGO EDITORIAL BOARD Sandra Alcosser Marilyn Chin Glover Davis Steve Kowit

Poetr y International Notable Books, 2008-2009

A Poetics of Hiroshima, William Heyen, Etruscan Press Almond Blossoms and Beyond, Mahmoud Darwish, tr. Mohammad Shaheen, Interlink Books Archicembalo, GC Waldrep, Tupelo Press Ashes in Love, Oscar Hahn, tr. James Hoggard, Host Publications Blood Honey, Chana Bloch, Autumn House Press Carpathia, Cecilia Woloch, BOA Editions Carrying the Songs, Moya Cannon, Carcanet Body Clock, Eleni Sikileanos, Coffee House Press Dearest Creature, Amy Gerstler, Penguin Press Hovering at a Low Altitude, Dahlia Ravikovich, tr. Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfield, WW Norton Father Dirt, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Alice James Books He and I, Emmanuel Moses, tr. Marilyn Hacker, Oberlin College Press How Beautiful the Beloved, Gregory Orr, Copper Canyon Humanimal, Bhanu Kapil, Kelsey Street Press Lucy, Jean Valentine, Sarabande Books Magenta Soul Whip, Lisa Robertson, Coach House Press Making Music, Patrick Cotter, Three Spires Press Manatee/Humanity, Anne Waldman, Penguin Press Mozart’s Third Brain, Goran Sonnevi, tr. Rika Lesser,Yale University Press Names, Marilyn Hacker, WW Norton National Anthem, Kevin Prufer, Four Way Books News of the World, Philip Levine, Knopf Open Interval, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, LSUP Orphan Fire, Alissa Valles, Four Way Books Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems, Ernesto Cardenal, New Directions Press Poems for the Millenium,Volume Three, Romantic and Postromantic Poetry, ed.

Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, University of California Press.

Sight Map, Brian Teare, University of California Press Red Rover, Susan Stewart, University of Chicago Press The Book of Seventy, Alicia Ostriker, Pittsburgh University Press The Ginko Light, Arthur Sze, Copper Canyon Press The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story, Rusty Morrison, Ahsahta Press

viii

The Poetry of Rilke, tr. Edward Snow, FSG Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, Keith Waldrep, University of California Press Tsim Tsum, Sabrina Orah Mark, Saturnalia Press Versed, Rae Armantrout, Wesleyan University Press What Goes On, Stephen Dunn, WW Norton Wheeling Motel, Franz Wright, Knopf With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry, ed. Tal Nitzan and Rachel Tzivia Back, SUNY Press

ix

Twentieth Centur y List of Women Poets

A List of 20th Century Women Poets compiled by the editors of Poetry International, with advice from Forrest Gander, Edward Hirsch, Jerome Rothenberg, Sandra Alcosser, Susan Stewart, Carolyn Forché, and Alicia Ostriker In the Fall of 2006, when Poetry International began to compile a database of 20th century poets currently available in English translation, we were embarrassed to find how few women poets have been translated into English during the last 100 years, in comparison with male poets. That led us to publish a special section on Women Poets of Africa in our issue #12. In addition, we sent out a questionnaire to various American poets whose work we respect for their list of beloved women poets of the 20th century in translation. Below are their suggestions.

Etel Adnan Ilse Aichinger Bella Akhmadulina Anna Akhmatova Yosano Akiko Anne-Marie Albiach Claribel Alegrîa Antonella Anedda Rose Ausländer Ingeborg Bachmann Polina Barskova Rachel Bluwstein Coral Bracho Nicole Brossard Edith Bruck Nina Cassian Patrizia Cavalli Inger Christensen Lam Thi My Da Julia de Burgos Sophia de Mello Breyner Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

x

Blaga Dimitrova Alba Donati Forough Farrokhzad Gloria Fuertes Leah Goldberg Dijala Hasanbegovic Ito Hiromi Raquel Jodorowsky Anna Kamienska Marie Luise Kaschnitz Shiraishi Kazuko Venus Khoury-Gata Sarah Kirsch Gertrud Kolmar Nina Kossman Else Lasker-Schüler Radmila Lazic Denise Le Dantec Rosaria Lo Russo Pura López Colomé Joyce Mansour Friederike Mayröcker

Cecília Meireles Melissanthi Concha Méndez Alda Merini Dunya Mikhail Gabriela Mistral Marcia Mogro Kadya Molodowski Valzhyna Mort Ada Negri Maria Negroni Giulia Niccolai Vera Pavlova Ana Pepelnik Alejandra Pizarnik Irina Ratuschinskaya Dahlia Ravikovich Jacqueline Risset

Amelia Rosselli María Sabina Nelly Sachs Elena Schwarz Kazuko Shiraishi Edith Södergran Alfonsina Storni Anna Swir Wislawa Szymborska Marina Tsvetaeva Fadwa Tuquan Anya Utler Cecilia Vicuña Else von Freytag-Loringhoven Yona Wallach Monique Wittig Zhai Yongming Zelda

[We would also love to hear from our readers. If you have a favorite 20th Century women poet writing in a language other than English, write to us with your suggestions! We plan to develop a collection of poems and profiles of these and other poets and store it permanently on our website. ]

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Contents

Poems Francesc Parcerisas Translated by Cyrus Cassells

Act of Gratitude 27 Holy Week 28 Then 29

Antonio Machado Translated by Rosie Berumen

The Eyes 30

Nazim Hikmet Translated by Deniz Perin

On Living 31 Since I Was Thrown Inside 34 Angina Pectoris 37 Things I Didn’t Know I Loved 38

Hai Zi Translated by Ye Chun

Distant Road 42

Carolyn Forché Por tfolio

Fisherman 44 The Lost Suitcase 45 Elegy for an Unknown Poet 47 Death Bed 49 The Museum of Stones 50

Mark Irwin

Shoes 51 A vanilla cake, 52 Luella 53

Yehuda Amichai Translated by Jeff Friedman and Nati Zohar

The Real Hero of the Binding 54

Christian Wiman Por tfolio

Every Riven Thing 56 This Mind of Dying 57 From a Window 58 Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone 59

xiii

One Time 61 All Good Conductors 63 The River 64 It Takes Particular Clicks 67 Late Fragment 69 And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud 71

Aleš Šteger Translated by Brian Henry

Raisins 91 Bread 92 Potato 93 Sausage 94

Maria Terrone

When the Butcher’s Son Passed Me 95

Gon no Sôjô Yôen Translated by Patrick Donnelly and Stephen D. Miller

On the Essence of the Welling Up out of the Earth Chapter 72

Ghassan Zaqtan Translated by Fady Joudah

The Song of the Drowned 96 Cavafy’s Builders 97

Tango of the Regent’s Residence Translated by Patrick Donnelly and Stephen D. Miller

On the Essence of the Passage “Form Is Emptiness and Emptiness Itself Is Form” 73

Leonar do Sinisgalli Por tfolio Versions by B. H. Boston

Old Grief 100 Old Loves 101 Via Velasca 102 Autumn 103

Fujiwara Koretsuna Translated by Patrick Donnelly and Stephen D. Miller

On the Introduction Chapter of the Lotus Sutra 74

Jesse Nathan

The Container for the Thing Contained

104

James Longenbach

Aldo Palazzeschi Translated by Nicholas Benson

Archipelago

114

The Old Nuns

118

Patrick Donnelly

Daylight Has Been Saved

by Time Again

123

Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein

The Froward Dog or The Farmer’s Dog

124

Regina Derieva Translated by J. Kates

“Do not pick up”

125

Michelle A. Galo Glass 75

In the Cemetery at Calvary

Church, Burnt Hills 76

Anthony Farrington Integument 78 David Gewanter

Baudelaire’s Day Book The Unspeakable

79 81

Moya Cannon

Parisii 82

Jean-Pierre Rosnay Translated by J. Kates

What the Caterpillar Said 83 Evening Jazz 84 “A girl is going to enter your brain.” 85 “I’ve come to the end of an October Sunday” 86 Port-Vendres 87 When 88

David St. John

Pythagorean Perfume 89 Velvet Aurora 90

xiv

Yona Wallach Por tfolio Introduction and translation 128

by Linda Stern Zisquit The Voice of Gold and

the Voice of Flesh 132

Untitled 133

The Monster Doe 134

Two Gardens 135

xv

Untitled 136 Strawberries 137 When you come 138 When you come to sleep with me like a judge 139 Hebrew 140 Let the Words 143 Again the Soul 144

Jay Hopler On the Grass is Thrown

a Latticework of Shadows 173

The Alligator 174

Peg Boyers Brodsky at San Michele, 1996 175

Rooftop: Aerial View 178

Bill Yarrow Whiplash Marriage 181

Joan Larkin

The Covenant 146 Upcountry 147

Geri Doran

The Snowlit Sky 148

Ghérasim Luca Por tfolio Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

My Insanity of Being 150 Sigh With Traps 151 Auto-Determination 152 Other Secrets of the Empty and the Full 154 Dream In Action 155 Hermetically Open 157 Spontaneous Initiation 160

Jacqueline Gens Into the Wood 182

Brian Henry Like Grass 183

Mountain Town

Stage Mother

J. Hope Stein Just Married 184

James Harms Friday Rich/Saturday Poor 185

In Your Bright Ray 186

My Life in Art 187

Ofer Ziv

Ammunition Hill 163

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Jay Thompson

Are All the Break-ups in your Poems Real?

A Mask for My Brother

Gerard Fanning

Newfoundland Time 166 Variation on Blue Note 167

164 165

Mary-Catherine Jones Spider 168

Shane McCrae “And we divorced in the mountains

and the stars” 170

Fiona Sampson extract from Deep Water 171

xvi

Stephen Dunn

Lessons The House on the Hills

188

Eleni Sikelianos

Kinesthetic Sketches of the Dead

193

190

Robert Peake At the Zoo 194

195 Michael Waters Log Cabin

Valzhyna Mort Love 196

Anne Marie Macari It Says 197

Still Falling 198 Rachel Hadas

Under the Floorboards 199

Mahmoud Dar wish Tribute II Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Fady Joudah

excerpt from Mural

202

xvii

A River Dies Of Thirst, Journals, 206

by Mahmoud Darwish. Archipelago Books Reviewed by Fady Joudah The Butterfly’s Burden 208

by Mahmoud Darwish. Trans. by Fady Joudah.

Reviewed by Deniz Perin Leah Goldberg Translated by Annie Kantar

from From Songs of my Beloved Land 211 from Journey Without a Name 213

Yan Li Translated by Arthur Sze

The Chinese Drawers 214

Orhan Veli My Gold-Toothed One 215 Translated by Deniz Perin Gossip 216

Quantitative 217

Poem with a Tail 218

Reply 219

Rainer Maria Rilke from To Dream Translated by Lorne Mook 10, 11, 12, 16 220 Tomaž Šalamun Por tfolio Translated by Brian Henry

Translated by Thomas Kane and the author

Equations of Daffodil 226 Veronica’s Veil 227 Self-Portrait 228 London City 1969 229 Wheat Doesn’t Rush 230 Hard Core 231

Everything that was Flesh

of your Flesh, says Jonathan 241

Ana Ristovic Purge 242 Translated by Brian Henry Spring Trade 243

Marina Tsvetaeva I know the truth 244 Translated by Lisa Wujnovich Jazra Khaleed Translated by Sarah McCann

Somewhere in Athens 245

Songs from “Cantares Mexicanos” Translated by Peter Everwine

Making the Circle 247 Nothing We Say 248 Prankster Song 249 Totoquihuatzin’s Song 250

Nikola Madzirov Translated by Magdalena Horvat

Many Things Happened 251

Robert Wrigley

Night Music 252

Siberian Poems Translated by Jerome Rothenberg

A Shaman Climbs Up the Sky 253

René Char Por tfolio Translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson

Courbet: The Stone Breakers 260 Lightning Victory 261 The Swift 262 To Brother-Tree of Numbered Days 263 Four Who Charm 264

Charles Harper Webb

Death Roll 266

Nurit Zarchi Translated by Jeff Friedman and Nati Zohar

She Is Joseph 232

Paul Celan Translated by Patrick Cotter

Rivka Miriam Translated by Linda Stern Zisquit

Sleep Song 234 Quiet, Beloved, Quiet: 236 “White are the tulips” 238 Summer Night 239

Sasha Parmasad

Memory of Sugarcane-worker Off Duty

Ellen Hinsey

A Natural History of Compassion 270

When my Father Died my Forehead Died 240

Frannie Lindsay

To the Flowering Plum Tree 271 on Beacon Street

xviii

268

xix

Sebastian Reichmann Translated by Sasha Vlad and James Brook

Right 272 The wooden objects belonged to 273 Elementary things 274

Veronica Jimenez

Postcard from Port

Alicia Ostriker Por tfolio

Werner Aspenström

The Sunday 332 You and I and the World 333 A Moment at the Pizzeria 334 The Larks 335

Tomas Tranströmer

Grief Gondola #2

Lasse Söderberg

From The Stones in Jerusalem, 2002 “Here, where everyone was a son,” 340 “During the nights I was close to the dead.” 341 “At the base of Mount Zion” 342

Lennart Sjögren

Wolf Child

343

Bruno K. Öijer

The Song I Pretended Evidence

346

Kristina Lugn

From The Moment of the Dog, 1989 “There’re lots of women my age” 349 “I washed the sheets” 350 “And the wives, yes they’re dancing” 352

Katarina Frostenson

Anti-brilliant 353 Index (to my finger) 354 Titan (to my machine) 355

Eva-Stina Byggmästar

From But Really How Tiny Are The Poets “THE POET,” 356 “oh, look there are cats in my cathedrals” 357 “sure enough, we built libraries,” 358

Horace Engdahl

From Meteors, a book of aphorisms 359

275

Love I (Summertime) 278 The Husband 279 Love II 280 The Widow 281 Love III 282 Grandchild 283 Vermont Dairy Farm 284 Six Haiku 285 Ars Poetica: Strategy 286

336

347 348

Essays Minas Savvas

Translating Verse 288

Steve Kowit

Robinson Jeffers: Impolitic Poetry and the Hounds of Hell 294

Afaa M. Weaver

This is so Esso

Feature Swedish Section Edited with an introduction by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström

308

319

Gunnar Ekelöf

Euphoria 320 Poetics 322 Voices Below Ground 323

Edith Södergran

Vierge Moderne 328 On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems 329 The Trees of my Childhood 330 The Moon 331

xx

Tomas Tranströmer’s First Poems, A Commentary by Jonas Ellerström 361

xxi

Book Reviews New European Poets 370 Edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer.

Reviewed by Kelly Lenox

Horse Latitudes

By Paul Muldoon.

Reviewed by Chris Cunningham Please

By Jericho Brown.

Living in Freefall

By Jan Wesley.

Reviewed by Meredith Davies Hadaway

392

394

Begin Anywhere

By Frank Giampietro. 375 Reviewed by Patty Seyburn

The Dirty Side of the Storm

By Martha Serpas.

Towards the Forest

By Holaday Mason.

Tall If

By Mark Irwin.

Reviewed by Reed Wilson

Sleeping with Houdini 376

By Nin Andrews.

Reviewed by Jennifer Welsh

Island

By Jeanette Clough.

Reviewed by Patricia Crane

399

Souvenirs of A Shrunken World

By Holly Iglesias.

Darling Vulgarity

By Michael Waters.

Reviewed by Lynne Thompson

Dreaming Escape 400

By Valentina Saracini. Translated by Erica Weitzman with Rudina Jasini and Flora Ismaili.

Reviewed by Stephan Delbos

Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California 372 Edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young.

Reviewed by Christopher Hayes The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present Edited by David Lehman.

Reviewed by Lee Romney

373

378

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad 380 Translated by Sholeh Wolpe.

Reviewed by Jackson Wheeler Masque

By Elena Karina Byrne.

Contrariwise

By Susan Terris.

Reviewed by Stephany Prodromides

383

Museum of Parallel Art

By Robert Wynne.

386

xxii

The Fortieth Day

By Kazim Ali. Reviewed by Martin Woodside

403

The Bag of Broken Glass

by Yerra Sugarman.

Reviewed by Jehanne Dubrow

405

Ditch-Tender

By Julia B. Levine.

World Over Water

By Robert Gibb.

Reviewed by Robert Peake

408

xxiii

Special Orders 411

By Edward Hirsch.

Reviewed by Lee Rossi The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks 412

By Charles Simic.

The World In Place Of Itself

By Bill Rasmovicz.

Reviewed by Chris Juhas The Most of It

By Mary Ruefle.

Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1966-1990

By Michael Burkard.

Reviewed by Sarah Maclay

415

How Beautiful The Beloved

By Gregory Orr. Reviewed by Gail Wronsky

419

The History of Anonymity 421

by Jennifer Chang.

Reviewed by Julia Hansen Tones of the Sacred: Common Prayer

by Fiona Sampson.

Reviewed by Tim Liardet

423

A New World Voice: Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic Reviewed by Marilyn Hacker

425

Making Music

by Patrick Cotter Reviewed by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

426

Mission Work

by Aaron Baker Reviewed by Tess Taylor

428

xxiv

poems

Francesc Parcerisas Act of Gratitude

Thank you, angel. Thank you, demons of the night.

Thank you, winter where the heart burns arid tree-trunks of desire. Thank you, bracing cold light, nocturnal water.

Thank you, midnight bile, laurel of morning, hoopoe of dawn.

For what’s odd, unexpected, wild, for evil and pain, thank you.

For the sum of what we are and are not, for all we avoid and all we crave.

Thanks for the lush words, love and silver, for yourself and myself.

Thank you for yes and for no.

For the ability to give thanks and for rendering them unnecessary.

Thanks for fear, for bread and oil, for the night time.

Thank you for lovemaking at the break of day, for the coin discovered on the ground, for your hand on my cheek, the gush of the fountain.

Thank you for your eyes and lips, for crying out my name with joy.

Many thanks, death, for your existence, for making all these things more vivid inside me—so very yours, so beautiful, brimming, and complete.

Translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

27

Francesc Parcerisas

Holy Week

Francesc Parcerisas

Then

Bending a little, he exits the car, then straightens himself, leery of shuffling. At the baker’s he purchases a loaf of bread, with coins fished from a stash at the bottom of his pocket.

He switches the lights on in his flat, banishing a shadow that caused a painting’s frame to seem awry.

Sheds his coat and slips into an old jersey.

Has dinner opposite the TV, while gazing listlessly at a free paper.

Grabs the phone to check for messages, opens and closes the empty fridge.

Life is a vengeful whore insisting he pay with the filthy muck of stifled anger.

Existence means darkness; he can’t suckle milk from a woman’s breast anymore.

God is unreachable.

The Son is dead, and the Father, alone now.

Hard times for poetry. He takes a knife and with the ink from his eyes writes this poem.

Then with her hands she’d crown her son’s head, then with her arms she’d embrace him, then with her fingers she’d pluck out his eyes, then with her teeth she’d gnaw his liver, then with motherly claws she’d shred his memories, then with her nipples she’d nourish him on the milk of hatred, then with her tongue, she’d insist, Lord, Lord, I’m only doing this for love, because you’ve pledged that this bread is your body and this wine, your blood.

Translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells

Translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells

28

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

29

A n to n i o M ac h a d o

Nazim Hikmet

The Eyes

On Living

I.

When his lover died he decided to grow old in the closed mansion with his memory and the mirror in which she saw herself one clear day.

Like the gold in the miser’s coffer, he thought he would save all of yesterday in the clear mirror.

Time for him would not run out.

II.

And after the first year— “How were they,” he asked, “brown or black, her eyes? Light green? … Gray?

How were they, good God, that I don’t remember?”

III.

He went out to the street one day of Spring, and silently strolled his double mourning, the heart locked…

From a window, in the hollow shade he saw flashing eyes. He lowered his and walked on… Like those!

1.

Living is no joke.

You must live with great seriousness

like a squirrel, for example, I mean, expecting nothing above and beyond living,

I mean your entire purpose should be living.

You must take living seriously, I mean so much so, so terribly that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall, or in your fat goggles

and white laboratory coat

you can die for people,

even for people whose faces you have not seen,

without anyone forcing you,

even though you know the most beautiful, the most real thing

is living.

I mean, you must take living so seriously that, even when you’re seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive seeds,

and not so the trees will remain for the children,

but because though you fear death you don’t believe in it,

I mean because living is more important.

Translated from the Spanish by Rosie Berumen

30

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

31

2.

3.

Let’s say we’re due for serious surgery, I mean there’s a chance

we might not get up from the white table.

Even if it’s impossible not to feel sorrow at leaving a little too early we’ll still laugh at the Bektashi joke, we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining, or impatiently await

the latest news.

This earth will grow cold, a star among stars,

and one of the smallest too, a gilded granule in blue velvet, I mean,

I mean this tremendous world of ours.

Let’s say we’re on the front,

for something worth fighting for, let’s say.

At the very first assault, on that very day

we could keel over and die.

We’ll know this with a strange resentment,

but we’ll still wonder madly

about how this war, which could last years, will end.

Let’s say we’re in prison and nearly 50, and let’s imagine we have 18 more years before the opening of the iron doors.

We’ll still live with the outside, with its people, its animals, its toil and wind,

I mean with the outside beyond the walls.

This earth will grow cold one day, and not like a chunk of ice or a dead cloud— it’ll roll like an empty walnut shell

endlessly in the pitch black.

One must lament this now, must feel this pain now.

This is how you must love this earth

so you can say “I’ve lived”…

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

I mean, however and wherever we are

we must live as if we will never die.

32

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

33

Nazim Hikmet

Since I Was Thrown Inside

Since I was thrown inside,

the earth has orbited the sun ten times.

If you ask it:

“Not even worth mentioning,

a microscopic time.”

If you ask me:

“Ten years of my life.”

I had a pencil

the year I was thrown inside.

I used it all up in a week.

If you ask it:

“A whole life.”

If you ask me:

“Come on now, just one week.”

Bread was white, fluffy as cotton

the year I was thrown inside.

Then it was rationed and here, inside, the people beat each other

for a pitch-black, fist-sized piece.

Now it flows freely again, but dark and tasteless.

The year I was thrown inside,

the second war hadn’t started yet, the ovens at Dachau weren’t lit, the atom bomb hadn’t dropped on Hiroshima.

Since I was thrown inside,

Osman, doing time for murder,

finished his seven and a half years and left,

drifted around for a while,

was thrown back inside for smuggling,

did six months and was re-released,

his letter came yesterday, he’s married,

his child will be born in the spring.

They’re ten years old now,

the children who were conceived

the year I was thrown inside.

And that year’s trembling, long-legged colts

have long turned into confident, wide-rumped mares.

But the olive seeds are still olive seeds,

they’re still children.

New squares have cropped up in my far-away city

since I was thrown inside.

34

And my loved ones

are living on a street I don’t know

in a house I’ve never seen.

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Time flowed like the blood of a child whose throat’s been slit.

Then that chapter officially ended, and now the U. S. dollar speaks of a third.

Yet, in spite of everything, the days have shone

since I was thrown inside, and from the edges of darkness,

the people, pressing their heavy hands to the pavement,

have begun to rise.

Since I was thrown inside

the earth has orbited the sun ten times and just as passionately I repeat

what I wrote

the year I was thrown inside: “The people, who are plentiful as ants on the ground

as fish in the sea

as birds in the sky,

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

35

Nazim Hikmet

Angina Pectoris

who are cowardly, courageous,

ignorant, supreme

and childlike, it is they who crush

and create, it is but their exploits sung in songs.”

And as for the rest,

my ten-year incarceration, for instance,

it’s all meaningless words.

If half my heart is here,

half of it is in China, doctor, in the army streaming

toward the Yellow River.

And, every morning, doctor,

every morning my heart

is shot by a firing squad in Greece.

And, when the prisoners have fallen asleep

and abandoned the infirmary

my heart is in a dilapidated villa in Çamlıca.

Every night,

doctor.

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

And, after ten years, all I have to offer my poor people

is a single apple, doctor,

one red apple:

my heart.

It’s not arterio-sclerosis, or nicotine, or prison but this, my sweet doctor, this

has caused my angina pectoris.

I watch the night through the bars and despite the squeezing of my chest my heart still beats with the most distant stars.

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

36

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

37

Nazim Hikmet

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

the year is 1962 March 28 I’m next to the window on the Prague-Berlin train evening is falling I didn’t know I loved how evening descends like a tired bird upon the smoky

wet plain I didn’t like the comparison of evening’s descent with that of a tired bird I didn’t know I loved the earth can one say he loves the earth when one has never ploughed it I’ve never ploughed it so this is my one and only platonic love I didn’t know I loved rivers whether they twist motionless like this one towards the foot of the hills the European hills with castles on their peaks or stretch straight ahead as far as the eye can see I know one can’t wash in the same river more than once I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see I know our lives are slightly longer than the workhorse’s and much shorter than

the raven’s I know people have felt this sorrow before

and will feel this sorrow after all of this has been said a thousand times before me

and will be said after I didn’t know I loved the sky whether it’s sunny or cloudy the firmament that Andrey watched lying on his back in the battlefields of

Borodino in prison I translated two volumes of War and Peace into Turkish voices reach my ears not from the firmament but from the yard the guards are beating someone up again

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I didn’t know I loved trees in winter outside Moscow in Peredelkino the beech trees appear stark naked

before me humble and courteous beeches are Russian in the same way poplars are Turkish Izmir’s poplars whose leaves fall who call us the Knife-makers

my tall beloved sapling we shall burn the villas in the forests of Ilgaz in the year 1920 I hung a linen handkerchief from a pine

branch with embroidered edges I didn’t know I loved roads and their asphalt Vera is driving we’re going from Moscow to Crimea to Koktebel

whose real name is Göktepe County the two of us in a closed box the world flows by on either side distant and silent I’ve never been so close to anyone before bandits crossed my path as I came down the red road from Bolu to Gerede I

was eighteen there was nothing in the carriage for them to take but my life and at eighteen our lives are what we value least I wrote this once before I’m stumbling across a dark muddy street to go see Karagöz one Ramadan night a paper lantern before me maybe this never happened maybe I read somewhere about an eight-year-old boy going to see Karagöz one

Ramadan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather’s hand his grandfather wearing a fez and a sable-collared fur coat over his robe

and a lantern in the eunuch’s hand

and I can’t contain my joy

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I suddenly thought of flowers poppies cacti daffodils In Istanbul in Kadıköy in a daffodil field I kissed Marika her breath smelled of almonds I was seventeen my heart was a swing moving in and out of the clouds I didn’t know I loved flowers comrades sent me three red carnations in prison 1948 I just remembered the stars I didn’t know I loved them whether I’m watching them bewildered from below or flying among them I have some questions for the cosmonauts did the stars appear much bigger in the black velvet were they gigantic jewels

or orange-colored apricots does one feel proud as one approaches the stars I saw their color photographs in Ogonyok magazine don’t get angry friends but shall we call it non-figurative or abstract but they

looked like those old oil paintings figurative and concrete one’s heart stops before them they represent the endlessness of our yearning our minds our hands I could look at them and think I could think about death without feeling the slightest sorrow I didn’t know I loved the stars Snowfall appears before my eyes both the slow silent flakes and the whirling blizzards I didn’t know I loved the snow I didn’t know I loved the sun even now as it sets full of cherry jam sometimes in Istanbul too the sun sets just like those color postcards

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but that’s not how you’ll portray it I didn’t know I loved the sea

and how but Aivazovsky’s seas are another matter I didn’t know I loved the clouds whether I’m below them or above whether they resemble mammoths or white-feathered creatures moonlight comes to mind at its most languid most illusory most bourgeois turns out I love it I didn’t know I loved the rain whether it tumbles down upon me like a net or drips across the window my

heart leaves me behind tangled in the net or inside a raindrop and

journeys to a country that doesn’t exist on maps I didn’t know I loved the rain but why did I suddenly discover these loves on the Prague-Berlin train next to

the window is it because I’ve lit my sixth cigarette a single one means death for me is it because I can’t stop thinking about someone who stayed in Moscow with sandy blonde hair and blue eyelashes The train moves in the pitch black I didn’t know I loved pitch black sparks fly from the locomotive I didn’t know I loved sparks so many things I only realized I loved at sixty years old on the Prague-Berlin train next to the window beholding the earth as though

I’d embarked upon a journey from which there was no return

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

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Hai Zi Distant Road

In the rain the wheat field emerges Things look a little strange in the rain It’s dark already. It’s raining I sit on water writing to you

Translated from the Chinese by Ye Chun

C a ro ly n F o r c h é P ortfolio

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Fisherman

The Lost Suitcase

March. The Neva still white, crisp as communion, and as we walk its bridges, steadying ourselves on the glaze, tubes of ice slide from the gutter-spouts to the astonishment of dogs, some of whom have not seen spring before, while others pretend not to remember, and a woman bends over her late potatoes, sorting and piling, and you say “in this house lived a friend of my father who was killed” and “in that house lived another, and in this, a very bad poet no longer known. ” We come to the synagogue and go in, as far back as a forgotten holiness, where we are told you can whisper into the wall and be heard on the other side.

But the rabbi doesn’t know you are deaf. We whisper into the wall to please him.

A sign in Cyrillic asks for donations, and in exchange we apparently buy tens of matzos wrapped in paper. There are only a hundred of us left in the city. While we are here, a fisherman waits on the river, seated with a bucket beside him, his line in the hole, but in the last hour water has surrounded his slab of ice, so unbeknownst he is floating downstream, having caught nothing, cold and delirious with winter thoughts, as they all are and were, and as for rescue, no one will come. It is spring. The Neva white and crisp as communion.

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So it was with the suitcase left in front of the hotel—cinched, broken-locked, papered with world ports, carrying what mattered until then, when turning your back to cup a match it was taken, and the thief, expecting valuables instead found books written between wars, gold attic-light, mechanical birds singing and the chronicle of your country’s final hours.

What, by means of notes, you hoped to become: a noun on paper, paper dark with nouns: swallows darting through a basilica, your hands up in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost in a hospital gown, and here your voice, principled, tender, soughing through a fence woven with pine boughs: Writing is older than glass but younger than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope.

Dear one, who even in speaking is silent, for years I have searched, usually while asleep, when I have found the suitcase open, collecting snow, still holding your vade mecum of the infinite, your dictionary of the no-longer-spoken, a commonplace of wounds casually inflicted, and the slender ledger of truly heroic acts.

Gone is your atlas of countries unmarked by war, absent your manual for the preservation of hours.

The incunabulum is lost—both your earliest book and a hatching place for your mechanical birds— but the collection of apercus having to do with light laying its eggs in your eyes was found, along with the prophecy that all mass murders were early omens.

In an antique bookshop I found your catechism of atrophied faiths, so I lay you to rest without your psalter, nor the monograph wherein you state your most

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Elegy for an Unknown Poet

unequivocal and hard-won proposition: that everything must happen but to whom doesn’t matter.

Here are your books, as if they were burning.

Be near now, and wake to tell me who you were.

You who are apart, wanderer, stranger, who bent down in winter for the lost glove of another, you are ein Fremder on earth as if you had been written toward us. Listen: bells! You are sheltered once again in the stillness of childhood, where the slow river remains, rain singing from a gutterspout, wet bottles, misted grillwork.

Apartness gathers the music of solitude as if it were a glass viola.

Bells ring that are and are not, and the soul is left wandering in the blue night.

You are the one watching, the one dreaming this, the homeless one left behind.

The soul has departed. Thinking, alone with your thoughts, the poverty of waking life, here where it nears the eternal.

A man stood behind you holding a knife.You walked into the lake until only your hat could be seen. The dead began to wander quietly in the hall of stars.

Your sister took her life. And then you couldn’t bear the gaze of others.

What you could bear, and for long hours, were the star-filled eyes of a toad.

I am your translator. Pity me. It is impossible to slip ein Fremder into the mouth

of another.

Last summer I went with you to the crematorium.

We said poems and covered your body with gloves and roses.

I know that you are dead. Why do you ask and ask what can be done?

Black is the color of footsteps, frost, stillness and tears.

It modifies branches and wings. Blue appears as cloud, flower, ice.

Deer stepping from the forest are also blue. A river is green, but green as well

are flecks of decomposition. Silver, the blossoming poppies, a wind’s voice, faces of the unborn. Death is their province.

The living, you say, appear unreal to you, as if they were on fire. God uttered a

gentle flame into his heart: O man! Yet the living gaze at the dead, imploring them to appear.

Why? you ask. The dead do not understand this. The living are oblivious to

what they are, measuring time as the flickering of day and night.

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Death Bed

Brown are the cesspools, rafters and shadows; golden the day, candles and a tent

of stars.

Ivory the hands and limbs of lovers; purple a night wind, nostrils and snails.

A skiff is red, as are wolf and wound.Yellow are the walls of summer.

Sleep is white, as is sickness, shirt and revenant.

What is left us then but darkness? Oneself is always dark and near.

in memoriam, Svetozar Daniel Simko (1959 – 2004)

So, Andreanska, you were with him in his final hours and I give you that, speaking the language I understood only in the kitchen of childhood: for you, a lamp-lit language spoken in tomato gardens and prison camps by those

sent away and those who let them be sent, so many words for no one and nothing, until history came for them too with its years of industry and waste, a tram pulling black smoke behind itself.

These are the suitcases manufactured in ‘communist times,’ from balsa and tin.

Here are the books, ink on vellum sold by hoodlums on the black market.

We must have crossed the bridge a dozen times those nights, but —can you imagine?— alone, with no one from whom to borrow a match.

There appeared a Russian deserter “from Afghan war,” who drew caricatures

for small change but never drew our likeness. And some nights there was singing

beneath stone angels, but we were otherwise alone. Our Svetko’s memories were of the scent of garlic fields beside the river, and of riding in the basket of

his father’s bicycle along its banks. On the night of the invasion there was a radio, and

red-starred jeeps that would become white-starred jeeps in the west.

He, with his friends, turned the street signs around, and the enemy by mistake

marched into Austria, the only such invasion in the history of that war.

So, it is over, as you tell me. When he closed his eyes, there were swans.

You took his hand on the last bridge and made him laugh.You have my yes,

Andreanska.

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M a r k I rw i n The Museum of Stones

Shoes

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin, collected from roadside, culvert and viaduct, battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir— stones, loosened by tanks in the streets from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen, schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse, pebble from Baudelaire’s oui, stone of the mind within us carried from one silence to another stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende, agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards, chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs, stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold, stone from the tunnel lined with bones, lava of a city’s entombment, chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium, paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army, stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown, those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions, feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert, fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan, stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt, from a chimney where storks cried like human children, stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart, altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, load and hail, bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with, stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake, stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root, concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf, all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

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Matthew Shepard, in memoriam

They cover the human foot. From the Old English sceoh, akin to the German schuh, from the Indo European base s(keu): to cover. The arch, heel, and sole.

The upper, tongue, and lacing. Some wore wingtips, Oxfords, and loafers, while others sported walkers or sandals as they left their offices and homes in that quaint mountain town. He was tied, naked to a fence, then beaten. They stood on a ridge. Some, barefoot, lined their shoes along the edge. Others wore them on their hands watching the sky.

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M a r k I rw i n

A vanilla cake,

Luella

with vanilla frosting, he’d made himself, he took to his mother who lived alone on the mountain, where he walked up the snowy steps under the masked pines. “Happy Birthday,” he said, as crouched, she walked and set it on the empty table surrounded by chairs and dozens of photographs. Where are they? she wondered, making coffee, lighting a candle as her son made a fire, his hair the color of ice, she thought as they both sat down, the cake between them, into which they buried their hands, touching. “It’s still warm,” she said. “Yes,” he said, as the wax dripped from the tall candle, and they talked. “How are things in the valley?” she asked. “Still green,” he said. “Good, good,” she said, as they began to feed each other with their fingers, closing their eyes, making wishes as the stars blazed through the big window, snow blowing from the eaves as they ate, telling of the past, then moments of the present— the weather and the heart—continuing to eat bigger handfuls, their faces white,

smeared, till it started to taste of something new and strange and far away.

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P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Today there’s an exact weight to the light like that of the sun crossing a lion’s body. Today we look but can’t find you. A lifetime, I say and remember nymphs of stoneflies rising toward the river’s surface. In dream you are young and children run across the hill of your shoulders. Sometimes you can see a light coming from rocks. It burns with an intensity once lost. The children, laughing, watch the lion shake a piece of red meat in its mouth then lie down to sleep: A disquiet, a light so bright your eyes are wet with it.

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Y e h u da A m i c h a i The Real Hero of the Binding

The real hero of the binding was the ram, who stumbled innocently into the thicket and didn’t know about the plot to sacrifice him in place of Isaac.

I want to praise his curly wool and the depths of his human eyes and the horns that were quiet while he lived.

And after he was slaughtered, they turned them into shofars and sounded their call to battle and their obscene cries of pleasure.

Christian Wiman

I want to remember the last moment like a beautiful photo in an elegant fashion magazine, the boy tanned and delicate in his velvet robe and next to him the angel dressed in shimmery silk, the boy and the angel waiting with empty eyes—across from them two empty spaces.

And behind them, in the colorful background, a moment before his slaughter, the ram caught the thicket, his last hope, with his horns.

After, the angel flew back to heaven, and Isaac set out for home, trailing Abraham and God who had left long before, but the ram— the real hero of the story— stayed behind.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jeff Friedman and Nati Zohar

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P ortfolio

Ever y Riven Thing

This Mind of Dying

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made Sing his being simply by being The thing it is: Stone and tree and sky, Man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made, Means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone Trying to will himself into the stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made There is given one shade Shaped exactly to the thing itself: Under the tree a darker tree; Under the man the only man to see

God let me give You now this mind of dying Fevering me back Into consciousness of all I lack And of that consciousness becoming proud:

There are keener griefs than God. They come quietly, and in plain daylight, Leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language To a fear that I can bear.

Make of my anguish More than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made The things that bring him near, Made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows, Apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

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From a Window

Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease over blanching yolks with an expertise honed from three decades of dawns at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine, where even the oldest in the old men’s booth swore as if it were scripture truth they’d never had a breakfast better, rapping a glass sharply to get her attention when it went sorrowing so far into some simple thing— the jangly door or a crusted pan, the wall clock’s black, hitchy hands— that she would startle, blink, then grin as if discovering them all again.

Who remembers now when one died the space that he had occupied went unfilled for a day, then two, three, until she unceremoniously plunked plates down in the wrong places and stared their wronged faces back to banter she could hardly follow.

Unmarried, childless, homely, “slow,” she knew coffee cut with chamomile kept the grocer Paul’s ulcer cool, yarrow in gravy eased the islands of lesions in Larry Borwick’s hands, and when some nightlong nameless urgency made him seek some human company Brother Tom needed hash-browns with cheese.

She knew to nod at the litany of cities the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past, to laugh when the hunters asked if she’d pray for them or for the quail they went laughing off to kill, and then—envisioning one

Incurable and unbelieving In any truth but the truth of grieving I saw a tree inside a tree Rise kaleidoscopically As if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close To the pane as I could get To watch that fitful, fluent spirit That seemed a single being undefined Or countless beings of one mind Haul its strange cohesion Beyond the limits of my vision Over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood Exactly as it had and would (But why should it seem fuller now?)

And though a man’s mind might endow Even a tree with some excess Of life to which a man seems witness That life is not the life of men.

And that is where the joy came in.

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One Time

1. Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

rising so fast it seemed the sun tugged at it—to do exactly that.

Who remembers where they all sat: crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers, VF’ers muttering through their wars, night-shift roughnecks so caked in black it seemed they made their way back every morning from the dead.

Who remembers one word they said?

The Longhorn Diner’s long torn down, the gin and feedlots gone, the town itself now nothing but a name at which some bored boy has taken aim, every letter light-pierced and partial.

Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill, I picture you some dime-bright dawn grown even brighter now for being gone bustling amid the formica and chrome of that small house we both called home during the spring that was your last.

All stories stop: once more you are lost in something I can merely see: steam spiriting out of black coffee, the scorched pores of toast, a bowl of apple butter like edible soil, bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass, my plate’s gleaming, teeming emptiness.

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Then I looked down into the lovely cut of a missing river, something under dusk’s upflooding shadows claiming for itself a clarity of which my eyes were not yet capable: fissures could be footpaths, ancient homes random erosions; pictographs depicting fealties of who knows what hearts, to who knows what gods.

To believe is to believe you have been torn from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.

I come back to the world. I come back to the world and would speak of it plainly, with only so much artifice as words themselves require, only so much distance as my own eyes impose on the slickrock whorls of the real canyon, the yucca’s stricken clench, and, on the other side, the dozen buzzards swirled and buoyed above some terrible intangible fire that must scald the very heart of matter to cast up such miraculous ash.

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All Good Conductors

2. 2047 Grace Street

1.

But the world is more often refuge than evidence, comfort and covert for the flinching will, rather than the sharp particulate instants through which God’s being burns into ours. I say God and mean more than the bright abyss that opens in that word.

I say world and mean less than the abstract oblivion of atoms out of which every intact thing emerges, into which every intact thing finally goes.

I do not know how to come closer to God except by standing where a world is ending for one man. It is still dark, and for an hour I have listened to the breathing of the woman I love beyond my ability to love. Praise to the pain scalding us toward each other, the grief beyond which, please God, she will live and thrive. And praise to the light that is not yet, the dawn in which one bird believes, crying not as if there had been no night but as if there were no night in which it had not been.

O the screech and heat and hate we have for each day’s commute,

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the long wait at the last stop before we go screaming underground, while the pigeons court and shit and rut insolently on the tracks because this train is always late, always aimed at only us, who when it comes with its blunt snout, its thousand mouths, cram and curse and contort into one creature, all claws and eyes, tunneling, tunneling, tunneling toward money . . .

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2.

3.

Sometimes a beauty cools through the doors at Grand,

There is a dreamer all good conductors

glides all the untouchable angles and planes

know to look for when the last stop is made

of herself to stand among us

and the train is ticking cool, some lover, loner, or fool

like a little skyscraper, so sheer, so spare,

who has lived so hard he jerks awake

gazes going all over her in a craving wincing way

in the graveyard, where he sees

like sun on glass . . .

coming down the aisle a beam of light whose end he is, and what he thinks are chains becoming keys . . .

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The River

It Takes Par ticular Clicks

In the river where we’ve stopped something is moving, something is alive and writhing in the dark water toward me, in Africa, in the middle of the day. I can see the baked clay puzzling up the bank, the troubled shadows of the trees. I can see across the water two huge rocks sliding suddenly from the black mud, two pairs of eyes gliding against the stream. It is coming clearer. It is very hot.

In the middle of the river drifting, in the current seething slowly closer, twenty of them, thirty of them: crocodiles feeding. I can see the stiff feet and the ripped flanks, the oils and the entrails, the pinkish, half-punctured gut of the small hippo bobbing in the water, slash and slash of red. I can see the weave and coil as if the water flexed itself, each welted crocodile taking turn, taking hold, swiveling from head to tail to tear the flesh and then the sudden satin of its open throat. So slow this current, almost imperceptible its tug. It’s going to take a long time for this to pass, blood in the water, blood on the banks and in the leaves. It’s going to take a long time before the gross bloat and wreck of the carcass curves out of sight, trees retrieve their shadows on the water, and my father, whom I have almost forgotten, breaks this silence.

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Flip-flops, leash-clinks, spit on the concrete like a light slap: our dawn goon ambles past, flexing his pit bull. And soft, and soon, a low burn lights the flight path from O’Hare, slowly the sky a roaring flue to heaven slowly shut.

Here’s a curse for a car door stuck for the umpteenth time, here a rake for next door’s nut to claw and claw at nothing. My nature is to make of the speedbump scraping the speeder’s undercarriage, and the om of traffic, and somewhere the helicopter hovering over snarls—a kind of clockwork from which all things seek release, but it takes particular clicks to pique my poodle’s

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Late Fragment

How to say this— my silences were not always mine: scrabbled hole and the dark beyond, vaporous pond as if water wanted out of itself, tip of the sycamore’s weird bare reach: some latency in things leading not so much to speech as to a halting, haunted art wherein to master was to miss— how to say this, how to say this . . .

interest, naming with her nose’s particular quiver the unseeable unsayable squirrel. Good girl.

My father was a boatbuilder.

Prow of a man, his world a sea to cleave.

I learned a dangerous patience, to navigate night, live on nothing, leave.

And my mother, her furious smallness, her way of saying her blade, the oil and onion’s hiss: from her I learned what lies beneath.

Mystic, Istanbul, Jakarta, Dar es Salaam— what was I meant to keep?

If the distances to which I’ve been given suggest some wantless heaven of the mind, what in me still traces the creekbed creases in the rough skin of the palm of one so long, long asleep?

If I say I loved the seagull tethered to its cry, the cypress’s imprisoned winds, speak to the brink of my hands a moss-covered rock soft and knobby as a kitten’s skull.

If I say I loved.

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And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud

Madden me back to an afternoon I carry in me not like a wound but like a will against a wound

Boston, Lisbon, Cardiff, Asunción: what name is not a horizon?

Somewhere it is evening, light grown mild and pliable, wielded by wave and rock, in the shore’s trees torn apart . . .

Give me again enough man to be the child choosing my own annihilations To make of this severed limb a wand to conjure a weapon to shatter dark matter of the dirt daubers’ nests galaxies of glass Whacking glints bash-dancing on the cellar’s fire I am the sound the sun would make if the sun could make a sound and the gasp of rot stabbed from the compost’s lumpen living death is me O my life my war in a jar I shake you and shake you and may the best ant win For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God until my fixed self, my florescent self my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self withers in me like a salted slug

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Gon

no

Sôjô Yôen

Tango

On the Essence of the Welling Up out of the Ear th Chapter

the mother’s hair

is black but

of the

Regent’s Residence

On The Essence of the Passage “Form Is Emptiness and Emptiness Itself Is Form”

it says:

wake up! things are empty! all the colorful forms!— the child’s eyebrows

have turned white—

why the sky of spring shows green?

how is it possible?

Translated from the Japanese by Patrick Donnelly & Stephen D. Miller

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is that why “empty” equals “sky”?

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Translated from the Japanese by Patrick Donnelly & Stephen D. Miller

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F u j i wa r a

no

Koretsuna

M i c h e l l e A. G a l o

On the Introduction Chapter of the Lotus Sutra

every spring I grieved, but O

in the garden of the Law

the flowers are grateful when they fall

Glass

Life, I have let the glass grow dirty between myself and you.

Translated from the Japanese by Patrick Donnelly & Stephen D. Miller

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M i c h e l l e A. G a l o

In the Cemeter y at Calvar y Church, Burnt Hills

CHARLES in white marble has sunk level with the ground where his narrow stone has fallen flat.

A lip of sod has him by one corner, and, it seems, will one day swallow.

Or dig a garden and work my ashes into the soil and give away the fruits to friends and neighbors.

Be they carrots, marigolds, toadstools in the lawn, let something grow.

Mementos broken finer, finer by the lichen and the very winds on which these church bells ride, as the dead go, giving their hands and heels and lips to the grasses, the oaks and evergreens.

Open wide, O Earth.

Your daughter is returned to you.

Take her in, O Earth, and make her new.

Open wide, O Earth.

Your issue has returned to you.

Take us in, O Earth, and make us new.

Return to dust, memento.

Go down where words are lost, where the humus holds the contours of a graven name.

When I don’t sit on a blocky headstone right for sitting, this is a discretion for the living.

Bury me under such a block, inscribed “Please sit� for passerby or wandering poet such as I.

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A n t h o n y F a r r i n g to n

D av i d G e wa n t e r

Integument

Baudelaire’s Day Book

I’ve a friend who thinks of insects as simple pockets of moisture. Exoskeleton overcoat. Not quite so wet as raindrops, but of more substance, he says, than fog. Keep in mind (in winged insects) the mesothorax and usually metathorax bear wings. That is,

some droplets lift themselves:

little water balloon (minus the latex). Origami butterfly

(minus the paper). Thought bubbles

(of flightless birds) unmoored. Consider the abdomen of bees our own buzzing tongues. Consider the surface tension of a small lake

(that also raises its wings) an inverted hillock really that lowers itself here and oddly here.

—September, 1993: the Cauliflower.

My father dying.When I saw him at “the Home,” part of his face drooped like soft clay under heat, his cheek a dented pepper. I stepped back and clutched the wall—it was my face, my drip of lead above the brow.

He was swinging his arm round and round, helped by a goat-bearded therapist, PEDRO. Rehab? Nothing could strengthen an arm against the tumor gnawing his brain. But therapy justified his stay to the insurers, it paid the attendants, the night staff, catering, maintenance—swing away!

The Hospital nurses had been slim, sardonically cheery, their platform clogs pranced, click clack. But now, the Rest Home ladies. Massive, flat-faced, they hummed above the polyester voop-voop of skirts, girdles, stockings & straps, cups, the beautiful housings…My lust desperate, I plump as they bend to fluff a pillow, or inject insulin (they treated his diabetes, sugaring the tumor). Lean over, Bertha!

I could bed them one by one, a low sour passion born of misery, thankfulness, to prove our family still warm and capable of earnest groping. Instead, I feed him pulp food, hoist him in the suspended sling, looped to a metal frame on wheels so that one lady can take him from the bed to the wheelchair and back to bed, a bucket of a man, dangling over the empty well…. My finger gets caught in the pulley, now blood splatters the chain and sheet. A fragrant nurse hands me a gauze…her painted nails, that pattern: the flag of Samoa?

This spare landscape. Waterdrop cranium; fluttering minds. Touch us; we fly.

Later I pray to the blister, that my nail would grow and loop and be cut before he dies. I watch for it when I talk to him by phone; at night the nail speck stares back, cloud or blastula moving under the coarse ice.

A previous stroke had made his skin sensitive: doing the crosswords, he idly shaved his arms with an electric razor, whose low-frequency waves grew a cauliflower in the brain-pan: it fattened in its room like an anchorite. No one is to blame, it’s time for him to go, the yellowing Rest Home walls slacken and shape themselves for the next man. One day the women didn’t come to roll him over, he dialed 911: the ambulance drove round from the front, the emergency guys scolding him, then cursing at everyone.

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D av i d G e wa n t e r

The Unspeakable

He died before I could clip it, but I gouged out the nailtop and sealed it in an envelope. A runaround infection came on, the finger bloomed a rainbow of blood, until one day the whole nail came off, a trembling soggy mollusk under a little skull cap. No women now: here at last is my portion.

My student Charlie Bernstein, strapping, curly hair, about to take a step, like Rilke’s blind man pondering, fingers at his lips…he wrote poems about flowers, hillsides, the girls he would bring there, and I nudged him, “send your stuff to the poet Charles Bernstein, he says language writes his poems, he says, ‘that these dimensions are the material of which the writing’—: this guy should meet another Charles Bernstein. Tell him you wrote his books. ” Curse my tongue. The boy never mailed them, but after he left school he was driving all night through Texas, and a truck killed him. ~ I met Prof. Bernstein once (stooped, alive) and told him about Charlie.

He said _____________. And I answered ______.

Two dray horses champing at seeds and forage.

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M oya C a n n o n

J e a n -P i e r r e R o s n ay

Parisii

What the Caterpillar Said

My father was a Paris cattle man.

Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri

Birds are not all made of porcelain says the caterpillar.

Nevertheless they too have something to say and they stubbornly keep trying, confusing and seducing human beings.

To hell with them! They are as innocent as we are.

Open the doors of the cages.

The Parisii, who ferried travellers across this shallow bend of the river, with its two islands— unmatched as the eyes of a Picasso demoiselle— lived on a worn trade route which led north to wintry islands, south to an empire, and an inland sea.

This twentieth century, without grace, torn between a gargantuan past of effort and ingenuity and a future which, with the haste of thieves, explodes one by one the doors of understanding, while little children of all colors die of hunger in front of silos of grain and himalayas of solid butter guarded by the lackeys of money!

They knew little of the glitter and tramp of the Roman legions which would soon bear down on their homes; nothing of northern longboats which would rip the river with their oars or of tanks which would motor in over metalled roads;

They knew nothing of Attila or of Charlemagne; nothing of cathedrals, like tethered ships, of the flourish of baroque courts, or of the hour of the sansculottes; nothing of painted canvas, of jazz, or of heated café talk, but waiting on the wooden quays, to load silver or cloth, or casting off, at dawn, in their tapered cots, raw-knuckled, in February frost and fog, they must have known this— the sun raddling a grey river, which separated two parts of Gaul.

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This twentieth century, gorged with shame, inventor of the holocaust that threw children into the fire like garbage. Age of vulgarity and of triumphant ugliness, no few strokes of the pen or notes of music will render you your dignity.

And do not call on God, nor beg Neither this one nor any other It’s too late.

Terrified by the cruelty and the ignominy of events beyond his control, God has committed suicide

drowned in the ocean of poets’ tears.

Translated from the French by J. Kates

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J e a n -P i e r r e R o s n ay

Evening Jazz

J e a n -P i e r r e R o s n ay

[A girl is going to enter your brain.]

One evening Marcelle and I had accompanied Raymond Queneau home to Neuilly when the idea of howling the whole neighborhood awake came over me I wanted to shout Paris is a table turned upside down by a drunken dancer a fever sore on the corner of the lips an address scrawled on the back of a pack of matches A car passed passed by inside this car four stunning women one named Solange the other Armelle Those who were sitting in the back seat were both called Laurence I beg you above all not to do anything stupid My trouble arose because I was positive I knew each of these young women but it was impossible to prove that or to explain it to anyone Milord the innkeeper and Courbet forced their way into my mind and there was the staircase and the footbridge A couple stopped You are like my heels the man said you think properly only when you are on the sidewalk dying is not a proof

A girl is going to enter your brain. Pay attention all of you because you will be given no information about her, except for this: she is eleven years old on an autumn day in 1908. Her father does this, her mother does that. Of course they are both alive at the time we are speaking of. The girl laughs, something girls often do.You may note that her parents are French. Later she will come to France. You come across this girl in Vienna, in an Austria still delightful at the time we are speaking of. She is wearing black patent leather shoes; not for one instant does she suspect what her fate will be. She is eleven years old, I’ve already written that. Some thirty years from now, with her husband, she will fight in the Resistance and be deported to Ravensbruck.

For this one instant, for all eternity, she is laughing. She is eleven years old.

After you have read or listened to this poem, you will be able, if you close your eyes, to see her clearly, to hear her laughing. Nothing will escape you, not the color of her eyes, of her hair, of her pretty little dress, of her white stockings.

But I have written too much about this. I leave you and go back to the streets of Vienna where flares of music float along as in a movie.

And the girl is smiling at me, she who does not know, innocent as she is, that she has died, as have I.

Translated from the French by J. Kates

Reader how are you doing? How do you fit into this existence?

Translated from the French by J. Kates

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J e a n -P i e r r e R o s n ay

[I’ve come to the end of an October Sunday]

I’ve come to the end of an October Sunday

in the year

nineteen-hundred fifty-eight It is nine-twenty My life I see it as a circus act the elephant is nothing without the acrobat

accident is part of the ceremony twenty feet

behind a wall a man

is stoking a boiler I have never seen him but I know he will

be dead

Here the pencil gets away from me Lydia the little blonde bareback rider

dreams of marrying

Tonio in the tiger cage it is twenty-five of ten

(it can’t last) The hardest part is over

I’ve passed

thirty the rest is downhill

After all I might have done better to

shut up once the poet was damned now he is despised

J e a n -P i e r r e R o s n ay

Por t-Vendres

A wave leaves the water and adjusts its golden stocking. Ingrid dances in front of a suitcase heavy with all kinds of clothing, including a hat adorned with fuchsia. It’s hot.

To get at Ingrid, a boy with a fishy voice talks about Puerto Rico. A wave leaves the water and with one last thrust of its shoulder casts its foam onto the sand.

Translated from the French by J. Kates

Translated from the French by J. Kates

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J e a n -P i e r r e R o s n ay

D av i d S t . J o h n Pythagorean Per fume

When

When a horse thinks it’s a turtle, who cares?

When a young, ambitious turtle thinks it’s a giraffe and its neighbors shrug their shoulders; when another turtle slides off a mossy stone, falls on its back and beats its stubby paws in the empty air for hours until it dies, who raises questions, even of himself?

When a petty official who has received a small inheritance and decided to change his profession is sprayed with buckshot by a disgruntled wretch, who complains?

When, brought to the edge of the page like a cliff falling away into the void, the poet, remembering the inconsistency and childishness of the act of writing by means as arguable as those he employs more or less well with his pencil, rereads what he’s written,

what misery!

Unless there’s a miracle at the meeting-place.

Is that a flower in your hand Pythagorus I thought so Walk with me tonight underneath the universe Its animal spirit still alive & pulsing You know even though my vest is metal My eyes are open & the mystery of perfume is the perfume of mystery Don’t walk away from me now Even in the Silver Age blaze of your song I will wake Inside the sleeping liberties Even if your boat is carved of rancid meat & your sails are frozen with ice don’t despair

Translated from the French by J. Kates

The wind From the South is coming Everyone knows the changes yes even you Who fear has crippled The way sulphur colors the afternoon air Even you will smell every fresh passage & the way Between the sneering angels & the razors of the rocks

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D av i d S t . J o h n

Velvet Aurora

AleĹĄ Ĺ teger Raisins

The bird on the walk unrolled his velvet jacket

Whose veins, whose loves, whose traces, Whose time evaporated in the wrinkles of raisins.

& everything he saw he believed Juliette stood beside Orpheus thinking only of her soul

The cool grains of past summers.You eat them and you eat.

As you would eat the fingertips of god, which hold all.

& the way it always shivered in the shape of a pine

Reduced to the utter humility of the aged.

Like handfuls of pensioners on a pilgrimage.

& everywhere everywhere the dark licked its lips again & everywhere lillies lifted their faces

They rise from the table and plunge into your roof.

The whole bunch rises. Truly rises.

To the flames of hummingbirds just as Everywhere there arose a sense of pure design & all the songs & all the hymns were sung again

Whose arteries, whose fears, whose traces, Whose gargling gulps down the wrinkles of raisins.

The ancient fingers grab you from within, Choking you until you spit out their name.

Beyond the velvet shadows of earthly love

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

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Aleš Šteger

Bread

Aleš Šteger

Potato

Every time, he leads you into temptation to become a gentleman Who feeds on crumbs under his servant’s table.

He asks you to do him harm, for you to stab him, To shred him to pieces, consume his still warm body.

Without shame he appears to you naked as at Creation.

He is a pervert. He provokes you with abstinence.

But he is being given you and you give. And every morning And every evening you repeat the floury game.

He made you into a crematory of guilt.

When he feeds you, you speak and instantly are more famished.

Yes, yes, he loves you, that is why he accepts your knife.

He knows that all his wounds crumble in your hands.

The potato remembers the soil better than the farmer who digs him out, his

nightmares.

Inside his forehead you are born from the fallow and you eat back his potato.

It’s better to have a head buried deep in clay and to keep silent By the anus, temperate against the sky, than to repeat the ancient tale of

torment.

It’s better to forget that your legs and stomach dangle in emptiness.

Lucky that your hands do not know they are held only by a few peelings—the

last land.

When you submerge him at the bottom of the pot, you revive the ancient

curse.

The eye of Atahualpa prophesies bad luck as it is pulled out.

Centuries, which separate you, passed by more quickly, as the Colorado beetle

spawns.

His time is yet to come, and you are running out of potato.

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

Note: The potato was introduced to Europe via the Incas. Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, was tortured before being killed by the Spanish. In Slovenian, to run out of potato is to run out of luck.

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Aleš Šteger

M a r i a T e r ro n e When the Butcher’s Son Passed Me

Sausage

Did you see? Two hundred thousand frankfurters Demonstrated for workers’ rights.

Six million kosher salami gassed in the second world war And a million hot sausages murdered fifty years later in the Balkans.

But at the same time, concern. The number of obese mortadella is rising.

It is necessary to take immediate steps against gonorrhea in the blood sausage.

on the street, he was cradling a skinned lamb in his arms, stripped to the bone, its head askew.

He held the body as a blood-splattered father might hold a child he had just lost, knowing there is nothing to be done, his apron a map of sorrow.

And ooooh, some special sausage in a mini skirt.

And look at that Hungarian in high heels. Her stitch and wonderbra.

Meaty mixture of lies, fears, faltering and hope.

But why love, this frightening concept?

Is your stomach rumbling again? Come, put it in your mouth.

Between the anus and the mouth the appetite of a body for a body.

Bulimic mass, caught in the bowel of language.

Hurt it. Take it. Let the words burst between your teeth.

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

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G h a s s a n Z aq ta n

G h a s s a n Z aq ta n

Cavafy’s Builders

The Song of the Drowned

At night I climb the cookie dough rope and the wooden carts and call to my sister behind the reeds by the irrigation channels.

We sketch a school out of black ceramic design numbers and dolls out of sugarcane.

A teacher steps off the Jerusalem bus in the morning leaps angrily into the market’s mud, and the boys, with their hair cut, are mesmerized by the convent: there’s a bell on a white ram’s neck and conquered trees under the sun over the holiday swings.

The river was so fast when we were born the reeds were thick by the river…by the marshes!

I have a tune in the melody with which I did not arrive but it is my only gold and means It has the probability of improvisation the tenderness of verbs and the solidity of narration As if secret builders Cavafy had awakened were passing through the hills and started digging by my pillow.

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

And beneath the mud the drowned prepared fish for nets.

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

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Leonardo Sinisgalli P ortfolio Photo by Marsha Boston

Versions adapted from the Italian by B. H. Boston

Old Grief

Old Loves

The old cry easily.

In broad daylight, sitting in a secret part of the empty house, they burst into tears, surprised by infinite despair.

They lift a sliver of pear to their parched lips, the flesh of a fig sun-baked on roof tiles.

Even a sip of water can cool a crisis, even this visit by a snail.

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The old sprawl beyond memory behind doors. They stuff every eye with cotton wool.

Of course they toy with death, drunk, stripped bare.

They’re afraid of getting caught in the act by a cop or a teenager.

Who cares if they’re watched by the moon?

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Via Velasca

Autumn

The trampling of years has buried this road, narrowing now in this my favorite hour.

One night the fading light snuffed out every sound, my name a shout swallowed in a dream.

The road breaks, the day dripping from the peaks of rooftops: the hour plays sweetly in my chest.

Only the light remains: this zombie, this glimmer: a fish lit up in its glass bowl.

The flies seem happy to see me again.

Crawling on the wings of my glasses, they jump onto the tips of my ears.

This white paper charms them.

I speak, I caress them, scoop them in my hand, call their names— Filomena Fantina Felicetta.

I tell myself they will always be the same.

One preens in the mirror of my nail, the others hiding until he finds them.

Versions adapted from the Italian by B. H. Boston

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J e s s e N at h a n The Container for the Thing Contained

It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday.

I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves.Yesterday it rained and rained.This is rural Kansas, where I grew up. The nearest town is Moundridge, population 1500. My flight from where I live now, San Francisco, was delayed hours, hours I spent reading an Italian poet named Leonardo Sinisgalli whose sense of place was split a bit like mine, the city on one hand, the countryside on the other. Sinisgalli was from Montemurro, a tiny village a hundred miles southeast of Naples, but he lived and worked in Rome most of his life.

I’m far from the elegance of Rome, but there’s a structural grace to the building I’m approaching. I pass a scruffy windrow of cedars. My boots sink into wet ground. In a few steps I will be looking at the barn—red and silver, boxy, and huge as the unbridled agricultural fantasies of the settlers who settled Kansas.

It is elegant in its functionality, alien in its imposing quadrangles of tin. Inside, a dank smell hangs, and cobwebs garnish doorframes, and these remind me of a prose poem by Sinisgalli: “The industrious artificer carries his raw materials in his stomach. To build his webs he always begins at the beginning, always spitting out equal angles and parallel segments. ” Sinisgalli’s use of geometric language here is not surprising. He was trained as an engineer but he gave it up in his early twenties to write poetry. Though the pictures in his head were from the rural south of Italy where he grew up, poetic form (friends called him “the engineer poet”) is what preoccupied him.

Sinisgalli is defined by this preoccupation—obsession, even—with form.

The poet turned 28 in 1936, the year Benito Mussolini assumed the title “His Excellency, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire. ” Sinisgalli passed 30 and then 35 as World War II bled Italy barren. He was in mid-career and 37 when Il Duce hung from a lamppost. It is remarkable that Sinisgalli, who died in 1981 at 73, never directly converted any of his country’s tribulations into subject matter. Meanwhile, he criticized critics for missing the point, for paying too much attention to what a poet says instead of how he’s saying it. “The critic,” Sinisgalli writes in a prose poem called “Presuppositions,” “is often a kind of small animal that can crawl all over the surface of a sphere but never know how to reach its center because he’s not familiar with its formula, its form. ” For Sinisgalli, form grew content. Via form, he thought—via the alchemical combination of sentence structure, linguistic device, words matched

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and bonded—language leads us to its implications. The contents of a barn, if you will, mattered less to Sinisgalli than how it was built. Questions of subject matter became subservient to questions of form.Which is why Sinisgalli, though he lived in Italy through the catastrophe of two world wars, never wrote about any of it.

W. S. Di Piero years ago brought into English a selection of Sinisgalli’s poems called The Ellipse, published in 1982 by Princeton. It covers poetry written from 1927 to 1979, and outside scattered surfacings in anthologies, Di Piero’s translations are among the only versions of Sinisgalli’s poems in English.

In “Lucania,” Sinisgalli probes the reunion of one self with another, adulthood with childhood, filling the poem’s final stanza with confidence and lamentation: I’ll come back, alive, under your red rain, I’ll come back, guiltless, to beat the drum, to tie my mule to the gate, to catch snails in the garden.

Will I see the smoking stubble, the brushwood, the ditches? Will I hear the blackbird singing under the beds, and the cat singing on the graves?

I’m reading The Ellipse in the loft of my parents’barn,which they had converted into a game room with overstuffed chairs, and foosball, and a cheap pool table, and an adjustable basketball goal for shooting hoops.The loft is a cavern with slanting ceilings and rafters. Reading Sinisgalli reminds me that stanza is a word brought to Englishspeakers from Italian, and in Italian it means room. And Sinisgalli’s sense of the stanza is so purified, so contained, so room-like, and this reminds me that he studied math, that he was practiced in precision. He knew how to build rooms, and from rooms, buildings.

Each stanza he pens presents itself as a well-crafted shell, a container that’s singular, a container whose function nullifies any need of decoration, or whose decoration is functional.The edges of his stanzas—defined by where he breaks lines, places periods, or how he makes phrases—are like the spare, essential lines in an architect’s drawings, lines that give structure to whatever he’s trying to preserve the way walls give structure to a room. 1

The title of this essay is borrowed from Jack Gilbert.

Architecture presents a vivid metaphor because pieces of art, if they succeed, become fixed points in memory. They become buildings on the skyline of the past. A brilliant few weather all the storms of forgetting.

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Consider this, the second-to-last stanza of “Lucania” (which, my apologies, we are now reading backwards): In volcanic tinderbox air the trees weirdly throb and breathe, oak trunks fatten with the essence of heaven.

Heaps of rubble lie untouched for centuries: nobody dares turn over a stone, afraid of the horror.

I know hell’s navel lies under every stone.

Only a boy can lean over the edge of the abyss and scoop nectar from shoot-clusters swarming with mosquitos and tarantulas.

Robert Hass has written about how to define form, I think instructively: “We speak of the sonnet as ‘a form,’ when no two sonnets, however similar their structures, have the same form,” he says in Twentieth Century Pleasures. Form, he suggests, dwells at once everywhere and at the center of the poem, in the unity of the poem’s music and its vision. He goes on: “Form is not the number or kind of restrictions, conscious or unconscious, many or few, with which a piece of writing begins. A sonnet imposes one set of restrictions and a poem by Robert Creeley with relatively short lines and three- or four-line stanzas imposes another. There are always restrictions. . . ” Hass quotes Creeley quoting Pound: “Verse consists of a constant and a variant. ” So it’s more than restrictions, but still, what is form? In 1957 painter Ben Shahn wrote “The Shape of Content,” an essay that’s as valuable now as the day it was published. “Form,” said the painter, “is the abolishing of excessive materials, whatever material is extraneous to inner harmony, to the order of shapes now established. Form is thus a discipline, an ordering, according to the needs of content. ” It’s more than a structure, a lens, a rhyme scheme, or a number of lines. 2 Form is all these in concert. But form most of all is shape: imaginative, emotional, metrical, typographical, and musical shape. And a poem’s shape is born in the echo chamber of the self in which an artist makes mechanical decisions, one after another, while constantly negotiating the repercussions of those decisions.

I would caution as well, for what it’s worth, against confusing a poet’s “style” with a poet’s “forms. ” The forms are a product of, among other things, the poet’s style. Style has, in my mind, more to do with the tone, voice, and register that a poet strikes, rather than the mechanics and structures of the poem. It gets slippery. The concepts are interlarded but, to me, formal calculations—form—should be thought of as one specific (and disproportionately important) component of a poet’s style.

In my apartment in San Francisco I have a drawing the size of an unfolded city map of a fleshy nude woman lounging, half looking away. It was made by filmmaker Jean Negulesco in 1960. It’s done with one black line and the line never breaks, all the curves and bulges and smooth edges of the woman rendered, it appears, in one breathless stroke. The impact of the drawing is immense; its starkness levels.

The line tells me how to look. It creates a boundary. It creates in light a set of parameters.The eye cannot argue.The impact of the drawing is even more immense because of the affect of the line’s lineness. That is, the line may have taken hours to draw, but its smooth, unshakeable motion suggests it happened in a flash. It is illusion masquerading as epitome, and it is the genius of form. In this case, a woman sitting on a wall takes the form of a single line.

I am going to translate this further. Say there is a lovely woman sleeping in a nearby room at this moment. Her physicality, her shape, the way her body was ordered is marvelously pleasing to my eye. Say the beauty of the container is matched by the beauty of what is contained, by the beauty of who is contained.

Say that when she wakes, she’ll drift in with puffy, slight-smiling lips and speak wondrous strings of words only she can speak, in cadences only she knows.These are the forms of her mind made manifest in the beats of language.

The forms Sinisgalli’s words assume are honed and polished, images and enjambments alike selected in the service of precision. Consider the fourth, third, and second stanzas3 of “Lucania,” the molten core of the poem, and a path straight through the poet’s sensibility: Land of huge mamas, of fathers dark and radiant as skeletons, overrun by roosters and dogs, woods and limestone, lean land where the grain toils miserably (wheat, corn, semolina) and the wine is dark and chewy (mint from the Agri, basil from the Basento!) and olives taste of oblivion, flavor of sorrow.

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3 The fact that we can read this poem backwards stanza by stanza and have it make a kind of sense is another proof of Sinisgalli’s ability to make little rooms within poems. Each stanza is almost a separate and individual poem. Each stanza is contained, pebble-like. This invites playful rearranging.

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The translation captures well the quiet power of the repeated preposition in the first line: “Terra di mamme grasse, di padri scuri. ” The stanza has a stately, incantatory ring, like names being read off a roll call at a nightmarish graduation.

And this coming before it: The sun slanting on laurel, the good bighorned sun, tongue of sweet light, sun greedy for children, here in the piazzas!

It trudges like an ox, and on the grass and stones it leaves enormous stains swarming with ghosts. . . . preceded by Sinisgalli’s insistence in the second stanza that the spirit of silence—the spirit that inhabits corners and shadows (which is to Sinisgalli the spirit of the poet)— springs from things most primal:

The spirit of silence is everywhere in my grieving province. From Elea to Metaponto, sophistical and golden, baffling and sly, it drinks the holy oil in churches, goes hooded in houses, dresses as a monk in caves, grows with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages.

Which returns me to Kansas in April, to the stagnant pools of water that form in the weedy grass around the barn after a torrential rain. In a few weeks it will be May, and warmer.The ditches filled with water, the mini-lakes on the fields, all now filling with mosquito larvae, will soon be steamy breeding pits for hordes.

They will be infested, unpleasant places to be. But at the same time undeniably fertile. When I read “with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages” I think of these stagnant pools, and I think of Czeslaw Miłosz writing that a person “constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins. ” Miłosz and Sinisgalli—one in Poland, one in Italy—lived through and well beyond World War II. Ruin and rot are places of breaking down, of returning to parts. The poet, to Sinisgalli, is the boy who might “scoop nectar / from shoot-clusters swarming with mosquitos. ” The spirit that “dresses as a monk in caves, grows / with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages. ” There is no place in Sinisgalli for overblown rhetoric, for eloquence for its own sake. He was philosophically liberal—he would “sooner live backstairs than in a sumptuous tower” and, he believed that the poet “confides not in princes but in

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janitors, mailmen, pensioners. ” Still, Sinisgalli did not spend his poems lambasting Mussolini or his regime as they clogged the land. He did not make war-torn Italy his material. Rather, he attacked fascism by not attacking it, at least not head-on.

His poems stood against the forms of fascism by countering its use of language and therefore its thinking. Language was the front, form the weapon. Putting it this way, I suppose, makes it sound more intentional and polemical than it probably was on Sinisgalli’s part.We’re talking about a process inside the man, one that operated below the fleeting fashions of conscious decision-making. This is to say, I don’t mean to canonize Sinisgalli, or conjure up motivations in the man that weren’t there. Sinisgalli wrote the way he wrote not to make a point or start a revolution. He wrote the way he wrote because it was the way he liked to write.

Sinisgalli distinguished himself in engineering, math, and physics, but he refused a spot at the Istituto di Fisica in 1929, saying later, “Although I could have joined the young men who were ushering in the atomic age, I preferred to follow the painters and poets. ” Romantic, yes, but with “Cartesian precision” (Di Piero’s words), Sinisgalli waged his own assault on empty rhetoric in the privacy of his study. He decried poetry by “Rhetoricians and Sophists. ” He strips down his poems to clean, exact stanzas that are at first blush devoid of emotion; the speaker of these poems sometimes seems dead as a camera. His forms reveal an obsession with both precision and accuracy, simplicity and mystery.

Whether or not Sinisgalli conceived of his work in polemical terms—my guess is he did not—the poet’s choices within his poems stand in opposition to the rhetorically swollen, euphemistic language of fascism. In that climate Sinisgalli’s insistence on making accurate, truthfully-observed, un-grandiose poems seems radical. 4 Here at last is the first stanza of “Lucania”: To the pilgrim crossing its frontiers, moving down through the Alburni pass or following the sheep-track on the slopes of the Serra, to the kite snapping the horizon line with a snake in its claws, to the emigrant, to the soldier, whoever comes back from refuge or exile, whoever sleeps in sheep pens, to the shepherd, sharecropper, and salesman Lucania opens its barren plains, its valleys where rivers crawl like rivers of dust.

This wasn’t a conversation limited to Italy.“One of the ways by which contemporary verse has tried to escape the rhetorical, the abstract, the moralizing, to recover (for that is its purpose) the accents of direct speech, is to concentrate its attention on trivial or accidental or commonplace objects. ”This is T. S. Eliot writing on Georgian poets for The Egoist in 1917. He would publish The Waste Land five years later.

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One shouldn’t mistake Sinisgalli’s astonishing embrace of broken-down returners here with grandiosity.This stanza ends in dust. Sinisgalli, writing in war’s wake in “On The Figure of the Poet,” unpacks what it means to write antieloquence5:

The Poet… has had to draw from the wells of instinct, from his animal tenderness. He has had to trust in his sense of smell more than in his learning, in his native dialect more than in official culture. Let us not accuse him of giving us tubers instead of jewels.

While Mussolini was shouting “Victory Italy!” in the great metropolis of Western civilization, Sinisgalli was writing poems made from a childhood lived in that land’s barren south-country, poems like “Lucania,” or, later, poems like this one from the early 1950s—so hard and tight and sure of itself I want to compare it to a weather-beaten pebble; it’s as if Sinisgalli designed the poem based on some corresponding physical object—called “The Wind Has Stopped Blowing”: The wind has stopped blowing through the valley, the dogs are gone, children fly past with swallows in their hands.

A mole pokes its head from a hole, an insect rolls bits of dung, the ant gathers grain, winter isn’t far.

Sinisgalli is proud of his “tubers,” his elegant un-jewels. In Germany, fascism lit a pastoralist fire and rural men and women could be counted on for patriotism. In Italy, however, fascism caught on slowly in the villages of the south; it competed for power with the mafioso, winning much earlier the urban centers of the north. In any case, in images of the countryside, Sinisgalli found something uninflated, something that didn’t pretend or posture. There is starkness to the grind and repetition—the chores, the demands of crop and livestock, season and weather—of rural life.

6

And what would he have been reading? Sinisgalli was well versed in Rimbaud,Verlaine,Valéry, Descartes, Rousseau, Schopenhauer and the plain-spoken 19th century Italian poet Guido Gozzano. Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Foscolo, and Tasso would have been drilled into his and every other Italian student of his generation’s head.

5

A poet who shared Sinisgalli’s distaste for Montale, as well as his desire for small elegant poems, was Sandro Penna, born two years before Sinisgalli in 1906. Penna was also the first queer Italian poet to write openly and directly about his sexuality (from George Scrivani’s 1988 translation of Confused Dream: “Always boys in my poems! / Well, I don’t know / about anything else. ”) His short, bursting, erotic lyrics made him less than iconic in the eyes of the fascists. Luckily for him, he too was a recluse. W. S. Di Piero, translator of Sinisgalli, is also one of Penna’s conduits into English. In 1982, in addition to Sinisgalli’s book The Ellipse, Di Piero published This Strange Joy, which includes the following four-line, untitled, sentence-long poem: “Maybe plain and easy poetry happens / unthinking as a traveler’s hand / inside an airless crowded train / falling on a boy’s shoulder. ” Alda Merini, on the other hand, was “found” by Montale, but still, she’s a good example of the antieloquence that came after Sinisgalli and Penna (she was born in 1931).

Her favorite is the aphorism, which she turns into a brutal barb. Examples: “Death is a perfect boundary” or “Superficiality / disturbs me / but profundity / murders me. ” Montale endorsed and recommended her work widely. Susan Stewart and Carla Billitteri each have published solid approximations of Merini’s verse in English. Stewart’s was published by Princeton (2009) and is called Love Lessons. Billitteri’s chapbook of Merini poetry is called I am a furious little bee and it was published by Hooke Press (2008). The two aphorisms cited just now were from the Billitteri chapbook.

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Conscious or unconscious, it’s a formal decision to let that first line billow out (“Nella valle non passa più il vento”—it’s the longest in the poem in Italian as well), or to revert immediately afterwards to short, three- and four-syllable lines, or to end on terse, prickly terms: “winter isn’t far” (“l’inverno non è lontano”).

Sinisgalli knew personally—his day job for a while was with Olivetti as an advertising director7—what Marshall McLuhan would articulate decades later: “The medium is the message. ” The shell is the content. When I read Sinisgalli’s verse I think of William Carlos Williams writing in The Wedge (1944) that, “it isn’t what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes. ”8 •••

7 Sinisgalli founded Civiltà delle Macchine, one of Italy’s most influential design magazines. Like many other Italian writers in the twentieth century, Sinisgalli had no university training in literature or writing.

8 Stephen Burt believes the pendulum in American poetry has swung again toward Williams’s sentiment. He points to a growing body of work by American poets who cast their music in the cardinal directions of precision, elegance, intelligence, and object obsession. As an example, he nods to Graham Foust (As In Every Deafness, 2003). Here’s “Managed Care”: “Flowers in a blue / glass, capable / as doors. / The sun erases / all the grass. / The yard is done for. ” I read Burt’s piece while working on this essay and I couldn’t help but think of lines from Sinisgalli like “olives taste of oblivion, / flavor of sorrow” and “the ant gathers grain, / winter isn’t far. ”

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Unlike Czesław Miłosz, Sinisgalli seems to feel no guilt about having lived through Europe’s second great war. In “Dedication,” Miłosz addresses the dead of the Warsaw uprising: “You whom I could not save / Listen to me. / Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. ” Miłosz, to be sure, saw more carnage than Sinisgalli, and so perhaps the war entering his poems was unstoppable. It’s hard to say what Sinisgalli would have written had he endured more direct hardship. But even Miłosz, who was able to write directly about the war, even he became convinced a poet’s developed sense of form was more important than whatever the poet was talking about. “The reality of the war years,” he writes in “Ruins and Poetry,” “is a great subject, but a great subject is not enough and it even makes inadequacies in workmanship all the more visible. ” If anything, war and passage through fascism deepened Sinisgalli’s belief in a poet’s taking responsibility for his or her forms.The world had come undone.

Official, inherited modes had become suspect. In “On The Figure of the Poet” (the word figure in this title is noteworthy: it’s a word that has to do with shape, and it’s another sign of where Sinisgalli’s priorities lie) he writes: The extraordinary stability of ancient forms (comparable only to the stability of the pyramids and colossi, of columns and cupolas) has surrendered the field to less abstract structures that are more free and easy, more articulate, certainly more short-lived. The equippage of metaphoric language—the burden of symbols, figures of speech, ornaments, and emblems—does not incite the Poet to take risks [emphasis in the original].

Sinisgalli’s poems are not the cries of an evangelizer or syrup from a propaganda dealer. They are brief transmissions from an inward-turned journey.

At my parents’ farm, there is a swing I love. It hangs from a Honey Locust across the sewage pond from the barn. I am sitting there the day before I pole vault back across the Rockies to California when I read “Via Velasca,” written by Sinisgalli sometime in the 1950s. A long shiver begins in my heel and surfaces on the top of my skull. In Di Piero’s English translation, there are no words not necessary, no lazy lines:

It’s less likely than ever

that someone will clutch at you

and beg pity for his suffering.

The windows of the Verzee

are stuffed with rags.

Among the shops and signs

you look for a memory, odor,

stone, landmark

in the blasted street.

Your pockets are filled with life.

Filthy with smoke, outcast, you slowly

bend over to tie your shoes.

Your pockets are filled with wind.

This is a crisp sound, a cessation of the static for a second. Unfurl the butterfly nets of memory and image and music, says Sinisgalli. Catch wind. Fill your pockets with it.

What does incite the poet to take risks? Sinisgalli’s beef is with baggage, with weighty, muddling, or flashy language. He wants forms conducive to the boiling down of things. “The Poet’s only standard or ambition,” he writes, “may finally be to document the possibility of his own existence. ” Sinisgalli believes, if nothing else, in evidence, in proofs. He is a mumbling mechanic diagnosing reality. He is a fierce quiet scientist experimenting on time. He is a farmhand laboring in the chicken coop of literature.

So how consciously was Sinisgalli really pushing against fascism? I’ve circled this question throughout the essay, and I want to answer it with the old truth, ‘trust the art, not the artist. ’ True, Leonardo Sinisgalli did not participate in the resistance. He did not protest or get arrested or throw tomatoes at government offices. He did not even state that his poems were an open challenge to Mussolini’s regime. But he wrote them, and so to me they are the main event.

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J a m e s L o n g e n bac h Archipelago

A plain of calcareous mud, covered by the sea at high water to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, but divided by an intricate network of narrow channels from which the sea never retires.

This is why the city feels not simply decayed but incomplete, a record of human resourcefulness that cannot be finished because it couldn’t have been ordained.

•

In some places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen into islands.

I don’t remember staying at the San Gallo; neither do I remember visiting Madonna dell’ Orto, the church where Tintoretto is buried, though I circled it on the map.

• An elegantly dressed woman standing in two inches of water to buy a loaf of bread.

The two arched windows, slightly lower than the other four, that break the symmetry of the doge’s palace.

I remember eating in the little trattoria at the base of the Zattere where the Stazione Marittima begins: tables of men, laborers.

I saved the bill: 12,600 lire.

A garbage collector tilting his wheelbarrow up the steps of a bridge.

• A man pissing against the wall of a narrow calle.

The mermaids at the base of the column at Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

• The nearly transparent marble grape leaves floating above the drunken Noah’s head.

What do you want for your birthday?

Four crosses, two pelicans, two boars.

I want to go back to Venice.

The lights of the Giudecca in winter: lampposts hidden in fog.

We took the train from Florence and stayed in the little hotel on the Rio di San Vio, near the Salute, where we’d stayed before.

The city was preparing for carnevale but the streets were deserted; tables of masks.

• Follow at evening the windings of some unfrequented channel into the midst of the lagoon; remove the lights of the city.

• Nothing on the façade of San Marco is indigenous.

Pathless, comfortless, lost in dark languor and silence interrupted only by seabirds, you will feel something of the horror with which this solitude was chosen as a place of habitation.

Every slice of marble, every column, every statue is borrowed or pillaged or adapted from its original use.

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Teenagers from Murano taking the boat to school.

Grandmothers pointing to the little bunches of spinach on the grocery barge that moors each morning on the Rio di San Barnaba.

The squero where the gondolas are repaired, nobody ever working.

The barista murmuring in dialect, all vowels.

Photo by Bruce H. Boston

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Aldo Palazzeschi The Old Nuns

Shreds of ostrich feathers, quivering, dusty, worm-eaten, in little baskets shaped like bird nests; this, to some scorn, is their hair’s own form.

Exhausted pinks, discolored, indiscernible tints, faded and tinted again; impossible little flowers, tufts and nosegays, frail as cobwebs, shot through with holes, raised high on the brow and groomed over and over again; behind, a little knot and pigtail.

Or hair in the form of a dinner plate, and right in the center a weird quill, the pointed end of some old pheasant feather, standing on end.

Feathers of little chicks, of turkeys, of roosters, of capons, all’s fair in old nuns’ hair.

Shawls made of old scraps fringed with beads, with felt, and velvet bows, encased in curls of tiny lace.

Waistcoats with bristling fringes

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and with tassels at the waist, on the breast, and over the shoulders, a cassock with frills, the remnants of scavenges here and there, the ritornelles of yesteryear, all things of such beauty that you never see anywhere except on old nuns.

Some, out of sheer devotion, dress in priestly garments, with the proud collar; a few have the composed gravity of a monk.

But all, all of you are a little self-conscious.

And how I enjoy watching you!

You wander, you mill about, full of guilt and shame, of pride and purpose, full of dignity, throughout our favorite palace.

Amidst the gilt, the damask, the altar pulpits, the curtains, the candelabras, you come and go as though in your own home.

Stiff curtseys on rigid legs.

I seem to be dreaming of decrepit palaces of deposed bygone kings, everything decaying, disintegrating.

You rise, you leave, and return,

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and curtsey, curtsey, you kneel again.

your palace, because in each of you is a wellspring of grotesque regality.

You hop along or hold yourself with dignity erect, some hobbling with gout, others attempting a pirouette, with paralytic twitches of the head.

Your faces are balls of wrinkles, your necks protrude, move among rags, like heads of turtles.

Your eyes peek from their recesses out of obstinacy, with haughtiness, pettiness, superiority, with such security in your interior selves.

What were you? What are you?

Retired old maids? Broken-down ladies?

Might some of you have been dancers, some floozies?

Dancer, floozy! How you’ve fallen!

Did you lock yourself in stubborn purity, or did nobody want you?

Or did you know love well?

Here’s the mystery that interests me in you.

Love! You! How many years has it been!

I think of stripping you bare, tearing off your faded little jackets; the filthy waistcoats you piled on yourselves, fearing pneumonia, to strip you bare, undress you of that filthy wrapping, to have you nude before me.

Hunched, twisted, monstrous, even for an instant to spark a quiver of the most horrible desire in you, see you dance before me obscenely hobbling around laughing, teasing, I’d want the most virginal,

Tell me, is it purity that spoiled you so, or vice?

How to recognize you from your remains?

And yet still you’re flirtatious!

You doll yourselves up, pathetically color what’s left of your hair, wear false braids, false curls tinted another color; you’re dressed for the holidays, and your holidays are sad, sad and stubborn; the people who fill the church with color push you, irritate you, it’s no longer your house where you hold court,

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P at r i c k D o n n e l ly Daylight Has Been Saved by Time Again

maybe the one never before touched, to give all my twenty years!

To hear you squeaking under me, screeching, creaking; to crush you, beat you, give you the most horrible joy, the most ferocious martyrdom!

(Your mouths, toothless, bent, to me reveal monstrous libidos.)

To contaminate you all, all, to give you hate, love, and scorn, to abandon you, with one solitary gesture throw all your prayers to the wind, and to leave you with a laugh!

Away! Away! Away!

What’s this? Who’s here?

Naked before me, the mother of my mother, the old woman. . .

No! I swear!

I never touched them, the old nuns, I just amuse myself watching them.

and now the late April of the second summer of my fifties is already beginning to burn.

GET UP AND EARN SOME MONEY is what that light, too much light, says, and also

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN UP FOR HOURS. I know they have, they always have,

every time I keep an appointment at eight I am astonished at the number of people

already on the road.

You lie lazy and came late to every phase, a voice like my old father’s

seems to allege.

“But,” I want to argue with the light, “though I came late, I came. ”

There were years in the 90s when it looked like I’d rush straight from spring to winter,

with the rest of my brothers of the bars and baths and groves of reeds crushed into mazes.

Then I circled back to have late spring, a real adolescence, even as others were wiping

their mouths of that meal.

Is it greedy then to request late summer, even early autumn?

To ask for a harvest, the wheat ground so fine you could hold bread to the light and read through it?

Now summer and the work of that light begin to press down like a kind of war on the earth,

and the real war lowers over us its magnifying glass, and O my brothers of the bars and baths

and groves of reeds crushed into mazes, who ate metal when the wood ought to have been green and then sank

under the frozen water: let me rise to work, because there’s too much light to sleep.

Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson

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J a s o n R a n o n U r i R ot s t e i n

R e g i n a D e r i e va

The Froward Dog or The Farmer’s Dog

[Do not pick up]

—After Claire Keegan’s The Forester’s Daughter

So that the area around his belt be maintained The dog was to be shot and dead The animal instinct to test its strength Permitted the dog to one last run The hunter rallied and cocked his gun, as The dog was given to sally and bandy forth If it could survive this, it would have its way It would have its way whether it knew It was to die or not The dog came running, running farther, Farther away from its master Outrunning, outrunning the bastard Plodding, plodding forward into the distance Disappearing, disappearing from view

Do not pick up this stone, stones like these once were the death of St. Stephen.

Do not mingle with this crowd, once already it has demanded a Crucifixion.

Everything that once was over and over again will be repeated, so that you, when you come to meet death, will not send to his death someone else.

Translated from the Russian by J. Kates

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Y o n a W a l l ac h P ortfolio

Translated, with introduction by Linda Stern Zisquit

Waltz With Wallach

She was a child when her father was killed. The year the state was born. I heard her name for the first time the dark February we arrived. At a party for translators, I didn’t know a word of Hebrew, but I had been invited to the party honoring Gabriel Priel where I met Gabi and Zali, my new Israeli ‘brothers. ’ They were editing a journal for a special issue on Israeli poetry, and asked me to try my hand at two of her poems. They told me about her demonic verse, her experiments with sex and drugs.

I was thirty. She was still alive. But nothing, nothing could have been further from my mind than a long term relationship. It was winter, bleak, silent, I looked out from the absorption center for new immigrants on the city of Jerusalem, my new home. With two little daughters and a husband I loved – but whose need to come here had ripped me from my other home. I couldn’t speak couldn’t breathe there was no light in the basement of our immigrant quarters, I left without a word, he followed me with the little girls and twelve suitcases to a cheap hotel in the center of town. Where to go? At the party I’d met poets, translators, people accustomed to the harsh light. I couldn’t see my way through that first weekend. I called my mother and cried, unable to comfort her for the sudden cruel separation from her only daughter, or my weakness in not finding expression enough for my own ambivalence to console either one of us. But that request for two poems resonated as I enrolled in the Hebrew class at the immigrant quarters where we returned after being offered a third-floor space with a window that opened to the light. We stayed there six months. I bussed the girls each morning into town, chafing against the brutal landscape that softened over time as the Hebrew gutturals became another home.

I never met her. Those first two poems I tackled like so many things in my life as ‘the challenge presenting itself that I cannot refuse. ’ Why Yona why the attraction initially so unconscious so circumscribed by responsibility by desperation by loss. No voice. I could have as easily slipped into a stream and used that material. My life at the time so vulnerable and inhabitable by whatever wind flowed through. Missing home finding home missing words missing phrases missing rooted connection missing the ground that enables flight missing all that I had thought of as my self and at the same time wildly and dangerously experimenting in my new life breaking the borders of traditional religious observance while keeping close all the barriers as authorities as keepers of the gate as dynamic judges – and so Wallach was the perfect choice – though

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I never considered her a choice. I was as if chosen. It was what was given to me.

Out of darkness. As organic a responsibility as my own poems, as much an act of faith and trust as the poems that came from my own daily attending to life’s textures.

What changed in you Yona, she was asked. I’ve developed techniques she said. An ability to analyze the material. She was already sick then, dying. In the hospital the doors opened for her, the corridors, monasteries where she no longer felt afraid, there she found the porous poetry I seek, the ability to use all the material that once seemed unfit for poetry. Hers was cerebral and physical. A psyche made of body and flesh. A language of the self dynamic and procreative. Where God is revealed. Like nothing I imagined at the beginning. The censorship I’d heard of, the enticing gossip, photos of the vamp the long hair the exaggerated platform shoes the theatrics – none of that as compelling as the intellect the spirit moving through the brain the enormous power of her appetite to dig the Hebrew for its roots and follow the tributaries of its watery underground feeding system to reach the ancient, the slang and the marketplace, the transcendent blue dome the Church of the Dormition,‘the sky a helmet over us. ’ I used that phrase in a poem recently and had no idea till now it may have come from her. Intimidated at first by her reputation, I submerged my ear in the hardest sounds I’d ever encountered.

Word by word, phrase by phrase. Buds of sensation unfolded into meaning. The pathetic persecuted little children of her early lyrics, the pursued Jonathan/Jesus the gladiola stalk whipping across the page, the sounds of her leaping tongue, the split, crossed, exchanged and multiplied selves. How did I ever enter that domed room? What would have happened if I’d resisted, said no?

A slow start. Like stones. Coals. Like fire. It caught on. Like smoke it rose and formed shapes I didn’t recognize. An attraction? Affinity? We never met. Her father was killed in the War of Independence. He was a founder of the town where she was born. Kiryat Ono. Her mother ran the local movie house. She never left Hebrew, never left Israel. Had bouts of madness. A Tel Aviv poet who admitted herself to the Talbieh Hospital in Jerusalem to observe her states of mind under hallucinogens. Joined a rock bank. Made music. Made the stones and the coals and the buried nuggets of heat and cold rock together, the mind ignited. Secrets opened into generosity. As she watched her body consumed with cancer she gave up the fear that others would steal from her, or that she had to hide anything. She held on. I held on. Someone said reading Wallach is like riding a horse, you have to hold on, better not stop to make sense or analyze, just read, follow the words, the wild light, the music and the visual sounds.

So I started with those two personae poems Jonathan and Cassius. And then one day another. And another. Absalom. Christina. The incantatory monologues.

The love poems inviting God and Father to sleep with her.The k’desha engaging

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with holiness through sexuality. The powerful pleasure of not knowing where I was being led that kept me holding on. The “I” that never clearly voiced its personal sorrows or its delights only its mind-music singing wildly like an operatic heroine singing till she died singing at the top of her lungs singing till there was no place or relationship further to explore, long hair flowing, breathing pulsing muscular men becoming women becoming softer, sex in partnership, a landscape without particular clarity names rarely spoken memory less of a present tense lingering in the mind than a life-force of words making it happen.

I am now twenty years older than Yona Wallach when she died more than twenty years ago. It took me more than twenty years to translate the poems into English from the brilliant burning Hebrew of Wallach’s tongue, all the while charged by her mastery, charmed by her playfulness, provoked by her pursuit of spiritual truth. As the daily practice of prayer requires some estrangement, so her liberating wild poems appear now as living acts of faith.

The material was of her self: fear of persecution, fear of not being loved, the father and mother hunting, the doe, the Garden, the monster self. And of recurring situations. The doe recurs. Madness recurs. She took pills to watch madness. She played with fear as with a child throwing it in the air. Literature she said should help us understand our lives, not the nation. What matters is the personal, the private, what is connected to our lives.That is the work of literature, she said, to find the secrets of existence.

Wallach never wrote about the nation. Or the wars. Or the troubling leadership. Or the injustices. How did she ignore the burning issues? Wasn’t she a poet engaged in the local scene? Wasn’t she a Tel Aviv poet churning up the garbage on the street together with the holy books? Wasn’t her poetry a political act, a confrontation with the squeamishness the hiding behind tradition and gender-conscious rules of a language in order to free it, out of love and concern?

What is the poet’s motive? Is it finally to understand herself?

Would she have sat with me at a café and enjoyed our conversation? Would she have disdained my effort to translate her poems? I never thought about these questions, was taken as if by some internal force into the whirlwind of her hand’s work. And I never stopped out of frustration as I pondered the equivalent weight and size of a word knowing there was no match for her choice no studied solution that would please unless I let the words do it in me.

Caught in immobility, stunned by loss, I turned to her for some movement the way a bird’s call wakens. And there in the cadence of her “I no longer love being afraid” I found the longer line the gathering energy that repetition restores if we don’t restrain ourselves out of fear. Just as I had been afraid of their reaction, the chorus of men the ones who called my poetry passionate as if that were a female weakness a critical flaw. And she set me out on the branch to call with a

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thin voice, our song perched on a wire in the dark night and the sound of the bird that I perceived as hers as mine became a force. But really what other pleasure is there in a poem unless it carries you somewhere else.You stumble and fall over the difficulties and that too is another place, solitary, confused. God came through her window and when she knew He would no longer come she mourned. Towards the end she observed her body on the bed tired after so much doing, so much observation, knowing that above all she must take care of herself. Dismiss the hypnotist. All that tireless scrutiny must finally give way to simple acceptance. A fighter. She played with fire. And then the final poems slowed down by the body’s cancer became her guide, another light.

I keep thinking we are done, this can’t go on, but there is always more.

NOTE: k’desha: (from Hebrew root k’dosh, holy) a sacred prositute

Linda Zisquit Jerusalem, Israel May, 2009

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The Voice of Gold and the Voice of Flesh

The people the people of gold like a kind of machine folk glow like gold in the afternoon sun and I imagined their heart heart of gold pumping rushing gold to their brain gold dust shed from the gold rays of high sun and the leaves and the flowers and all this gold on gold and the voices were like gold knocking against thin and thick gold and their actions I didn’t interpret for the thinness kept becoming more what thinness? two fine membranes one gold and one dust and a momentary-gold-land turned into a place of living materials and life and life and life and life and life and life and the sounds of flesh that I gave voice to were life and life.

And we were like madmen all night lions roared in us and we were afraid of ourselves as if on top of cupboards because of ourselves and we were like the shell of a nut on the face of waters raging from ourselves and no one approached us to see because we were in deepest anxiety And big decisions were passing through us like long journeys and decisions were reversed in us and returning and whitening our eyes and all night we would toss and turn like wounded animals escaping

from ourselves and near us a man was narrating our ways and the signs And in the morning there was another man next to us half his face veiled and we were turned on our sides half our eyes black, half white and we would count with him or after him the signs and we would tell

hidden things and all night we willed our future and held on to our past as frontlets Pink dawn brought a new disaster to our homes our protector disappeared like something inexplicable from the so-called powerlessness of the submerged all was determined at fixed hours it was no longer possible to tell more than

a few hidden matters and we would lie down as one whose world turned upside-down and

the futures would stand and wait

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The Monster Doe

Two Gar dens

And all the birds were in my garden and all the beasts were in my garden and all of them sang the bitterness of my love and the doe sang more wondrous than all others and the song of the doe was the song of my love and the voice of the beasts was quiet and the birds stopped screeching and the doe climbed onto the roof of my house and would sing to me the song of my love but in each beast there is a monster just as in each bird there’s something weird just as a monster exists in each person and the monster doe walked around the garden when the birds bowed their heads when doe sang and the beasts dozed when doe sang and I was as if I wasn’t when doe sang at that soft moment she struck my gate.

And all the beasts fled and the birds flew off and the doe fell from the roof and broke her head and I ran away and in the garden of my love shuts a monster gorilla black and evil as oblivion.

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And in one garden all the fruits are yellow and ripe and it’s all round and in one garden all weeds and thin trees and when round garden feels thin garden feels round and when thin garden feels round garden feels thin and round garden needs thin garden and thin garden needs round garden and in round garden from every fruit pipes go up and down and in thin garden the signs of direction and into the pipes come the sounds of the ripe fruit and in the thin garden there is no sound and the round garden needs the stillness and the thin garden longs for a sound and when round garden feels thin garden the sound extends to the outer ends of the fruit and doesn’t go up the pipes and round garden lives the life of its forms and when thin garden feels round garden its true symbols strike the true fruits and make music so the thin garden plays in stillness in stillness.

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Strawberries

When you come to sleep with me wear a black dress printed with strawberries and a black hat decorated with strawberries and hold a basket of strawberries and sell me strawberries tell me in a voice sweet and light strawberries strawberries who wants strawberries don’t wear anything under the dress afterwards strings will lift you up invisible or visible and lower you directly on my prick.

My body was wiser than I its ability to suffer was less than mine it said enough when I said more my body my body stopped when I still went on my body couldn’t it faltered and I got up and had to walk away and my body after me

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When You Come

When you come to sleep with me like a judge

When you come to sleep with me wear a policeman’s uniform I’ll be the little delinquent you a policeman torture me get secrets out of me I won’t be a man I’ll confess I’ll break I’ll sing at once I’ll turn everyone in spit on me kick me in the gut smash my teeth bring me out in an ambulance to the future to the tomorrow.

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When you come to sleep with me wear a judge’s robe I’ll be the little convict after all you really love masquerading for every occasion you have another costume don’t get undressed wrap me in your black robe and under it be naked put me in I’ll be the little convict the mental existential delinquent the one who sentences himself to a thousand spiritual deaths a day I won’t live eternal life I’ll die the next minute without identity like a stinking vagrant be the law wear a wig on your huge head fuck me standing stick it into me so I won’t know where I am all these games that only you know, play otherwise I won’t remember it’s you otherwise I won’t know who you are do it so I’ll know.

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Hebrew

English has all the possibilities for gender every I – in effect is every possibility of sex and every you (feminine) is you (masculine) and every I is sexless and there’s no difference between you (feminine) and you (masculine) and all things are it – not a man not a woman you don’t have to think before referring to sex Hebrew is a sex maniac Hebrew discriminates against or in favor doesn’t hold a grudge grants privileges with an account longer than the Exile in the plural the he’s have priority with great subtlety and secrecy in the singular the opportunities are equal who says all hope is lost Hebrew is a sex maniac she wants to know who’s speaking almost a vision almost a picture what’s forbidden in the whole Torah or at least to see the sex Hebrew peeks through the keyhole like me at your mother and you when you were both bathing then in the shack your mother had a large ass but I never stopped thinking the days passed like the fading away of the showers you (feminine) remained a thin and soapy girl afterwards you plugged all the holes sealed all the cracks Hebrew peeks at you from the keyhole the language sees you naked my father didn’t permit me to look he turned his back when he peed I never really had a good look at him

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he always hid the sex the way the plural hides a woman the way a crowd is masculine in gender the way word is male and female there’s nothing like those sweet things Hebrew is a woman bathing Hebrew is a clean Bathsheba Hebrew is an idol that doesn’t defile she has small beauty marks and birthmarks the more she matures the prettier she gets her judgment is sometimes prehistoric such a neurosis is for the best tell me in the masculine tell me in the feminine every childish I is an unfertilized egg it’s possible to skip over sex it’s possible to give up sex who will tell the sex of a chick?

The man who nature creates before he’s marked with a conjugated verb.

Memory is masculine creating sexes procreation is the main thing for she is life Hebrew is a sex maniac and whatever those feminists complain about who seek stimulation outside the language with an intonation that interprets things signs only of male and female in a sentence will give strange sexual relations on every female a sign on every male a different sign when every verb and conjugation pattern are marked what the man does to a woman what he gets in return what power she exerts over him and what mark is given to the object

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Y o n a W a l l ac h

Let the Wor ds

and to an abstract noun and particles we’ll get a kind of sex game of nature an emotional event like a young forest a game of the general forces of nature from which all the details are derived general signs for all the events that can possibly happen at one time or another look what body the language has what dimensions I will love her now without cover of tongue

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Let the words do it in you let them, be free they will get at you they will come inside makers of many forms they’ll cause in you that same experience let the words do in you they will do in you as they wish making forms anew in the thing they will make in your thing the exact same thing for they are a thing they will make understand they will enliven for you that same experience and its meaning like nature for they are nature not an invention and not revelation but real nature they will make nature a thing in you like giving a kind of life to the word let the words do it in you

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Again the Soul

Again the soul’s too big on me hanging down like a giant piece of clothing like clothes the soul reaches my feet down to my shoes a giant like a father’s clothing on a little girl the soul hangs down large clothes hanging down like a soul on consciousness like a giant soul on a child’s consciousness consciousness hangs down like consciousness larger than human dimensions descending on a soul a giant suit shoes inside without sexual marking a girl inside this whole big thing without answer again everything’s big on me everything’s too big on me like someone’s clothes hanging down like a giant consciousness without sexual markings for a girl a father’s clothes fit without secondary sexual markings for a boy a mother’s clothes will fit the mother’s consciousness like a mother’s clothes will reach down to her shoes on the boy naked shaking from cold from psychologically naked shame the introverted homosexual phase like a symbolic garment till the situation’s the real clothing for a given state the state of mind’s the real clothing of a person all this no becoming our poisoned blood in some measure all this no was our sense of humor all the no in fact the mood was the hard part in all the knowledge kindness is a type of mood a kind of genius a true mood is real clothing for respect hypocrisy is lack of style a false mood a faked state of mind how could anyone not see it an imitated mood or imitation of mood in all this falseness how will hypocrisy not emerge as a poison the colors greens and pinks stream down the face the oranges glisten the greens soothe and are quiet me I have no mood I have nothing to wear like the attending oblivion that ruins the continuous flow of life uniform clothing that is a good and happy mood and clothes of ritual and ceremony complicated as experience consciousness that doesn’t discern between life’s fine shadings and the uniformity of state for which any state’s good for the mind

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will descend as a father’s clothes or a mother’s on a child who discerns between two ability ah ability like an old man between too late mood is the true clothing go tell a child.

Translated from the Hebrew by Linda Stern Zisquit

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J oa n L a r k i n

J oa n L a r k i n

Upcountr y

The Covenant

A shtik flaysh mit tsvei eigen, I was a piece of meat with two eyes, an animal watching another animal. She fed, dressed, named me, flushed my waste, scrubbed my pink skin till it sang. The kitchen was hers, where the iceman’s tongs pincered solid blocks, cream rose in bottles, inching up past the lip, coal roared through a chute into the cellar.

Unsaid, invisible: the weight she carried, cold and dense as the block the iceman shouldered, stung through his burlap rag.

I lapped her scorn, answered her bitter call.

She needed to eat. I was her meal, I was the nearest protein.

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Baby owlet, purple owlet––I keep singing, Road. Where are you riding me? What’s this little Bavaria deep in woods, men standing round with beers? Those leaves just shivered; keep rolling, little Silver.

It’s real woods now––no Sof-Serv, no Satan, no Olde Flea motel. Those are vultures perched in that oak, six-foot wingspread, eyes fixed on the deer’s corpse. I don’t grudge their blood-filled feast. If we reach Red Hill, reach the mouse kitchen, I’ll tear through tomato flesh, I’ll kill the loaf. No moon, Road. Don’t quit me now.

I want to sleep in the mouse house, I want to watch from the porch while a doe tears leaves with her teeth.

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Geri Doran The Snowlit Sky

Thus prayer assails the unbeliever: a flush of white, a stain in the imagination’s night topography.

The black entanglements of the winter trees form a darkness hemlocked, riverine— quick rivulets arc, ascend, recede into the looser, tilled surface of the night.

We open on territory uncomprehending and vast: a ribboned dark, that choked branch the length of Lear’s unspent raving, deep as the voice chastisement threw down blow by blow onto the regrettable child who wanted of Love . . . not this sermon.

In whom the nub nevertheless crimped a little tighter, the small-mouthed girl gathering to herself such residues as were left.

This course in history is known and unsurprising, the course of all small fiefdoms bent on redemption but first and most cloyingly on praise.

What infirmity inheres? Likening it to dry grass in the caked earth, is praise mere succor, a trust of tears shed for the asking?

The wellspring chiefly the inheritance of the trebly misunderstood: a shell game’s léger de main, not here, not here. The earth’s not right— the hillock’s cursed; that plain blood-stained; throughout, the starvelings are among us.

What’s fealty next to this? Or, elsewhere— The earth dispels its questions, rock by rock. Pitch-black, the branches thicken night, make a creek-bed of the blighted sky—one we follow, lost to our geography, to reason, picking our way, like a mad vainglorious king. And slipping wildly.

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Ghérasim Luca P ortfolio (1913-1994)

The Principle of Uncertainty From Hero-Limit Translated from the French by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

The translator wishes to express her heartfelt gratitude and acknowledgements to Bertrand Fillaudeau (Éditions José Corti), whose generous consent made possible the publication of these translations in America.

My Insanity of Being

Sigh With Traps

despair has three pairs of legs despair has four pairs of legs four pairs of airy volcanic absorbent symmetrical legs it has five pairs of legs five symmetrical pairs or six pairs of airy volcanic legs seven pairs of volcanic legs despair has seven and eight pairs of volcanic legs eight pairs of legs eight pairs of socks eight airy forks absorbed by the legs it has nine forks symmetrical in its nine pairs of legs ten pairs of legs absorbed by its legs that means eleven pairs of absorbent volcanic legs despair has twelve pairs of legs twelve pairs of legs it has thirteen pairs of legs despair has fourteen pairs of airy volcanic legs fifteen fifteen pairs of legs despair has sixteen pairs of legs sixteen pairs of legs despair has seventeen pairs of legs absorbed by legs eighteen pairs of legs and eighteen pairs of socks it has eighteen pairs of socks in the forks of its legs that means nineteen pairs of legs despair has twenty pairs of legs despair has thirty pairs of legs despair does not have any pair of legs but absolutely not any pair of legs absolutely not absolutely no legs but absolutely not a leg absolutely three legs

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the invisible hand rests on an invisible lion the lion floats in an invisible room perfectly suddenly invisible the air of this room is an invisible knife insensitively breathed in by the lion essentially invisible for the invisible knife the hand is merely a face with hand hardly visible but it is him the knife that is naively slowly clearly invisible for the face with hand is merely the surface of the hand the mirror-like and sensitive surface of the water of a lake of what that is beyond a drowsy lake and absent and easy and passively invisible passively invisible the invisible hand takes the passively substantial knife and drives it drives it drives it deeply into the madly invisible water particularly invisible silently invisible of your face simultaneously cloud cloud sand visible unrecognizable indivisible invisible sand cloud sand unrecognizable sand

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Auto-Determination

the manner of the manner of mo of mom the manner of mom sitting her mania of sitting without me her mania of silk her manner of ilk1 ilk ilk ilk at night of sitting at night without me the mania of the manner of mom the mania of self that night of sitting there of sitting yes! of sitting no! that night there where the manner of sitting in oneself without me sitting in the manner of in the manner of an ilk in silk she is the silk in self yes! yes and no! the mania and the manner of mom of sitting in herself without me sitting in oneself darling! in oneself and all alone darling! at night in the manner of a horse sitting in the manner of a horse and a wolf of a wolf shawl o darling! o my boat2 of silk ! o! yes! sitting no! sitting at night and all alone in oneself o! no and no! manner of sitting without me in oneself without me without in o darling! it is a manner darling!

a mania of a mania of the manner of manner of sitting in oneself without a chair sitting sitting without a chair that is it! it is a manner of sitting without a chair

The French word that Luca uses is “oie,” which in fact contains two connotations: “oie” as the word-ending of “soie” (meaning “silk” in English), and “oie” as a new word in itself (meaning “goose” in English). It is a deliberate play of vowel sounds.

2 The original French word is “chaloupe,” which actually derives from the other word in the preceding line, “châle-loup” (meaning “wolf shawl”).

1

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Other Secrets of the Empty and the Full

empty emptied of its emptiness it is fullness empty filled with its emptiness it is emptiness empty filled with its fullness it is emptiness full emptied of its fullness it is fullness full emptied of its emptiness it is fullness empty emptied of its fullness it is emptiness full filled with its fullness it is fullness full filled with its emptiness it is emptiness empty filled with its emptiness it is fullness empty emptied of its fullness it is fullness full emptied of its emptiness it is fullness full emptied of its emptiness it is emptiness empty filled with its fullness it is fullness full emptied of its fullness it is emptiness full filled with its fullness it is emptiness empty emptied of its emptiness it is emptiness it is full emptiness full emptiness emptied of its full emptiness of its empty emptiness filled and emptied of its empty emptiness emptied of its fullness in full emptiness

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Dream In Action

the beauty of your smile your smile in crystals the crystals of velvet the velvet of your voice your voice and your silence your silence absorbent absorbent like the snow the snow warm and slow slow is your step your step diagonal diagonal thirst night silk and floating floating like the moans the plants are in your skin your skin them mess she messes your perfume your perfume is in my mouth your mouth is a thigh a thigh that flies she flies towards my teeth my teeth devour you I devour your absence your absence is a thigh thigh or shoe shoe that I kiss I kiss this shoe I kiss it on your mouth for your mouth is a mouth she is not a shoe mirror that I kiss just as your legs just as your legs just as your legs just as your legs your legs legs of sigh sigh of vertige vertige of your face I enjamb your image like one enjambs a window window of your being and of your mirages your image her body and her soul your soul your soul and your nose surprised I am surprised nose of your hair your hair-cut in flames your soul in flames and in tears like the toes of your feet your feet on my chest my chest in your eyes your eyes in the forest the forest liquid

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Hermetically Open

liquid and in bones the bones of my cries I write and I cry from my tearing tongue I tear your arms your arms delirious I desire and tear your arms and your arms the bottom and the top of your body shuddering shuddering and pure pure like the orange orange of your knees of your nostrils of your breath of your stomach I say stomach but I think of the swim of the swim of the cloud cloud of secret the secret marvellous marvellous like yourself you on the rooftop somnambulist and cloud cloud and diamond it is one diamond that swims that swims with suppleness you swim with suppleness in the water of the matter of the matter of my spirit in the spirit of my body in the body of my dreams of my dreams in action

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the love the torrent the emptiness the chair the empty chair the torrential and empty chair suspended in the meta-emptiness the metachair is suspended by the torrential cord of meta-emptiness the metacord tightens and absorbs the torrential meta-neck of whoever is suspended by the cord at the neck of the woman at the hazy and floating neck of her meta-woman empty torrential and seated the torrential meta-woman is seated on the chair seated on the emptiness of her chair she meta-floats perpetually in the absolute meta-emptiness of my desires absolutely torrential absolutely meteoric and substantial the meta-head of the substantial and meteoric meta-woman shoots up like an arrow between the meta-thighs of my dreams and the meta-tooth of my desires arrow biting and rapid that presses lightly hung on the back of the meta-chair of my dreams and desires always seated always unpredictable and absolutely dazzling the meta-woman always floats and meta-floats in the emptiness her little meta-flame visible by transparence burning in the torrential interior of her head while so close to the incandescence of her head a little below her huge meteoric haircut passes like a cloud cloud from the instantaneous evaporation of its vast mental torrents the big metaphysical tortoise the famous tortoise of the eternal meta-torture threatening with its grey,

torturer, meta-metaphysique heaviness the beautiful carnal physique of the meta-woman concretely seated on her flying meta-chair flying floating and seated in her turn on the chair voluptuously supported by the feet of my senses

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by my five senses by a thousand claws and by a thousand paws of the passionate meta-sensuality tumultuously sprung up in the meta-sweat in the infinte meta-substance of my senses absolutely substantial the beautiful eyes the beautiful breasts the beautiful metaphysical buttocks of the absolutely substantial meta-woman substantially torrential and meteoric transgress beyond a torturer of the metaphysics without physics transgress and nullify the grand nothing metaphysics for always seated on the meteoric meta-chair of my infinite and torrential meteoric desires the meta-woman opens the woman she opens and discovers her translucent chair her translucent wombs her transmittable hair eruptive devouring and sleeping her heart pierced by the transparent bullets of my caresses in a trance her sweet meta-vulva her black meta-mouth the innocent transplant of the flower of her mouth in the aerial lands of my buttocks the transmigration of the mouth of her soul to the buttocks of my breath the unusual transfers the unfathomable transfusions the gigantic transmutation of all the meta-metals in love meteoric torrential meta-meteoric and substantial the perpetual and triumphant gigantic transmutation of maternal milk made of meteoric lava made of substantial meta-emptiness made of sperm made of sperm and universal meta-sperm made of diamond’s sperm made of your heart’s sperm

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made of black sperm of the absolute meta-luxury absolutely luxuriant and absolutely absolute

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Spontaneous Initiation

the tentacular and spectral comb of my tetragrammic name combs the beautiful hair terminologically grown on the body of Olga in the same way as the famous position erotic named as “the horse” combs the hair of nothingness the hypothetical comb of my nominal sign combs the spectral hair of Olga it combs it bleeds it straddles day and night the beautiful hair telepathic unleashed on the name fatal on the oval name

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of Olga in a body-to-body telepathic telepathic splendid and complementary one combs one bleeds one straddles day and night the antithetical tête-à-tête of these two spectral tetragrammes in the same way as the famous erotic knight identifies himself mythologically as his horse my telemetrical name Luca identifies itself physiologically to Olga he identifies himself to the splendid hair homograph of Olga whose specific

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Ofer Ziv Ammunition Hill

letter g dissolves tautologically in the ocean of the vertige of the horse’s lightning flash calligraphical of my L initial primordial and triangular initial like a synthesis eruption in the fixation of nothingness

Translated from the French by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

The hill where we took our class trip, fourth grade, had a stone with hundreds of names.

We walked through the trenches touching the sand bags passing fingers along machine-gun stands now laden with dust.

The view of Jerusalem rolled beneath us—this is where we came from, that is where they stood. The main bunker fell last.

We sat and ate our sandwiches under old pine trees, sparrows twitted sunlight in our hair.

Then I stared at the statue of metal flame and whispered to the teacher my uncle had died here and touched one of the names. Arieh Natanzon the random name I chose from the stone, classmates looking at me differently, some of them kicked pebbles with their shoes, some looked at the earth.

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A i m e e N e z h u k u m atat h i l

J ay T h o mp s o n

Are All The Break Ups In Your Poems Real?

A Mask for My Brother

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse— then yes, every last page is true, every nuance, bit, and bite. I have made them up—all of them— and when I say I am married, it means I married all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.

Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

At dinner I think How does he live on such tiny portions?

On the street I think How does he wear out his shoes so fast?

He falls asleep watching his beets boil, tips the milk over in the morning,

smashes the apples in the bowl at night.

My brother: wire-limbs, beet-greens hair, tomato-face.

Our youth is the leaves’ green yellow,

night is our cat in the corner. I shake the stained tablecloth at him: Charles cut that shit out, this place is our one shot!

He follows my big shadow from room to room.

The ruined statues down the driveway keep us company, fatherly and regular, moss-covered as there’s only one season here.

Pursuit. My brother returns to night, rubs it. It leaps out of the room and he leaps after.

It’s the only time he leaves.

I wake up to his clapping. Nice sky country! he says past me, face looming in the window, clap clap clap.

But to his born-bleary eyes, the sky’s just shapes.

No recourse but to praise.

Nowhere we are, now here we are, know where we are!

His knobby hands yank his own hair.

He staggers

like a horse, sings

like a cricket, pulls loose like a branch full of leaves.

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Gerard Fanning

Gerard Fanning

Variation On Blue Note

Newfoundland Time

Round the planting of the Gort oak the true magnetic poles began a variation.

Ignoring the jolt of our millennium they reclined briefly in the Pacific Ocean down near the island of Guam.

But when they cradled the spine of Siberia they passed all understanding, only to emerge later in the belly of King William Sound.

If a gourd adrift on a water meadow levels the draught in an ocean liner, the babbling shelves of bottled spring, the sodden taste of smalt and beryl should feed canals on our sister planets

On my aimless navigations of the midland and western bypasses, sleek asphalt like a black stream amongst saplings, I can gain the half-hour of daylight like the half-hour I mislaid when I once crossed from Nova Scotia into the bosom of Newfoundland.

So when I recite the litany of true verticals I can realign and slip through the fissure that folds back, not at the open field nor at the forest, but at the border between.

and somehow yield a love supreme.

But pipes leak gas, roofs leak rain, my blindfold phrases are tired and sprung and dribbling back to their various parts, the many slips that sink a ship, port-wine stain, mizzling tributaries of vein, feed the drip on the lip of my saxophone.

You may ache for a theme. I do not.

I love the self-fulfilling water butt.

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M a ry -C at h e r i n e J o n e s Spider

eight legs, you won in a lottery, spider. strictly in clined you are, to tramp led ambition.

er of legs as eyes? across my cheek I brush a side a part icle once liv ing on a wood en desert. there are empty tables every where.

but fast some how fast you take curtsy, pir ouette, leave. have you an audience elsewhere? a highway of these days. a glass of you. of you & i. spun out on this wood en stage, we are soloists. & unlament ing. we God’s synonyms for spider. so many of you with so many eyes—how did you purchase the same numb

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Shane McCrae

F i o n a S a mp s o n

[And we divorced in the mountains and the stars]

extract from Deep Water

3.

And we divorced in the mountains and the stars

/ No clearer in the mountains Imagine the spine’s fossil curve: how it sinks a hook into the dark.

and we saw / The stars clearer in the mountains and the wa- / ter rolling

Seahorse remnant, residual ammonite. down the mountain was the mountain

Seep, silt, the pelvic crescent’s alluvial sex smell—

Destroyed by water and the water roll- / ing down darknesses, compressed

as fear compresses, to drift-shapes, fish mouthed

the mountain was the water un-

able to penetrate the rock we did Not choose a life that could be changed

and we

on ocean floors,

half-recognisable in some black-and-white dream.

Must change our lives The mineral spine ground feather-thin, and we divorced in the mountains

/ And higher in the mountains animals eroded by air-stream dark to an archaic lace,

like figures raised in grainy stone among alders—

We wouldn’t recognize as living in / The mountains

Level watched us

and impossible at sea

stalked us were

whose dark silhouettes stud the flood-water—

Ready to kill us spires prayer climbs past, if we trapped them where they lived

breath floating free of everything mineral,

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J ay H o p l e r On the Grass is Thrown a Latticework of Shadows

It’s not that I want to die; it’s that I don’t want to live Longer than the people I love—; even a misanthropic Loner like me has people he loves: a mother, a father, A sister or two, a few friends—.

rising from this bedroom: where curtains keep out the night-whisper of rain and gather a flexible dark.

Being alone by choice Is one thing. Being alone because there’s no one left….

That’s a different ache entire.

O, how adept I have become at this tongue-in-cheek Suffering! How easily I affect a misery I’ve not yet Earned—. I hope God has mercy on me; although I Don’t know—exactly—what I mean by that.

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J ay H o p l e r

The Alligator

Brodsky at San Michele, 1996

1/ The summer sky, star-scarred and hardened, is as close to you Right now as I can ever be and it’s every bit as difficult to set

That endless night in December—with six weeks to live– you discourse, Joseph, from our Eames chair, grandiloquent with vodka.

Verse, verso.

Your course by. But…, why should that matter?

With each spoken line break, a drag from your cigarette, your left hand swings back and forth, lips to ashtray and back again.

Some bearings are meant to be lost, Hot Stuff. I thought you knew that.

2/ In the whisper-thin hiss of the wind In the thickets, in the cries of the night birds and the trill of the crickets, A hint of all that’s infinite is hidden—, an indication, however Small, of eternity, its dark heartbeat.

3/ If you were here with me, I would point to the empty moonlit lot where that little yellow boatHouse used to be and I would say,

To hell with forecasts of your failing heart.

Your right hand rakes the rug, fingers score imaginary rows, scrape at words, coughing heedlessly as you plow on, harrow-hand tilling the text—We till and we sow, one line, then another.

As if the literal body could drag on forever, follow the metaphor, harvest the words.

•

Love nothing—.

By summer, back in Venice, we make our pilgrimage to your grave, crossing the lagoon to the walled island of the dead, just one stop away from the islands of the living.

No breeze or rain for weeks.

We step onto the half-submerged embankment where flood and drought cohabit, past

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walls of graves stacked like drawers to the hedged-in garden reserved for the well-heeled dead.

The sandy dirt is dry and hard, the shabby poppies in the vase black with mold. And the vines— there are no vines.

The evergreens are brown and the palm fronds, dropping, bow to the heat.

The parched myrtle covering other plots has not yet grown over yours.

Christ everywhere: crucified, resurrected, with saints and without.

Still no tombstone.

I sweep away the debris, order scattered love notes from fans, sticky offerings of Russian candies, dead rose-stems.

We rake your grave, wipe clean your name and dates,

I put stones on the mound and instead of Kaddish recite the only lines of yours I know by heart:

the rude letters carved onto two crossed sticks stabbed precariously into the ground. A cross for you, traditore,

I sit at my desk.

My life is grotesque.

to mark—or mock?— your final translation: exiled from Jews, but restored to the Russians, Diaghilev and Stravinsky— on the same island at least.

How shrewd then, the move: interred at last near your Christian peers, a place where a Jew has no place —furbone!— across from Black Shirt Ezra now sentenced to endure you for eternity.

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P e g B oy e r s

Rooftop: Aerial View

—Castello Trentanove Dodici, Venezia, 1965

She is twelve, an expat brat in a bikini, sunbathing on a rooftop terrace. His terrace.

From the bedroom window his wife watches them.

Her head aches.

The sun’s too bright, says the wife, then

He is her first Jewish Intellectual, a young scholar on a Fulbright photographing Venetian churches.

ducks inside, whipping her wet hair into a black rope, twisting it at the nape against her stark white skin.

She is forever saying things like

Today, on the sly, he photographs her.

It is not important. Only the sun is important, the bikini stencil it burns

That would look nice on Jake, where can I get one like that for Jake?

around her budding breasts, the terrace. There are fresh cherries too, and ice tea: so American she feels, so reassuringly American

From him never a word about Kitty.

That is her name, Kitty. With a whiny feline voice to match.

and adult, drinking ice tea, speaking English on the rooftop at ease in a bikini, spitting pits into a green Murano dish.

What Kitty thinks the girl does not know.

What she knows is the terrace, the camera, the books, the endless boredom of summer which abruptly

She is comfortable with men.

Expecting the worst (three brothers had seen to that) she is never let down.

one day ends when on the stairwell a team of medics passes her running Kitty on a stretcher to the nearest canal.

Unlike her brothers, he is a striver, ever-hungry, and inside her rises her own striving, her own hunger to match his.

No Jake in sight to ride with her in the ambulance boat. No Jake to loosen the knot at her neck.

He feeds her books and talk. She learns that smart is sexy. The eros of mind thrills her.

He throws out the line, reels her in.

At home, no explanation. Nothing about headaches, nothing about the rope or the pills, nothing except no more rooftop young lady

Some days more than others she feels his appetite, his eyes on her, the camera, a reach—inadvertent brush of skin on skin.

and overheard, the incomprehensible word: breakdown.

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B i l l Y a r row Whiplash Marriage

For the girl only the season has broken: suddenly all the Americans disperse, some to different continents—leaving Venice, then later returning (together, apart) year after year returning and returning—until ten years later at a ballet matinee in upstate New York, not Venice, that whiny feline voice rises behind her above the wildly cheering crowd, Why this dancer, why all the cheers?

The girl—for she feels herself suddenly to be that girl, the girl in the bikini on the terrace, recognizes

A wrench flies through the air and cracks your windshield. It’s the unexpected that makes life so smashing. Like walking along a beach and seeing deer come out of the water. Like talking to a magician about the half life of figs. Like waking up to the sound of bleeding. There are many ways to pretend to die but one is not surprise. We all have an ageing uncle who showed in his handshake the strength he still possessed.

He was married to a puissant woman of endemic agency.

They sired your most obnoxious cousins. I wish I had a mirror implanted in my brain so I could see my life less directly than I do. I had a dream the daylight needed repainting. I called my uncle in Kentucky. He said he’d take care of it, but he died when his car drove directly into a dove.

the improbable voice and realizes she is now Kitty’s age that year at trentanove dodici in Venice.

She turns to answer Kitty (looking well with another man, not Jake) and sees everything—the rooftop, the bikini, the books consumed with ice tea and cherries, Jake’s camera probing, then retreating, Kitty’s tight black twist, and the guilty pits spit into the green Murano dish.

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J ac qu e l i n e G e n s

B r i a n H e n ry

Into the Wood

Like Grass

Twilight, I walk toward the wooded retreat graveyard where mostly women from the Vermont Asylum for the Insane are buried, final resting place for wanton girls, syphilis cases, melancholics, or other ailments— their unclaimed bodies interred over a century ago now sunken holes beneath my feet.

Perhaps, they worked in the dairy or gardens, exercised, had craft activities in sun-lit rooms, ate well, or if dangerous, were assigned to locked dungeons out of view.That solitary citadel of humane architecture just around the bend its pointy spire heralds token hope for a once wealthy clientele.

The Retreat graveyard’s now littered with broken headstones felled by generations of pranksters, carved names obliterated by moss but so many died young I notice.

Did they just waste away? Give up? Abandoned?

The year I worked in the Retreat kitchen for minimum wage, I saw the locked cells while taking the underground passage to deliver food to wards for elderly patients, food I ground myself bound for nagahyde recliner trays set up at mealtime under droopy necks nested into shoulders roused by cheery nurses on my arrival.

Sometimes, when I pushed my cart alone piled high with steaming dishes, sweat down my back, swift images like ciphers of light dart as I roll past rows and rows of white doors set in lovely stone— specters animated by my presence, or an imagination activated down in the basement, my numerical mantra of counted steps steady against pipe gurgles and the hollowed strangeness of abandoned spaces like the broken culvert next to my childhood house counting out rocks I tossed into the torrential brook below where I prayed to make the pain go away, a string of pearls threaded to bind the fissure between the present moment and distant future yawning so unattainable— all of seventeen, how even ordinary life can snap a girl in two for reasons barely recalled.

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Fall too late to plant. Ground cover. Clover.

Mountain Town

All the feet confused.

Stage Mother

In a stage whisper claims to not know you at all.

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James Harms

Just Married

Friday Rich/Satur day Poor

Husband is food. I mean good or roof. Which husband? Men, women and snowmen— Where… is my underwear? Husband wakes me with licking cheeks. I make pillow of husband’s shoulder and husband.

Dousing the dishes topless for husband: I souse the mugs and bowls with warm lemon froth and bubble; I sponge our utensils: spoon, knife and prong, for food we will eat next Tuesday and Sunday & Tomorrow; I scrub & bristle & muscle the pig-headed pans with sporadic splash and suds to skin; I rinse & fill & rinse & empty & fill & empty & fill & empty to the music of water on twice the dishes.

Husband puts his face in a bowl of afternoon cereal and we sing: Where, where is my underwear?

In the phenomenal sock project, I watch husband place lone socks across the kitchen table: could be inside a pair of pants or suitcase.

In the earth of blankets, I gladden husband by the glow of lamplight through

the sheets.

(Where is my underwear?) The sky drools sweetly to the ear, the purring animals

in our bed.

Light snore, the seashore at night.

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The swans follow Helen, a sandwich in her pocket. And now she’s screaming at her boyfriend, “Thank you for making me beg,” as he rides away on his Schwinn waving one finger.

Beneath the bridge the smell of batteries and goose shit, the smell of old wool all wet with fog and breath, the smell of Friday night, the smell of clear air beaten blue by spray paint and rotten fruit.

Even Hector has a check to cash and we’re all wondering where to go first: the liquor store on Beechurst or the sub shop near the bus station. I wish Helen’s phone would stop ringing.

I never understand the river town girls with their frayed sleeves and pearls like broken teeth around their necks, at their wrists.

If we hurry we can spend every dollar by dawn. The smell of iron or the taste of it. The look of Helen all stoned and happy in a gas lamp’s gold glow. The look of beer in a glass. The look of polished wood, the ring stains and puddles, the letters carved with a penknife: “Friday is a kiss. ” I don’t get the steam on the river. I wish the moon would stop shaking. I wish Saturday would stay still on the other side of midnight. There’s a little girl or Helen staring at a shop window, waiting for the mannequin to move.

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James Harms

James Harms

In Your Bright Ray

My Life in Ar t

I haven’t always loved the word guitar, though two guitars in one song, like two trains heading together toward Toledo or Akron or some other city in Ohio, two trains on separate tracks, one angling north to miss Columbus, where Union Station disappeared into the dirt in 1976, the other ghosting I-70, two trains traveling west but differently, one acoustic and one electric with a violin filling in the shadows, the electric losing its hold on notes as it moves north, fuzzing around the edges, the acoustic as steady and straight as a locomotive pulling into Union Station (if it were still there) dragging a load of textiles, bolts of bright cloth for the new industry of central Ohio, where light falls now unrefracted by filth and fills the fields at dawn with shine… or, for the poets of Cleveland, who have never gotten over the clean air, with broken glass flashing in the grass… two trains. But I believe now “In Your Bright Ray” has three guitars and no violin, though two seem to be traveling the same track.

I have seen all the cities of Ohio, all the capitals of Europe, but I’ve never been to Brisbane, though I love the name (which is pronounced like “Has been,” though I have not).

I hear the sunlight is striped in Brisbane and makes a sound like a scar, which is to say like a voice that isn’t there anymore, but is.

She felt the edges of the moment like the smooth face of a dime.

I felt her face with my eyes closed against the sparks, the spray around her fingers as she opened an orange.

She guessed about my money. She showed me the buttons on the inside.

For hours the rain thickened into snow then back again.

She said, OK, enough, just talk about your brother, the last good wave you caught before leaving but don’t don’t do that. But she let me. The clasp is what I’d call it. A hook, she said, and I had it in my teeth as she lit a cigarette and said, It’s snow now for good.

We heard the same small voice become a crocus in the earth beside the path, a car in the cough descending the staircase.

You can’t afford this, she said. Or that. I showed her my fake eye, my blonde marble, my wallet photo of Katharine Ross as Etta Place.

She sang instead of anything, though she held me a while, or part of me. And when I floated away I left a gift in her hand.

A little pearl.

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Stephen Dunn Lessons

One summer when I was young and open to influence and desperate to be other than I was, That is no country for old men cadenced everything I said.

I could be speaking about my mother’s tea cup collection or Kurosawa’s latest film, yet I couldn’t stop hearing that assertive, modulated claim.

Meanwhile, almost everywhere, the sexual revolution had begun – closet doors opening, women fond of cleavage at odds with women burning bras, men saying, May I?, and girls not waiting to be asked.

Why not favor all of it, I thought, or at least let me in far enough to decide? My experience up to that point was little more than first hand. I wondered if Yeats had found himself similarly fascinated and disoriented.

After all, there was Maud, her passionate resistance, her devotion to a cause – a woman unlike any he’d known.

If I can’t have everything, the romantic in him must have thought, let me settle for the unattainable.

It took me years to learn life isn’t kind to those with obsessions, and yet the self selves; with time, even Yeats would turn to troubles

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larger than just his own.

After that summer, I subdued his singular voice with many voices, some expansive, some clipped and hesitant, often unmelodious, and free verse like free love began to seek only what might constrain and hold it just right.

Soon, more than I knew how to accommodate – tiger lilies, jackhammers, mudslides – all the stuff of the palpable world, seemed to want something from me.

I had to learn ways to exclude.

Meanwhile the great criminals walked right in, left with the jewels.

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Stephen Dunn

The House on the Hill

An attention to detail, many believed, was the way in, the tao of getting from sea level to the large house at the end of the road, atop the hill.

he’d witnessed or enforced or had chosen to ignore. And since you couldn’t be sure about that, or him, or exactly who was in charge, it might be time,

Too much telltale noise if you drove, so you’d walk, noting rosebush and dragonfly and ugly slug – nothing unworthy of your gaze.

you thought, to distract yourself, veer off. Weren’t you also in danger of becoming humorless, overly purposeful, a prisoner of one idea?

You might see a schooner offshore with white sails unfurled, and, high above, perhaps a plane gliding motorless over the entire scene.

You’d look down, not up, and the simplest stone you’d come upon would turn into an emerald, say, illuminating a path.

You observed and named, and at the end of what you saw might come an idea, something to help you avoid or engage whatever was inside. Rumor had it

Or you’d extract from the blackberries an invisible stain – your passport – and soon, from out of the fog, this one day you could do no wrong,

the owners were tired of trespassers, especially those, like yourself, low born from low lying towns with certain aspirations in mind.

a large, welcoming house would emerge made out of invention and surprise.

No things without ideas! you’d shout, and the doors would open,

It seemed wise to proceed as if the house were guarded by ghosts – no telling if the doors would be bolted, or what might spring open in your face.

and the echoes would cascade down to the valleys and the faraway towns.

In your dreams, of course. In real time, the weather wouldn’t be right, or ghosts

Such was the lore. But you suspected entry depended on some caretaker and how well he’d been treated in his life and how hard he’d thought about things

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Eleni Sikelianos Kinesthetic Sketches of the Dead

Someone photographs his hands trembling in black air, radiating electricity & light disguised as dogs would be blocking the gate.

Still, the long climb itself was what each day you woke to plan and think about.

It simply was what you did,

Balsa wood configurations are nailed to the legs to show which muscles move as he pedals These are ghost muscles, limned in calcified lightning.

These are ghost hands, throwing off sparks.

These are ghost bikes.

For my father is always moving through the dark.

you didn’t have a choice, even if your words were again and again met by silence, or those doors had opened to a world you couldn’t abide.

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(The dead are caught in our studies of motion. )

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R o b e rt P e a k e

M i c h a e l W at e r s

At the Zoo

Log Cabin

His tongue is a prehensile whip he wraps around branches like a bell cord, stripping the leaves with a tug. He ambles, graceful although stilted, nods sagacious on his escalator neck, his stoppered horns a-fuzz with harmlessness, his eyes a-crinkle like a lean Saint Nick. My friend, Giraffe, let us take a stroll together this fine day.

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First sanctum of solitude and ruin, Boyhood tabernacle bereft of prayer, The log cabin purchased for one dollar— The ad scissored from the inside cover Of Justice League of America— Arrived in a flat business envelope.

I’d thought to live away from family, Catholic father and Jewish mother Who prolonged cocktail hour with secular Oaths until highball glasses lay shattered, Long shards glinting in gummy shag. I’d thought To civilize the Brooklyn wilderness, Bear law unto the heathen lands.

Nothing More than a whopping square of yellow crepe, “Logs” inked onto all four “walls,” the cabin Unfolded over the kitchen table Long enough to trail the floor, where I stooped, Chagrined, inhabiting my foolishness, Less Dan’l Boone than self-scarred savage, Murder rattling my bones for the makers Of commerce, the wily illustrators, Scheming superheroes, and my parents Laughing now, urging their pioneer home, Supper ready and no God in the house.

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V a l z h y n a M o rt

A n n e M a r i e M ac a r i

Love

It Says

the most human sound a body can hear – teeth being cleaned late at night across the hallway. even the locusts listen confused. she too, on a bare mattress thrown over the floor, is surprised how much of his body is in that sound – as if she had just now noticed that he had arms.

I know you are there, I can hear you in the soles of my feet.

Sleeping, curled to make a home with my spine, my flesh making that orphan music it makes for you,

the spit shooting down the sink – she still counts as his body. the noose of his saliva over her pussy – she still counts as his body.

someone within hums or whines all night, all

the suitcase of the body slapped with stickers of scars from every location – he folds her inside and he ships her and ships her and ships across canteens behind gas stations, across seas, across the hands of men in blue uniform, he ships her faster to catch the early delivery truck.

the witnesses gone, you, gone from yourself.

Talk to me, you are the ear of my longing, talk to me, that’s all the body wants, all it ever says.

when he sits underneath her skirt she is compelled to make confession. through the wall their neighbor reads the names of medications, and she thinks the neighbor counts precious stones: amiodarone, zofenopril, metoprolol, mexifin. oh yes, she will inherit those jewels. she will wear those jewels over her mouth to hide its twist. but for now he cleans his teeth and the locusts fall silent. she lies across the hallway smelling his long-day clothes tossed on the bathroom floor as his sweat crawls out of the cotton folds, and disperses and multiplies like cockroaches.

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A n n e M a r i e M ac a r i

Still Falling

R ac h e l H a da s Under the Floorboar ds

Remember being dressed in the fur of earth, our loping

Outside Bridgeport, the gold of afternoon broke through clouds and factory chimneys. Brick warehouses, pylons glowed with late September light.

The blond young woman sitting next to me was taking notes in a copy of Beloved

limbs? Once I dreamed of you falling, and I fell after you, but there was nothing to land on and I woke up.

and skimmed from my light sleep, a dream came back: two blond little sisters in a barn.

Trespassing, hiding in the hayloft, I overheard them weeping.

The dream was so close to the surface it almost bumped its head on the dusty floorboards.

And then I wondered if you were still there, locked in the dream, still falling, but without me to find you.

We can’t count on waking, and if we did, opening our eyes, our backs against the tough grass, and if we lifted our hands, what strange animals would they be?

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M a h m o u d D a rw i s h T ribute I I

Note:This is part two of a two-part tribute to Mahmoud Darwish; part one appears in our previous issue.

excerpt from Mural

In the fractured urn the women of the Syrian coast wailed from the distance and burned with the August sun. I saw them on the road to the springs before my birth. I heard the water in the ceramic jars cry over them: Go back to the cloud and mirth will return Echo said: Only the past of the powerful returns on the obelisks of vastness…(their relics are golden, golden). While the letters the weak write to tomorrow return and ask: Give us the bread of sustenance, give us a stronger present. We are not immortal (we have only impersonation and incarnation) Echo said: I am tired of my intractable hope. I am tired of the ruse of aesthetic: What after Babylon? Whenever the road is clearer and the unknown reveals an ultimate goal, prose disseminates in prayer and anthem breaks Green, my poem’s land is green and high…

It looks out on me from the flatland of my abyss: You’re strange in your meaning. It’s enough that you be there, alone, to become a tribe…

I sang to weigh the spilled vastness in the ache of a dove and not to explain what god says to man.

I am not a prophet to claim a revelation and declare my abyss an ascent I am the stranger, with all of what I was given of my language. If I submit my emotion to the Dhad,

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my emotion submits me to the Ya’.

And the words, when far, have a land that neighbors a higher planet. And the words, when near, have an exile. The book is not enough for me to say: I found myself as present as a filled absence.

Whenever I searched for myself I found the others. Whenever I searched for the others I found only my stranger self in them, so am I the one the multitude?

I am the stranger. Tired from the Milky Way to the beloved. Tired from my adjectives.

Form has become narrow. Speech wide. I overflow my vocabulary’s need, I look at myself in mirrors: Am I he?

Do I perform my role well in the final act?

Did I read this script before the show or was it imposed on me? Am I he who performs the role, or did the victim change his affidavit to live the postmodern moment, since the author strayed from the script and the actors and spectators have gone?

I sat behind the door watching: Am I he?

This is my language. And this voice is the prick in my blood but the author is another…

I am not from me, if I come and don’t arrive.

I am not from me, if I say and don’t speak.

I am the one to whom the mysterious letters say: Write, and you’ll be.

Read, and you’ll find.

And if you want to speak then act, and unite your opposites in meaning… your translucent interior is the poem

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There are sailors around me but no port.

Dust has emptied me of gesture and phrase.

I found no time to know where I should settle my brief moment between two points. I haven’t yet asked my question about the blurred simile between two doors: entry or exit…

And I found no death to snipe at life, no voice that shouts: Fast time! you snatched me from what the mysterious letters of the alphabet say to me: The realistic is the certain imaginary

Time is zero. I didn’t think of birth when death flew me to nebulae, where I was neither alive nor dead, where there’s no being or void My nurse would say:You are much better today!

Then she’d inject me with sedatives: Be calm and worthy of what you’re about to dream…

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Time that has not waited… has not waited for anyone who was late for his birth, let the past be new, it’s your only memory among us, when we were your friends and not your vessels’ victims. Leave the past as it is, not leading or lead I saw what the dead remember and forget.

They don’t grow older, they don’t tell the time in their wrist watches. They don’t feel our death or their life, and nothing of what I was or will be. All pronouns dissolve. He is in “I” and in “you. ” Not part and not whole. No living tells the dead: become me …and all the elements and emotions dissolve. I don’t see my body over there, I don’t feel the ardor of death or my first life.

As if I am not of me. Who am I? Am I the missing or the newborn?

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A River Dies of Thirst, Journals, by Mahmoud Dar wish.

Archipelago Books.

Reviewed by Fady Joudah

Some time has to pass before “resistance” or the “political” is not the first thing tossed into the field when discussing the writing of Mahmoud Darwish in English. But how much time? The matter is not simply bound to “facts on the ground” and has much to do with our recognition (or lack thereof) of how Darwish has long engaged his art as a field of language where “all beautiful poetry is an act of resistance. ” A River Dies of Thirst is Darwish’s last collection to come out in Arabic, nearly eight months before his death on August 9th, 2008. The book’s title in Arabic is The Trace of the Butterfly (but had to be changed to avoid confusion with another translation of Darwish’s earlier works, The Butterfly’s Burden). Its subtitle is Journals: a festive, at times chaotic, combination of journal entries, prose poems, poem fragments, broken ideas, brilliant meditations, and fully realized poems. In them Darwish performs yet another of his aesthetic shifts, namely the blurring of boundaries between prosody and prose, formalism and free verse, in part as a stand away from the camps of absolutes that often plague the poetry world. As a formalist, Darwish continually renewed Arabic prosody, but always struggled with “free verse” or “prose poetry”; how to write it, and in what ways is it not necessarily “free”. In one of the entries, he asks Mark Strand after they read together “In Madrid” about “the dividing lines between poetry and prose” and Strand hesitates, “as true poets do when faced with hard definitions,” before he says: “The rhythm, the rhythm. Poetry is defined by its rhythm. ” Or as Darwish says elsewhere in the book, “interrupting the rhythm from time to time is necessary for the rhythm. ” This paradox marks the significance of these diaries. They are the late works of a master artist aware of his time-less-ness as he engages in one final act of abandon where the lyric subjectivity turns art into shadows of itself. “There is no I but I,” the narcissus proclaims in “Point of View” while the sunflower replies “I am only what I worship. ” Or perhaps it is in Theodore Adorno’s words on “Beethoven’s Late Style” that one can see the trace of the butterfly in what remains of Darwish’s lyrical river: “Touched by death,” Adorno writes “the hand of the master liberates the mass of material that it previously shaped”; “as splinters,” “expressions no longer of the isolated self but of the mythical nature of the living creature and of its demise. ” “What is objective is the crumbling landscape; the subjective side is the light that illuminates it. ”?1 For Darwish extreme individuation dissolves into its otherness. His long journey into the self,

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with the stranger, the humanized enemy, and the collective “we,” is a Sufi’s “I,” metaphysical and existential at once, an interior-exterior.

The book begins in chronological order with a series of pieces that address the suffering in Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, with a mixture of satire and gravity, where “heroism too has its sell-by date” and “the house as casualty is also mass murder. ”When Darwish asks himself about hope he “construct[s] a mirage” and goes on searching “in his desk drawers for the person he was before asking this question. ” “Hope is not the opposite of despair,” “it is a talent. ” And “suffering is not a talent” but “a test” of it. And indifference is “one aspect of hope. ”The book strolls us gently into his private walks, where his imagination becomes one of his other selves, a faithful dog hunting clouds, and young girls throw pistachios at him and call him “uncle,” while “he sees himself as absent” “to lighten the burden of the place. ” He even intuits the weekday of his death accurately: “I believed I’d died on Saturday. ” His relationship with clouds is revelatory, like Newton’s apple; hallucinatory, like a silk shawl caught in the branches of a tree; and quotidian, like “soap bubbles” in the kitchen sink that “dissolve into a forgotten poem. ” A “rustling” is “a feeling searching for someone to feel it. ” And “jasmine is a message of longing from nobody to nobody. ” Throughout the book Darwish delights us with prose narratives or poem fragments about so many lyrical preludes that came to him and went nowhere, between sleep and wakefulness. These diaries are also writing about writing. What Darwish sieves is a “perfection [that] is the same as imperfection / and [a] memory [that is] forgetfulness made visible. ” A River Dies of Thirst lures a translator’s imagination into several possibilities of form and lyric as testament to the mastery Darwish possessed while on the earth of “multifaceted metaphors” and rhythms. For such a brilliant, crafted recklessness, filled with juxtaposing diction and music, Catherine Cobham’s translations sway delicately between mystery and clarity, “the visible and the invisible;” a beautiful rendition for anyone who will read Darwish’s work for the first time, or for those who have already encountered it, in the presence of absence.

Theodore Adorno, On Beethoven’s Late Style, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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The Butter fly’s Burden

by Mahmoud Dar wish. Trans. by Fady Joudah Por t Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007

Reviewed by Deniz Perin “There’s a love walking on two silken feet / happy with its estrangement in the streets. ” If I had to capture the essence of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in one brief passage, these are the verses I would choose. They are from the poem “Low Sky” in the latest collection of the wonderful Palestinian poet’s work, The Butterfly’s Burden. The translator from the Arabic, Fady Joudah, compiled three of Darwish’s books in this collection: The Stranger’s Bed, A State of Siege, and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done. The result is a collection of poems that reads as one would ‘read’ a butterfly’s wings; what one encounters is elusive, heartbreaking, wistful, yet hopeful. This is all the more true because The Butterfly’s Burden is a bilingual edition:The Arabic on the left, presumably illegible to many western readers, is mysterious and lovely.

Once upon a time, in the days of the Sufis—Islamic mystics whose poetry flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries—Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi composed these lines: “say who / I am. Say I / am You. ”1 The Sufis believed in the merging of identities: We are all one, for we are one in God. Let us now skip ahead to the 20th century, when Mahmoud Darwish exclaimed, “how much of me is you, my love / how often! Who am I!” In Darwish’s poetry, too, identities shift and merge. But Darwish’s weaving together of selves is not the divine one of the Sufis: Rather, it has to do with an irreparable loss of self, and with a yearning for an undefined, and perhaps indefinable, other, who at times seems long lost, at times, just within the poet’s reach.

For, let us not forget: Mahmoud Darwish is a poet of exile. And, being a poet of exile, he has no choice but to be a poet of loss. He spent most of his life far from his homeland, living in Lebanon, France, Egypt, and other countries.

Interestingly, the poems in this collection were all published after 1996, the year of his return to Palestine. But the sense of exile and nostalgia remains as strong as ever.We could, of course, speculate on reasons why (Israel’s continuing occupation of the land, political unrest, etc. ), but we are here to discuss his poetry—a poetry of loss. He writes:

I

won’t return to my name in the wilderness, never

never

never.

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When one has lost so much, love has no choice but to follow suit. Love, perhaps, is a luxury, available only to those who have the space (homeland) and time to live it out. Throughout Darwish’s work, we witness lovers being torn apart by circumstance. Such passages are all the more heart-wrenching because Darwish’s language (and Joudah’s translation) is so quiet, so simple and unassuming:

What will we do with love? you said while we were packing our suitcases do we take it with us, or hang it in the closet?

I said: let it go wherever it wants it has already outgrown our collar and spread

Like a fleeting butterfly, love has left the poet’s makeshift home… for, unlike the human body, the love our bodies bear is free.

Though many poems in the collection allude to the Israeli occupation of Palestine—or rather, to its consequences—most are not overtly political. Rather, Mahmoud Darwish is one who often contemplates and questions, through a myriad of thoughts and images, what it means to be in a state of exile, and what it does to one’s identity. He is one who asks, “what / will we do without exile, and a long night / that stares at the water?” Or recalls, “How often have I picked lilies / secretly off your fence. How often were you / a meaning and its image at treetops. ”

“State of Siege,” a book-length poem, is an exception to that. Rightly placed in the middle of the collection, it clearly shows an angrier side to Darwish, one that usually lurks under the surface. The images and characters are those of war and siege: tanks, guns, bombs, soldiers, martyrs, guards, and mothers grieving for their sons. Much of the poem may be considered controversial. For instance, he writes, “(To a killer:) If you’d contemplated the victim’s face / and thought, you would have remembered your mother in the gas / chamber, you would have liberated yourself from the rifle’s wisdom. ” However, agree or disagree with such statements as we may, it would be hard to deny how moving are the portraits of mothers who’ve lost their sons:

If you’re not a rain my love be a tree soaked with fertility… be a tree and if you’re not a tree my love be a stone soaked with humidity… be a stone

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and if you’re not a stone my love be a moon in the lover’s sleep… be a moon (that’s what a woman said to her son at his funeral)

Leah Goldberg from From Songs of My Beloved Land

2.

Even in “State of Siege,” there are moments of serenity, calm, and beauty. And one gets the sense that, despite his rage, Darwish ultimately yearns for peace. He writes, “When the fighter planes disappear, the doves fly / white, white. ”

Luckily for us, this difficult and uncomfortable, albeit powerful, poem is framed by the work we are more used to when we think of Darwish, the work that I opened this review with, nostalgic and lovely—love-ly.The majority of his work focuses on the human being, on our hopes and fears, our essence, rather than on the horrible things we can do to one another. The majority of his work presents images that set our conscience and imagination free: lapis lazuli, lilac nights, olive trees, birds, moons, bodies of water. I end this review with a passage that brings together many of these images, a passage that reminds us that, despite everything that has been lost and may never be regained, Mahmoud Darwish is ultimately a poet of hope:

Another day will come, a womanly day songlike in gesture, lapis in greeting and in phrase. All things will be feminine outside the past. Water will flow from rock’s bosom.

No dust, no drought, no defeat.

And a dove will sleep in the afternoon in an abandoned combat tank if it doesn’t find a small nest in the lovers’ bed…

And perhaps, a butterfly will be relieved of its burden.

In my beloved land the almond blossoms thrive, in my beloved land a guest will soon arrive, seven maidens, seven mothers, seven brides at the gate.

In my beloved land a flag flies atop a castle, to my beloved land a pilgrim will travel, at a good hour, at a blessed hour, at an hour which erases all sorrow.

But who has an eagle’s eyes to glimpse him, who will be wise of heart, and know him, who will make no mistake, who will not lose his way, who will open the door when he comes?

I am asleep and my heart is awake, the guest passes my house.

Now it is morning, and in the yard a stray stone rolls.

(Post Scriptum: Mahmoud Darwish passed away on August 9, 2008. May he now rest in the peace he so longed for. Looking, in our minds, toward his grave in Palestine, we may see many butterflies there. )

Coleman Barks with John Moyne, The Essential Rumi. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 276.

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Leah Goldberg

from Journey Without a Name

3.

4.

In my wretched, beloved land even the moon above waits like a beggar at the door, hunched over, wavering and pale.

I walked with the ships and stood with the bridges, I was cast across the street with the elm’s falling leaves.

I had autumn, a cloud glowing near a black chimney, and a strange name no one could guess.

Tattered, threadbare clouds emerge from a wing of sky, hurrying, humble and fair to hide its bare disgrace.

Elul 5720, Copenhagen

In the morning the sun rises, yellow as the autumn, and there, at the top of the alley rests a butchered golden hen.

Translated from the Hebrew by Annie Kantar

Translated from the Hebrew by Annie Kantar

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Yan Li

Orhan Veli

The Chinese Drawers

My Gold-Toothed One

I pull out the Chinese drawers, one by one, take a look at the years that I lived through; in one drawer, those texts of underground poems used to wrench themselves; now, in the quiet, I can hear the sounds of their retirement.

In another drawer are a few grain coupons which are already antiques; from the day they became obsolete, I knew, even though they were cultural treasures, they never had pride for these crops from this land.

Come, my darling, come with me: Let me buy you silk stockings, Take you on taxi rides, Escort you to concerts.

Come, Come my gold-toothed one, My eye-shadowed one, my wavy-haired one, my tease; My cork-heeled one, my whore, come.

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

In another drawer are two Red Guard bands, one rusty fifty-per-cent steel watch, and a couple of photos from the April 5, 1976 memorial in Tiananmen Square— they all have the somber quiet after sacrifice.

The drawers, the Chinese drawers: even pulling them out from the bodies of the five evil breeds— a Red Book must be in there.

Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Sze

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Orhan Veli

Gossip

Orhan Veli

Quantitative

Who said I had a crush on Süleyha?

Who, but who Saw me kiss Eleni in Yüksekkaldırım, in broad daylight?

So, I picked up Melahat And took her to Alemdar, did I? I’ll tell you about that later—but Whose leg did I squeeze on the trolley?

And I frequent the taverns of Galata, Get sloshed And have a bit of fun there, eh?

Get off it, for goodness sake, Get off it for a minute, I know what I’m doing.

I like beautiful women, I like blue-collar women too; I like beautiful blue-collar women Best of all.

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

And what’s the story: that I tossed Mualla into a rowboat And made her sing My Soul’s Exile?

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

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Orhan Veli

Poem with a Tail

Orhan Veli

Reply

We don’t click, our paths part ways: You’re the butcher’s cat, I’m an alley cat.

You get your food in a fancy bowl, I get mine in a lion’s mouth.

You dream of love, I dream of bones.

—From the butcher’s cat to the street cat—

But your life’s not so easy either, buddy: It ain’t easy Wagging your tail like that, day after day after day.

You speak of hunger, So you must be a communist.

So, it’s you who’s been burning down all those buildings: The ones in Istanbul, The ones in Ankara— You pig, you!

Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

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Rainer Maria Rilke from To Dream

10.

11.

When the people who idly drone are treading with old assurance the track they’ve trod, I wish for a clean path to travel, through fragrant places moving as solemn and solitary as a god.

Do I know how my life moves along?

Dense smoke of perfume that passes on breezes; in bronze-brown grasses a forlorn cricket song.

Also in my soul there rings, deeply, a sound sad and dear as a child in the fever may hear how the dead mother sings.

Aware of brighter rewards; changed by distances shining bright through spray— with cool blossoms around the forehead and myths as chaste as children filling a breast as still as the seventh day.

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12.

16.

Already early-waking nature shows from its badly tattered cover the lovely, pure neck of a god; and only in valleys deep and narrow, behind some bare and violet bushes, winter displays, with mistaken boasting, a trace of white where it has trod.

Curfew. Among the mountains it gets retold in echoes whose tones grow more and more subdued. And you feel, rising from the floor of the green valley, a fluttering breeze, a cold one.

In the white streams of the meadows, among the boulders, it babbles like small children saying prayers; near the black alpine forest thick with firs, it passes like a twilight, a century-old one.

I go between the willows, walking the soggy wheel-ruts of the highway, and the wind is mild. The sun is fine, resplendent in March’s radiance.

It kindles yearning in the dark hearts of the white candles offered at my expectation’s shrine.

Through gaps that form when one cloud is unrolled on another, the evening casts a red display of blood-corals at the rock walls. They ricochet inaudibly from all the basalt shoulders.

Translated from the German by Lorne Mook

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Tomaž Šalamun portfolio

Equations of Daf fodil

Veronica’s Veil

Cold keys, boiling heart.

Scented mirror, red flower.

In the valley bombs are falling on the town.

A bee is tangled in the hair above my neck!

Boiling keys, cold heart.

Red mirror, scented flower.

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

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Self-Por trait

London City 1969

The Slovenian gulag is exactly like Tomaž Hren. He also drank everyone’s souls, the documentalists’ the most.

Let’s not be optimists.

My cock— a candle which lit up here at the graves— still shines.

We ran. “Puffed up pumpkin!

Puffed up pumpkin!” we heard from the heavenly shelves. Who wouldn’t get excited.

The junks leaked, less and less people were carried over.

You can’t fit one kilo of ashes in the tubes.

They dirty real fast.

I dreamed giants with tight bellies.

The leaves of grass were huge.

Snails, not oxen, were harnessed to the carriages, on and on up to our underrating the intelligence of small cattle.

Snails always bluff with their bowler hats.

They’re black. Pricks! They only look intelligent. All is not good that glitters.

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

Translated from the Slovenian by Thomas Kane and the author

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Wheat Doesn’t Rush

Har d Core

Nesting cavity, dark and deep, kiss the eyes of film. The one who smokes is the dead son-in-law.

You, you, you, get away from the innocent feet. Turn the light off for your supper.

The lion who vomits water, stares at the Gaper Brook. My love! Your prick binds me. I’m your Vesuvius. Don’t be afraid to take from my mouth.

My mouth is your mouth.You feed them and make them alive. The inside of elephants is stranger than white pasta. The cheetah is blind. Science is an echo. A head of steam forms the site.

Yup. It’s only a thing of milieu, whether I am a genius.

A genius is a turnip-cabbage in a turnip in a kale in a cellophane in a freezer.

In a frock it slides on white skin and crushes into

Translated from the Slovenian by Thomas Kane and the author

the pouch’s angle.

Ants are illuminated.

Enough.

Translated from the Slovenian by Thomas Kane and the author

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Nurit Zarchi She Is Joseph

Rachel knots her daughter’s hair and presses it down under a silk cap and chalks her face to roughen the skin and calls her Joseph.

Shaken, Rachel says, “But that is not all.

You will be locked in a prison because of your dreams, yet only your dreams can save you.

For she has no son and her prayers are numbered and she must lie to her husband, to her husband’s sons.

She must lie even to God.

My prayers are numbered, and I can’t decipher the words in the water, and a prophecy hovers in the wind that passes over the fallen sheaves and the dying kine. ”

The little girl sits in the tent in an opulent blue gown and in public, she is Joseph, but in private her mother brushes her abundant hair.

The little girl sits in the tent, afraid to breathe, and her mother holds her hair and calls her Joseph.

Now Rachel has given Israel an heir, Joseph, the beautiful one, and has washed away her disgrace as though bathing her daughter’s innocent thighs.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jeff Friedman and Nati Zohar

She lifts off the silk cap and unknots the abundant hair and lets it fall over her daughter’s delicate shoulders and reads the future in its darkness.

“My daughter, your brothers will cast you into a pit and then sell you into slavery. ” The young girl sits in the tent drinking the shadows with her eyes, caught in the spell of her mother’s hands, in the spell of her words, in the story she is weaving out of the sheen of her hair.

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P au l C e l a n Sleep Song

With the moths, with night

When you lift your hands

I steal my way into your sleeping:

and celebrate the darkness, free-er,

over you I am a mute

I am the whispering veil,

breath which watches,

you float away from strangely.

how the mirror, not too late

Translated from the German by Patrick Cotter

crowns and presages your hours.

The moon when it comes and weeps, doesn’t shine on your hair,

it looks under your eyelids, what strangers they conceal— I must lean over you, when the moon moves on…

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P au l C e l a n

Quiet, Beloved, Quiet:

Sorrow shuffles over gravel; a staggering echo climbs to the clouds, rain fell consoled and released.

The budding fingers of evening pluck golden song from the harps of bushes.

Flocks of pigeons rush nearby, quivering begin a silver game, the ring coils itself around your neck, and steals away.

Already the earth pushes the watch gear rapidly into the wild vine, falling loose from the gate.

Soon all cries will be quelled.

Translated from the German by Patrick Cotter

Silence under sail settles in starry coves.

The hours in the lilac blush and ripple: “Love, let loose your hair; loudly the season resounds in us, our darker scent is sweet as rain on its way to you. �

Moths ready themselves for nighttime.

Still you hesitate: must the red tulips be there first and, when the dew grows too heavy, droop?

Breath rushes: how many flowers does Yes count?

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P au l C e l a n

P au l C e l a n

Summer Night

White are the tulips: drain yourself over me.

Night exchanges wind for fanning hands.

Say: Will the moths swarm?

Say: Will my mouth be the only cup of sorrow?

And will you shut your eyes to the rosy shimmer?

Say? This time then—can you feel it? —don’t let go of my arm before the world.

A glow-worm kisses an ivy leaf and watches the new stems, hidden…

Again the wind dreams up new roguery: ruffles the stars and frightens beetles.

A white trembling, the naked birch trees huddle lightly in the wish of the spruces.

Your step propagates the quiet, dazzles it, and softens.

And magic comes to put a new heart into life.

In the fern the moon reveals a hesitant ache which winds around grasses, threads through twigs…

The beasts remain standing before the sheen of the mushrooms where poison reddens itself, more magnificent, more gentle.

White are the tulips: drain yourself over me!

Translated from the German by Patrick Cotter

Again the wind dreams up new roguery: ruffles the stars and frightens beetles…

A glow-worm kisses an ivy leaf Quiet: my fingers search for you, hidden…

Translated from the German by Patrick Cotter

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Rivka Miriam

Rivka Miriam

When my Father Died my Forehead Died

When my father died my forehead died.

At first I didn’t understand the whiteness that spread over it for I thought it was alive and breathing.

But lines stopped appearing on it and it doesn’t go up and down with my thoughts.

When my father died I understood my forehead also died.

I carry it with me white and pale and high coolish far far from my flesh I’m afraid to touch it.

Let me say kaddish over my forehead which was very pretty and warm light and shade played on it boys caressed it and in the spring of its youth it died.

Translated from the Hebrew by Linda Stern Zisquit

Ever ything that was Flesh of your Flesh, says Jonathan

Everything that was flesh of your flesh, says Jonathan is about to drop off you, like a shell— detach and come off, like a hymen like the scab of a wound like snakeskin.

Every inside is peeling off, says Jonathan, becoming outside to make space for a new inside.

A boy peels off to become a youth. A caterpillar to become a cocoon.

The cocoon will be a moth.

Even I, who is moving inside you will drop off and fall.

Like ancient skin, slowly I will wither and dry up.

But I won’t forget you. I’ll sneak in, in disguise, I’ll become a hat in your closet, a coat a pearl brooch that you’ll be able to pin on your lapel.

Translated from the Hebrew by Linda Stern Zisquit

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A n a R i s tov i c´

A n a R i s tov i c

Pur ge

Spring Trade

While white-washing the apartment I decided on a book purge, but threw away only the catalog of editions from ’85 and a few books of poetry.

Some little bird sang, spoke two, three words and shat on the terrace, ashine with sun.

From then on the shelves swayed and creaked like some ancient tubercular lungs, stuck in Dostoevsky, beautiful again, a vespiary, like meta-punishment.

So this little bird, still a matchbox, outgrew her wingspan.

Her eyes only half phosphoric grains.

And every night, Osip M. , the noose travels from your name to my neck, and the head, however, descends on its own: you know all my telephone numbers.

From the small shit grew a four-leaf clover: our luck speaks in an animal language and in the language of good digestion, exceeding its causes and not choosing the spot where I would land.

Translated from the Serbian by Brian Henry

Truth is, it must keep quiet: the sun above us, what more to mention growing more into golden gallows.

Translated from the Serbian by Brian Henry

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M a r i n a T s v e ta e va

Jazra Khaleed

I know the truth

Somewhere in Athens

I know the truth! Enough of the old truth—out!

No need people, with so many people on earth, to struggle.

It is evening—see—it is nearly night.

What speaks to you—poets, lovers, generals?

The wind bows low, the earth bathes in dew and soon sky, starry blizzard will rest.

And under soil, soon sleep, we all will, who never, on earth, let each other sleep.

Translated from the Russian by Lisa Wujnovich

Somewhere in Athens December the Sixth The kid will kill the cop before sunup Somewhere in Athens December the Seventh On the streets the banks are burnt one by one Somewhere in Athens December the Eighth Let’s cut a rug in Parliament’s rubble Somewhere in Athens December the Ninth The poets in the streets eulogize fires Somewhere in Athens December the Naught The rebels shot the bell-tower clocks

Translated from the Greek by Sarah McCann

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S o n g s F ro m “C a n ta r e s M e x i c a n o s ”

Making The Circle

Songs From “Cantares Mexicanos”

Translator’s Note: Although the Aztecs had developed a pictographic form of writing, their poetry—what they called “flower and song”—is essentially an oral system of song-making. The poet Tecayehuatzin speaks of “working the song fields/ going back and forth among songs” and the metaphor is an apt description of the poetic process, the intent being not innovation but renewal and refinement, a kind of on-going “conversation” with and within a traditional and conservative body of work in the Nahuatl language.The translations printed here, based on the annotated Spanish texts of Angel M. Garibay and Miguel León-Portillo, are an attempt to add my American voice to the long conversation of the tlamatinime—“those who know something. ”

With necklaces I tie you With troupial’s black feathers I bind you With macaw’s red feathers I circle you With sun’s gold colors I paint you With quetzal’s blue-green feathers I draw you tight With songs I complete you This circle I will place Inside the palace walls There we will live Together On loan to one another Until death calls I am Temilotzin God’s messenger Keeper of flowers And I make this song For friendship’s sake

Translated from the Spanish by Peter Everwine

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S o n g s F ro m “C a n ta r e s M e x i c a n o s ”

Nothing We Say

S o n g s F ro m “C a n ta r e s M e x i c a n o s ”

Prankster Song

Nothing we say is real, O Giver of Life.

What we say on earth is only a dream, as if we rose bewildered from sleep.

And even when you are given emeralds by the handfuls, or with other jewels beseeched— though it be by great lords and warriors— no one can say what is real.

I’m scattering war flowers. I’m Sly-face and I come from the war.

I’m a quetzal bird and I’m flying: by difficult ways I’ve come from the war.

I’m a red-neck thrush and I’m flying.

I’ve come to change into a flower, into Rabbit-stained-with-blood.

Look at me! I’m serious, holding my sides— Me, Eye-winker! the one laughing!

I come from Flower Courtyard. Look at me!

I’m serious, holding my sides.

I’m going to change into a flower, into Rabbit-stained-with-blood.

We follow a dream, friends, our hearts are trusting, but Life Giver mocks us.

Translated from the Spanish by Peter Everwine Translated from the Spanish by Peter Everwine

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S o n g s F ro m “C a n ta r e s M e x i c a n o s ”

N i ko l a M a d z i rov Many Things Happened

Totoquihuatzin’s Song

Many things happened while the Earth was spinning on God’s finger.

Precious jadestone, marvelous jewel, rarest of the most rare— your heart, O Life Giver, which I lack words to praise.

I am Totoquihuatzin.

Some day will you abandon me?

Will you take away your help?

How easy for you!

How swift, your disgust!

My heart drinks the wine of flowers, which is my strength on earth: to be drunk with war flowers, to taste their colors on the tongue— that’s what it means to be alive, here, under the sky, drunk with flowers!

Wires released themselves from pylons and now they connect one love to another.

Ocean drops deposited themselves eagerly onto caves’ walls.

Flowers separated from minerals and set off following the scent.

From the back pocket pieces of paper started flying all over our airy room: irrelevant things which we’d never do unless they were written down.

Translated from the Spanish by Peter Everwine

Translated from the Macedonian by Magdalena Horvat

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R o b e rt W r i g l e y

Siberian Poems

Night Music

A Shaman Climbs Up the Sky

Full moon and wide forest trail make the headphones possible.

He need not walk by ear but is allowed all the way to nowhere in particular and back Bach’s Brandenburg concerti, music as lavish and intricate as the pine needle lacework shadowed along the ground he walks.

What shuffles and skitters, what hoof thumps running away as he passes, he does not hear, but hears instead the basso continuo and violins; what inquiries of owl and crescendo of coyotes he also does not hear, but hears instead an oboe and French horns calling in his ears.

He fears, therefore, nothing, and allows the day’s wet fallen snow to rumble soundless under his boots as he walks a mile, and then more, from home.

As many as the stars, the notes of Bach’s music, as many as the Brandenburg’s movements, the eyes he’s seen seeing him pass like a kind of God, which the Margrave of Brandenburg, Bach’s benefactor, was also not, having insufficient musicians to perform the concerti, and who therefore left the full score unplayed in his library, until it was sold, upon the Margrave’s death, in 1734, for twenty-four groschen, twenty-four small silver coins, which end-to-end would barely extend a quarter the width of the trail our man, deaf to the woods and the mountain night, walks and even, eventually, begins to gesture his way down, up, and over, conducting

Altaic, Siberia

• The Shaman mounts a scarecrow in the shape of a goose above the white sky beyond the white clouds above the blue sky beyond the blue clouds this bird climbs the sky

•• The Shaman offers horsemeat to the chief drummer the master of the six-knob drum he takes a small piece then he draws closer he brings it to me in his hand when I say “go” he bends first at the knees when I say “scat” he takes it all whatever I give him

with his blunt, mittened hands, the virtuoso stars, an orchestra of light and forest and snow, through which he walks a mile or more from home, and returns, so that at the end of concerto number six, we see him bowing and shaking the hand of the first violinist, the wind.

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••• The Shaman fumigates nine robes

markut whose left wing hides the moon whose right wing hides the sun

gifts no horse can carry that no man can lift & robes with triple necks

who never gets lost who flies past that-place nothing tires her who comes toward this-place

to look at & to touch three times: to use this as a horse blanket:

sweet prince ulgan you are my prince my treasure

in my house I listen for her singing I wait the game begins

you are my joy

markut is the mother of five eagles

••••

The Shaman reaches the 1st sky

Invocation to Markut, the bird of heaven

my shadow on the landing I have climbed to (have reached this place called sky & struggled with its summit) I who stand here higher than the moon

falling past my right eye landing here on my right shoulder

this bird of heaven who keeps five shapes & powerful brass claws (the moon has copper claws the moon’s beak is made of ice) whose

full moon my shadow

wings are powerful & strike the air whose tail

•

is power & a heavy wind

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The Shaman pierces the 2nd sky

you have use for the hoofs of our horses you who give us flocks who keep pain from us

to reach the second landing this further level

sweet prince ulgan

look! the floor below us lies in ruins

for whom the stars & the sky are turning a thousand times turning a thousand times over

•• At the end of the Climb: Praise to Prince Ulgan

Translated from the French by Jerome Rothenberg Note: After a version in Roger Caillois and Jean-Clarence Lambert, Trésor de la poésie universelle, 1958. The subtitles are derived from Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism.

three stairways lead to him three flocks sustain him PRINCE ULGAN! blue hill where no hill was before: blue sky everywhere: a blue cloud turning swiftly that no one can reach a blue sky that no one can reach (to reach it to journey a year by water then to bow before him three times to exalt him) for whom the moon’s edge shines forever PRINCE ULGAN!

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RenĂŠ Char P ortfolio

Translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson

Courbet: The Stone Breakers

Lightning Victor y

Sand and straw live gently, soften the fall of wine.

They gather quills from dovecotes.

Theirs is the gullet’s greedy tongue.

They slow bare toes of girls, Chrysalids pierced.

Lighthearted they catch the well-suffered blood.

The bird spades the earth, The serpent sows, Death, seasoned, Hails the harvest.

In the stones we devour the grey fire’s plague, While in town they conspire and scheme.

Still nothing beats these ruined roads Where twilight air bears the scent of tomato vines, Forgiveness for outbursts soon to come from our wives, And the bite of thirst shoved down to our knees.

Inside us, explosion.

Inside me alone.

Insane and deaf, how could I be more so?

Son, our labors of dust Will be seen tonight in the sky.

Already the oil is rising to life from lead.

Lepers descend with the slow snow.

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Pluto rules the sky!

Gone, second self, fickle face, season of flame and season of shade!

In a flash, love—equal of dread— With an unseen hand, contains the blaze, restores the sun, recasts the beloved.

Nothing augured a being so bold.

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The Swift

To Brother-Tree of Numbered Days

Swift with wings too bold, pumping and shrieking joy as he circles the house. Just like the heart.

Thunder withers before him. He sows in the placid sky. If he touches ground, he will tear apart.

Larch tree’s brief harp, On the spur of moss and stones in seed; —Forest’s façade where clouds break apart— Counterpoint paired to the void in which I believe.

He scorns the swallow, her commonness. Lace has no use from the tower.

In the darkest of hollows, he finds his narrow respite, where none fits better than he.

In the long brilliance of summer, he streaks his way in shadows, through midnight’s shutters.

No eyes can hold him. His presence is only his shriek. A slender gun is going to bring him down. Just like the heart.

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Four Who Charm

I. The Bull

IV. The Lark

It is never dark when you die, Encircled by shrieking shades, Twin-pierced sun.

Sky’s last ember and day’s first fire, Gem set in dawn, she sings of the restless earth, Carillon master of breath and free to fly.

Love’s brutal beast, truth in the blade, Singular pair, by each other impaled.

She who charms is charmed to death.

Translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson

II. The Trout Riverbanks, you who collapse Adorned to fill the mirror; Gravel below the babbling boat Embraced and released by the stream; Grass, grass always endlessly stretched, Grass, grass never left to rest, What is in store for your creature Whose heart has propelled her Amid the transparent storms?

III. The Snake Prince of distortion, induce my love To foil her Lord, the one I hate—his somber suppression, gaudy hope.

May your colors prevail, stately snake, Under cover of wood and in every home.

By the line joining fear and light, O snake made for margins, you feign flight.

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Charles Harper Webb

Death Roll

Shots of starved North Korean babies, mothers sifting seaweed for edible bugs, make me want to grab the steaks out of my freezer, and fly right off to help. Instead, I switch channels to gazelles that prance into a river choked with crocodiles, then do what they do best, which is to spring— from one mouth, it happens, to the next.

As alcohol rips open a few spare (I hope) brain-cells, I bite my olive, and shake hard to commemorate the Crocodilian Death Roll, in which a croc grabs a big mouthful of gazelle, and—small, scaled legs held tight against its white belly—whirls until the living flesh is twisted off, then swallowed whole.

Columbia’s astronauts—freighted with medals and Presidential dreams—had their mission aced until they plunged into earth’s atmospheric stream, and friction’s crocodiles ripped them to bits.

An FBI official who chewed an honest agent up, and let a Soviet spy swim free for years, nods his thin, toothy head. With hindsight, he says, he’d act identically.

Reptiles like him bellowed and snapped to save their own tails as people sprang from the Twin Towers into Manhattan’s hungry river of concrete.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-il—his birth heralded (he says) by a new star springing, gazelle-like, into the sky—hungers to eat the world alive.

Better tonight, before my biopsy, to gorge on steaks than let him yank them from the mouths of babes.

Better to down a cold martini like James Bond: one government employee who, being fictional, can do things right.

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Sasha Parmasad Memor y of Sugarcane-worker Of f Duty

—for Roslyn Gajraj

Ajee on a wooden bench in our road black pitch soft like her sagging breasts, sifting rice in a wide square soop, yellow husk from white grain, brown arms muscular like balata wood.

How I love her.

In that ripe heat the air around her misshapen feet, rippling, toe-nails like thick scabs soles thirsty, gray, with black gorges me at her side, neck arched, acutely watching the orhini knotted at her sweaty nape bundle black coil of hair, bench – crude hacked with cutlass blades, stabbed with rusted nails, her tunneling veins, the green marriage-tattoo on her wrinkled forearm.

I long for merger.

There is a scent of burning sugarcane in the air pungent – and she sighs as she sifts, long eyebrows of cane-ash swimming about her heaving arms velvet butterflies me rushing to catch them, emerging with dusk-stained fingers and lips.

“I look like you,” I say.

Nothing.

I stare at her mango face – What am I to you? – at her armpits,

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the damp darkness of the cloth, raw edge of heel.

In a hard drizzle of rice I touch with smooth fingers, her ankle, gnarled toes.

She stops sifting to say, “Child, shift out of the way!”

I step off the brown jute bags spread like bed-sheets around her bench – Yellow husk buzzes in burning breeze; white grains fall down.

She begins to sing.

Sponge feet butter skin hand made for holding pen head level with her calabash knees, I think You will teach me to work, I will take your burden away.

Through dry, rippling air I trace the low unraveling hem of her dress the long scar on her ankle, black, baby toenail, until I see with envy she sifts while standing on water.

Notes: Ajee – paternal grandmother or elderly grandmother figure Soop – sieve Orhini – head-veil

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Ellen Hinsey

F r a n n i e L i n d s ay

Annals: A Natural Histor y of Compassion

To the Flowering Plum Tree on Beacon Street

[Exhibit A] There, in the twenty-fourth chapter—embedded in archaic vowels like coiled fossils found in clay—one finds the story of how, after the toiling of war, when enemies finally lay together in the dust, in that hour when the bereaved search out a place where sorrow can rest, the old king yoked together the sharphoofed mules, and parting all in attendance, lashed the startled horses on— And drove through the opened city gates into night’s uncertain province— And how, from on high, a swift messenger was sent to close the enemy’s eyes in sleep, so that the king might travel unseen and bring his mission to completion. And how, awake in his rough-hewn lodge, within hearing’s distance of the beaked ships, the great warrior—who, for nine days in his own grief had wept—there received him; And how, to his own amazement, before the towering shoulders, the old king bent down, and in broken sorrow for his son, kissed the hand of the one who had slain him; And how the warrior, watchful of the pain he bore, in sudden compassion took hold of the old man’s wrists, and in words drawn up from grief ’s sharp abyss, vowed to return his son’s body—even in its lifelessness. And how, there, side by side, in night’s closed vault, in a commonality of breath and skin, the two mature men wept—each for his own.

While under each word the ceaseless river of revenge flowed.

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And here you are outside the Sovereign Bank in the night-blown rain, old now; almost unable to grip your million blossoms, bride whose groom, spring after blustery spring, doesn’t show up; what can you do but stand there, idly fashion one more sapwood ring of your own, and keep on sighing

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S e ba s t i a n R e i c h m a n n

S e ba s t i a n R e i c h m a n n

Right

The wooden objects belonged to

A calf with a triangular head, four eyes, and two mouths was born in the little village of Belacraon, Switzerland.

- News report

i use a scheme i’m proud of the sudoriferous of the sons i adopt the proverbial ones i’m buried up to the neck in myself only above the neck do I breathe July 1966

Translated from Rumanian by Sasha Vlad and James Brook

the wooden objects belonged to the wooden forests the iron objects belonged to the iron forests the water objects belonged to the water forests the human objects belonged to the human forests when in the year 1 a calf with four eyes was born and in the year 2 a calf with four eyes was born and in the year 3 a calf with two mouths was born and in the year 4 a calf with four eyes was born and in the year 5 a calf with two mouths will be born and in the year 6 a calf with four eyes is born and in the year 1000 a calf is born and in the year 2000 the wonderful fresh unexpected curiosity the fresh curiosity in the year 2000 the fresh curiosity is the birth of the calf with a triangular head with four eyes with two mouths with four eyes with two mouths no one should believe anything the triangular head the four eyes and the two mouths are nothing more than the calf and the calf nothing more than the sun following a game of solar chance the light the light for us 1968

Translated from Rumanian by Sasha Vlad and James Brook

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S e ba s t i a n R e i c h m a n n

V e ro n i c a J i m e n e z Postcar d from Por t

Elementar y things

Elementary things: which is the pupil whence springs the drollery of the species that made you hot several times on the same day if it matters at all your experience is perfecting itself if it matters at all to hear legends and be unable to hate their stability because their stability has lasted as long as some of your powdered thoughts (for them) not to know if it’s better to be alone at the top of the suspended imperial table without any legs without foundations of thoughtaceous fairness or to be at the table with three legs where you wouldn’t miss the fourth leg

The philosopher González Pérez, stevedore of seat number three, examines with imperceptible avidity the sensual movement of the sea. Each white drop of foam having brought forth a gram of a grand immeasurable secret. The roar of boats’ motors does not impede his thoughts on all that earth was and will never become because they ran an unspeakable path at the hand of blonde goddesses half fish, half women, common as currents.

Translated from the Spanish by Heather Galan James

in the reason called: the fourth leg in the comic and nausea-provoking envy called: the fourth leg elementary things that you don’t know every time one time when you know them that’s a moment a fixed stage when you know them it’s the way it always is you construct here and now on the nose under the rhinoceros horn you construct a bedsheet with a hundred knots smaller than a flea a bedsheet called poem a flea called albrecht you construct musical instruments for opening bottles with gas you construct scissors for cutting hair nails milk January 7, 1969

Translated from Rumanian by Sasha Vlad and James Brook

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Alicia Ostriker P ortfolio

Love I (Summer time)

The Husband

Somewhere between 116th St and Pennsylvania Station the Broadway train rocking along and stopping

When he is deep inside her suddenly she sees what he is doing: he is like a man in a mineshaft

to let people off and on, then rocking and stopping again they began to kiss in the way lovers do

clay walls wet, tracks fading into the distance

when they want everyone else to notice their bliss and perhaps, even, to share some of it

he carries a weak flashlight peers forward

so I thought it was appropriate to stare I liked her turquoise tank top, her dangly earrings, his curls

What is he doing?

Is he afraid of snakes?

but nobody else was staring, I couldn’t think why not, except an old black lady across from me

No, he is seeking the other man, the rival, the brother, the father, the God.

a big shopping bag between her knees when we caught each other’s eyes we smiled a quick been-there-done-that conspiratorial old lady smile, while the subway lights flew by and the month was deep July

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Love II

The Widow

In the ocean said the oceanographer there is no place to hide beluga whales protect each other by traveling in a group

Just as the snow is melting and the buds are about to declare themselves, this happens now she busies herself about her death duties in order to keep her sanity

probably the instinct to save any individual that seems to be sinking as they do with babies and others in trouble by lifting them from below into the air

day and night her mind is like jangling keys don’t even ask how she is sleeping as if a piece of her own body were amputated yet the wit and courtesy of her email notes persists

is not species-specific so that when the young diver began to choke thinking now I will die she felt this incredible force almost like a machine push her upward

she consults with clients, attends meetings, travels alone like a stripped twig riding a gale unbearably light she thinks the world underneath unbearably hard

until she breached and breathed rinsed by the sky but the giant form dove and disappeared into the immeasurable sea

finally she discovers how much she resembles her mother

those of her own species drew her up peeled her suit off, wrapped towels around her wondered why she cried and cried since she had not died

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Love III

Grandchild

Elohai, neshama‌.

Too late for mating season what is the cardinal doing all week flying between

I take her to the park, I swing her in the little swing help her on the slide, lotion her face and arms against the sun she runs around in her little bluejeans

the feeder outside my kitchen and the hedge by the brick wall where a female or is it a juvenile

the sun is getting higher, as it does every morning the game now is for me to chase her the air is dusty and warm

waits with needy beak wide yellow-pink inside not cheeping but vibrating its wings so fast

my god the soul you gave me is pure when another child comes into the playground she points excitedly and shouts: baby!

they blur like a hummingbird’s it’s the same thing girls do with their eyelashes the adult male pecks some seed for himself then gracefully swoops to her low branch and feeds her gets some for himself and feeds her again all week this goes on I am almost stoned just from watching

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Vermont Dair y Farm

Six Haiku

For Peter and Joan

Meadows green mountains soft after many icy centuries

Airpor t

stream races along the road blacktop smooth and the sun bright

Child at the airport hugging his grandfather’s legs all the adults smile

my friends up ahead with their bird books bikes propped by the roadside

July Night

a dozen Holsteins along a wire fence slowly turn their heads as I pedal near

All night the peepers singing around our small pond, drunk men, happy men.

one after another they gaze at me as if I were the long-awaited being

This haiku requires that we fill our cups to the very brim. And drink.

who would find their lost calves or somehow replace them

Drink, drink, and more drink, then in the morning the poets run around outside—

Grasshopper

A grasshopper leaps through the meadow, escaping the mower. This time.

Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin

Stroll around a pond: frog after frog after frog jumps, and jumps, and jumps.

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Ars Poetica: Strategy

When the wind is against you, run faster and keep your head down.

When there is a cross wind, run faster.

When there is a tail wind, fly.

E S S AY S

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Translating Verse

M i n a s S av va s

Say what one will of the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and worthiest concerns in the totality of world affairs. –Goethke to Carlyle

Cocksureness is the pitfall of the translator.This is especially true of translators of poetry; those whose notions of what translations must be are so well-defined that they haughtily assume that whatever poem they are translating will somehow suit itself to their Pro-crustean preconceptions. I am not suggesting here that the translator should cower in fear before his original, nor am I saying—like Dante and Robert Frost—that translation is the art of the impossible. What I do say is that the translator needs to approach the poem-to-be-translated with caution, concession, and circumspection and that he ought to be flexible enough to alter his approach with each endeavor.

Translation of verse is indeed a protean enterprise, and there are as many ways of translating as there are poems.The translator, after considering the poem’s strengths, will have to decide (a) which of these strengths should be rendered in his reproduction, (b) how many he can render in the new language without sacrificing what he deems to be the poem’s spirit, and (c) which of these strengths need to be reproduced faithfully and which to be tempered in order to make the poem readable in the new language.

Translation is not the art of the impossible but it is the art of compromise.

Often the choice facing the translator of verse is a stark one: either he debilitates the poetry and makes an accurate translation of the prose sense (Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin is the purest example of this approach), or he attempts to retain the poetry with an approximation that does not always abide with syntax and diction. When he tries to accomplish the latter, however, he should admit that it will not, it cannot, be the same poetry.The difference in inflection, in convention, and the overall texture of the new language will not allow an identical poetic rendition. Still, if he cannot have an identical twin for the original, he could try to have a half-brother, or perhaps a first cousin. And it is not accidental in this regard that those who have brought the poetic relationship closest have been themselves poets: Chapman, Dryden, Pope, FitzGerald or, in this century, John Ciardi, Robert Lowell, Michael Hamburger, Robert Bly, Ezra Pound, and Stephen Spender. In the hands of these artists, a translation is given substance and meaning relevant to contemporary readability; “Ghosts are supplied with blood,” as Pound put it, to enable the original poem to speak in a new locale and to the present, to set it within an enduring frame of reference. A translation in this

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context is like a relay baton and the translator like a relay runner who, at the end of his lap, hands the baton to the next generation.

As so many others have said, then, we cannot Xerox a poem from one language to another though we can make a rough copy. This means, of course, that we may have to add some words or omit others, that we may, and invariably need to, change the syntax, and that, sometimes, we may even have to tamper with the original poem’s form. How intelligent these changes will be naturally depends on how intelligent the translator is. Risk and compromise are most important here, and the translator must worry not only about the adequacy of his interpretation but about the feasibility of presenting it to readers who are strangers to the original. “The poet cannot hope to present his vision intact,” writes Kimon Friar, “just as a translator cannot hope to present the poet’s work unaltered. ” And further on: “There is no one form of translation that is valid as such or ’better’ than another, for this depends on intention. … All forms of translation are valid and should be judged on their own terms. ”1

Though Mr. Friar’s observation is itself generally valid, I feel that he is being slightly modest and generous. His superb translation of Kazantzakis’ Sequel to the Odyssey, for instance, would not have been as “valid” on most other translators’ terms. Hence, it is correct to say that, though there is an approach or two or three for every poem, an inferior or a wrong approach can be used in certain translations. And while rarely is a response to a translation anything other than subjective, occasionally a consensus can be reached.

Imagine, for instance, a German or Italian translator trying to render in interlinear fashion E. E. Cummings or William Faulkner. The interlineal translators, in fact, are usually the most vulnerable, the most failure-prone victims of verse reproduction. I speak with some sympathy (not cocksureness) when I say that “purist” metaphrasts, word-for-word buffs who propose to recreate the language of a Mallarmé or Leopardi or a Sikelianos in “English equivalents,” deserve to receive ten blows on the buttocks with Roget’s Thesaurus.

Poetic imagination, not synonyms, and the exegetic, not the literal, approach appear to be more successful when translating verse with the hermetic aura or the esoteric words of, let us say, Mallarmé or Montale, the lyricism of Pushkin or Solomos, the difficulties of a Hölderlin or Palamas.With writers such as these, compromise becomes especially significant; and the “literal” translator steps on the threshold of failure when he proposes to achieve “through the most literal possible rendering of word, phrase, image…the ’indescribable being-there’ of the original poem. ”2 As if we could know its “being there!” As if we have— even if we knew—its literal equivalents!

Absolutist translators especially should remember that words that may seem “literal” usually have a different history, a different etymology, a different

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shade, even a more oblique meaning in the original language. Furthermore, organic sounds that may serve the original well often are lost in the synonyms that appear to furnish the closest literal adherence to the original words.“Don’t bother about the WORDS, translate the MEANING,” Pound advised Michael Reck about a proposed Japanese Trachiniae (from Pound’s English, from Sophocles’ Greek). And George Chapman in the preface to his translation of the Iliad pointed out that “it is part of every knowing and iudiciall interpreter not to follow the number and order of words but the materiall things themselves. ”The word Turk, for example, has many more connotations in Greek than in English, snow more to the Siberian than the Libyan, bush more to the Congolese than the French, tulip more to the Dutch than the Guatemalan, etc. “Even the simplest word,” as Friar says, “can never be rendered with its exact equivalents into another language. ”

It should be clear then that while literal translations could prove successful poems, in most challenging reproductive endeavors translation is an act of recreation. For in the majority of cases, most grammatical relations, most corresponding ambiguities, most cultural ironies, most tonal subtleties simply cannot be satisfactorily rendered into another language. Literal equivalents will exist, of course, but the results, as often the judgment of the results, can only be partial and personal. Yevtushenko’s lines in “O perevodakh” (“About Translations”) are appropriate here: “There exists a pathetic, schoolboyish type of exactness—but creative exactness exists as well. ”

What all this suggests returns us to the earlier contention that limited though the approaches to a single poem may be, the translator who does not acknowledge a multitude of methods will better illustrate the cynical traduttore traitore. More than a scholastic mind, then, more than a linguistic competence, the translator must possess a poetic imagination that will enable him to synthesize the energies of the original and adhere to what Nabokov calls “the servile path” by being as faithful as possible to what he considers to be the poem’s spirit.

Hence, the translator may be proud as the man who placed the flesh around the skeleton, but he should be humble since his inspiration—never a product of parthenogenesis anyway—was “borrowed. ” One translator from the modern Greek, after quoting Maria Callas’ statement that “the singer is the servant of genius” and that “as interpreters, it is our duty in all humbleness to read between the lines, to search out his soul, his message, to mind-read his style, what he is trying to tell us,” responds: “I can’t say that as a translator I myself feel quite as humble about my task as Miss Callas does about hers.” Yet this eminent translator admits that modern Greek is “a particularly elusive” language, and “the art of translation is inevitably an art that involves distortion.” Further on he advises less knowledgeable translators to “aim at a language as close to the language men actually speak in our time as that of the best contemporary verse in

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the translator’s target language. ”3 Sounds fine! But will, and should, all translators agree on “the language men actually speak in our time”? And will we concur on “the best contemporary verse,” or should we first check with the author of this exhortation? Is Emily Dickinson’s language similar to, and her poetry better than, Whitman’s? Is Berryman’s verse “contemporary” to Brautigan’s? Varnalis’ or Kazantzakis’ better or “contemporary” to Seferis’? Language, after all, like verse has fluidity; it is like a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting with the forces that bear upon it. Within a generation language differs from occasion to occasion, from purpose to purpose, from subject to subject, from contact to contact, from man to man, from lyrical mode to lyrical mode, from emotional state to emotional state, from place to place and year to year. Thus to say, use “the language men actually speak in our time” is to say very little, for so many are the factors that impinge upon that judgment that it often ends up looking more subjective than objective, more like necessity than freedom.

The keen translator of poetry will invariably have an intuitive, subconscious sense of the language of his time. But what is more important for him to have is sensitive antennas that receive the nuances, the ironies, the signals of his race–“the nerves of the age” as Yevtushenko puts it.The poetic vein indeed, that sensitive and mysterious nature is perhaps paramount in the best of verse translators. Consider Pound’s practice as interpreted by Hugh Kenner: “Translation does not, for him, differ in essence from any other poetic job; as the poet begins by seeing, so the translator by reading; but his reading must be a kind of seeing.”4 The demand that the translation should produce an effect comparable to the original work will in most cases prove to be wishful thinking, for we really do not have any irrefutable means of knowing what effect the original poet intended or, more importantly, what effect the original audience (even as a monolith) received. It would be logical to conclude then that the translator, who should translate only what he loves, faute de mieux, can only hope to affect his readers as the original affected him.This is not easy, of course, but the deft poet-translator will convey an approximation with no more difficulty than the original poet when he turned his vision into a poem.There lie the terror and the fun, the discretion and the challenge!

The difficulties of translation indeed demand that we be modest while doing the best we can with the resources at our command. As George Steiner observes: Anyone translating a poem, or attempting to, is brought face to face, as by no other exercise with the…limitations of his tongue. It compels us to realize that there are raw materials we lack, stocks of feeling, instruments of expression, inlets to awareness which our own linguistic territory does not possess or has failed to exploit. 5

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Hence the translator’s modesty should be surrounded by a certain amount of courage, the willingness to take risks. It is such courage that enables Robert Lowell to admit, in his introduction to Imitations, to being “reckless in literal meaning” while laboring hard to capture the tone of his originals. In contact, many metaphrase renderings fail to convey the delicacy of expression, the resilience of rhythms, the mood surrounding the verse—and ultimately, poetry is the casualty. Such arthritic translations illustrate the hypertrophy of “accuracy” at the expense of sound, rhythm and tone, though sound, as Frost said, is “the gold in the ore. ” It is like studying the inner parts of a clock but neglecting all hope of listening to its life-revealing throbs or of ever telling the time.

It may be redundant to remind ourselves again that poetry is less a matter of what is said than how it is said. The translator of verse must certainly concern himself with meaning, but his idiom must also be committed to the fact that what he is translating is a poem and that its design and its spirit are poetic.

The original, therefore, must find in the translation a new and active poetic life, a verse-consciousness in the present. Through its rhythms and emotive overtones, the translation should come close to rendering not only the original’s communication but, more vitally, its communion with the reader.

Consequently, a rule of thumb for verse translation will not do. Rules of thumb are better suited for translators of prose. The translator of poetry must have a constantly shifting coordination of priorities: now the image must be reproduced though the tone is weakened, later fidelity to the metaphor is necessary while the mood is enfeebled, the diction should be emphasized here, the rhythm must be flexed into the thought in another instance, an obscure allusion should not be lost further on, etc. Invariably something will have to give; the problem in most cases is what to obfuscate and what to illuminate. The ritual of sacrifice seems necessary in verse translation, so that the god of fidelity may be appeased. That is what Jean Garrique means when he says, “There is the joke: to be faithful to a poem you must be faithless, that is you must not seek for the literal equivalents, word by word, you must rather approach it [quoting Pasternak] “with that conscious freedom without which you cannot come near to great things.” 6

This freedom—and what I have called here “modesty”—should lead the translator to try his hand not because he can do “better” than those who have preceded him but because he feels that he can at least do it differently, from a perspective he can call his own. Finally, like the poet, he should know what he has given, but, like the poet again—though he hopes for positive acknowledgement— he cannot really know what the individual reader has received.

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Notes: 1 “On Translation, ” Comparative Literature Studies (September, 1971), pp. 198, 200.

2 The phrase belongs to M. D. Herter Norton in his Foreword (p. 11) to his translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (W. W. Norton & Co. , Inc. , 1962).

3 “On Translating Cavafy and Seferis,” Shenandoah (Winter, 1972), pp. 32, 49. Also in this article, with a translation which I entitled “Concealed” (The Chicago Review, August, 1969) and he,“Hidden Things” (which erroneously evokes images of miscellaneous artifacts, drawers, and safety-deposit boxes), the author tries to show that his way of translating Cavafy is closest to the poet. Though the Chicago Review version does abide with the criteria proposed in the article, the author finds the translation inferior to his.Why the poem in the Chicago Review “fails to achieve a rhythm and diction sufficiently natural to the original for the equivalence required,” he does not say. What equivalence is required, after all? What authority, besides the translator of “Hidden Things,” will tell us what “rhythm and diction” are “sufficiently natural” to be faithful to Cavafy’s original? What secret formula must one apply in order to discern that “Hidden Things” is as “natural” a rendition as one can achieve?

But since we are speaking of this particular poem, it may be worthwhile and illustrative to note that in his translation this proud translator makes an inexcusable error. For after Cavafy’s admission of failure, because of obstacles and social intimidation, he goes on to say that stin teleiotéra koinonia (“in the more perfect society”) someone else like himself will certainly act with freedom.

The author of “Hidden Things” fails to render the specificity of stin which clearly implies that the more perfect society will come, that it is definite and preconceived in Cavafy’s mind. “In a more perfect society,” as “Hidden Things” renders the line, makes the definite vague and uncertain, the positive abstract and capricious. Good translators should have better reasons for not feeling humble.

4 Introduction to Ezra Pound:Translations (New Directions, 1963), p. 10.

5 Introduction to The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (Penguin, 1966), pp. 27-28.

6 Introduction to Translation by American Poets (Ohio University Press, 1970). P. xxviii.

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Robinson Jef fers: Impolitic Poetr y and the Hounds of Hell

S t e v e K ow i t “The passion for truth is the faintest of all human passions.” — A. E. Housman

If Nietzsche was correct when he observed that the poets lie too much, it is also true that now and again a poet emerges who articulates truths so incendiary and forbidden that the guardians of the public good cannot help but be disconcerted. When it is politic to mouth chauvinistic homilies and genuflect to the tribal gods, those seditious writers and dissidents who refuse are ever in danger of being torn apart by the Hounds of Hell, the beasts who guard the gates of propriety as Euripides, who terrified his Athenian countrymen by showing them the savage face behind the veil of their self-aggrandizing myths, is rumored to have been so torn apart. Osip Mandelstam disappeared forever into the gulag. Anna Akhmatova’s verse was banned, Boris Pasternak was forced to turn down the Nobel Prize because he could not avoid depicting the pathological nightmare of the Soviet state. But they dared not arrest him, he was too famous; instead, they threw his wife into a work camp to teach him the virtues of silence.

In Turkey, Nazim Hikmet served decades in prison and was then forced into exile when he refused to fight in the US-sponsored Korean slaughter. Richard Wright, Rafael Alberti, Joseph Brodsky, Juan Gelman and Czeslaw Milosz are just a few of the poets of our era who suffered exile. Cesar Pavese, Kim Chi Ha, Juan Ramon Hernandez and Irina Ratushinskaya are among the many poets of our century to be imprisoned. Garcia Lorca was murdered by the Spanish fascists for being a homosexual and a communist. Roque Dalton was murdered, or so it is generally believed, by internecine warfare among his fellow revolutionaries.

Today, Forough Farroughzad’s sexually transgressive poetry is banned by the Iranian Islamic Republic.

In the most benign form of punishment, such writers are simply disparaged by critics, and the reading public is discouraged from paying attention to their works. Take, for example, the case of Robinson Jeffers. His refusal to write in the elusive modernist manner of his contemporaries, his lack of patriotic fervor during the Second World War, his grave reservations concerning the nobility of humanity, his insistent condemnation of mankind’s congenital cruelties, his disparagement of man’s primacy in the cosmic order, and the long shadow of misanthropy that fell across the entire body of his work were hardly designed to endear him to the critics and reviewers of his era. Although his screeds against

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humanity’s cruelty, America’s imperial designs, and the human degradation of the environment do not, these days, seem very wide of the mark, he has not regained the stature he once had and stands notably apart, both philosophically and aesthetically, from the modernist giants of twentieth century American verse. “No major American poet,” Dana Gioia has commented, “has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers.” Nonetheless he still has an impressive number of passionate readers and advocates, and the most appealing of his poetry is by no means in danger of being forgotten.

But what has remained perhaps least noted in his work is another quality shared by few of his contemporaries—a large-spirited compassion for his fellow beings, a compassion that does not exclude our nonhuman brethren. It is not impossible that it was precisely this empathy and compassion that account for his poetry’s unwavering focus on the world’s cruelty, man’s savagery, and his nation’s destructive history. As early as 1923, in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” Jeffers was warning that America was settling “into the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,” and he was advising his sons to “keep their distance from the thickening center.” (“Shine, Perishing Republic” CP 1: 15) During the First World War he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist as a pilot but because he was already in his thirties he was rejected for being too old. But the astronomical toll of death and destruction that the war brought shocked him out of his naïve romanticism and he came to view that catastrophic event—and the very idea of war—with horror. A few years later, in “Love-Children,” one of the shorter poems included in his 1927 collection The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems, he writes without apology: “I’m never sorry to think that here’s a planet / Will go on…perfectly whole and content, after mankind is scummed from the kettle.”

(CP 1: 213) To have insisted that mankind was a destructive force in the world and to have offered his allegiance to that larger creation, the universe itself, in which Homo sapiens is but one of myriad sentient beings—and by no means the most admirable—struck the central note of his subversive philosophy.

Jeffers’ rise to prominence in the 1920s was meteoric, but so too was his fall just a decade later. During the 1930s and ‘40s the literary critics and reviewers turned on him with vituperative scorn. James Rorty, one of his earliest admirers, commented in 1932 that Jeffers “expressed the death wish of a spent civilization,” (qtd. Vardamis 23) and in 1935, Rolfe Humphries, giving his distaste a more explicitly ideological spin, chastised Jeffers for having made in his poetry “no effort to show that the present horrible frustrations, deformations and agonies of men are due to the fact that they are for the most part still living under the denigrating capitalism of The 20th century.” (24) In 1936, Ruth Lechlitner scolded him for apparently favoring the “annihilation of humankind,” (23) while in 1939, Delmore Schwartz, similarly appalled by Jeffers’ rejection of humanity,

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and perhaps also by his thoroughly anti-modernist proclivities, called his work “without interest and without value.” (24) The New Critics, who dominated American poetic taste in the 30’s, did not find his prosody dense, complex, elliptical and ambiguous enough, and their attacks, begun in the late ‘20s, continued through the 1950s.Then too, there was the obsessive violence of the longer poems that was shocking to a poetic establishment that was comfortable with a more bookish, intellectualized, urban and “civilized” poetry.With the publication of Be Angry at the Sun in 1941, and his adamant refusal to add his voice to the drumbeats for war, his disdain for what he calls in “Prescription for Painful Ends,” “the immense vulgarities of misapplied science and decaying Christianity,” it became clear that Jeffers was not a member of the well-mannered, progressive chorus. In 1942, Babette Deutsch, who had praised him lavishly a few years earlier, went so far as to say that his latest collection of poems gave “color to the suspicion that Jeffers has fascist sympathies.” (25) Deutsch was not the only one to suggest as much, though it is difficult to see the reasoning behind such a charge other than the fact that he was an uncompromising pacifist, condemnatory of Roosevelt, and thoroughly antagonistic to the war. Though he was politically conservative, it is hard to imagine what in Jeffers’ philosophy or nature could possibly be considered fascistic. But Jeffers’ “isolationism”—a pejorative term meant to castigate those individuals opposed to the war—seemed all but treasonous to the patriotic American sensibility that saw Germany as dangerously totalitarian and aggressive and the United States, England and France as democratic, egalitarian and noble. Jeffers had been educated in Europe and was anything but a provincial or an isolationist: what he opposed was not close relations with Europe but the horror of seeing the United States being sucked into the war. The influential American critic Yvor Winters, in his most important book, In Defense of Reason (1947), simply dismissed Jeffers’ work as “pretentious trash.” The darkness of Jeffers’ vision, his relentless insistence on life’s anguish, and his evident dislike of human nature provoked Winters to suggest that the poet should consider committing suicide. (23) Many of the attacks were clearly or implicitly about his anti-modernist poetics as well as his politics. In the introduction Jeffers wrote for his Selected Poetry, a volume that Random House published in 1938, the poet states the case for his aesthetic proclivities this way: Long ago, before anything included here was written, it became evident to me that poetry—if it was to survive at all—must reclaim some of the power and reality that it was so hastily surrendering to prose. The modern French poetry of that time, and the most “modern” of the English poetry, seemed to me thoroughly defeatist, as if poetry were in

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terror of prose, and desperately trying to save its soul from the victor by giving up its body. It was becoming slight and fantastic, abstract, unreal, eccentric.

The paragraph following that one suggests an aesthetic of moral seriousness that is no less antithetical to the spirit of modernism: Another former principle came to me from a phrase of Nietzsche’s: “The poets? The poets lie too much.” I was nineteen when the phrase stuck in my mind; a dozen years passed before it worked effectively, and I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel; not to pretend to believe in ”optimism” or “pessimism” or unreversible “progress”; not to say anything because it was popular, or generally accepted, or fashionable in intellectual circles, unless I myself believed it; and not to believe easily. These negatives limit the field; I am not recommending them but for my own occasions.

It was the publication of The Double Axe in 1948, a decade after the appearance of the Selected Poetry, that completed the evisceration of his reputation. Random House published that collection only after excising its ten most seditious short poems, demanding a number of line changes in others, and by including a brief, polite publisher’s note to assure the reader that “Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume.” It was only three years after the Allied victory and to many readers the poems in The Double Axe must have seemed little short of treasonous. The details of that publishing episode, with excerpts from the correspondence between Jeffers and Saxe Commins, his editor at Random House, can be found in In the Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers, by James Shebl.

Although his publisher’s demurrer seems a gentlemanly way of handling the situation, the decision to delete ten poems from the book was a more questionable one. In “An Ordinary Newscaster,” one of the 10 suppressed poems, the speaker meditates on a typical radio newscast during the war with a prophetic commentary that I suspect no other significant American poet would have dared write or publish:

“The German astronomers Are interested in a red spot of Jupiter, they hope the eclipse will help them learn something more About the red spot. But our brave fliers are interested only in the red

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splashes Made by our falling bombs.”

This is perhaps the most ignoble statement we have

heard yet…. our whole attitude Smells of the ditch. So will the future peace.

(CP 3: 127) Today, such criticism would hardly seem an inappropriate denunciation. Anyone who watched American newscasts in the winter of 1991, during the bombing of Iraq, or during the bombardment of Afghanistan in the first few weeks of our invasion of that nation a decade later, or who listened to TV news or radio broadcasts during the horrors we wreaked upon Iraq during our invasion of that nation in 2003, will recognize the news media’s triumphalist gloating to which Jeffers is referring—those atavistic expressions of joy at the slaughter of one’s putative enemy. That Jeffers was perfectly correct, that his emotional and ethical impulses were far more sober and praiseworthy than those of many of his countrymen, was not the conventional opinion of the times: not surprisingly, The Double Axe was greeted with fierce hostility. R. I. Brigham announced in the St. Louis PostDispatch that “only the most devout followers of the right-wing nationalists, the lunatic fringe, and the most ardent of Roosevelt haters could, after reading The Double Axe, welcome the return of Robinson Jeffers.” (25) In a recent essay, Justin Raimondo summarizes the fiercely negative critical reception to that postwar volume: [December 17, 2007 Issue] The chorus of jeers that rose up from the critics was deafening: “A necrophilic nightmare!” declared Time magazine. “His violent, hateful book is a gospel of isolationism carried beyond geography, faith or hope,” scolded the Library Journal. The Milwaukee Journal concurred: “In this truculent book, Robinson Jeffers . . . makes it clear that he feels the human race should be abolished.” His critical reputation shattered on the rocks of the postwar One-World consensus, the poet never regained his former stature. As William Everson wrote in the foreword to the 1977 edition: “Hustled out of decent society with antiseptics and rubber gloves, The Double Axe was universally consigned to oblivion, effectively ending Jeffers’ role as a creditable poetic voice during his lifetime.

In his preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems, Jeffers tells us that his verse presents “a certain philosophical attitude that might be called Inhumanism,” which he defines as “a shifting of emphasis from man to non-man; the rejection

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of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” That viewpoint (less provocatively called “transhumanism”) is simply a perspective freed of its anthropocentric delusions and which was evident even in his earlier work, a perspective that allowed him to view humankind as but one species among many, a perspective characteristic of a scientific attitude associated with sociobiology, an orientation that we now call “evolutionary biology.” But his orientation was by no means devoid of a spiritual aspect: by shifting his focus from the human, Jeffers could more fully invest his awe in the magnificent splendor of the Earth and the cosmos—an attitude that is at the crux of his entire life’s work. When he spoke of himself as “not well civilized,” he was confessing his allegiance to that larger, transhuman world rather than to the human domain of the comfortably acculturated. In a 1939 meditation on Hitler, “The Day is a Poem,” he characterizes his poetry as “crusted with blood and barbaric omens, / Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry.” (CP 3: 16) Whatever else his inhumanism implied, it was certainly not a paean to inhumanity and it was certainly antithetical to fascism. It was the inhumanity of mankind of which he despaired and from which his inhumanist philosophy afforded him some modicum of philosophical distance and relief. And of course humanity and its miseries were always at the heart of his poetry. The attitude of his inhumanism is not merely in accord with the rather obvious realization that man is one insignificant being in a vast universe, but also an emphatic insistence on the obvious fact that some salient Homo sapiens characteristics—our constant warmaking, our habitual cruelties and destructiveness, our arrogance in imagining the world was placed here for our pleasure—are not altogether attractive. That understanding is, of course, at the foundation of his misanthropy, a charge that despite his denials seems well justified, for Jeffers never made a secret of the fact that Homo sapiens was not his favorite species.

Though he made use of the term “God,” it did not imply, for him, a personal, redemptive Judeo-Christian deity, nor faith in the orderly and morally just universe that is associated with an omniscient deity obsessed with human concerns. In 1956 he wrote: Another theme that has engaged my verses is the expression of a religious feeling, that perhaps must be called pantheism, though I hate to type it with a name. It is the feeling—I will say the certainty—that the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it. (qtd. Everson 208) This pantheistic and mystical sense of awe that he experienced in the presence of the natural world is not, he made clear, attributable to a moral force concerned with good and evil. Rather, the god he intuits is

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a consciousness inherent in the cosmos, one that cares nothing for man or any other creature, a god without mercy or love. The notion that this world had been placed here for the convenience of this bipedal hominid sporting a vestigial tail, a lethal surfeit of intelligence, ineradicable tribal malice, and boundless arrogance—he viewed as a tragic delusion.

Rather, the sublime power of the cosmos, viewed as an entity whose manifestation is everywhere grandeur and extravagant beauty, is a being which “does not care and will never cease,” a phrase from “The Great Explosion,” the opening poem in Jeffers’ final volume, The Beginning and the End. (CP 3: 413) It is this “God” that Jeffers constantly invokes.

Jeffers’ pantheism is perhaps of far less weight than his ethic. Our task, the poet tells us—and, as I said earlier, I believe it has been much too little noted—is to remain merciful and compassionate. In “The Answer,” he writes: When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction….

To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil;

and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness.

(CP 2: 536)

Although the poet is decidedly not a Christian, in one intriguing poem he borrows the Christian notion of original sin for a singular and most interesting purpose. One of the short poems from The Double Axe, to which he gave the title “Original Sin,” has a band of primitive hominids, “the most repulsive of all hotblooded animals,” gleefully roasting alive the giant mammoth they had trapped in a pit. He writes:

This is the human dawn. As for me, I would rather Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

But we are what we are, and we might remember Not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

(CP 3: 203)

It is as bitter a passage as one is likely to find from the pen of an American poet and certainly strong evidence of his anger at humanity. Perhaps even for Jeffers the insistence on man’s venomous nature and the rather shocking assertion

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that he’d rather be “a worm in a wild apple” are the products of the particularly gloomy and despairing mood brought on by the horrors of the war, a mood which permeates the entirety of that 1948 collection. Though the word “misanthropy” has unpleasant connotations, what does it imply if not disgust with the congenital and pervasive meanness of human nature, the human disposition that relishes domination and delights in torture and killing—that tribal self-righteousness and the attendant contempt for those whose land and wealth we wish to steal, the perennial human hatred for those not of our tribe, pigmentation or persuasion?

And how interesting that from this bitter misanthropic narrative the author draws the lesson that the ubiquity of human viciousness should restrain us from hating any individual: since we are all guilty of such evil—love of vengeance and slaughter, greed, hypocrisy and bullying arrogance. Each of us needs to be wary of our own darker predispositions, our own presumed and false moral superiority to our neighbors. But what is no less interesting is that our species’ original sin, according to Jeffers, was not the slaughter of one’s fellow man—an act universally acknowledged to be criminal (except when such slaughter is sanctioned by the state)—but the slaughter of an animal, a wild non-human creature, an act that has always been perfectly acceptable in the Judeo-Christian world. It seems evident enough—though it has not been much acknowledged —that Jeffers’ disgust at humanity is a product not of cold-heartedness but of an excessive compassion and empathy—not just for his own species but for his fellow earthborn creatures.

Pained at the glee his countrymen expressed at the slaughter of the enemy, he understood that such periodic bloodbaths were a product not of the low character of our nation’s citizens but of our species’ congenital love of the hunt, our love of visiting pain and death on our fellow creatures. In “The Purse Seine,” first published in his 1937 collection Such Counsels You Gave Me, Jeffers describes the nets being hauled in as the captured sardines “wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny…each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame.”

And then in the poem’s second half, he describes a contemporary human city, it too densely packed with helpless creatures who will not escape the inevitable mass-disasters. Even as he watches he knows “The circle is closed, and the net / Is being hauled in.” (CP 2: 517) But critics who have dismissed the description of the fish in that poem as simply a metaphoric vehicle while the poem’s real subject is the mass of human beings crowded into their cities, are very likely mistaken. It is, in fact, the first half of the poem, the section about the captured and panicked fish, that is the more vivid and more deeply felt. In Jeffers’ first notable collection, Tamar and Other Poems, originally self-published in 1924, the poet describes a similar scene in “Salmon Fishing,” a powerful poem of 17 lines, but in that piece the author doesn’t bother making the scene of horror serve as a vehicle for any human tragedy. He describes the fishermen this way:

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In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace Of a long angry sundown, Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers, Pitiful, cruel, primeval. . .

And he describes the dying salmon like this:

Bill Flodden with a long-handled tool

…the bloody mouths And scales full of the sunset Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will The wild Pacific pasture nor wanton and spawning Race up into fresh water.

(CP 1: 6) That is the poem of a man anguished—unambiguously—by the agonizing mass death of small sentient creatures. The fishermen are “pitiful and cruel.” We are reminded, pointedly, that it is Christmas month. If his world-view is misanthropic, it is a misanthropy that springs from compassion, from profound regret at the inherent cruelty of our nature.

Jeffers’ ability to take seriously the lives of other creatures is best known from that shocking line from “Hurt Hawks:“I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” (CP 1: 377) It is a poem of tender concern for an injured bird whom he had fed for six weeks and had then found himself forced to euthanize, a great redtail that: “Had nothing left but unable misery / From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.”

Here is the hauntingly painful opening of another short poem “Memoir” also from Such Counsels You Gave Me, a poem composed in the years just before the Second War. It begins with a visit to an animal research laboratory:

I saw the laboratory animals: throat bandaged dogs cowering in cages, still

obsessed with the pitiful

Love that dogs feel, longing to lick the hand of their devil; and the sick

monkeys, dying rats, all sacrificed

To human inquisitiveness, pedantry and vanity…

Near the poem’s conclusion, the speaker comments that “Here in this sanctuary” he need not recall:

that a million persons Are presently dying of hunger in the provinces of China. I need not think of the Russian labor-camps, the German Prison-camps, nor any of those other centers That make the earth shine like a star with cruelty for light….

The poem concludes:

I need not think of the probable wars,

tyranny and pain Made world-wide; I need not… know that this is our world, where only fool or

drunkard makes happy songs.

James Karman suggests in his critical biography of the poet that Jeffers would not have made a good soldier: “Despite his training in medical school, training that might have helped him place some distance between himself and the injuries of others, Jeffers was unusually sensitive. He neither hunted nor fished because he did not want to inflict pain on living things.” (Karman 41) However, there is some evidence that Jeffers did hunt, if only on rare occasions. In “Shine, Empire,” a poem from Be Angry at the Sun, he writes:

Leaving the laboratory, the speaker encounters some ranchers dehorning bulls in a field above Rio Piedras Canyon and while describing the gory process the speaker remarks that these are “sane men,” that is, they are rarely capable of “feeling pain outside their own skins”: (CP 2: 524)

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like pruning shears Crushed off the horns and the blood spouted; Ed Stiles, our knower of bawdy stories, the good-natured man, Stands by to cake the blood-fountains with burning alum. These fellows are fit for life, sane men, well buttoned In their own skins; rarely feel pain outside their own skins: whilst I like a dowser go here and there With skinless pity for the dipping hazel-fork.

If I were hunting in the Ventana canyons again with my strong sons, and to sleep under stars, I should be happy again. It is not time for happiness. Happy the blind, the witless, the dead.

(CP 3: 17)

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According to Tim Hunt, an earlier draft of that poem made no mention of hunting. There he simply says: If I were in the Ventana canyons with my strong sons, and to sleep under the stars, I should be happy again.

(CP 4: 633) Whether or not Jeffers had ever taken delight in sport hunting, and despite the fact that his long verse tragedies were famously drenched in vengeance, rape, incest, conflagration and murder, he was a man with a vehement antipathy to human violence and acutely conscious of mankind’s brutality toward our fellow sentient creatures. But he relished the grandeur of the violence inherent in the natural world: he is the singer of coastal storms and violent seas, the poet whose major symbol was the predatory hawk. For the non-human creatures he has no moral judgement: they are part of the cosmic magnificence, “innocent” in the sense that they are behaving in the manner that nature has forced upon them— part of that natural world without moral agency. Like the sea and the stones, they have no alternative. The matter is set out nicely in “Orca,” a poem from The Double Axe wherein the speaker watches from a cliff two killer whales move shoreward toward a covey of sea-lions who had been loafing in the “swinging tide of the inlet.” As the birds begin screaming above him, the speaker sees below that “brown blood and foam / Striped the water of the inlet.” The poem ends with this telling passage: Here was death, and with terror, yet it looked clean

and bright, it was beautiful.

Why? Because there was nothing human involved, suffering nor causing; no lies,

no smirk and no malice; All strict and decent; the will of man had nothing to do here.The earth is a star, its

human element Is what darkens it. War is evil, the peace will be evil, cruelty is evil; death is

not evil. But the breed of man Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has run

Wild and ought to be stopped.

(CP3: 205)

But isn’t man’s nature, with all its cruelty, also part of that existent whole, part of that majestic beauty? And if that is the case then God isn’t quite so beautiful.

In “Contemplation of the Sword,” a poem from Be Angry at the Sun, the poet comments on that problem with his conception of the world, a problem made more acute by the war that he saw was inevitable: 304

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Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the

cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us

again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart.

(CP 2: 544)

It is humankind alone, the species that kills other creatures for recreation and indulges in periodic orgies of mass murder of his own species, that darkens the earth and should be stopped. The relationship between our quotidian cruelty to the other animals and our savagery to each other is spelled out in a stanza from “The King of Beasts”:

Cattle in the slaughter-pens, laboratory dogs slowly tortured to death, flogged horses, trapped fur-bearers, Agonies in the snow, splintering your needle teeth on chill steel – look: Mankind, your Satans, are not very happy either. I wish you had seen the battlesqualor, the bombings, The screaming fire-deaths. I wish you could watch the endless hunger, the cold, the moaning, the hopelessness.

I wish you could smell the Russian and the German torture camps.

It is quite natural the two-footed beast That inflicts terror, the cage, enslavement, torment and death on all other animals Should eat the dough that he mixes and drink the deathcup.

(CP 3: 138)

“Despite his writing,” his friend, the photographer Edward Weston once commented, “I cannot feel him misanthropic: his is the bitterness of despair over humanity he really loves.” (qtd. Karman 95) An isolate figure who was never interested in the status of his literary reputation, Jeffers spent his final years writing and living in his beloved Tor House. An heroic poet of an heroic landscape, it is unlikely that he lived those last years with the consolations of Christian hope. If his notion of god was of an inherent consciousness immanent in the natural world itself, a god unconcerned with humanity, one that “does not care and will never cease,” it was clearly also a god that did not promise man personal immortality and the rewards of Paradise. “Hungerfield,” published four years after Una’s death, is bracketed by passages of quiet grief. In the opening section he begins to indulge in that consoling philosophy of eternal recurrence to which he had always been attracted, but then, with a heartbreaking ellipsis stops himself:

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It is possible that all these conditions of us Are fixed points on the returning orbit of time and exist eternally…

It is no good. Una has died and I Am left waiting for death. Like a leafless tree Waiting for the roots to rot and the trunk to fall.

Some 50 lines later he once again refuses the romantic lie, the small, consoling trope of conventional elegiac verse that allows the speaker to address the dead: Never fear: I shall not forget you — Until I am with you. The dead indeed forget all things.

And when I speak to you it is only play-acting And self-indulgence: you cannot hear me, you do not exist. Dearest…

To remind himself, in the midst of this passionate apostrophe to his beloved Una, that she no longer exists is Jeffers’ attempt, once again, however difficult it might be, to tell the truth. But in the poem’s final ten lines Jeffers again addresses Una to tell her, in a passage that permits itself a consoling mystical hope that is more reminiscent of the optimistic philosophy of Whitman than the dark one of Jeffers, that: You are alive and well in the tender young grass rejoicing When soft rain falls all night, and little rosy-fleeced clouds float on the dawn.

I shall be with you presently.

(CP 3: 375)

Another elegiac poem of his last years, one memorializing both Una and himself, is written in the voice of their beloved Haig, Robin and Una’s bulldog, the companion of many years. It is one of Jeffers’ most unashamedly tender poems. Here the poet of epic conflict and thunderous violence permits himself a sweet fantasy born of innocent love. Instead of lying by their fire as he had done in life, Haig lies now in the ground a few feet outside their window. It is a poem that exhibits the poet’s appealing humanity and his empathy with and compassion for other creatures, a characteristic that, as I have been arguing, has been largely overlooked, a humanity quite inseparable from his inhumanist vision. In the end it seems likely that the critical Hounds of Hell who pursued him with their wrath and did their best to destroy his reputation will not triumph. His work is too powerful, too large-spirited to be soon forgotten. “The House-Dog’s Grave” ends like this:

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I hope that when you are lying Under the ground like me your lives will appear As good and joyful as mine.

No dears, that’s too much hope: you are not so well cared for As I have been.

And never have known the passionate undivided Fidelities that I knew.

Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided….

But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.

I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures To the end and far past the end. If this is my end, I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

(CP 3: 12)

Works Cited Everson, William. “All Grass is Flesh” from The Excesses of God, in Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet, ed. Robert Brophy. New York: Fordham U Press, 1995. 208 Gioia, Dana. “Strong Counsel” from Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture.

Graywolf, 1992.

Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. Story Line Press, 1994.

Raimondo, Justin. The American Conservative “Robinson Jeffers: Peace Poet,” The American Conservative December, 2007. www. amconmag. com/2007/2007_12_17/review. html Vardamis, Alex in Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet, ed. Robert Brophy, Fordham U Press, 1995.

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This is so Esso

A fa a M. W e av e r

The Esso filling station sat at the intersection of Federal Street and Edison Highway, six blocks from my family home. It had the old sign, the oval shape in red, white, and blue. The station was a marker of the white world of business, as owning a gas station was beyond the range of entrepreneurship for black folk in the Baltimore of my childhood. It seemed as if it should have been a sign for something to eat, maybe for one of the restaurants sitting along old Highway One heading southward to the family grounds. Those were mostly “white only” restaurants, which was one of the reasons we packed our food and drinks in coolers and picnic baskets. White only rules also were what drove black men to buy the large cars that became the centers of cultural jokes.Whole families could pack into a private space that was safe in times of segregation. The Esso station in our neighborhood was a few hundred yards from a Negro baseball league playing field my father frequented when I was too young to remember. There it was with the oval red, white, and blue, and as I remember it, this filling station of my childhood, so bright and clean as opposed to the dirty station in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. In “Filling Station,” the last line is her summation of compassion and her sense of human as belonging. She writes, “Somebody loves us all. ” If anyone would know the real engine of influence from poet to poet, it is in the secret of a word or a phrase. The whole poem is carried with some kind of affection, but we are propelled by these perfect tricks of language, such as “ESSO—SO—SO—SO.” It is the sound of the name of that red, white, and blue sign for the gas station that was also in my East Baltimore neighborhood which ensures my fondness for her work.

Now that I am in my fifties, I find myself wondering what Bishop would have thought of me. Even as I find common issues in our work, I also dare think myself quite other than what I suspect her perception might have been had she known me. As I speculate, I use her poems as a gauge of her possible perceptions of black people. Her explorations into black culture are not among her best poems. She had no sense of the black vernacular, although her interest in “Songs for a Colored Singer,” to take one example, is rooted in an admiration for the subject, however personal and naïve it might have been. She was a poet on the move, one engaged in the art of observation with attention to detail, and she was a poet driven by child trauma. She was a poet steeped in white privilege. I wonder what she would have thought had she stopped at my family home on Federal Street to see this odd little boy in glasses bent over a dictionary, making up languages from alphabet tablets.

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I wonder what she might say today if I were to sit with her and explain that I came to a realization of the engine of trauma in my work in my fifties, just as she did, that I have been “on the move” just as she was, that I write to experience as opposed to the philosophical staking out of life in the way of Stevens, a poet I have avoided for most of my life.

She might do what one white woman poet did when I was talking with her about myself and Bishop. She let out a harsh and snarling snicker that almost made her choke on her coffee, and when we left the coffee shop she spiced her talk with vulgarities as if to put me in my place, the place of the ambitious primitive. Bishop might do that, or she might be a good deal more compassionate, amused in whatever degree, but compassionate and simply sit there and smile to think that my mother was concerned about the appearance not only of her house but of the whole neighborhood. Her concern was that she wanted success for me.

It seems that American culture and poetry has reached this place, this house as it were, where black and white poets can see themselves as writing the same page. It may not be of interest to many of them to do so, as many of us are more likely to be proud of our differences and unwilling to let them go as these differences spell a singularity as well, the quality of being special in the world of poets, where ego is supreme.

When it comes to Bishop and myself, cartography informs each of us from the beginning. “The Map” is the first poem in North & South, Bishop’s first collection, and “Borders,” a poem about maps, is the first poem in Water Song, my first published collection. Maps describe a space with reference to a coordinate system, using points, numbers and lines to produce something that can guide a person who is traveling in an unfamiliar space. The poet’s life work, her poetic project, is this unfamiliar space. In exploring she makes a new map. Her work becomes a map in itself. In the profundity of Bishop’s poetic gift, cartography provides a way for the poet to match her experience through travel with her unfolding body of work. The unfolding of her work is comprised of moments where her interior is lit with the brilliance of reconciling a painful childhood with a poet’s life. I, too, am a survivor of child trauma and know cartography as a way of processing the past while in the process of creating art. In this way cartography shows us the relationships of one land to another. These lands are experience.

Bishop’s pain meshes with that of her mother in her piece “In the Village” with that haunting scream, the sound of a mind coming apart, an exploding interior.

A child robbed by trauma of the normal circumstances of loving and supportive parents will spend the rest of her life looking for that presence in

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her relations with other people. This quest is hobbled by an inability to know the constructs of genuine intimacy. There is this insatiable longing to be fully engaged with life while at the same time tied by coping strategies to something less than a fuller intimacy. I see Bishop’s fascination with the natural world as a chance to be intimately involved with things that make few requirements of her other than adoration—orchids ask only to be touched, cats ask only to be fed and held, and Nelly the cow asks only for doting smiles. The poet does not have to open her heart and thus her wound to speak the desire to be heard, to share emotions and feelings, to lay herself open and vulnerable. North and south are the frame of the pulse in her search for intimacy, as it has been for me in mine. In Bishop’s case, north signifies the cold and frozen terrains of a frenzied heart and painful memories while the south signifies the chance to experience an open and robust passion, all of it a dream. For me the south has been the place of a wound forever on fire while the north has been the chance to live in the coolness of a healing space.

She is quoted as having said she felt neither “…homeless or at home…” while explaining that she traveled because she enjoyed it. Having spent considerable time studying Chinese and living in the culture, I can sympathize with her.The difference in our travels and interior investigations is in the level of participation in the cultures we visit. On the other hand, I have had to restrain an inner longing to belong in the way of what Tessa Bartholomeusz calls neoOrientalism, which is to say the wide-eyed American seeking completion. I have had to eschew that and grasp the more realistic and more difficult wholeness that lives in the place where I was born, and I have had to do that without Bishop’s white privilege.

I read “Brazil, January 1, 1502” as the eager voice of a woman looking onto an image of perfection, a balm for the chaos inside her. She arrived in Brazil the year I was born into an America so very different from hers but as close as two poets trying to figure the determinants of a gift against the challenges given to our poetic gifts by child trauma. In Bishop’s poem, “sin” exists in the foreground, much like the tragic loss of childhood sits waiting to turn innocence into a bewildering set of obstacles.The poet’s work becomes the long journey to find beauty in the world to compensate for the horror that lives inside. Bishop paints innocence so beautifully in this poem, and I cannot help but think she is painting her own childhood as it might have been had her father lived, her mother remained intact and the northern part of her soul’s cartography been much happier. With chaos living inside her, she cannot tolerate a mess. When she finds it, she quickly goes to the task of putting things in order, with nature as her model.

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Bishop’s mother was womanhood and motherhood gone from order to an imperfect chaos, an embarrassment to a child, a painful drilling in the heart that leaves a gaping absence. I see Bishop moving to celebrate natural order and beauty wherever she found it and to criticize dirt and disorder wherever she found those things, but in doing so with the latter she displays, to my reading, a certain mischief and whimsy. I suspect she was even titillated at times, and I think this titillation is the disorienting effect of the memory of trauma. It is also the recognition of pain that is the earmark of being human. I see this titillation and fussy lack of tolerance for things that need straightening in “Something I’ve Wanted to Write About for Thirty Years.” It is more this than a malicious intent to malign a whole culture and its people. My suggestion here is that her need for order outweighs the malignancies of racism. There is a definite implicit concern for what is wrong in the world.

For me the American South was the disorderly place, the setting for the trauma, and a serious case of hay fever. I looked northward, both to the cool summers and images of whalers with their ships and lies. Nothing is quite so disturbing to me as a greater proximity to the equator, and a childhood spent working class and somewhat poor in the segregated south of the nineteen fifties gave me no picture of white people other than these grim monitors of social borders who would hurt me if I broke those laws of segregation. However, after twenty-four years of living north of the Mason Dixon line, I remain uneasy with northern aloofness, the blunt honesty, and a lack of intimacy that belies liberal intentions.

If Bishop and I are connected by the use of our cartography in a poetic odyssey launched in part by child trauma, Wallace Stevens and I are connected by a solitude away from the more ordinary solitude of poets who live closer to the art’s social mix. I have never gone so far as to pick a fistfight with a pugilistic novelist as Stevens did with Hemingway, and my literary apprenticeship of fifteen years was shorter than the time he worked as an insurance executive. However, the quality of that isolation is similar in my perception, and I do think the separation of race and class as configured in America’s working class ethos makes my own separation more distinct in many ways. When he did step from his business life into the literary, Stevens’ white male privilege gave him credence among his peers that is, of course, inaccessible to me. Still the broader engraving on the poetic soul that such isolation makes in a poet’s life is one I have always felt. The circumstances of both Bishop and Stevens’ lives made for a necessary eccentricity, just as it has in my own. By eccentricity I am not suggesting strangeness. On the contrary, I am suggesting the need to develop as a poet away from the trends of the day.This isolation feels at times like alienation, and the struggle for such poets is to find intimacy in the art itself, as if poetry is a living being.

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In The Necessary Angel, Stevens writes, “It is important to believe that the visible is the equivalent of the invisible; and once we believe it, we have destroyed the imagination; that is to say, we have destroyed the false imagination, the false conception of the imagination as some incalculable vates within us, unhappy Rodomontade. One is often tempted to say that the best definition of poetry is that poetry is the sum of its attributes. So, here, we may say that the best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. ” With his solitude and his sense of scholarship as the palette of the poet, Stevens had no choice except to have a “…mind of winter…” to move on with his poetic project. This mind of winter I take to be the feeling referred to by Helen Vendler as she writes, “Stevens’ poetry is a poetry of feeling pressed to an extreme; the pressure itself produces the compression and condensation of the work.” I see Stevens’ poetic oeuvre was “…pressed to an extreme…” by an intensely solitary isolation.

That isolation I know from working in factories, a literary apprenticeship that made my life as a poet both possible and incredible. The literary world seemed a foreign and dangerous place, full of an esoteric social knowledge of which I knew absolutely nothing. But it seemed also that I had a key to the working class interiority that was both missing and undesired among American poets, especially the African American, as black culture has historically had to guard the citadels of itself from outsiders who seek to know our interior world.

We behold “…Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Stevens’ lines resemble the beauty of English mimicking the language of Buddhism, and much of what most Americans know of Buddhism is the “sound of one hand clapping” syntax that mimics the efforts of the Asian sages to get to nonthinking, as if there is such a thing. “One must have a mind of winter…” is the poet looking ahead to the fearsome project of bearing this whole sensitivity, this poetic consciousness, through a whole lifetime and using it to produce something worthwhile, and the poem is one of the better contributions in the century. Christopher Clausen cites some of Stevens’ early work as standing above the crisis in the art that tends to unfold after modernism. Still I wonder what Stevens would have written had he lived and traveled more, had he had more memory than imagination.

His ideas of mind and imagination appear in “The Snow Man” in an abundant way, and so much of what he thought of things such as mind and transcendence resembles Emerson’s thinking on the same matters, which is not a revelation by any means. However, from a postcolonial standpoint the fallacies of both poet philosophers beg a deeper examination. Emerson wrote of the “One Mind” in a way that is certainly admirable. His was the first generation

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of Americans to be fascinated with Asian religion and have access to texts in translations. Their fascination continues to affect us to this day, as does our lack of a real understanding of these cultures. Massachusetts has as many Buddhist enclaves and devotees as some moments in Asian history, Zen centers and stalwart coolness appear as frequently as Boston’s notorious and circuitous cow paths that defy a final contemporaneous feeling with the rest of the world.

Stevens never made it to Beijing, but he looks for ways to describe the icy interiors of his isolation in the poem. He was not enlightened inasmuch as enlightenment entails the sublime attainment within ourselves that allows us to experience all things with all people at all times. Such was the nature of Stevens’ suffering. It was difficult for him to express love outwardly, which, to my perception, evidences a struggle for self-love. So it is no wonder he would make such egregious a title as “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” That and the comment he made about Gwendolyn Brooks when she received the Pulitzer both speak to the self-hatred that lives inside racism, and I extend my forgiveness, as I think that is the only way to break the cycle. Emerson’s one mind blinks its unrealized, prenatal eyes in the space Stevens names between memory and imagination, between the visible and the invisible, and neither of them knew the world beyond thought, the beginning of wisdom. Entry into that dimension requires the most profound love.

Disciplined meditation practice has several real effects on the mind and perception, and the one most applicable to a discussion of Stevens is what is known in Chinese as (ding li), or definite strength. It is best described as consciousness observing the rooting of the mind in the way the center of a merry go round is rooted and the merry go round is all of life moving about you. One has the experience of both moving and not moving at once. The intellectual life of Emerson and Stevens was more akin to a Nautilus workout, but we have also needed that, as I hate to think what deeper pits of ignorance American culture would have were it not for these attempts, and American culture has a way of making things its own that is not apart from what happens in other cultures. We need only turn to the way Buddhism became Chinese to see Americans were not the first to take what we needed and leave off the larger, fuller contexts of things. When Buddhism came to China, it could do nothing other than become Chinese.

The Auroras of Autumn has this closing at the end of the second section, “… the color of ice and fire and solitude.” For selfish reasons I did not want Bishop to admire Stevens, a poet caught in a complex asceticism, as how could someone whose work I admired admire someone I wanted no connection with in any way. Such betrayal is unforgivable. My avoidance of Stevens had everything to do with my own isolation, and so I did not want to know much of what he

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went through in life or much of what he wrote. He was a cerebralist as a poet, and I was determined to experience the world, once I was released from fifteen years of factory work, my literary apprenticeship. Emerson and Stevens did not know the sitting meditation practices essential to the practice of Buddhism and Daoism, and so they could only intellectualize in the way of the unity of all things the Buddhist state of transcendence. That intellectual transcendence is the engine of Steven’s “mind of winter. ” In the absence of love Stevens had poetry, the eternally critical lover, as I see him pressing feelings to an extreme in “Poetry Is a Destructive Force”: That’s what misery is, Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

Writing and living this way, one has to confront a certain loneliness that valorizes itself over the years. Loneliness wants to possess a poet. Down this road lies the life of the poet recluse. In the history of Chinese poetry the poet’s cave is a recurring image. The cave is the braincase in Stevens’ cave, his mind of winter.

My avoidance of him has been my own fear of not being able to accept an invitation to the social mix, the poet’s ballroom dance. Instead, I wait outside the ballroom, pretending to be at ease because the poet’s ballroom dance is actually taking place on a luxury liner headed to mountaintops named Parnassus, Everest, and Kilimanjaro.

Stepping down from the window to the ballroom, I gaze onto the horizon as the ship heads out into waters deeper than any of us realize. The door opens and Stevens steps out to join me for a breath of fresh air. I have to remind him I am not the cook. We turn and go to the railing to look out over the ocean, and in a little while we are joined by Bishop, drinking glass in hand. The three of us look out over waters, calm perhaps under a new moon. Bishop likens it to the most subtle turns in a play of blue she saw in a Chagall painting, while Stevens disagrees. He says the patterns of the waves are such that his whimsical strokes could do nothing. He declares this can only be done justice by taking an early Flemish masterpiece and rubbing it down to where one can see skyscrapers aching to be born. The waves tap a little loud at the edge of the ship while the music from the ballroom rises, and I remind them that Langston Hughes threw his Columbia University books over the edge of the merchant marine vessel he signed onto as he headed out to see the world.

“Well, he needed the education,” says Stevens.

Nodding a little, as if some dream is rocking in her eyes, Bishop says to both of us, “If I were him I would not come back to America.”

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At this point in the company of these two with whom I am not supposed to keep company, I can only embrace silence.

It is the quality or state of not being taken seriously by the dominant culture that has angered and saddened African-American poets at times, and the greater anger has come from having to know a tradition that chooses to believe it does not need to know the black tradition. For many African-American poets, the way to being a poet was made possible by Langston Hughes and others who lived lives as evidence of the chance to live their own lives as poets. If Stevens had to confront the adversity in his personal life, the lack of affirmation and support for his poetry Langston Hughes felt, the insurance executive poet might have quit the world of letters. Hughes determined that one had to have a mind of the blues, the necessary angel of resistance to the dominant culture’s strategies for the erasure, cultural and otherwise, of the black presence.

Hughes’ poetry has been a balm to my muse, but it is his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” that has been the lighthouse over the seas for me for many years. The essay appeared in The Nation on June 23, 1926 and is both profound and problematic, marred as it is by flirtations with primitivism and generalizing about class structure in the African-American community. However, it was still the breaking open of the seals at a time in American culture when lynching was all too prevalent. It was a very young Hughes, a young poet who would see more and more that his place in the black tradition was to live this life as a poet and writer, to make that life an affirmation for those still unborn, and to struggle as he did with the censorship of racism. He did this as a product of the middle class who observed the working poor and the poor who could find no work. In the year the essay was published, Harlem had taken on the dressing of a desperate slum in some places, even as it housed the great artists and thinkers of the time.

The WWII surge in the Great Migration brought the second large wave of poor African Americans into the cities, and with it the rise in education and the extending of the black middle class. Several of the major players in the Black Arts Movement were the offspring of educated, middle class blacks. Haki Madhubuti is an exception, and his memoir Yellow Black is a testimony to his childhood experience of poverty and the dangers of growing up in a dangerous urban environment. African-American poets living and working today include people such as Madhubuti, who represent the result of broadened opportunities for sharecroppers and otherwise poor black families that came north to find work in the factories during the second World War and subsequently enlarged the black middle class. Himself a middle class black man, these people were the subject of Hughes’ poetry and prose, Madam Alberta K. Johnson, Jesse B. Simple, and more, people he loved as he transformed them in his imagination.

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In this way Langston Hughes affirmed the culture for those of us yet to be born and gave us a way to believe in ourselves as artists.

The Civil Rights Movement was for the evolution of black American literary culture what the Civil War was for the larger American, as the flowering of black poetry was held back by slavery and its successor, southern and northern segregation, such that it would take the final push of the 1940’s and 50’s to prepare the way for what we see being produced today by African American poets. Greater participation in the culture that has come with the social changes in the last fifty years have positioned the black poet to be able to choose whether to write from a stance of a more secure sense of inclusiveness in American society.

It is from this crucible, this foundation that we can now read the whole tradition and contextualize ourselves within it, or we can go our own way, leave off from the rest of American culture, declaring it forever incomplete and beyond redemption.The movement is an illustration of the Doppler Effect, the changing frequencies of objects moving in space. It is the movement Hughes helped initiate and which he hoped would one day produce greatness. Hughes knew himself to be a prophet. He believed we are inextricably tied as one whole culture, and that the deeper enrichment of American literature is to come from those groups whom the dominant culture tries to dismiss. So Hughes wrote referring to life after death in “Daybreak in Alabama”: When I get to be a composer …I’m gonna put white hands And black hands and brown and yellow hands And red clay earth hands in it Touching everybody with kind fingers…”

Touching everybody with those kind fingers in the life after death, I am sure he would have offered them to Stevens and Bishop, enriching Bishop’s words, “Somebody loves us all.”

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S w e d i s h P o e t ry F eature

Feature on Swedish Poetr y by

Malena Mörling

and

Jonas Ellerström

Preface

“Look at all the stars”, we say and point up to the sky. Twelve hours later, someone on the other half of the globe says exactly the same words and points to a different sky with other stars in other constellations.

No selection ever gives a true or even comprehensive picture of the poetry of a given country or language. What we present here is a florilegium; the Latin words means a wreath of flowers, picked for their beauty. The Swedish poetic tradition is exceedingly rich and the 20th and 21st centuries alone represent many writers and a vast amount of magnificent poems left out of this tiny selection. We give you four classical modernists—Edith Södergran from the early days of free verse and a freer poetical diction; Gunnar Ekelöf, who introduced surrealism to Sweden in the 1930s; Werner Aspenström, who after the angst of World War II developed a more personal form of nature poetry; and the well-known Tomas Tranströmer, who is represented here by some of his very early poems, never collected in book form, as well as by his poem “Grief Gondola.”

These four are followed by a number of important contemporary Swedish poets: Lasse Söderberg, who was an early friend of Tranströmer’s and has throughout his long career written with an international vision; Lennart Sjögren, whose sturdy but very precise poetry may recall Ted Hughes; Bruno K. Öijer, who came along as a Dylanesque seer; and Katarina Frostenson, who is perhaps the single most influential poet of the last twenty five years; and finally Eva-Stina Byggmästar, who both works within he modernist tradition of Swedish-speaking Finland and breaks altogether new ground. All these poets are represented by poems from their latest collections. A bonus is thrown in at the end. Enough for now. Enjoy.

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Gunnar Ekelöf Born into a wealthy family in 1907, Ekelöf spent most of his inheritance while studying in London and Paris before making a tremendous debut with his first collection, “Late on Earth”, in 1932, a book that introduced surrealism to an unprepared Swedish audience. Ekelöf developed, through various stages and poetical personae, into the most important poet of his time, with a thematic and stylistic scope that remain unrivaled. He died in 1968, having completed his justly admired Byzantine trilogy the year before.

Euphoria

You sit in the garden alone with your notebook, sandwich, flask and pipe.

It’s night but so calm the candle burns without a flicker spreading a reflection across the table of rough planks and gleaming in flask and glass.

You take a sip, a bite, you stop and light your pipe.

You write a line or two and pause and ponder the streak of evening glow gradually turning into morning glow, the foaming sea of wild chervil, green-white

in the shadows of the summer night.

Not a single butterfly near this flame but choirs of ants in the oak, the leaves so still against the sky…And the aspen rustling in the quiet: All around you, nature is ripe with love and death.

one with the multitude of flowers that lean out of the dark and listen to something I had on the tip of my tongue but never uttered something I did not want to reveal even if I could.

And that there is a murmuring inside me of pure happiness!

And the flame rising…It’s as if the flowers were pushing closer, closer and closer to the flame like a spray of rainbow light.

The aspen quivering and playing, the evening glow tiptoeing and all that was unutterable and distant is unutterable and close.

I sing of the one reconciliation, of what is practical, for each and everyone alike.

As if it were the evening before a long journey: Your ticket is in your pocket and everything is finally packed.

And you sit here almost feeling the presence of distant countries, feeling how everything is in everything, at once its end and its beginning, feeling that here and now is both your departure and your homecoming, feeling that life and death are strong like wine inside you!

Yes, to be one with the night, one with myself, with the flame that looks me calmly in the eye, calmly and inscrutably, one with the aspen that shivers and whispers,

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Gunnar Ekelöf

Poetics

Voices Below Ground

You should listen to the silence the silence behind applications and allusions the silence in the rhetoric or in the so called formally complete This is a search for meaninglessness in what is meaningful and the other way around And everything I so artfully seek to compose is conversely something artless and the entire fullness empty What I have written is written between the lines

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Gunnar Ekelöf

The hours pass. Time passes away.

It is late or early for different people.

It is late or early for different lights.

—In stillness the morning light pounds the drug of sleep and hides it away in all the pharmacies (with the black and white checkered floors) – colorless and bitter at dawn myself tired like never before years and days until my death…

—I want to go from the black square to the white —I want to go from the red thread to the blue.

That young man! (there is something wrong with

his face) – That pale girl! (her hand is with the flowers

in the window: she only exists in relation to her hand which only exists in relation to…)

The bird that flies and flies and flies. With its flight.

Someone who is hiding. Others who only exist

in relation to other things.

The old woman who tiptoes and tiptoes until she is detected.

Then she turns craftily smiling and retires.

But she comes back.

The custodian at the pulpit (painted, worn pine

grain). He does not have any eyes.

The child turned to the black board, always turned to

the blackboard.

The pointer scraping. Where is the hand?

It is with the flowers in the window.

The smell of chalk. What does the smell of chalk tell us?

That the hours pass, time passes away.

That slowly the light of morning pulverizes the drug of sleep. …with the black and white checkered floors—

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—Archaeopteryx! What a beautiful name!

—Archaeopteryx! My bird.

—Why does it chirp so unhappily?

—It’s chirping about its life, wants to fly away, has perhaps

already flown.

I caressed it already as a stone.

With several thousand-year-old beats, my stone heart pounded in my veins.

Perhaps there were petrified birds and lizards in there!

Rhamphorhyncus! Archaeopteryx!

In a new light the stone became a living bird and flew off but comes back sometimes out of obligation or habit.

There is always someone who remains, that is the terrible thing.

—Iguanodon!

The bird is gone but claims to still be here—is that

to protect itself?

How could it still be here? It is not here.You’re the one

who’s here.

The bird is free.You’re the one waiting.

—I’m waiting.

I long for the bird that flies and flies with its flight.

I, it turns out, was tied to the rock, the ancient rock.

Lately the bird has complained about not being able to

sleep.

Who can sleep?

I woke the bird one night—it was at home.

I woke it because my thoughts were plaguing me.

I wanted to know.

The bird claims to have flown away in order to provide for me

a much larger happiness— I caressed a stone, I became a stone.

I became the last piece in the puzzle, the piece that doesn’t fit anywhere, the picture whole without me.

There is always something that remains, that is what is terrible.

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Everything turned in me, everything evaporated.

The bird took my wings and donated them to another

light.

It was extinguished. It got dark.

Archaeopteryx! Archaeopteryx!

I groped around in the air, got nothing in the hands nothing to remember, nothing to forget…

—There is no forgetting in the house of the abyss.

—Not when everything is the abyss.

—Is there no light?

—Not when it’s turned off.

—Is it night or day?

—It’s night.

—How the lanterns are staring hard!

—They’re keeping watch over the stones.

—That far below the surface?

—There’s no surface!

But there on the bottom I see a lone limestone

among the fish…

Dumb, deaf they wander around in their own light.

It doesn’t have light.

It has no bottom.

It can’t close its eyes over anyone’s happiness.

It can’t open them.

—This is hell!

—No, it is emptiness.

And the house of the stars is empty and the souls retreat out of the universe— The earth is winding time slowly and without emotion around its

axis, more elastic than any rubber-band.

I must put my feet against the ever winding

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from landing to landing, on steps on top of steps of

stone…

You hold your head still: You’re forced to take the steps one by one and the body twists itself: You twist your head off.

You are choked in stone, you float in viscous stone, you

sleep in there.

Birds and shells sleep in there like you with lizards and flowers, even rain drops sleep on pillows of stone, beneath sheets of stone.

With a thousand-year-old pounding, their stone hearts

beat in veins of stone.

During billions of years of stone, time whirls them along in raging storms of stone through oceans of stone to heavens of stone…

—Where am I? Where are you?

—Wake up!

—Where am I? —In the house of the abyss.

—Is there no forgetting in the house of the abyss?

—Not one’s own but other’s.

And all these sickly people that drift homeless around

the wards only keep the walls as their doctors.

The fever-curves totter here and there over the barred

doors.

Everything is lying on its back, everything is continually turning over on to its back. It is not possible to know what is up or down. Everything is continually turning over onto its back, even the chairs, even floors and walls.

Everything is turning.

Everyone’s eyes are glazed and empty like windows,

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it’s not possible to detect night or day…

—Is it night or day?

—It’s night and the night is resting reflected and black against the window-panes.

The night is rising, the night is about to reach the fourth floor.

The night is about to reach the fifth floor.

The night is about to reach the sixth floor.

Now the night has reached the seventh floor.

—How many floors are there?

—Many.

—What incredible pressure against the window-panes on the ground floor!

If they exploded the night would rush in, fill the floors with darkness, rise from floor to floor!

—Move up there in the stair!

—Out of the way!

—Sure, keep on stumbling!

There’s a pounding in the radiator like in a strained heart, there’s a dead flickering in the lamps as they exert counter pressure and hold down the darkness.

A white loneliness against a black loneliness.

And while the darkness is rushing around the eaves of the house cries on top of cries of silence pour out of all of these isolations: —Who are you, shadow by the pine-painted pulpit, stained with school ink, carved with penknives through the many generations and layers of paint?

—Death was passed over with all the promotions.

Death was left sitting in his place like a worthless custodian.

The hours pass. Time passes away.

Slowly the light of morning pulverizes the drug of sleep.

—I want to go from the black square to the white.

—I want to go from the red thread to the blue.

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Edith Södergran

Edith Södergran

Edith Södergran (1892-1923) was born in St Petersburg, Russia and lived in the Swedish-speaking part of southeast Finland. She was a pioneer of free verse and was a distinct and powerful voice in Swedish poetry. Södergran’s lyrical poetry was bold and expansive in its vision. A leading European modernist, she was highly regarded by her contemporaries and influenced generations of Swedish poets. Her poetry has shown a remarkable ability to continually speak to new readers and fascinate scholars. She is on par with Else LaskerSchüler and other famous early female European modernists, and she would deserve to have her small output translated in its entirety. Edith Södergran died from tuberculosis at the age of 31.

On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems

From The Rose-Altar, 1919 On foot I wandered through the solar systems, before I found the first thread of my red dress.

Already I have a sense of myself.

Somewhere in space my heart hangs, emitting sparks, shaking the air, to other immeasurable hearts.

Vier ge Moderne

From Poems, 1916 I am not a woman. I am neuter.

I am a child, a tomboy and a rash decision, I am a laughing streak of scarlet sunlight…

I am a trap for all ravenous fish, I am a toast in honor of all women, I am a step towards chance and ruin, I am a leap into freedom and the self…

I am the blood’s whisper in the ear of men, I am a fever chill of the soul, the desire and denial of the flesh, I am an entrance sign to a new paradise.

I am a flame, searching and bold, I am a body of water, deep but daring up to the knees, I am fire and water in earnest situations on free terms…

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Edith Södergran

Edith Södergran

The Trees of my Childhood

The Moon

From The Country Which Isn’t, 1925

From The Country Which Isn’t, 1925

The trees of my childhood stand tall in the grass and shake their heads: what has become of you?

Rows of pillars stand like accusations: unworthy you walk beneath us!

You’re a child and should know everything, why are you caught in the trap of illness?

You’ve become a human being, strange, hateful.

When you were a child, you conducted long conversations with us, your gaze was wise.

Now we’d like to tell you your life’s secret: the key to all secrets is in the grass on the hill of raspberries.

Sleeper, we wanted to rattle you, we wanted to wake you, you dead one, from your sleep.

How everything dead is marvelous and unspeakable: a dead leaf and a dead person and the disc of the moon.

And all flowers know a secret the woods preserve: that the moon’s orbit around our earth is the course of death.

And the moon weaves its wondrous web loved by flowers, and the moon weaves its fabulous web around everything living.

And on late nights in autumn, the moon’s scythe cuts flowers and in endless longing all flowers are waiting for the moon’s kiss.

(September 1922)

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Werner Aspenström

Werner Aspenström Few poets are as distinctly Swedish as Werner Aspenström (1918–1996). At the same time, there is in his rich output, a streak of dreamy melancholy, of cosmological fantasies, that make him a cosmopolitan poet, a poet belonging perhaps in equal measure to the animal and vegetable kingdoms as to the human dimension. Like many of his contemporaries, Aspenström was born in the countryside, which continued to play an important role in his work, and moved to the capital, where he found the city to be another landscape, full of small daily wonders.

The Sunday

Because it will never return, I will not forget this day.

The sun rose in the east and set in the west, turning the sky over to the stars and a spaceship swimming alone.

The radio talked and sang through the open window from behind the perpetually red geraniums.

With a pair of scissors, a woman harvested some bunches of blackcurrants and brought them into the kitchen.

Out in the courtyard, at the time of the evening news, a boy was still kneeling by his scooter taking delight in the spark plug’s sparks.

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You and I and the World

Don’t ask who you are or who I am and why what is, is.

Let the professors sort it out, it’s their job.

Place the scale on the kitchen table and let reality weigh itself.

Put your coat on.

Turn the light off in the hallway.

Close the door.

Let the dead embalm the dead.

Here we walk now.

The one wearing white rubber boots is you.

The one wearing black rubber boots is me.

And the rain falling on us both is the rain.

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Werner Aspenström

A Moment at the Pizzeria

The Larks

The lamps are shaped like crash-helmets.

Their strong light press against the small tabletops casting a ring of semi-darkness around each lunch-guest.

The quartz watches sever second after second.

It will take at least a month before the willow-warbler returns from the equator.

Every so often I receive letters from an engineer who has calculated the age of the universe at 14 billion years.

I am not a mathematician, I’ll have to just trust his equations.

For me time exists sometimes, sometimes not.

The wind-torn fruit hesitates halfway between branch and grass and wonders: Where am I? Everyone in this room, including the owner who is kneading the white pizza-dough, have partly just arrived and is partly immortal.

The willow-warbler is partly here and partly at the equator.

Is there such a time?

There is such a time, such a point in time.

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Two of the windows on this central Swedish farm watch over the marshes overflowing with light all the way down to a lake, occupied with its waves.

The earthworms have begun their spring tillage.

The larks work the earth their way.

I don’t want to own these fields.

I want to be these fields.

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Tomas Tranströmer Tranströmer (b. 1931) is Sweden’s most internationally wellknown poet and has had his complete works translated into a number of languages. The following poem Grief Gondola #2 is the title poem of a collection that was published in Sweden in 1996.

Towards the end of this segment is an essay on his early poems which remain and will remain uncollected, and according to Tranströmer, are to be translated only within the context of this Ellerström essay. They show the young Tranströmer’s extraordinarily swift and sure development into the already mature poet who made his stunning debut with a collection of just seventeen poems in 1954.This is the first time the poems and their accompanying commentary have been translated into English.

Liszt has composed a few chords so heavy they

ought to be sent to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.

Meteorites!

Too heavy to rest, they are able only to sink and sink through

the future all the way down to the year of the brownshirts.

The gondola is heavily laden with the huddled stones of the future.

III Openings toward 1990.

March 25: Worry about Lithuania.

Dreamt I visited a large hospital.

No staff. Everyone was a patient.

Grief Gondola, #2

I Two old men, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying on

the Grande Canal together with the restless woman who is married to

King Midas he who turns everything he touches into Wagner.

The green chill of the sea pushes up through the palace floors.

Wagner is a marked man, the well known Caspar profile is more tired

than before his face a white flag.

The gondola is heavily laden with their lives, two round trips

and one one-way.

II

In the same dream a newborn girl who spoke in complete sentences.

IV Compared to his son-in-law, who is a man of his time, Liszt is a

motheaten grandseigneur.

It’s a disguise.

The deep that tries out and discards various masks has chosen just

this one for him— the deep that wants to join the humans without showing

its face.

A window in the palace blows open, they grimace in the

sudden draught.

Outside on the water, the garbage gondola appears, paddled by two

one-oared bandits.

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V

VIII

Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his own suitcase through sleet

and sunshine and when the time comes to die there will be no one there

to meet him at the station.

A tepid breeze of highly gifted cognac carries him off in the midst of

an assignment.

He is never free of assignments.

Two thousand letters a year!

The schoolboy who writes the misspelled word one hundred times

before he is allowed to go home.

The gondola is heavily laden with life, it is simple and black.

Dreamt I was starting school but came late.

Everyone in the room wore white masks.

It was impossible to tell who was the teacher.

VI Back to 1990.

Dreamt I drove a hundred miles in vain.

Then everything was magnified. Sparrows as large as hens sang so that my ears popped.

Dreamt that I had drawn piano keys on the kitchen table. I played on them, mutely.

The neighbors came in to listen.

VII The clavier which has been silent through all of Parsifal (but it has listened)

is at last allowed to say something.

Sighs...sospiri...

When Liszt plays tonight he holds down the sea-pedal so that the green force of the sea rises through the floor and flows

together with all the stone of the building.

Good evening beautiful deep!

The gondola is heavily laden with life, it is simple and black.

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Lasse Söder gber g

Lasse Södergberg

A contemporary and close friend of Tranströmer’s, Lasse Söderberg (b.1931) has travelled widely and lived for many years in France and Spain. His poetry is characterized by precise images and a spare style; he is a master of acute observation. The following poems are from his collection The Stones of Jerusalem (Stenarna i Jerusalem, 2002), a book that offers glimpses of life as a guest in the troubled city.

[During the nights I was close to the dead.]

During the nights I was close to the dead.

Rain fell on their remoteness.

Rain fell on the refugee camps, also remote.

Darkness flowed between the stones, forming large pools.

In each pool the rain telegraphed in its own secret alphabet.

[Here, where ever yone was a son,] From The Stones in Jerusalem, 2002

Here, where everyone was a son, I was the son of no one.

I had no father, not even a tree, a pillar or a rock-face nothing I could call father, lovingly and on my bent knees.

Therefore I killed no one.

Therefore I wrote on the steamed-over mirrors.

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L e n n a rt S j ö g r e n

Lasse Södergberg

Sjögren (b.1930) made a comparatively late debut in 1958 and has for over fifty years refined his poetry into one of impressive power. He lives on the island of Öland, off the east coast of Sweden; city life has never tempted him, though he has made acute descriptions of it as well as of his lonely, wind-swept island landscapes. One of many Swedish poets who deserve to be more widely translated, here is a sample from his latest book, ”Out of the Human World”

[At the base of Mount Zion]

At the base of Mount Zion I heard armored cars approaching.

They rolled in the dawn towards the fourth chapter of Genesis.

They tore dust from the road and the dust gathered around them.

Wolf Child

From Out of The Human World

Like clouds around the tabernacle.

But the sound of their engines was loud.

Little wolf child we’ve met before but now I see you here again one of your legs is lopped off your nose is covered in scabs you can no longer hunt you will not live much longer.

The winter night and the moon the moon that gives you your severe shadow on the snow.

If I could kill you— already you’ve grown skinny, you whimper.

It would be one thing if you could be tamed but you’ve already said that you will not be tamed you have a pride that prevents you from being tamed.

Two legged one who became one legged.

Four legged one who became three legged Manchild—wolfchild

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The line between man and wolf isn’t that severe you both have to kill to survive and do it best in packs.

Because everything hunts everything even the stones hunt.

Wolf-child, howling man-child now your eyes are just like a child’s and I am getting sentimental where we sit facing one another on the cold snow the blood stained snow.

And I have no healing salve, no healing tongs.

If I could only give you a wooden leg but with a wooden leg you could hardly hunt.

Death is the only thing I can give you but that I have already done so many times before— we could perhaps meet beyond death and there make the covenant which is not here.

Your eyes are gleaming they are so cold and so fiery.

If the moon as it watches us only could give a sign in one direction or another but I don’t think it cares about neither spite nor love.

Perhaps you know more about what stirs in such places perhaps you hear the whispers.

Did a ripple of warmth reach you I cannot feel?

Sure, you could kill me too I could try to strangle you and you could push your teeth into me like two lovers embracing we could lie then on the white snow.

Cripple and still you’ll seek life for yet another day as long as life lasts.

Wolf-child man-child.

Wolf-child, wolf-hug, wolf ’-paw, man-child, man-hug, man-hand.

Actually I don’t think you have the strength to kill me and neither have I the strength to kill you we have killed too much already.

Who, by the way, tore off your paw, your hand was it the trap, during a fight or was it a much too sharp stone that fell?

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B ru n o K. Ö i j e r

B ru n o K. Ö i j e r

These days, Öijer (b. 1951) is the Swedish incarnation of Poetry with a capital P. Öijer is a hip, hugely popular performer of his own suggestive poems. His impressive work reveals an infinitely subtle, melancholic and empatheticic poet. While retaining his roots in Bob Dylan’s whirling lyrics and the underground late 1960s, Öijer has become a truly important poet capable of sounding great depths.

The Song

From Black Like Silver, 2008 the downpour grew numb stopped beating against the shutters I lay awake in a hotel room in Siena listening to far-off voices and laughter heard the song of the high heels of women vanish down the narrow alleys I thought about how this was your town I thought about a night in autumn when you and I met far from here in our cold, backwards country you were holding a book of Keats’ and Shelley’s poems and seemed happy to see me you wore a long old-fashioned dress and black hair da Vinci could have caressed we were barely more than twenty years old and why were you not allowed to live why didn’t I realize how short your visit to this world would be

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I Pretended

you were not there and when I pretended to touch your face it dissolved into water and reflections of light on the pillow the room had already changed its clothes into a forest clearing where the fairy sat behind her small green desk with the desk drawers pulled out and wet with dew she had gone astray into inhabited areas and excited with tears in her eyes she tried to write herself back home again with furious speed the ink stand full of blueberries had tipped over words and sentences hovered and burst around her hands like soap bubbles the wind had caught and bit into

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B ru n o K. Ö i j e r

Kristina Lugn, (b. 1948) recently elected to the Swedish Academy, continues the tradition of strong, ingenious women writers. Lugn is a formidable poet who writes of everyday love and who is a sharp observer of the hypocrisy and vanities of society. Her personal poems offer a blunt but sensitive view of human frailties and shortcomings.

Evidence

food of the intestine the daily chewing if the weather society and other illnesses have lodged themselves in our genes and kept the truth from being revealed as if finally after half a century they have found the lost airplane it stood still in the heavens rusty from rain snow and hail around the wings spider-webs were growing suitcases and clothing lay scattered like clouds

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Kristina Lugn

[There’re lots of women my age] From The Moment of the Dog, 1989

There’re lots of women my age who’ve even less reason to like themselves but force others to do it anyway even though they’re neither beautiful nor in anyway productive.

Gallop gallop.

Perhaps it’s not that ridiculous after all to use vegetable dyes.

Exercise is also good, especially for the brain.

And to express your feelings in ceramics.

Because then you get at the same time a bunch of stuff that gives the home character.

Something to be proud of.

Gallop gallop.

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Kristina Lugn

[I washed the sheets]

I washed the sheets until they smelled like apples.

Our bicycles were still in the basement.

Far away very far away from home there’s someone who loves me sincerely.

I hung up a dress and moved inside of it.

Almost like a musician.

And it’s not funny Since I’m only kidding even though I’m sad.

And despair was resting over the water in my lake.

And my apartment was lovingly stretched in the private sphere.

An airplane had crashed in here.

And the passenger’s eyes were stars who didn’t mourn their beauty.

Everything that is most beautiful drifted through the room.

I had enforced a most strange walk all the way down inside of me.

And all the way up in the grass the cows sauntered kindly and the cows wandered kindly deep down in the pasture.

That’s when the alarm got switched on.

And the water broke in the house God had forgotten about.

I was almost like sheet music It was almost as if you were thinking of calling me then.

When my indignant nail studded shoes suddenly turned into pink slippers with rabbit ears.

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K ata r i n a F ro s t e n s o n

Kristina Lugn

[And the wives, yes they’re dancing]

After the largely politicized 1970s, Swedish poetry changed.

From the mid-1980s, poets turned to language itself, as their prime sources of interest and motivation. A dense, allusive, and semantically conscious poetry was the result, and none embodied the new style more than Katarina Frostenson (b.1953). Her work is today without a doubt considered the most influential of the past decades, and has earned her a seat in the Swedish Academy.

And the wives, yes they’re dancing they’re gifted musically and they’ve been operated on they’ll always be young since they’re dancing they’re gifted musically and they’ve been operated on.

Anti-Brilliant

From Speech and Rain, 2008

The light cools in brilliant

red mouth

my pen scratches the sheet of paper, tears up a wound, gaping

the features disappear in their own glow – you say: it is brilliant you mean I am a Diamond the brilliantess luminous mask jabs the knife into your fat B

a ray goes of itself White high-gloss but you are where the echo dies

standing in the reflection in the black of a gaping mouth in your throats soft-speckled roughness down here it says: edge be an edge

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K ata r i n a F ro s t e n s o n

Index (to my finger)

Titan (to my machine)

in darkness I discovered myself kissing you taciturn tip

At dawn I listen to your breathing

your nerve endings shivers when you touch the steel you turn numb from lightly touching the same, soft spot what guides you in extending to find your way in the whirl of the work confusion scatters

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and you make me happy!

shivering your bone follows the edges of gray keys you extend and in this extension the new world

the small creaking sound as if by a mini jaw from you then a sigh is drawn gives up! you are breathing! – burning – you’re almost finished it grows dark and over extended time everything in you will wear out become red then black your friend has made a hole where k once was you are being searched, literally you are being eradicated, thrown on smoldering mounds it is a scorching landscape where the white of the eye easily turns yellow human beings are playing like little creatures by entangled heaps where your innards are burning the baby’s hand

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E va -S t i n a B y ggm ä s ta r Eva-Stina Byggmästar (b.1967) is one of many excellent, contemporary, Swedish-speaking poets coming from the minority of Swedes living in Swedish speaking Finland.

Their tradition differs slightly from the Swedish: they tend to be simultaneously more aware of tradition and more experimental. Byggmästar is no exception: she is a follower of Gunnar Björling who revolutionized language, but she adds to her work a playfulness and organic mysticism all her own. She works within the modernist tradition of Swedishspeaking Finland but breaks altogether new ground.

E va -S t i n a B y ggm ä s ta r

[oh, look there are cats in my cathedrals]

oh, look there are cats in my cathedrals there are words there and in the cat’s eyes secret libraries of poetry gleam in really small print so believe me poets like the smell of blueberry ballpoint pens…they like everything…that is you know…really exuberant—that is when it is almost at the same time but really not before then in any case not later than then when they burst into roaring laughter but burst into tears of joy over such a treasure of a word and just as you’d expect there is a laughter about a word but not at all too late not that no—

[The Poets] From But Really How Tiny are The Poets

THE POETS, is what it says on the poet’s little mailbox, that’s just what’s to be expected, isn’t it, but perhaps not exactly in upper case letters, anyway you imagine that there they are inside the two of them, in their little writers’ home…Writers’ Home The Rambling Rose…and scribbling away to their heart’s content…and perhaps that they write something like this: pat the pretty poems, you too!

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E va -S t i n a B y ggm ä s ta r

[sure enough, we built libraries]

sure enough, we built libraries, out of drift wood, I like that…and your collections of books, books that drifted together every which way, mostly poetry collections, that I liked!

H o r ac e E n g da h l This is the man who every year until 2008, in front of the world’s TV cameras, would announce: “The Swedish Academy has decided to present this year’s Nobel Prize in literature to...” But it is not well known outside of Sweden that Mr Engdahl, (b.1948) and former Perennial Secretary of the Swedish Academy, is himself a wonderful writer: a quite brilliant literary critic, and, as this small selection from his book Meteors (Meteorer, 2003) shows, a distinguished writer of aphorisms, that most daunting of genres.

From Meteors, a book of aphorisms

The feeling of how one throws a rubber-band engine plane remains in your hand even after many years. Not too hard, so that it ascends steeply and then looses speed, not too loosely so that the nose points downward when the engine accumulates power. If your hand possesses such knowledge, you might perceive it as self-evident even natural. I was startled when my own boys threw their planes totally incorrectly the first few times. But it was not my instructions that helped them find the way. Their teacher was the phenomenon itself.

I believe that the well known words of Mallarmé about “thinking with your entire body” are better understood if you imagine a rubber-band engine plane than if you imagine dark forces that speak in whispers from the body’s organs. It is in the interface of the unpredictable exterior, that the body “thinks”, not in those hormonal functions, that by themselves not even can be the basis of a feeling, because the feeling has got to have an object worth discovering.

What is love? A toss in order to conquer gravity.

• Gray days, when heaven is an eye blind with cataracts, and the light is stunned like a fish you’ve beaten against the railing. Days we know even while they are going on that we will not remember. Days when we suddenly feel as if it was recess in school, and the life we have lived all these years is nothing but a lively daydream. We traverse that spot in time’s labyrinth where we first got lost.

•

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Tomas Tranströmer’s First Poems

A Commentary by Jonas Ellerström I put my cup of espresso down and look down into the black dregs: a gaze from an ancient animal! It tells me: wait—have patience—what is repulsive will disappear—everything disappears.

• A dream of lunacy. I am on my way to a party in a city, I even believe that the party is taking place in my own home. When I arrive it seems to have been in full swing for quite a while. The hallway is cluttered with coats and shoes, all in a mess as in the old days on the bohemian side of town and even from this distance you can hear the buzz of elated people coming from the inner rooms. I know who is there. They’re my friends, charming people all, who wish me no harm whatsoever. But I cannot make myself enter. I am standing with the door ajar and I feel with utmost certainty that it is impossible to enter and talk to them, that I never again will do it. Silently I walk down the stairs and out into the street. It is empty as if it were five in the morning. I start to walk between the rows of 19th-century houses and notice that something has changed. A lunacy has emerged that liberates me from the obligation to speak.

I no longer understand what a “house” is or a “morning” or a “dog.” A strange light falls on the square, chrome yellow, in slanting rays, both terrifying and beautiful, belonging to another world. The fear I at first feel at discovering that I have gone mad, gives room to a calm that stretches to the bottom of the sky. I saunter down the sloping sidewalk, in no hurry, filled by a bliss that can only be compared to a first kiss.

• The self can only tolerate chiaroscuro. If you remove shade and light it does not exist.

In 1956, two years after his first book 17 Poems was published, Tomas Tranströmer received what at the time was considered to be a sizeable stipend from the then newly founded Swedish FIB’s Poetry Club. In an interview his good friend and fellow poet Lasse Söderberg asked him: “Don’t you think you are a spoiled poet?” Playful as it is, this question reflects an image of Tranströmer that arose early—an image of him as a poet blessed by the gods and who emerged already fully mature with his first collection.

The image of an artist who is born fully developed is of course false. It is true that 17 Poems is one of modern Swedish poetry’s most remarkable first books and it’s no wonder that this popular myth was perpetuated, but the mythic image of Tranströmer does not match reality.

Tranströmer had not published much when his first book appeared in the spring of 1954. This was due in part to, that he, like many of his contemporaries of the early nineteen fifties, made an early debut. At the age of twenty-three he was still among those who had taken their time. But the primary reason was surely that the painstaking meticulousness that is characteristic of Tranströmer’s writing process was already present from the beginning. In the conversation with Lasse Söderberg the young poet stresses that he does not envision a future as a writer only: “I don’t want to find myself in the situation where I have to write for money.”

Tomas Tranströmer’s published work is significantly less than the volumes written on Tranströmer: reviews, interviews, translations into other languages and poems set to music.

17 Poems has its pre-history. That pre-history is not entirely unknown in Sweden but it hasn’t been much commented on. There are a total of ten unknown Tranströmer poems, published from 1948 onwards that don’t appear in the classic 17 Poems. The first poems that Tomas Tranströmer published were printed in a school magazine of his high school in Stockholm in 1948. The autumn issue of the magazine carried four poems by the seventeen-year-old Tranströmer. The first one reads: this now rises like warm smoke in cool air this calm now

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the dog is free of his bark the hare is free of his anxiety the flute is free of the mouth of man and plays alone in this beautiful impoverished now that strains against the army of the seconds and drowns in swirling water but survives me It is a good first poem; the repetitions and variations are simple but effective, and even though the flute appears to be borrowed from earlier generations, the poem still belongs to a new period of Swedish poetry. The angst of the nineteen forties and their tense observation of the political situation of the world has now passed. The focus is on the individual, the present, and I particularly like its attributes: “this beautiful impoverished now”.

In a later conversation with poet and translator, Gunnar Harding from 1973 Tranströmer describes in detail his high school environment and the circumstances that led to his earliest interest in poetry. As an example of how he wrote “after a year of trying” he shows Harding the second of the first four poems. It is called “mining district”: i walk across smoking wounds (in the moment of the thistle) and in my belt i carry a thousand keys

if you are about to swim the water must be alive the water must be fleeing with pebbles of flint in its mouth he who swims who lets the water play the instrument of his skin is a soft anchor among streams a dice bright as a torch alone like a drowned soldier

(that the wheels have rolled up here as well) solitary mining tower

a devilish finger and the gravel black with longing for water and the pine black with longing for a storm i walk across the smoking wounds like frightened horses burnt clouds flee over the treetops the paths seek their goals and the forest carries a thousand keys in its belt Gunnar Harding replies that the poem may have some weak lines but at the same time it holds a certain stringency, “perhaps a trace of your scientist’s

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disposition”. This gives Tranströmer the opportunity to mention that his poems often have a definitive geographical starting point: “I never invent anything really. I never lie about the surroundings.” The mining district poem, he says originated in 1947 during a bicycle trip with some friends through Sweden.

The mining tower stood close to the city of Fagersta.

These exact locales may be of small importance to the reader but it is apparent that Tranströmer achieves a level of exactitude when he has a clear image of a memory to build on, as in the stanza about the mine, the gravel and the pine tree. The rhythmic repetitions show an already developed sense of poetic form, while the lack of punctuation is a result of the crash course in modernist poetry he tells Harding about. “Actually I think I was the most advanced modernist in my high school because I did without punctuation and only used lower case letters which annoyed my old Latin teacher.”

A year or so later, Tranströmer gradually abandoned this style for traditional punctuation. If you compare “Gogol” in 17 Poems, with a version printed in a magazine in 1950, you’ll find that the word order is the same but that the version in the book has full punctuation and uppercase letters and that Tranströmer’s voice is now more distinct.

The third school magazine poem is titled “Swimming” and reads:

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the swimmer burns slowly he is a bait to the hungry pier if there is a pier he creates unrest

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if there is a shore but he himself walks calmly over boundless mountains with fire in his lungs Here you can sense for the first time Tranströmer’s typical landscape, the archipelago of Stockholm. That the poet is an ambitious student is perhaps revealed by the allusion in the first stanza to Demosthenes, the Greek orator who practiced speaking clearly with pebbles in his mouth. Tranströmer’s friend Christer Duke, who edited this issue of the school magazine, remembers this poem especially clearly. He has stressed that Tranströmer’s contributions were definitely above average and is of the opinion that it was his high school years that made Tranströmer into a poet. Before this, Tranströmer had dreamt of becoming a musician or a composer.

The prime element of the archipelago is of course water. Water returns in the last of these first poems, a quatrain whose title, “Lento”, introduces another theme in Tranströmer’s poetry namely the connection to music. we’ll all die from a too heavy head from eyes that are too large

from dragging hair we’ll all be petrified in heavy waters Scholar and poet Kjell Espmark, carefully describes in the introduction to his book about Tranströmer, which authors young Tranströmer read.Among them was T. S. Eliot and “Lento” doesn’t entirely lack connections to the short section “Death by Water” in “The Waste Land.” Tranströmer also read French surrealists like Paul Eluard and has a particularly close connection to Ragnar Thoursie, a Swedish poet of the nineteen forties, who deserves a greater international reputation.

In the autumn of 1948, the country’s most distinguished and established publishing house, Bonniers, surprisingly decided to fund a literary high school magazine. In its second year, this magazine printed another five poems by Tomas Tranströmer. The first two of these poems are a reminder of how important surrealism was to Tranströmer. The sea and the coast are no longer possible to place geographically. They are as dreamlike and symbolically general as in a painting by Yves Tanguy. The poems both lack titles: the deserted day lies tossed up on the beach

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small spiders build in fine sand fine sand around the deserted ship in between the loom that weaves the ocean and the spider in the sand with only its shadow for a playmate : the deserted sailor the deserted day wrecks conceal everyman’s coast • • • to sleep with eyes open on wide slopes your woven cloth is full of blind spots your nautical chart is drawn on panther skin your nets rot in the ocean where you forgot them The third of these poems is the first example of the well-read young poet using strict form. In his autobiographical work, Memories See Me, Tranströmer relates how he discovered, during his boring Latin classes, the clarity and the beauty of Horace and that through “form (Form!) something could be brought forth”.

Sapphic meter along with blank verse are the most important formal elements in 17 Poems. Here in the new school magazine Tranströmer tries his hand at a simple trochaic meter: frigid blue-grey horses glimpsed through the thick fog finding thus a cavern where a dead man is held

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millstones turning slowly the wheel never ceasing dead man’s hands are glowing the weather flees above

(easter) The five poems that all lack titles end with a flickering cinematic text of three stanzas. Once again they bring surrealism to mind and its preference for the gothic elements of nineteen-century literature. If Tanguy could be used as a reference point for the first two poems, Louis Buñuel could be mentioned in connection with the following: the man with the pram is sharply outlined against the disc of the sun a moment ago, he trampled an ant to death a fog fumbles across the church yard with its fingers the wagon-wheels come to a stop in front of an overgrown grave the man squats and listens: he has the face of a sailor and the flowers that are placed on the earth are just as wilted The poem immediately preceding this one, which is the fourth in the group, of all of Tranströmer’s high school poems, is the one that most clearly point ahead to his mature poetry. Its most significant distinguishing marks are exact and surprising metaphors. The terseness and the originality of Tranströmer’s images have often been commented upon; here the temperature is higher than the reader is used to, the atmosphere more threatening. Five years before his first book, Tranströmer is already capable of a poem such as this: fever algae asleep in the body’s pools

The mast soaring towards the heights branches out invisibly.

The black anchor dives as though in imitation of a fish of prey.

In gardens where the unexplainable exploded, a leaden branch is being moved by sacred currents. – And here man’s shadow stops nailed in place by a ray of light.

The opposing motions in the first stanza are also to be found in Tranströmer’s poem “How-Things-Hang-Together”, from 17 Poems. This poem was first printed also without a title, along side “Toccata” in the same magazine.

It is possible that caused Tranströmer to compare the two poems directly and choose “How-Things-Hang-Together”; maybe he found the religious vocabulary of the second stanza (“sacred”, “the inexplicable”) too obvious and general. A final guess would be that he had caught himself in the act of borrowing two lines. The poem’s ending is difficult to read without thinking of Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodos’ “And Suddenly It is Evening” as short as it is classical: AND SUDDENLY IT IS EVENING Each and everyone stands alone on the world’s heart pierced by a ray of sunlight— and suddenly it is evening.

like a giant tick bloated with blood the sun hangs above the fringe of the forest

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There is a final early and never republished poem. Once again it has a musical title, “Toccata” and was published in the late autumn of 1950. The poem is interesting because conceivably it is an example of what Tranströmer cut when finishing his first book manuscript. The high school poetry would hardly have been eligible but “Toccata” was printed at a stage when the seventeen poems were finished one after the other. Kjell Espmark has dated the book’s poems from autumn 1949 (The Stones) until summer 1953 (Elegy) and of those no fewer than thirteen were finished by the end of 1952.“Toccata” reads as follows:

If Tranströmer had indeed read Quasimodo’s poem it might have been in a collection of original poems and translations by Swedish poet Sture Axelson from 1948. Tranströmer himself seems to remember that he heard in the concert house in Stockholm a performance of newly composed pieces by

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Swedish composer Karl Birger Blomdahl. Blomdahl set Quasimodos’ poem to music and retained the original Italian lyrics.

Half of the poems in Tranströmer’s first book had already been published in various magazines. He was already something of a celebrity, and there are stories of his old high school friends collecting clippings of his poems. That his debut book was the result of a purposeful, conscientious and protracted work, rather than sudden inspiration, is shown by the study of these very early poems.

And that should only increase our admiration for that first book. Tranströmer’s development from the autumn of 1948 until spring 1954, from 16-23 years of age, from a high school magazine to a first book published by Sweden’s major publishing house, shows such a dramatic arc that has few counterparts in Swedish poetry.

book reviews

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New European Poets Edited and with an introduction by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2008.

Reviewed by Kelly Lenox

Quick:Who is your favorite poet writing in Galician, Sami, or Romagnolo?

Can you name even one contemporary poet from The Netherlands, Bulgaria, or Iceland?

Editors of “New European Poets,” Miller and Prufer thus found it strange that “of [the] poets of our generation, few knew much of anything about today’s European poets…. [T]he poetic dialogue that blossomed throughout much of the twentieth century seems to have wilted today. This is a shame, because, to put it mildly, a lot has happened in Europe—and European poetry—over the past forty years. It seems high time that our transatlantic poetic conversation be reinvigorated.” Fortunately for readers in English, Prufer and Miller chose to do just that, assembling 270 poets, selected by 24 regional editors, translated from over 30 languages.

These voices, widely diverse, can reflect on the socio-political landscape (as demonstrated by Macedonian Zoran Ančevski, tr. Graham W. Reid and Peggy Reid): “Whatever is slouching / will never reach Bethlehem or Jerusalem / nor Mecca or Medina / but hurrying / …down different European corridors / in red crescent or red cross ambulances / will enter a wilderness of mirrors.” Or, they can speak from a more immediate ground: “I am a fruitful stranger of some weirdoish upbringing, / I have a hundredmoneyed purse but cursed to sad my heart / I am a poemmaker….” (Karl Martin Sinijärv, Estonia, tr. by the author with Eric Dickens and Richard Adang). And, of course, the intimate: “I will spend the night with those days. / With the smile you left in the sheets” (Rose Alice Branco, Portugal, tr. Alexis Levitin) as well as the simply luminous (Kirmen Uribe, tr. from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin): Cardiogram —Describe, if you would, his heart for me.

—It’s like a frozen lake, and the face of the child that he once was is erasing itself in there.

The anthology’s geographic arrangement leads the reader on a tour of Europe, beginning with Portugal and moving generally east then north then west again, roughly following language groups. While the reader does notice

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the imbalance of male to female poets (the proportion is almost two-to-one), one can also see that many more female voices are represented from a younger generation. There are political and cultural reasons, especially in the formerly socialist countries of central and eastern Europe, but again, this book focuses less on analysis than on getting the work of a fascinating spectrum of poets into our hands.

“Pencil in the Bread,” by Yiorgos Chouliaras of Greece (tr. David Mason and the author), captures something of the variety and depth of the poetry gathered here. It begins: bread sweet bread, bitter bread, of society and of the confined, bread of my mother and my father, bread of the earth, a dried-up slice, with klarina or a saxophone only, bread of exile and of your homeland, bread of the hungry and the insatiable, bread of the fool and the unjust, syllabic bread, holy bread, of the dead and of the courageous, raisin-bread, chleba, nan, bread shared four ways, consecrated bread, true bread, bread of fairy tales, white and black, moist bread and dry, wedding bread, unleavened, bread of the cook, …

Today’s America, so insular, alienated from the rest of the world, could use more introduction to the poetics of other languages, cultures, environments. With this collection, Miller and Prufer have injected a leavening: some names to start with, and a context from which to search out these voices and enliven our own. Importantly, we are introduced here to the poetries of so-called “dying” languages such as Gaelic, Catalan and Belorussian, which in itself is an act of linguistic preservation.

Of course, any lover of contemporary European poetry will find a favorite or two missing from this impressive list. I, for one, find it rather strange to see any grouping of Bulgarians without Rumen Leonidov or a list of contemporary Irish poets without Rita Ann Higgins. But, in the age of complex copyright fees such ommisions, however lamentable, are not surprising. What is laudable is that this book brings together in English—for the first time ever—such important new European voices as Lidija Dimkovska, Piotr Sommer, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Ales Stegner, Valzhyna Mort, Radu Andriescu, Polina Barskova, Ana Ristovic, Elena Shvarts, Eugenius Alishanka, Durs Grunbein, Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, and several others, whose work will no doubt remain in the forefront of Europeaen poetics in the years to come.

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Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California Edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young. Preface: Robert Bly. Santa Cruz, CA: Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008.

Reviewed by Christopher Hayes

That place name, California, is barely out of our mouths before it begins to conjure up so many diverse characterizations. The ninety poets whose works are found within this anthology know as much. It is in their blood. In their introduction, the editors describe this diversity in terms of an ever-shifting environment. Whether that environment is “urban, rural, coastal, or pastoral,” the poets of the Bear Flag Republic all have in common their ability to move beyond simple definitions of geography.

The title is taken from Larry Levis’s essay “Eden and My Generation,” in which the Fresno poet tells us that “It is the geography of the psyche that matters, not the place.” California, then, is not for these poets a final frontier, but a jumping-off point. The poems grounded in locales specific to that expansive western state contain the same liberal energy as those that aren’t. The word liberal here is not a reference to political affiliation, but to a serious playfulness that belongs to all successful prose poems. Whether they take the form of elegy, parable, or the back-and-forth dance of dialogue, there is an elasticity within each one that reminds us why abandoning the poetic line every once in a while is so necessary.

We may know the Golden State for its openness of landscape, its mountains, vineyards, and salt-sprayed coastline, but this anthology also reveals California as an idea. Just as Levis dictates, every poet here lays out on the page the Sierras and Napa Valleys of the mind.Where some anthology editors choose to preclude each poet’s entry with a hefty chunk of biography, Buckley and Young decided instead to give the authors a chance to discuss their particular predilections for the prose poem.

In one such selection, Amy Gerstler writes that prose verse “is an attempt to try and fuse the angelic and the tawdry; the holy and the lowlife; the earthly and the celestial.”This quote has just as much to do with the diction and scattered narrative linearity of this variable form as it does the core energy that pushes its subject matters into sometimes peculiar relationships.

Assembling any practical definition of the prose poem, some writers tell us, even as they attempt to do so, is like looking for the Loch Ness monster.

The essays on poetics which make up the first quarter of Bear Flag Republic are just such exercises, but not ones grounded in futility. The range is full, covering history, process, and influence as well as definition.

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Among the more obvious references to the French forefathers of the prose poem, Bertrand, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, there is also a highly informed essay penned by Morton Marcus called “The Fu: China and the Origins of the Prose Poem,” which traces the form back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD).

Collections of essays such as this only become truly beneficial to the reader when they allow dissenting viewpoints into their pages.

In his own essay entitled “Influences,” editor Christopher Buckley is comfortable with such dissent. When speaking of Allen Ginsberg, he says, “I do not recall then or now anyone I know classifying “Howl” as a prose poem,” yet this does not keep Buckley from detailing the effect of that poem’s “prophetic riff[s] and declamation[s]” on his current position as a writer of prose poems.

There is perhaps no better way to classify the nature of California prose poetics than by starting with a little rebellion.

The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present Edited and with an introduction by David Lehman. New York: Scribner, 2008.

Reviewed by Lee Romney

If pornography was hard for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to define (he famously noted that “I know it when I see it.”), eroticism gets an equally big-tent definition in David Lehman’s juicy anthology of American erotic poetry. In addition to the must-have ingredient of “artistic value,” Lehman makes room “for love and wanton lust; for the imp of the perverse, all forms of ardor, all manner of fetish.” In The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present, Lehman makes sure that desire, not just fulfillment, has its say.The love of language, he notes, shares billing with the language of love.

Poetic scholars are likely to deafen one another with arguments over the famous poets slighted by their absence from this anthology, and the single works chosen to stand as sole representation for many greats who were included (only Emily Dickinson was allowed more than one poem). For an anthology covering 208 years, it is off-kilter: only a half dozen 19th Century poets are included, while recent works proliferate, touching on “office sex, first sex, oral sex, cybersex (‘in a tangle of Internet,’) solo sex, sex from the other’s point of view, voyeurism, bondage…and the use of a gin bottle as a surrogate lover.” Lehman is no hack when it comes to poetry collections: He is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he created. He has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). So those readers willing to accept his selections here will surely enjoy the ride.

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The collection pays homage to the orgasm. Charles Simic’s “Breasts” joyfully trumpets mammary geography. “They bring on their nipples / Beads of inaudible sighs / Vowels of delicious clarity / For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.” The collection also lays bare the delight (at times the shame) of masturbation, and offers detailed primers on sexual arousal, topped by W.H. Auden’s famed 1948 poem “The Platonic Blow,” which was passed around in underground homosexual circles for decades, though Auden renounced authorship in later life. It leaves little to guesswork. “I plunged with a rhythmical lunge, steady and slow, / And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll with my tongue. / His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered ‘Oh!’/ As I tongued and squeezed and rolled and tickled and swung.” The ridiculous parades before us in Thomas McGrath’s 1962 recollection of a summer of lust,“Walking three-legged in the sexual haze,” and in Alan Feldman’s “A Man and a Woman”(1970), which honors, in a manner both grave and hilarious, the persistence of heterosexual misunderstanding and the inevitability of coupling.

But what stands out most in the end is abstracted desire, that oblique galaxy that forever holds the human soul in its mouth. As Sandra Alcosser writes in “The Nape,” from 1998, “Sometimes I don’t know who I am— / my age, my sex, my species— / only that I am an animal who will love / and die…”

When, in “December 11th,” Anne Sexton writes of mutual climax, it is of beings merged: “We are bare.We are stripped to the bone / and we swim in tandem and go up and up / the river, the identical river called Mine / and we enter together.

No one’s alone.”

The poetry finishes long before the volume does: buried in its sumptuous folds is a second section of comments from each living contributor about favored erotic muses, as well as notes prepared by Lehman and Jill Baron on the deceased authors. The format is gawky: some contributors share only names of authors; others quote the lines that leave them weak-kneed, or write poetic odes to their chosen scribes. The notes on behalf of the dead, meanwhile, read more like stiff academic bios. Still, there are hidden gems.The same year that W.H. Auden wrote his underground musing on perfect fellatio, Lehman shares, he, Auden, told a friend that the American man had two desires only, one of which was “to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper.”

Lehman’s collection leaves the reader feeling much the same—surprised by invisible hands and mouths, with rhythms tantalizingly rough and subtle as holy silence, and taken on a blissful journey that is over all too soon.

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Begin Anywhere

By Frank Giampietro. Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2008.

Reviewed by Patty Seyburn

Consider the Frankenstein School of Literary Criticism: the poet as an assemblage of other poets, with some strange, life-giving force that animates the poem, separating it from the creation of its predecessors. (I know, it sounds suspiciously like Harold Bloom.) Though the poet does not feel the need to do violence to his/her predecessor, he feels deep sorrow when said influence passes (figuratively or in “real time”) from his life, from his aesthetic. The poet (Modern Prometheus, according to Mary Shelley), exits borne away on an iceraft, asserting that he is going to make his own pyre and set himself on fire, declaiming to his makers: “my agony was still superior to thine.”

Sounds like a poet to me. Fortunately, Frank Giampietro is not into competitive agony. And I like the Frankenstein School better than the Geometric School, which (according to my definition) asserts we are all on a poetic continuum: we look back and wave or spit at our forebears who in turn look back and wave and spit at their forebears, and so on. That school would say: well, here’s Frank Giampietro’s first book. He’s been influenced by (among others) Tony Hoagland, who was influenced by (among others) Frank O’Hara, who was influenced by (among others) William Carlos Williams, and so we have a nice, long line of waving and spitting poets.

But I think Giampietro—and most poets worth their “salt”—have a more complicated lineage than that—more of a circulage (nonce coinage) or a poorly drawn Venn diagram with some extra squiggly parts.

Giampietro is doing something new, or new-ish. We are cursed with interesting times—there’s a lot of new in poetry these days. In the latest Boston Review, Stephen Burt titled what a group of some young poets are doing “The New Thing”: a poetry that, writes Burt,“seeks well-made attentive, unornamented things… The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and… fidelity to a material and social world.” That new thing is not, however, Giampietro’s new thing. His new thing, akin to recent work by Stephanie Brown, Judith Taylor and other poets with the good sense to live on the West Coast, privileges the sentence, using line breaks in a casual, not pyrotechnic manner: more conversation than compression, and very colloquial diction (how can I not like a poet who begins a poem with the word “anyhoo”?).

The most compelling aspect of his poetry, though, as appealing as the voice is throughout, and it is quite appealing, is what I’d like to call (and so will) “deceptive transparency”: on the surface of the poems, it appears that everything is fine in Denmark—that is, you understand what is going on—but on rereading,

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the poem becomes muddier and more complex, rather than more revealing.

This is a pleasurable twist: we usually reread a poem because we get an inkling of something we like, but know that we have only a partial understanding.

Giampietro’s poems are more phyllo dough than crust: more layers, more layers, with dollops of meaning smeared in between, rather than filling beneath. I like pie, but I really like spinach pie.

I did not want to like this book. I did not want to dislike it, either, but I did not want to like it. On a first read, it gave me pleasure. I distrust pleasure, so I put it down and slumped off to be in a bad mood. I picked it up the next day.

Well, not quite the next day: I had to feed my bad mood. The next week—that is true. And again, it gave me pleasure, and I read and reread the poems, and was sad when the book was over, and was comfortable with that sadness. So I read the book again, and tried to figure out something about pleasure and sadness, which, clearly, the author has figured out something about.

At first, I distrusted the book, and whether this is stupidly honest or not, because I get tired of reading about people’s drug habits. The book begins with heroin—not a boast or brag, not a romanticization—quite the opposite. Nonetheless, there it is.That first poem is a good poem: the poet does not equate the high with happiness, but with the past, when happiness was a different matter.Then he sends the reader into the terrain of the family, faith, marriage, mortality, human frailty, et al.That’s all. He circles back around to most of these subjects, melds and intertwines them, and concludes (in the final poem, titled “Jealous”), by tipping his hat to symmetry: “… doesn’t a melody always end with the note on which it began?”

Which made me go back and read the first poem, titled “Juice,” and made me think about being jealous of one’s life and even one’s own past, as if we only ever live on leased land, however high the mortgage. And then I thought, well, while I’m here, I’ll flip through the book again, which is after all titled Begin Anywhere. And so, for a moment, for a long series of moments, even I stopped waving and spitting.

Sleeping with Houdini

By Nin Andrews. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2007.

Reviewed by Jennifer Welsh

Rarely does a collection so solid in theme and construction leave a reader so dizzily and gloriously suspended, as if witnessing a mirage without the requisite thick haze. We are quick to recognize the image, but its reality and origins remain suspect. Like the namesake of her book’s title, Nin Andrews is a masterful magician, a slippery escape artist of words and thoughts, leading (or misleading) us on a challenging, charged and profound reading experience.

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Andrews’ first full-length collection since Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane (Web del Sol, 2005), Sleeping with Houdini is presented as a trinity of sections in prose poetry, each distinct in its perspective and purpose. The first, “Making the Sun Rise,” sets the collection’s emotional table. We are immediately submerged in a young girl’s inscape as she intuitively negotiates the tightrope of childhood trials: the mystery of familial love, the fickle notion of self-identity, the trauma of a blossoming female body, the seductiveness of death and its brave pioneers, and, above all, the chronic and fervent wish to escape existence via invisibility (a feat she considers both possible and desirable upon hearing her parents’ stories of Harry Houdini and the inconclusive circumstances of his death). Exactly why she longs to disappear and what she will gain by it is Andrews’ first sleight-of-hand, as the child veers from confidently asserting that she alone sets the morning sun ablaze to concurrently grappling with the niggling conviction that she is but an audience member in life’s grand production and not its featured player. It is this shifting and disconcerting sense of arrogance, displacement, fear and longing for some unnamable tether that permeates the collection, steeping it in the visceral riddles and ruminations that constitute a woman’s time on earth.

In the second section, “Déjà Vu,” Andrews deals exquisitely with the messy glory of adult sexual relationships, as the musings of the young girl are put into practice by a grown woman. It is here that the more nebulous entreaties of a child become meatier and more sinister, ultimately focused by the painful experience of thwarted romance; in the collection’s title poem, the woman concludes with calm, almost sage-like assuredness, “The problem is, everyone falls in love with death. Death is the most seductive lover. Everything a person wants, death has.”

From that dire declaration we are taken into the collection’s final section, “The Beautiful Lie,” where we bear solemn witness to the aftermath of love lost. It is the subtle erosion of the girl-child’s original artless whimsy, in which even the darkest anxieties are relayed with a reserved buoyancy, that makes this section the most poignant, and most terribly adult, of the three. This is not to say, however, that Andrews has disavowed all humor; found amongst even the most harrowing narratives are welcomed shards of cagey, truthful wit.

With the exception of the collection’s final piece, which covers nearly seven pages, Andrews’ poems seldom go beyond the length of a single page, employing no elaborate punctuation or spacing. Instead, her poems are tight, polished jewels of increasingly brutalized reveries and queries.Is Houdini simply a deified icon worshipped since childhood? Is to sleep with Houdini to sleep with death and experience pure, uncomplicated intimacy with the great nothing? And what does it mean to escape, and just where do you escape to? Does it mean to finally belong to someone or something, or to quietly relinquish, defeated? These are the sweet questions that linger long after you’ve finished Andrews’ provocative work. A neat trick indeed.

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Souvenirs of A Shrunken World

By Holly Iglesias. Kore Press, Tucson, AZ: 2008.

Darling Vulgarity

By Michael Waters. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2006.

Reviewed by Lynne Thompson

Have any of you, gentle readers, ever chanced to look through a stereopticon? Considered by some to be the end of the 19th century’s equivalent to the end of the 20th century’s VCR, it was an entertainment device patented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. Dictionary.com defines it as a “magic lantern… with two projectors arranged so as to produce dissolving views.”

I couldn’t get the memory of the instrument I’d once viewed as a child out of my head as I read the gems in Holly Iglesias’ Souvenirs of A Shrunken World. In this small—you can almost hold it in your palm—book of prose poems, Iglesias captures the excitement and the terror of the new and prior centuries (“Mere children, we learned more in a week than we could forget in a lifetime”) through the lens of the 1904 World’s Fair held in St. Louis, Missouri.The book’s title gives a small hint of the wonders to be found inside this microcosm, and in the first poem, “Running for the Fair,” a stereograph prepares the reader for the journey, “past and future neck and neck.” The irreality of this reality is even presaged by the titles of the poems: “Façade,” “Geography of the Americas,” “A Romance of War and its Simulation,” “The Degenerate Classes” and “Anthropometry.”

The reader is propelled on the journey, however, by the voices emanating from the poems—these are souvenirs of a harsh reality not always associated with historic accounts of the Fair. In “New Century, New Woman, New St. Louis,” the reader is warned, “Were it not for our dedication to municipal housekeeping, the World’s Fair Visitor might take home a memory of coal smoke and unpaved streets.” In “Vagrant,” we’re reminded that thousands of people of all ages (“Racing for the train, we are a cyclone of knickers and pinafores, nickels and gum drops”) were eager to see something “on a scale of magnificence never before attempted”: “Come along, Mary, says he, can’t be seen loitering amongst the hoi polloi and traveling men now, can we?”

But, as Iglesias quotes Helen Keller, “the bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction,” so we do get to loiter among the hoi polloi (President Jefferson and Lewis & Clark in “Centennial: Against the Grain”) and traveling men (“Headliner”[’s] fearless midgets of the Congo Valley) as well as the dramatis personae of the ordinary, as in “Model Student” (“We did our sums; recited the pledge to the flag…”) and the extraordinary (“Seventy-five thousand people pack into the Plaza St. Louis on the hottest day of the year for the Pygmy dance.”)

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In mining the Exposition for the page, the curiosities described might almost cause us to ignore the craft of the poems. To do so would be a mistake.

Each piece has a precision of language and a musicality in its movement toward the dissolving views of a world long gone, so delicately applied as to be almost invisible—a gift, dear readers, which I happily urge you to accept.

• Michael Waters’ Darling Vulgarity also creates a flavor of carnival, of spectacle, but with a much more personal design. He warns us in an opening note that “First they understood nothing, then had to unlearn even that—.”

The reader, thus, is conditioned for this conundrum right off the bat when, in the first poem, “Black Olives,” Waters declares, “In those days while my thenwife / taught English to a mustached young nurse who hoped to join / her uncle’s practice in Queens…I’d prowl the Ambelokipi district / attempting to decipher / titles emblazoned on marquees—My Life as a Dog / Runaway Train, Raging Bull—.” Waters doesn’t let the reader off the merry-go-round in the succeeding poems, as where the speaker proclaims, in one, “That Halloween I wore your wedding dress” and admits, in another, “We’re bathing together when Alina kneels in steam / to reveal crimped flaps of skin…” And in closing the first section of the book with “American Eel,” Waters makes it clear that this festival, with its “terrible breath” of events (metaphorically and delightfully presented as “eels stranded in low tide, mud /eels thrashing the river’s bottom, urging their flaccid intimations forward…”) will pass onto future generations as he hugs his daughter, his “darling / vulgarity” and dooms them both, stating “We are that kind of people,” attempting, unsuccessfully, to distance them both from his lover and her unobservant friends.

The second section of the book is comprised largely of a multi-part prose piece beginning with a memoir entitled “The Bicycle” and concluding with a final reflection entitled “The Soul.” Sandwiched between these reveries are two wry and curious essays that concern, presumably, Waters’ own encounters with Allen Ginsberg in 1966 and Robert Lowell in 1970. What ties the selection together rather well is a question near the section’s conclusion: “Who understands the whimsies of rural reception, much less the vicissitudes of God?” In a larger context, “The Bicycle and the Soul,” as well as the other poems in the section, build upon the theme of life as spectacle that is established in the opening section.

A third section braids the natural world into the spectacular vision Waters is creating. He guides us with references to “God’s disinherited”; he enchants in “Deep Sea Sponge,” with its reference to Venus’ Flower Basket, with its reminder

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of “how we survive, and how we love.” “Scarabs, Processional” (“how will I find you once I awaken /…naked amid the alien thistle”), “Who Are These Ravens” (“hauling behind them / the terrible dawn, then spattering it / with the ragged, monotonous calligraphy /of their hundred hewn and inky bodies?”).

Section IV moves beautifully to the realm of artists and their view of this carnivalesque world. Frost, Miles Davis, Balthaus and Raymond Carver, among others, make their appearance.What is left to them but to accept the inescapable, to say, as in the poem “Pavese”: “I rage in your remnants and stains”?

In the final section, the poet returns the reader to the personal, most notably in “Green Sweater,” where the speaker wears his father’s sweater, the color of “grey-green waters,” and acknowledges “How falsely we approximate nature, lacking modesty.”

Again and again, the collection returns us to the terror and excitement of the “darling vulgarity” of our existence, its braid of humor and bathos. It’s worth reading, once and then twice more, as an essential reminder of the fate we can’t escape.

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad Translated by Sholeh Wolpe. Foreword: Alicia Ostriker. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Jackson Wheeler

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Sholeh Wolpe with a forward by Alicia Ostriker, introduces a new generation to the work of the poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who died in 1967 in Teheran.

What makes this book of translations exceptional is the attention given, in a selected poems, to the arc of the artistic growth of the poet, beginning with early poems published in 1955 in her first collection, Asir (Captive), through the posthumously published Iman Biyarvarem beh fasleh Sard (Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season), in 1967.

Although I would characterize much of Farrokhzad’s work as “emphatic,” there is, over time, a shift in her perceptions of what is important and worthy of her poems. During much of Ms. Farrokhzad’s lifetime, the Shah, returned to power by a military coup, was working to modernize Iran with Western influences.

Farrokhzad’s poetry encapsulates what many young women intellectuals were feeling at the time: a sense of freedom and equality not seen since the advent of the theocratic government now holding sway. The early poems are giddy and impatient; from the poem “Sin”:

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O my life, my lover it’s you I want.

Life-giving arms, it’s you I crave.

Crazed lover, for you I thirst . . .

And later, at the end of the same poem: I have sinned a rapturous sin beside a body quivering and spent.

I do not know what I did O God, in that quiet vacant dark.

—from Deevar (The Wall) Wolpe is wise to keep some of the indicators of Farrokhzad’s language which might otherwise seem dated, for example the use of the expressive “O” and adjectives like “rapturous”; however, Ms. Wolpe tempers the dated language with straightforward English phrases like, “I sat beside him punch-drunk.” This juxtaposition makes the translations fresh and new.

Her love poems are remarkable for their time, given what one understands of the current availability of her work in Iran. Most of her poems have one or two word titles and deal with subjects not openly discussed in conservative Muslim societies.

The early poems carry titles such as “Sin,”“Captive,”“Grief,”“Bathing,”“On Loving,” and “The Ring.” She describes nakedness, passion and, in “The Ring,” she refers to what one presumes is a wedding band, as “the clamp of bondage, of slavery.”

In her poems her persona speaks fully as the equal of the lover, from the poem “On Loving” (“Let me lose myself in you… I’m so filled with you / I want to run through meadows… it’s the loving I so love”) to the sensual “Bathing”:

Aroused, parched, and fevered, the water’s lips rippled trembling kisses on my thighs, and we suddenly collapsed, intoxicated, gratified, both sinners.

One should note that Wolpe’s translations strive to capture sensual language, which, at times, may have carried coded meanings. Time and again, Wolpe uses the word “spent,” which carries with it in English a post-coital meaning that I think Ms. Farrokhzad clearly intends in some of her early work, which celebrates a form of breaking free from convention.

The work from 1964 has a more mature and somewhat melancholy tone, especially those poems from Tavallodi Degar (Reborn). The poems are also longer, displaying a greater confidence of voice. A favorite poem from this collection,

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“Those Days,” is too long to print in its entirety; however, a couple of excerpts reveal the strong sensual language, the daring imagery and yet a tone of sadness rather than defiance.

Those days are gone the days of staring at the secrets of flesh, of cautious intimacies and the blue-veined beauty of a hand holding a flower…

Those days are gone.

As uprooted plants wilt in the sun, those days, too, rotted in sunlight…

O grief, is now a lonely woman.

The final poems are from the posthumously published Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season (1967). Although not overtly political, the poems deal with change and a sense of unease. The imagery is full of violence or suggested violence. From the poem “After You”:

Masque

By Elena Karina Byrne. Dorset, VT:Tupelo Press, 2008.

Contrariwise

By Susan Terris. St. Louis, MO:Time Being Books, 2007.

Reviewed by Stephany Prodromides

In Elena Karina Byrne’s second full-length collection, Masque, language stalks its subject. Words are papier mache’d just-so into Commedia dell’arte masks, and these masks become animate, promising a kind of truth that is best experienced “like the translucent hands of the dead / pressed, still warm, on the forehead / of my lover” (“Fertility Mask”).

Each poem opens with an epigraph that, along with the poem’s title, tethers one corner of language to meaning. As words and images constellate into a jeweled arrangement, reading becomes a delicious, vicious hunt—intimate, and demanding:

A kind of devotional

quarantine, a snuff of the past

After you, we betrayed one another.

We erased with lead pellets, with exploded drops of blood, the mementos written on plastered walls. . .

I arise, sip water and suddenly remember how your newly planted soil trembled in locust swarms.

How much must one pay?

How much does it cost to grow a cement wall cubicle?

which now looks like anyone’s future. But it’s mine

you’re looking at; I am your only addict

and I solemnly share you, your visceral ruin, a variation on the pale mask I pass around. Don’t you see? Here:

I take your face seriously.

If I can’t have you, everyone else will.

We lost whatever we were to lose.

We began our journey without a lantern; …

I imagine, had Ms. Farrokhzad lived, she would have joined the exodus from Iran, in the late 1970s, of so many other intellectuals, artists, and groups deemed to be dangerous and heretical. Many of these exiles came to Los Angeles, where, out of exile, Ms. Farrokhzad’s work has once again found its voice, loosed from its cage by the deft sensibilities of the poet Sholeh Wolpe, whose translations have given Farrokhzad’s voice wings.

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(“Disguise Mask”)

Through the mask of its assumed character, each poem observes us, the spectators, and in turn examines itself: the actor, the other side of the mask. In “She Mask: Inversion” the speaker gropes toward a unity of these two:

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This life

•

just wants to begin again with an embrace, but she will

keep me from ‘I’ as long as she can.

Don’t understand. Farewell, farewell…

I know I belong inside.

But this

is where I do my best thinking.

And this is fitting. Byrne quotes Susan Sontag, who explains there are “two mythical parts of a single self: the corrupted person who acts, and the ingenious soul. The Latin word persona, from which the English word “person” derives, means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person, then, is to possess a mask.”

Ultimately though, and always, Byrne is “interested in how language “verbs” out the subject…. How language works backwards that way, that somehow language can bring you to a subject—rather than the other way around.” She presents mask after mask in a tour de force of philosophy, art, and history that is at once sensuous and unrelieved. Considering the myriad personas Byrne presents in these poems, it is no wonder that some seem surprised at their very existence, as in “Animal Mask:” … I am Wapiti running and running and running, call me from the sleeper waves, call me from the den and hollow know, out, the she in it, all, amphibia, anima target I am. I ask. Please, just put me out of my misery.

She consoles the reader, saying,“There now, don’t despair. / We have always made strangers out of ourselves / by loving others” (“The History of Restoration: Grief Mask”).

A supremely human collection, this work stutters glittering and armed into the reader’s subconscious. Erudite and hungry by turns, the book is a singular pleasure.

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There is an argument in Contrariwise, as promised in the title, brilliantly orchestrated in persona poems and epigraphs between two distinct groups of nineteenth and twentieth-century historical figures: On one hand, those with an obsession for pre-pubescent children, led by Charles Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll, of Alice in Wonderland fame); on the other, the children themselves, led by Alice Liddel (Dodgson’s Alice inspiration), and their adult advocates.

John Ruskin speaks in the first poem, “Ruskin’s Advice to Charles Dodgson,” and seems to warn Dodgson from his attentions to young girls: Blossoms should be left Innocent in their beds, as nature intended, For us to admire. Ever part of the wild undefended.

As each successive poem unfolds, it is clear that the fixation leaves its mark on both parties, despite any and all attempts to the contrary. In “The Real Alice,” Alice Liddel speaks of a muddied reality that results from her association with Dodgson:

… So when you see the last photograph he took, the one where I’m eighteen and glowering, please understand I was struggling to remember how it was before everything changed, before we slipped from a land of wonder to Wonderland.

Dodgson’s persona poems navigate a harrowed territory between confession and (sub)consciousness, most strikingly in “Photographing the Alices,” where he slips into Wonderland text: … aware of the cold-blooded in me, I wanted . . I loved

we’re all mad here I’m mad you’re mad But chaste. Awed. No wish to spoil the unsullied.

who in the world am I ah that’s the great puzzle Interspersed between these persona poems Terris places shorter lyrics, typically named for flowers. The flower lyrics represent, perhaps, “the wild undefended,” both predator and prey. In direct contrast to the mannered persona poems, these shorter works speak by turns with power, like “Pomegranate” (“Let the paper birds fly. Let the bloody seeds / Burst. Let the fog keep all its secrets”), and rapture, as in “Asphodel”:

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Lift the stem—yes, Flex it, rock it back.

From black to green to white.

And there at the rim exhalation of whimpering pink, one more unconscious release.

Images of mirrors, butterflies, and photographs appear throughout the book, and Terris enjoys multiplied mileage with the poem “Imago.” (An imago is the last stage of development in an insect—the sexually mature stage). She describes a luna moth, much like “the Alices,” we might imagine, as a …hungry phantom with no mouth, silent and round-eyed, helpless to change its fate…

J.M. Barrie’s persona poem, “J.M. Looks for Alice in Neverland,” strikes a sweeter, melancholy tone: Who wants a button or a kiss Who wants to fly Who will read me and take me to bed Sweet girl who can’t grow up Alice little mother I’m here Contrariwise proffers a modern pantheon of potential perpetrators, their victims, and their scolds. This book overflows with breathtaking line breaks and a tumble of sound, meaning and allusion. Aficionados of Victorian-era flower meanings will consume it with much pleasure. It is, after all, a little book about obsession.

Museum of Parallel Ar t

By Robert Wynne. Huntington Beach, CA:Tebot Bach, 2008.

Horse Latitudes

By Paul Muldoon. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006.

Reviewed by Chris Cunningham

In this series of ekphrastic poems, Robert Wynne imagines a stroll through a museum of imaginary or “parallel” artworks.Wynne’s imaginary pieces generally

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fall into three categories: a classic work by a contemporary, kitschy, or popular cultural artist (“Dan Flavin’s The Kiss,” “Theodor Geisel’s [Dr. Seuss’s] Madonna and Child,” “Currier and Ives’ The Scream”); a contemporary, often kitschy piece by a master (“Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Dogs Playing Poker,” “Marc Chagall’s Velvet Elvis); and, finally, mismatched masters (“Piet Mondrian’s Starry Night,” “Claude Monet’s Persistence of Memory”).

Clearly, part of the pleasure of these poems is the cleverness of these juxtapositions. On the one hand, Wynne has a lot of fun (as do we), for example, repainting The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with artists from Dorothea Tanning to Keith Haring to Matt Groening: “Adam reclines comfortably, his chest emblazoned with the words ‘I went to the Creation and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.’” (“Matt Groening’s Creation of Adam”) On the other hand, in contrast to this kind of playful postmodern confusing of high and low, Wynne also offers some wonderfully haunting poems of paintings you wish actually existed, as in “Vincent Van Gogh’s Mona Lisa,” quoted here in full: Her hair is the color of wet haystacks, her lips so thick with red paint she can’t open her mouth.

It’s not so much her slight smile but those wild eyes, bright green and yellow, that follow you into the next gallery.

What was she doing with her hands?

You can still feel them unfolding like a letter.

If she had a voice, it would be pale blue and quiet as paper.

Wynne’s new Mona Lisa is as enigmatic as ever, but, whereas Da Vinci’s original is slightly flirtatious, smiling at some private joke, this new Giaconda with her “wild eyes” and “lips … thick with red paint” is both more knowing and less free than the original.That she “can’t open her mouth” implies her desire to do so, a suffocating, nightmarish speechlessness reinforced by the “wild” desperation of her eyes and the apparently significant but ultimately untranslatable “unfolding” of her hands.

In addition to the ingenuity of these imaginary conjunctions, there are also some moments of lovely ekphrasis. In the surrealist Paul Delvaux’s rendering of Degas’ “The Rehearsal,” we find this finely drawn scene:

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There is a skeleton seated at the floor’s edge

nudity nothing but a distraction

proud of its perfect posture, the way bones sing against each other as a body moves

to keep us from realizing every place we go is essentially the same.

without all that unnecessary flesh. The skull cocks itself to one side, sockets staring at pale breasts which sway toward the floor as women stretch slowly into fifth position.

it’s not stairs I see

but a tangled escalator

Through two narrow windows the blade of a crescent moon

keeping the man moving

even though he never moves.

ladles the night’s ration of light.

An exhausted dancer falls. Gravity knows the weaknesses of toes, tendons, will.

However, there are dangers in a project such as this. On the one hand, the challenge in ekphrastic poetry is that the poem not be pure re-presentation, lest the poem become what Plato complained any poem is, an imitation of an imitation, without an internal life and necessity of its own. There’s a similar challenge in the very cleverness of Wynne’s conception—indeed, in any “project” poetry book. The danger here is that a poem can seem more about satisfying the internal imperatives of the book’s logic than about engaging with a subject that requires the existence of a poem.The reader needs to feel that a poem is necessary not just to satisfy the needs of the project but in its own right.

But at their best, Wynne’s poems succeed because of the jarring, amusing, and provocative fusions they imagine. That is, his strongest pieces help us to a greater understanding of both the painter and the painting, and in the union of the two, discover something new that neither alone knew, something that is the poem’s own subject. For example, in a diptych on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Mark Rothko’s version (“if the title means anything, then the thin line // which holds the nearly identical squares apart / must be the staircase, nude and all”) wonders whether movement is a myth, happiness a line stepped across without any real substance,

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Across the page in the Escher rendering of the same painting, “The title is a ruse: there is no up or down”:

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In “René Magritte’s Still Life,” Wynne writes, “There is so much we want, but nothing as much as the power to make images real.” At the same time, if these poems show us nothing else, it is that an image is the creation of a consciousness, that the painting we know is not the painting we know unless it’s by the painter we know painted it. Or, as Wynne puts it, “to refute something is to celebrate its absence, to recognize desire.”

• Answering questions from a room full of high school students, Paul Muldoon once admitted, reluctantly (he feared they’d think him “corny”), that his favorite word was “Daddy.” The moment is instructive because it gets at a generative tension in Muldoon’s poetry between high emotion—love, grief, outrage—and the nagging sense that language diminishes that emotion, debasing it as mere sentiment, as corn.

Thus, there’s a disparity in Muldoon’s work between texture (formally inventive, intensely musical), tone (playful to silliness, wry almost to deadpan), diction (from archaic to colloquial to demotic) and poetic content: harrowing stories of personal, familial, cultural, and national trauma, including 9/11, the Iraq War, AIDS, cancer, and drug and alcohol addiction (heroin is only one of the “horses” alluded to in the title). Indeed, much of the collection is elegies—the poet’s sister Maureen (to whom the book is dedicated),Warren Zevon, numerous family and friends, “the old country”—but it’s unlikely that a reader would, at first read, call these poems “elegiac.”

It turns out that these poems are harrowing not despite their often playful surfaces but because of them. For Muldoon, the darker things get, the lighter.

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For example, in “At Least They Weren’t Speaking French,” he weaves an absurd refrain—the poem’s title—and a recurring bit of nonsense through the stories of two uncles, one apparently killed by TB, the second (perhaps) by a noxious bout of blood poisoning: At least they weren’t speaking French when another brother, twenty-something, stepped on a nail no one had bothered to clench in a plank thrown halfheartedly from the known to the unknown fol-de-rol fol-de-rol fol-de-rol-di-do across a drainage ditch on a building site. His nut-brown arm. His leg nut-brown.

That nail sheathed in a fine down would take no more than a week or ten days to burgeon from the froth of that piddling little runoff fol-de-rol fol-de-rol fol-de-rol-di-do and make of him a green and burning tree. His septicaemia-crown.

Sowans as much as he could manage. Trying to keep the flummery down as much as any of them could manage. However they might describe the stench, as exhalation, as odor, at least they weren’t speaking French.

Like the rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosy,” which turns the plague into a child’s game, here a horrific bit of family lore takes form intermittently as gibberish, the final line threatening, almost, to turn the whole story into a joke: for Muldoon, lightheartedness is a strategy, and nonsense is what you say when what you want to say is exactly what you don’t want to say.

This fol-de-rol-ing also highlights Muldoon’s fascination with the physicality of language—word as sound. And indeed, musical echo (alliteration, pun, rhyme, etc.) is central to Muldoon’s poetics: on the one hand, it is the musical force that pulls each poem into existence—and back into silence (many of these poems bite their own musical tails). On the other hand, the rhyme of memory, memory as rhyme, is the means by which so many of these poems come into being. In “Eggs,” for example, the speaker cracks open—and into—another moment of family history: I was unpacking a dozen eggs into the fridge when I noticed a hairline crack

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at which I pecked till at long last I squeezed into a freshly whitewashed scullery in Cullenramer.

Here a Proustian egg in the present leads the speaker to interrogate the “whitewashed,” “hush-hush” family story of his “mother’s mother,” who took eggs off to market in the morning only to return that night “completely smashed / on hard liquor bought with hard cash, / fuck you, cash on the barrel.” As we see here, another thing that makes these poems non-elegiac in their tone is Muldoon’s refusal to sentimentalize the past. Indeed, Muldoon pitilessly ironizes such sepia-washed nostalgia in the double sonnet crown, “The Old Country.

Here “every platitude [was] a familiar platitude” and every boy was still “one of the boys” and every girl “ye girl ye” for whom every dance was a last dance and every chance a last chance and every letdown a terrible letdown from the days when every list was a laundry list in that old country where, we reminisced, every town was a tidy town.

The book ends with the long terza rima sequence “Sillyhow Stride,” an elegy for the rock singer Warren Zevon. Apostrophizing Zevon, the poem ranges widely and allusively to include the poet’s dying sister, John Donne, the Japanese restaurateur Nobu Matuhisa, Ivory Coast child soldiers, Minoru Yamasaki (the architect who designed the Twin Towers), turkey buzzards, and the A & R men who helped destroy Zevon and his career, et al. Drawing on Zevon and especially on Donne, whose lines weave throughout this hellish canto, Muldoon’s sprawling lament stretches (and occasionally snaps) the limits of syntax, threatening at times to veer into rant, held in check, barely, by the poem’s own formal strictures. As Muldoon himself says toward the end, I want you to tell me if grief, brought to numbers, cannot be so fierce, pace Donne’s sales pitch, for he tames, that fetters it in verse,

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throwing up a last ditch against the mounted sorrows, for I have more, Warren, I have more….

Doubting that poetry’s “numbers” can “tame,” “fetter” or defend against his “mounted sorrows” (note the equestrian allusion), Muldoon wonders in the end whether he isn’t Donne’s “Triple Fool,” the poet who thinks that “if [he] could draw [his] pains / Through rhyme’s vexation, [he] should them allay,” only to discover that “love and grief ” “are increasèd by such songs, / For both their triumphs so are publishèd.”

Please Poems by Jericho Brown. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008.

Living in Freefall

By Jan Wesley. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2007.

Reviewed by Meredith Davies Hadaway

If poetry is the music of what happens, Jericho Brown’s poems suggest there is a of a whole lot of shaking going on. Divided into sections that mirror the toggle switch on your iPod (Repeat – Pause – Power – Stop), Brown’s tracks combine his own grooves with the voices of singers like Janis Joplin, Natalie Cole, Diana Ross, and Marvin Gaye, in a mix that is sexy and tragic, letting us feel the heat that is the charred edge of heartbreak. “Nothing hurts / Like old R & B,” Brown tells us. And mostly it hurts so good.

From the opening, “Track 1: Lush Life,” we know these songs will pack a punch: “The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you. / To see you shake your head. The mic may as well / Be a leather belt.” Brown’s music comes from that place where pain, desire, love, and disappointment negotiate an essential harmony: “Speak to me in a lover’s tongue— / Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.” We hear just such a chord in the collection’s title, “Please”—sounding desire, satisfaction, and a plea for mercy in a single syllable.

It’s an old song, Brown reminds us. One he hears in the word “ancestors” and in the blood and sand that infuse the Gulf of Mexico with echoes of love and danger: “Its waves a siren of song / Beware the dark // Sand, the skin of my father / Will my lover look in his face // And call me his baby / Kiss my black back // Or cut me open with a switchblade / The red, the Gulf, the sea // A song our mothers sang.”

Familial love is no less potent than its romantic counterpart and equally complex. In “Prayer of the Backhanded,” we see the brutal “back of my daddy’s hand” unload its burden of fury and forgiveness in the face of a son “Who glories

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in the sin / Of immediacy, calling it love.” No wonder notions of punishment and love seem to inhabit the same chambers of the heart. Brown’s music is hardwon. As he tells us: “the best music / Is made of subtraction. The singer seeks an exit from the scarred body / And opens his mouth / Trying to get out.”

The song itself becomes an act of survival as witnessed by Brown’s esteemed back-up singers—Minnie Riperton, Luther Vandross, Donny Hathaway, and Marvin Gaye—all dead in tragic circumstances but still alive in their music.

Violence, passion, love, and betrayal make up the crucible.This powerful collection is Brown’s anthem to his ability to withstand the flames and come out singing in a triumph that is both human and holy. As the poet exalts in “The Burning Bush”: Now, I have a voice. Entered, I am lit.

Remember me for this sprouting fire, For the lash of flaming tongues that lick But do not swallow my leaves, my flimsy Branches. No ash behind, I burn to bloom.

I am not consumed. I am not consumed.

• While reading Living In Freefall, you may experience a roar in the ears and glimpse the ground rushing toward you, before a few lines blossom like a parachute to offer hope of a soft landing. In explorations of both heaven and earth, Jan Wesley lets you experience the danger, the plummet—and ultimately the grace—of surviving the constant tumble in an atmosphere dense with loss, love, desire and delusion.

As the title suggests, bodies will fall, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unexpectedly, but always with consequence. Poems about the complications of earthbound relationships are punctuated by plenty of poems with aerial views.

“I succumb to the sky every chance I get,” the poet says in “Icarus’s Ex.” And the “freefall” motif plays out dramatically in a series of skydiving poems, where jumpers become both weapons of mass destruction: “… heading / vertically, / not quite / conscious, / and merciless / as wing-tipped bombs” and jubilant survivors: “knowing boisterously we have lived / again over a swaggering sunset jimmied / into cackling, sometimes deadly, ground.”

No less frightening is the emotional freefall inevitable in the departures of husbands, friends, lovers, family members—all skillfully evoked in language honed by memory: “Her voice / still echoes through cupboards and clothes / bagged in the blackness of closets” and desire: “our days ablaze in happy endings, when seconds / apart was like being without skin.”

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In Wesley’s long descriptive lines, life’s “plentitudes” include its absences.

Her world is still inhabited by those who have left it—mother, father, lovers— and by the barking “bi-polar gods” who are harbingers of future departure on an operatic scale: “our ocean bulges and sways, / crowds of waves crooning I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you.”

This simultaneity of love and loss culminates in a poetic sequence entitled “Duets for the End of Time” where a moment of personal catastrophe, the drowning death of the speaker’s daughter, swells to encompass the larger landscape, with Twin Towers falling, the Iraqi war threatening and lightning striking in the distance. The speaker finds redemption, if only momentary, in the coming together, the “fire // ignited between us,” as the grief, the loss, and impending disasters are held briefly at bay and “we try for a new way in.”

Throughout this collection, Wesley maneuvers between desire and disaster with both the skill and the courage one might expect from someone who jumps out of airplanes. But the movement is not all downward. Wesley also takes us on ascendant trajectories, as in this journey from inner to outer “Space” where love, recalled, provides both transportation and transformation: “I shoot up arrowed as a rocket // and remember him clung to my ankles, headed / straight up, specks of people’s lives growing // dimmer, faces slapped in brightness // both of us panting and pawing for altitude, // sipping from dippers, breathing ten million stars.”

The Dir ty Side of the Storm

By Martha Serpas. New York, NY:WW Norton & Company, 2007.

Towards the Forest

By Holaday Mason. Moorhead, MN: New Rivers Press, 2007.

Tall If

By Mark Irwin. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues, 2008.

Reviewed by Reed Wilson

in death and joy / with disinterest and breathes out life and more life.” The next poem, “Water,” further immerses us in gulf-coast nature and culture, revealing how essentially intertwined they are: “In the morning the water like a deckhand, / a persistent curl against the shore, / who won’t back down, take no or be denied.” Water, figured first as this “deckhand” found “whoring with any swamp rat / or snake,” also becomes “a dull brother-in-law in front of TV,”—in short, a bayou denizen stereotype.

Serpas here shows us that the “dirtying” begins when we separate “nature” and “culture,” whether we do so in imagination or in actuality. The book’s prophetic thrust urges us to acknowledge the intertwining interdependence of all creation. In “Prasada” (which, an author’s note tells us, is a sacred food offering and means “grace” in Sanskrit), “Hot-tempered water / and summer air collude / to press their dominance into us, “ and in “Bully Camp Road,” even a junkyard is inseparable from what grows in, around, and through it: “A curl-tip of blackberry springs up / from a chrome gear shift, commanding / / What’s left of this pickup’s interior.”

Harold Bloom praises Serpas for, among other things, her “rebel and poignant Catholicism,” and the book certainly abounds with Christian references and symbols. But this rebelliousness is as old as the faith itself, and essential to its vigor. Most of the book was written, presciently, before the devastating hurricanes of 2005, but one poem, the book’s coda, was not. “Poem Found,” reminds us that our disrespect for the garden leads inevitably to our disrespect for one another: after the deluge of Katrina, “God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst / of the waters’ and into the dome God put / the poor, the addicts, the blind, and the oppressed.” And though He “allowed those who favored themselves / born in God’s image to take dominion over / the dome and everything that creeped within it,” this event, like “the fortunate fall” might just have been, for some, catalyst for a saving revelation: God held the dome up to the light

Hurricanes turn counterclockwise, so the “dirty side” of such storms is the right side, the side on which most damage occurs. In this, Martha Serpas’ second collection of poems, the term serves merely as a starting point: though we tend to know such storms and the geographies they affect by the destruction left behind (the “dirt” thrown up), both the nature and the culture of our gulf region has long adapted to these phenomena. It’s only recently that we have seriously “dirtied” this balance by inattention, hubris, and gross failures of compassion.

Language here then becomes a tool for complex ecosystem awareness— engaged and engaging observation that might effect a rebalance. The book itself is like the “Witness Tree” of the first poem: “Stronger and greener, that breathes

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like an open locket and in every manner called the others to look inside and those who saw rested on that day and those who didn’t went to and fro and walked up and down the marsh until the loosened silt gave way to a void, and the darkness covered the faces with deep sleep.

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•

the spilling stars, the slide of harmonics, the beginning of ice and then. . .

Holaday Mason’s Towards the Forest begins with an epigraph from Rilke’s “You Who Never Arrived,” a meditation on the purest grief—that for a love the poet has never actually known: “Who knows? Perhaps the same bird / echoed through both of us / yesterday, separate, in the evening. . . .” Rilke’s shade guides Mason’s hand throughout this, her first full-length volume of poems. She too yearns with musical passion for that which has been, and that which may or may not be known in this lifetime. Listen to how subtly she manipulates rhyme and assonance to this end in “A Liturgy of Air”:

new green.

But of course, such moments pass: “These are the fields of yes / and so, inevitably, sorrow.” It’s not so much how we satisfy our yearnings for such transcendence, but how we experience that rich wanting: Hunger is the world.

Plum blossoms, like glowing packages of light, must flower and fruit and be consumed.

And somewhere The sound of rain. And always

For this, one will do almost anything.

The human body With its pain—inevitable, pure— Knitting us together.

Listen, the ache is vermillion— a pliant drum— Of course one is also reminded in these lines of Emily Dickinson—dashes, pauses, the breathless evocation of all that eludes linguistic definition.The poem’s close however offers us the kind of lyric swerve Mason’s learned from Rilke, one in which the speaker abruptly wakens from aural meditation on what has been, to recognition of her persistent longing for human relationship: “More breaking glass, more rainfall, / The clock says the places, the designs, they’re all dreams. // Think of me sometimes.”

The poems here continually confirm Mason’s wise, sensuous maturity. In “Frieze,” the poem’s title only half-ironically puns; art or merely artful perception might indeed “freeze” moments of transcendent illumination:

The limits of modernity constrain Mason as she reaches beyond the everyday “real” to find ways of doing “almost anything.” In “Alchemy” her impatience with the “uranium breeze” prompts her to speed its decay to the hefty lead of individual words, “placing both / ‘feet’ on the ‘floor’ while searching for / ‘glasses’ so ‘you’ can ‘see’ the ‘room’ / from the edge of the ‘bed’.” That heaviness of particulars is the baseline, or, in this celebration of the music in all things, the “bass” line for the poet’s thematic variations. The poem immediately after this one, “Playing Ravel,” imagines a musician so “Dizzy with this love” that “he is lost—erupted, a captive bird caught in the curve,” and finally set loose, “sweat parting the body that surrenders everything.”

Such “surrender,” however, is not where we end, and Mason repeatedly reminds us of the ways our lives move always between great discipline and wild abandon. With this in mind, Chopin (who “lingers on rooftops” in “Frieze”) seems to emerge as Mason’s greatest tutelary spirit. In “Nocturne of the Pale Blue Vertical Room,” she too reminds us that even in our darkest moments, “Green gods conduct the sky.” By their grace we experience—in life and in art—“The making. The surrender. The losing. / The reclaiming.”

Listen to the music:

• Mark Irwin’s Tall If reads at first like notes from the sleep lab. Oneiric, richly evocative poems explore territories of consciousness most of us forget, or reject, on waking, as in the first poem, “Doors”:

the sorrow of spiders windswept in the Spanish trees

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In sleep the ones departed became doors but I must not have remembered for waking I walked in and out of the doors sometimes pausing touching a door as if I’d lifted something I needed Soon, however, this record of transitional consciousness becomes first of many meditations on time, the matrix of any “if,” tall or short:

but I got older and the rooms grew smaller and smaller and suddenly I was tall as the hour and the daydream terribly long. . . .

Privileged moments when the light comes out of the air and stands unused for a while. And so we walked out of our minds into the sky, ignorant of each gesture calling us back, the glittering armor on the ground.

Conceptions of time—how we experience it, make use of it, counteract its limitations, unify these poems. In “Theory,” “One theory of time’s a moving knife’s / edge, reflecting all, and all that it touches shines.” And in “Paradise,” “no one / really dies but / enters the Untime,” while “Paradise” is “the in / between the border / where a glance vanishes.” The poet, able to venture there, reconnoiters “the felt / but unseen,” and can return to reassure the grieving child he once was by telling him down the distance of memory: “Your father went to the Untime where people speak the language of None, a humming easily mastered that sounds like the distant ocean and feels like stars across the back of an October field.”

Irwin is a brilliant lyric poet, one of the best in his generation, and Tall If gives us permission (and demonstrates how) to be “out of our minds,” “ignorant,” and both undefended and unencumbered by our “glittering armor.” As the title of another poem tells us, the world is, rightly seen, “Liminal, Bridal, Tremulous,” and in “The Lastingness of Things Only Occurs in a Brief Light,” Irwin reminds us that “Time moves faster the farther we get from the center,” a scientific fact when speaking of the galactic center, where a black hole dilates time, and its peripheries, where our planet transits. Our human task is not just to discover such “facts,” but to “find the swift stillness in each place,” to “Tell your story in all its joy and sorrow. Use as few / words as possible, for adjectives would be useless to any god.”

Island

By Jeanette Clough. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Patricia Crane

Of course the poet does live mostly, as the rest of us do, in time and wakefulness, and the “Tall If ” of the title poem—our figurings of possible if not always probable futures— “had something to do with the flowers, their brief tents, / and ballast of color, and with the pollen / spilled like gold sugar onto the lawn.” As such, it also “had something to do with each of our / lives.” In order to

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survive life’s “ifs” failing to “be,” we must understand that “This is the way time / works,” through

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If the physical world is the context for this voyage, then acute attentiveness is the means by which the voyager ultimately relinquishes her mind’s hold long enough to experience it more fully: Jeannette Clough’s Island is a journey, a series of journeys, traversing jungle, desert, ocean, islands, bluffs, and even the body, wandering the edges between tangible landscapes and the more ephemeral realms of time, faith and desire.

While the speaker in these poems constantly resists urges toward coherence and “the Edenic compulsion to name everything,” she also understands her predicament called language, at times giving in to the litany: “gungurru, bangalay,

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manna,” “camphor, carob, copper-beech,” “ilex, cryptomera, morus, quercus.”

She resists and lets go, resists (“Again, I fail the test of coherence”) and lets go until, mid-way through the book there’s a palpable shift, a greater willingness to surrender to what her unconscious offers up, whether it coheres or not.

The result is that sight and what sight evokes conflate, like a whale’s tail appearing above the ocean surface and a lover’s arm resting on a chair. Even the speaker herself merges with the physical world: “I have a breastbone of sand / where heavy curved water breaks / where hollow exoskeletons of mollusks expose their edges.” From elephant tracks in shale to dogs running on a beach to a bow traversing a cello’s body to the curved lip of a lover, sight and experience accrue, culminating in what the speaker calls “the entire thing of creation curving in a wave like the body from whatever set it moving.”

At times Clough enters the object of her attention so completely, all reference points vanish and what is known suddenly becomes unfamiliar, the way repeating a word again and again can transform it into something foreign.

When language no longer holds up, eels seen from a boat merely “suggest the word undulate.”

Through her process of discovery and the concomitant struggle for what might be called ‘true’ perception, Clough finds herself face to face with the here-and-now. Which, like a fishing lure whizzing past her head, is “part of an arc thrown from the past into the fluid next.” “Even cataclysms and miracles,” she reminds us, “pick up with the present after the marvel retreats.” It is “the only beginning there is.” Of course, Clough acknowledges that even the present is elusive—“solidity is illusion viewed from a long way off ”—that life is a “chance batch of restless matter…a resilient mix surviving risk and flux,” that the best she can do is “wake up…take in the scenery and ignore the gloss.”

We are all islands and desire is a reef, “the submerged geography that edges each island self.” “The edge is never far away.” “We step into thin air; all it takes is practice.” “Whether a word is here or there, a meaning will come out.” “The sequence is anybody’s guess.” “Eternity becomes what you do now.”

Dreaming Escape Poems by Valentina Saracini, translated by Erica Weitzman with Rudina Jasini and Flora Ismaili. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008.

Reviewed by Stephan Delbos

The most recent publication in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Eastern European Poetry Series, Valentina Saraçini’s Dreaming Escape is an English translation of a collection originally published in 2002 in Kosovo. This handsome bilingual

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edition offers English-language readers the first extended look at one of Albania’s leading contemporary poets, and is a welcome addition to Ugly Duckling’s already diverse list of publications from significant authors who might otherwise be overlooked outside of Central and Eastern Europe.

Saraçini’s poems spring from a place of silence and often seem to lie just on the cusp of utterance, as if a moment’s hesitation might deconstruct them during the act of composition. Devoid of punctuation and narrative cohesion, these poems are grounded in a deep core of emotion, rather than the desire to relate a specific setting or experience. In this sense, the poem “Knocking” can be read as an ars poetica in which the poet confesses to a poetry more concerned with emotion and felt experience than novel craft or musicality.

Songs are not just magic Or the violin’s magic tones They are distant islands Seas lost somewhere A symphony of my journeys …

I want to live with the sea With the lonely kind To bury the fear These poems represent Saraçini’s at times desperate attempts to find stability in the midst of chaos—− islands in the lost seas of time and experience—and to bury her fear there. Composing a poem, for Saraçini, is a cathartic experience.

The poem represents a dream, an escape from reality. Inherent in the escape that dreaming provides, however, is a knowledge that dreams are the only available escape, yet are always temporary. But that temporary space can be returned to.

Moving poem by poem through the five sections of Dreaming Escape, one discovers a fugue-like organization in which themes and phrases are repeated, revisited and subtly manipulated. Saraçini’s phrasing (or at least Weitzman’s English rendition of it) almost always allows room for multiple interpretations. In the same way, Saracini’s serial style of approach to her subjects offers multiple attempts at expressing similar emotions. For example, the first and last lines of “War of Silence: “You are not the children of Oedipus /…Now one dies any old how,” are echoed and countered in a similar passage from “One Does Not Die of Fear”:

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You imagine yourself great You are not Tydeus …

One does not die of fear One does not live without pain This thematic and verbal recycling gives the collection a sense of continuity while allowing Saraçini to freshly revisit previously explored themes over an extended number of pages. Because each poem is an intense emotional expression rather than an explicated narrative, there is little danger of repetition.

The poems come to represent self-contained though often-repeated attempts at clarity. In this kaleidoscopic approach, emotional themes are explored from various points of view and through various modes of address.

Though the vast majority of the poems in Dreaming Escape are written in the second person, the object of address shifts from lover to general audience and even, perhaps, to the divine, as in the poem “If You Ask Me”: I know that You know When immortality gets tangled up In the escape of dreaming Then why do you ask me About the dreaming of escape

The For tieth Day

By Kazim Ali. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2008.

Reviewed by Martin Woodside

There is a remarkable tranquility at the center of this book, one made all the more remarkable by the themes of conflict and uncertainty that permeate Ali’s poems. The poet’s triumph here comes in his ability to balance and blend, weighing the big question against the small moment or muting a loud statement with perfect center-stillness. Ali’s The Fortieth Day is a loose collection of lyrical fragments, a meditation on faith, submission, and loss in the form of prayers, pleas, and open letters. In “Dear Father, Dear Sound,” the poet reaches out in a spare, elegant line: I exist only two cosmic minutes after you, an echo of your life’s whispering.

Hostage of existence Or a blinding azure light From the incinerated sun […]

You recited into my ear the call to prayer before I had either language or sight.

Even with this shift, however, the being addressed in these poems remains somewhat formless, as if the speaker, rather than addressing a specific person or deity, were addressing existence itself. The reader becomes a stand-in both for humanity and the void. One is reminded of Rilke’s famous question posed at the start of his “Duino Elegies:” “Who, if I cried, would hear among the angelic / orders?” (Leishman/Spender translation), but Saraçini forgoes this question altogether and begins immediately crying out, trusting, perhaps, that if no one else, her readers will hear her, or perhaps that she will find at least comfort in the process of composition.

One of Albania’s foremost contemporary poets, Valentina Saraçini has emerged from a tradition starkly different from the English-language literary canon. Rather than adhering to Wordsworth’s dictum of “emotion recalled in

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tranquility,” Saraçini inverts this statement, instead writing poetry that recalls tranquility in the midst of turmoil.

Despite, or perhaps because of her refusal of most tools poets use to surprise and delight readers, such as enjambment, metrical variation, and simile, Saraçini’s is an authentic voice of measureless clarity, a voice that dwells in a core of intimacy rather than form. Dreaming Escape is a collection of short, lightningbolt lyrics which do not seek to be recognized for their inventive craft but rather serve to cast momentary light on the shadows of irretrievable loss.

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Your whisper and the secret my life whispered in response are going at the speed of sound to the end of the universe.

Will they ever reach it?

Will they ever begin traveling back?

Simple yet uncontrived, the force of the poem uncoils through subtle changes in language and structure. Ali makes persistent use of repetition, using slight variances, as with “whispering,” “whisper,” and “whispered,” to turn the first three couplets into a resounding echo, setting up the sharp turn to the questions at the poem’s end. Often working in couplets, Ali isolates and reframes words

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and phrases through light, fluid cadences. Whether free or formal, his verses flaunt the easy music (one poem is written in amphibrach), lively but restrained, that punctuates “Math”: Adamant as the jade in the window the year carries itself into the new season.

When winter turned to summer I forgot it all like math,

against the cold measure of time.The poems are intently spiritual but very much of this world and often filtered through the reliable motions of time. The poet frames spiritual affirmation in the space of great emptiness, as in the opening lines of the collection’s stunning opener, “Lostness”: dear God of blankness I pray to you unerasable now could I live without You if I were ever given answers the summer thickens with lostness

God in the sky and God in the water dissolving at the horizon,

lovers who will not touch each other but look out into space

or God in the air and the plant condensing on the glass, a geometry of frost-rime, because when we went into the ocean, the waves were glass, green, the sky pure indigo.

The poem cycles through a set of related images, leading from water frozen on the window to the “glass-green” waves of the ocean, a seamless symmetry set against the cycle of seasons and punctuated by the speaker’s curt declarations of God. The recurring scenes, objects and themes in these fragments impose a vague narrative on the collection; the father whispering the call for prayer reappears in “Rope,” and of course, the titular fortieth day resurfaces in several poems here, notably “The Second Funeral,” which leads off the second of the book’s four sections.

Ali’s speaker demonstrates an acceptance, even a celebration, of his powerlessness before God, and the poems in The Fortieth Day celebrate that acceptance, the anticipation of deliverance, and the act of waiting that forever marks the present. Familiar sounds, images, and memories cycle though these pages, and the speaker finds freedom in the imposition of structure and tranquility in the abdication of expectation. Clearly drawn and precisely rendered, these graceful poems plot a clear course through uncertain waters. In “Sleep Door,” Ali points the way forth clearly, conjuring “boats up alongside each other”: We are a fleet now our prows zeroing in

We will return in forty days and the seam of the disturbed ground won’t be visible.

praying in the wind to spin like haywire compasses

Death is a miracle I do not understand, our life already split in half.

toward whichever direction will have us.

Five women across the street hold hands, forbidden to enter the burial ground.

In forty days our prayers will have evaporated into winter wind.

Ali grounds the abstract, the “miracle” of death, against the physical, the newly closed earth or the sure image of the women holding hands, with all set 404

thinking I do not belong in the world.

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The Bag of Broken Glass

by Yerra Sugarman. Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Jehanne Dubrow

In her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, Yerra Sugarman continues the project she began with her debut poetry collection, Forms of Gone, explaining

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what it means to be the daughter of survivors of the Shoah and reflecting on the difficult inheritance of trauma. While Forms of Gone articulated the grief of being a witness to atrocity, The Bag of Broken Glass demonstrates that the loss of such witnesses can cause additional grief. What happens to the children of Holocaust survivors when their parents die? Who is responsible for preserving the memory of the Shoah? How do the children—those labeled “the second generation”—recover from their parents’ experiences of suffering? Through the use of zigzagged, fractured narratives, Sugarman addresses these questions, elegizing family members who endured the Shoah only to face equally sad deaths fifty and sixty years after the end of WWII. Divided into six sections and a coda, the collection opens with a series of poems that mourns the slow death of the speaker’s mother. Here, the poet works as a psalmist, often speaking directly to a God simultaneously distant and close by: “Comes her soul, Lord, leaking. / My mother’s outline loosening— / the soul oozing. / There’s no sufficient patch for. // Night leans against the window, speaking rain. / Something, is it you, Lord, / tugs line of her” (“Night Watch” 1-7). The poet’s voice is clinical, yet fully engaged in the scene. We are meant to understand that the death of a mother evokes a kind of universal sadness but remains particularly poignant because it symbolizes the end of memory and testimony.When a survivor dies, one less person serves as witness to and evidence of the Shoah. In the compressed, narrow poem “Her Hands,” the speaker asks, knowing there is no satisfying answer,“It wasn’t that / I didn’t // take care of her / but how could I have learned how // to save her” (12 -16). In The Bag of Broken Glass, a word such as “save” acquires an uncomfortable resonance, suggesting not only the milieu of the hospital but also that of the death camp. The daughter’s inability to rescue her mother from pain becomes a last betrayal, one which the speaker cannot forgive herself for.

In the book’s second section, a long poem entitled “My Bag of Broken Glass, 1939 – 1978,” Sugarman moves backwards and forwards in time, between Poland and Canada. As is so often the case in the literature of the Holocaust, the poem’s slippery syntax and its broken appearance on the page gesture toward the elusiveness of the subject matter: “A cup can be open arms, can be a wound, / can be a daughter, a lover, a mother // who can fix and shatter” (54 – 56). After Auschwitz, all boundaries (ethical, aesthetic, and emotional) are shattered, and the poet must respond with art that reflects the brokenness of the world. Sugarman handles the task by constructing a collage of stories. The text works as love poem and elegy. It unites often incompatible forms of desire, that of the lover for the beloved, the child for the parent, and the bereaved for the dead.

The next section continues to consider the relationship between Eros

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and Thanatos.As the book’s title suggests, this is a work that centers on the delicate and the breakable. Moving from maternal love to sexual desire, Sugarman draws upon imagery of glass both unshattered and broken to elucidate the fragility of human relationships in a post-Shoah world. In “Glass,” the poet writes, “We teeter in facets” (33), while in “Untitled Love Poem,” Sugarman says of an absent lover, “She is as water / dripping from my skin / to a place on which light sways // an absence ossifies // into a brittle wanting” (11 – 15). The speaker’s connection to her beloved is tenuous.Their two bodies are composed of shadow, their passion more rooted in memory than in closeness and intimacy.

The fourth and fifth sections of the collection circle back toward the task of mourning the dead: close relatives, family friends, a Jewish poet murdered in 1944. Sugarman’s language often becomes most effective and affecting in her longer poems, where the lyricism of her lines has ample time to sing in the reader’s ear; for instance, “Journal: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, July 2003,” a magnificent series in twelve parts, chronicles the final days of an aunt, again moving between the Holocaust past and the present to emphasize the importance of preserving survivors’ recollections. Even as the poem laments the aunt’s death and the loss of her testimony, paradoxically the text itself also preserves her memory, giving new meaning to Shakespeare’s words, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

The book closes with an attempt to return to a prelapsarian state, an impossible feat for anyone raised in the shadow of the Shoah.The writing retains an echo of biblical rhetoric and diction. In poems such as “Because I Am a Stranger,” Sugarman once again demonstrates a psalmist’s gift for anaphora and for imagery rooted in the tangible: “Because I am a stranger and a bruise, / a mirror— / Because I take my shoes off to walk / barefoot by the mint and jasmine” (1 – 3). These final pieces place the trauma of the second generation within the long tradition of Jewish suffering, a history which begins well before the twentieth century, not with Sarah and Abraham or with Ishmael and Isaac, but with Eve in the garden. Although the speaker has been orphaned, her mind still uneasy in its imperfect vessel, some resolution seems possible now that she has survived the survivors. In the book’s coda, Sugarman writes, “O, to stitch one life together— / the house, the parents, the past, the love— // to wrap it in tinfoil, / to remake it stainless” (“We Did Not Come to Let Go” 11 – 14).

Although the The Bag of Broken Glass has much to tell us about the particularities of being a child of the Shoah, it also addresses an experience that readers will recognize as universal: that sorrow of watching our parents and older relatives die, no matter how much we love them, no matter how much we want to save them from their deaths.

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Ditch-Tender

By Julia B. Levine. Tampa:The University of Tampa Press, 2007.

World Over Water

By Robert Gibb. Fayetteville, AR:The University of Arkansas Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Robert Peake

Julia B. Levine’s third book of poems, Ditch-Tender, is accomplished, mature, and brave. Her poetry combines the fierceness of a poet like Sharon Olds, unafraid to look at the damage humans cause to each other, and the meditative lyricism of a poet like Robert Hass, who can hold our attention before an intricately woven tapestry of impressions, and dazzle us with the whole.

In “River Road,” the speaker is “abducted” by memory, leading us on a journey of associations through childhood molestation, to “the quiet snowing darkly around a girl / outside the church, crying into her cell phone,” then into the present tense of an American general’s radio interview in which he confesses, “I didn’t know / who wanted our help, and who wanted us dead.” The radio interviewer then fuses with the detective interviewing the molested child, asking the girl-woman-poet to “begin at the beginning,” to which she responds: First I was a girl. And then a stranger asked to touch me.

No, the creek was first. And iris. And foxglove.

No, start over. First there was beauty.

The poems in this book are often in couplets or triplets, intense forms well suited to juxtaposing musically-tuned impressions. Julia B. Levine is, as she says of ants in another poem, a kind of “dark carpenter”—nailing down associations like planks of wood, that we might appreciate not only the different grains, but how they fit together tightly, as a platform upon which we might dance.

Though her background is in clinical psychology, and several of the poems narrate therapy sessions, Levine resists the language of self-help, which hastens after conclusions, and instead casts human relationships in the real light of their own complexity. She asks questions of her clients, readers, and the world, demonstrating a tremendous capacity—what Keats might call “negative capability”—to address human consciousness on its own terms.

It is consciousness, ultimately, that is the subject of Ditch Tender, often dream-like, as in “I Tell Her About My Last Night With Her Father,” where a mythic figure wanders, abandoned, in a natural landscape, more animal than human. Such moments border on magical realism, as in the poem “Heaven,” where a mother and daughter discover “flies ripening a fetal deer,” and the

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mother “explains kindness as a wound / that ends before it hurts,” and the child concludes: Do we call it heaven, because instead of gravity, there are birds?

Because the down-below has to take the dark back from her bones, before the baby deer can fly?

And yet this collection, in its capacity for child-like association, also stares down the stark, grounded realities of limbless children, sexual trauma, and suicide.

It is truly a collection that reaches per aspera ad astra—through adversity into the stars—guided upward by unflinching evocations of all that our awareness can contain: from the crudity of ditches, to a seemingly limitless tenderness that is this poet’s gift.

• “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time” —John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn In reviewing Robert Gibb’s sixth book of poetry, The Burning World, Jackson Wheeler described the work as “poems of a remarkable imagination exercising a longing for a world now gone.” In Gibb’s new seventh book, World Over Water, his theme remains the lost world of nineteenth-century industrial Pittsburgh. But whereas Gibb’s previous collection may have burned with light and longing, the poems in his latest collection command a more quiet intensity, the cool reflection of water.

Gibb is fascinated by the Homestead steel workers’ strike of 1892, the subsequent lockout, and ensuing violence—in which his own grandfather took part. He frequently writes about photographs, as he does here in the fifth section of the sonnet sequence “The Homestead Lockout & Strike, 1892”: Out of the picture, above the watery horizon Which splits the work in half: the murky Buildings divided from their reflections, The smoke churning upward from its cindery Twin burning head down in the stream.

It’s either evening or nineteenth century,

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That light’s dissolve into longshot and time, The world over water, its ashen stacks, Guttering on the surface like a match.

Another “poem” in this collection is a tally of deaths by type attributed to the making of steel—195 men in one year killed by, amongst other causes, “hot metal explosions” (22), “asphyxiation by furnace gas” (5), and “electric shock” (7).

Clearly, these are political poems, but the politics of the Industrial Revolution—class wars, strikes, and company stores—are not easily transposed into the information age. It is not, therefore, in Gibb’s reflections upon old photographs and other paraphernalia of history, those “foster-child[ren] of Silence and slow Time,” that I find his work most compelling. It is instead in moments where the past touches into the present, through the lineage of working-class men, and their struggles, that Gibb’s work burns with life.

One such moment is in “Touring Clayton, the Estate of the Industrialist Henry Clay Frick.” Gibb recalls his grandfather amidst the tour of this opulent home, and what he describes as the “politics of ... anguish” in the conflict between the elite and working-class. In the middle of the tour, he thinks: Of the black varnished furnaces Splashing fire, slag like hills Of lava, my grandfather in 1905 Falling to his death in the mills.

Special Orders

By Edward Hirsch. New York, NY: Knopf, 2008.

Reviewed by Lee Rossi

“A demotic linguistic vitality—what Williams calls ‘the speech of Polish mothers’—is one of the pleasures of the American project in poetry.” With these words Edward Hirsch commended writers such as Whitman, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks to the readers of the Washington Post. In his latest book, Hirsch’s gifts for vivid description and passionate feeling produce work of appealing simplicity and directness, work which addresses the human dilemmas of a complex, post-theological age.

The poems themselves, rarely longer than a page and a half, are modest in size but not in impact. Those familiar with Hirsch’s poetry will recognize favorite themes: family history, Chicago and the Midwest, personal difficulties with insomnia and depression, an ongoing argument with an absent god, and the importance of art in creating meaning in life.

In addition to echoing earlier work, these new pieces talk to one another; they employ recurring images and concepts which expand in meaning and power as they are deployed in varying contexts. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil, which is mentioned almost incidentally in “Green Figs,” is alluded to a few pages later, when Hirsch compares artists to “a surviving Gnostic sect, living in caves and eating fallen fruit,” i.e. the fruit that made us Fall, and then caps off the series a little later with a frontal assault on Judaeo-Christian myth (in “A New Theology”): I think the whole shebang – the serpent, the apple with knowledge of good and evil – was a setup. . .

“The faces of the children’s dolls Were all hand-painted,”

Opposed to the tree of theology, source of knowledge and guilt, is the tree of “Green Figs,” wholly itself and yet also an emblem of human resilience under duress:

She is saying, “their little wigs Fashioned with actual hair.”

Other poems such as “Wood Work” and “Fingered” bring the realities of modern working-class life just as vividly home.

Gibb’s technique is consistently mature and craftsman-like, often working in stanzas of equal length with great precision, clarity, and skill. Confident, spare, and intellectually compelling, World Over Water shimmers with a terrible past, which casts its inevitable reflection into our modern world.

I need to live like that crooked tree –

solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free –

that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.

Hirsch’s earliest books were filled with poems which, according to David Wojahn, “begin as troubled meditations on human suffering [but] end in

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celebration.” That tension between sadness and joy has been present throughout his work, but the mix has shifted as Hirsch has aged, celebration becoming at times “not . . . celebration exactly, but a sort of agonized reconciliation.” In Special Orders, however, the habit of praise seems at least as strong as habits of pain, answering the endemic pessimism of our troubled times as well as his own troubled psyche, with declarations like the following: Happiness, too can be precise: Doctor, there’s a keen throbbing on the left side of my chest where my ribs are wrenched by joy.

“Art stands against the emptiness.” “We believe in the root power / of words, dreams, ecstatic trances, visions.” Even death is less an occasion for suffering than an opportunity for acceptance. In “A Night in September,” we hear the voice of a doomed passenger from United Flight 93: I have watched a crescent floating overhead, a wooden cradle on the river.

I have left the war-torn terror of the city to listen to the wind soothing the grass.

It is a wonderful, complex poem, admitting all the religious and political tensions of “a crisp night in September in a new century,” yet almost Chinese in its evocation of timeless rural serenity. There are similar delights throughout. In this diverse and very satisfying collection, we see Edward Hirsch at the top of his many forms.

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks

By Charles Simic. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2008.

The World in Place of Itself

By Bill Rasmovicz. Farmington, ME: Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., 2007.

Reviewed by Chris Juhas

Charles Simic is a negotiator of sorts—a diplomat—an intermediary, in aphorisms that remind one to savor the rich flavor of being. The Monster Loves His Labyrinth is a patchwork of these musings, anecdotes and observations drawn,

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as the title suggests, from notebooks spanning the author’s career. Imagine all the standalone bits between the polished poems of an author’s notebook and you’ll get a sense of the tone of this collection. It is in many ways bold, unafraid and more intensely personal than a traditional “poem,” in the most reduced sense of the word.These are honest thoughts, bursts of clarity and consciousness scribbled down, one imagines, both at moments of delirium and intense lucidity, leaving the reader inspired and provoked.What is accomplished, among other things, is a proper introduction, and a full conversation with Charles Simic.

Simic plays to the smallest moments of existence, where a moment stretches outward, vertically, like a melody note thickened by harmony. There is a powerful continuity here, a deeply human narrative that emerges from the in-betweens, honesty in its most luminous state. Its progression feels natural, the words breathe—space grows “in the midst.” Simic kneads time outward, turning instants into epochs: “I’m in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.”

Simic tries (and succeeds) to employ language justly, giving precedence to the thing or the act, balancing words and dynamic silence. “Poetry tries to bridge the abyss between the name and the thing.That language is a problem is no news to poets.” With this spirit, this understanding of the limbo between signifier and signified, Simic is able to re-characterize the world: “Eternity is the insomnia of time.” As he puts it, “My ambition is to corner the reader and make him or her imagine and think differently.”

Each moment is an attempt “to sensitize thought and involve it with the ambiguity of existence.”This blending of the cosmic and the personal locates the reader where Simic becomes less himself, more the reader, and the reader more Simic, less self. Both reader and speaker stand insignificantly in the vast spaces behind each word and yet one feels happily situated in the void: “The sense of myself existing comes first. Then come images and then language.”

Simic’s work reeks of this awareness, as when he notes “A lone cloud stumbling across the sky like a beery accordionist in a German tavern.” The reader can crawl through a rabbit hole like this, down into the belly of the image.

It is the comfort of knowing that these images are fit for occupancy that makes this collection so effective.

He navigates the treacherous waters of Western morality with abandon, reacting with guts, as a child might, to an otherwise indifferent reality: “I saw a priest walk past a homeless woman sprawled on the sidewalk and look away. I regret not running after him and giving him a kick in the ass.” Simic mines an unkind reality for bits of ironic respite—for irreverent chuckles.

Some of these entries are revelatory, some serene, others fat with cynicism—but all, arresting. This collection is the papery incarnation of Simic’s

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humanity—part poem, part philosophical exploration, part retrospective, part progress: “My aspiration is to create a kind of nongenre made up of fiction, autobiography, the essay, poetry and of course, the joke!”

• Bill Rasmovicz’s The World in Place of Itself is punctuated by the bittersweet concentrate of solitary exploration. These are quiet meditations, often slow and removed, cold but comfortable, where we find the skull “echoing / like a looted tabernacle.” Much of this collection seems to inhabit a place where the preeminent soundscape is a pulsing of blood against eardrum, where if we’re lucky, our absence is absolute. But Rasmovicz is wary of even this retreat in finding the body, “scarcely a home, / with its hollow streets, / its withered facades and nervous citizenry.” The World in Place of Itself is an act of removal, an establishment of a third area, somewhere close, in the void between outside reality and internal sensory experience.

Rasmovicz’s imagery falls somewhere between realism and surrealism, where any momentary space might occupy “Anvils in overcoats,” as in “Crows,” or where thoughts “blur like wet newspaper,” in “All Night The Rain.” But we are never left inside the image for too long. Whatever the digression, Rasmovicz makes sure we’re “jolted awake.” A firm rooting in reality lends this collection the feeling of weaving in and out of waking, of winding through unmarked alleys and well-lit boulevards, only to find somewhere we’d not known before and are unwilling to leave.

There is a heavy air of loss that dampens the spaces of this book. What is there to lose? On the other hand, what is there to have? Rasmovicz pries man from his incessant desire of the sensory world in true Buddhist fashion. In “After The Apocalypse” we are “Left only with ourselves, / and the awful proximity of now.” Through our chaotic tug-of-war with the dirt’s resounding echo, we lose and gain nothing but a sense of things, and even this sense belongs to no one.

The point of Rasmovicz’s book, this exercise in unknowing, is not to betray an impression of found comfort but to carry on a tradition of the poet in asking oneself how much of ourselves actually exists apart from the page.

This is a book where the mind becomes increasingly suspect. It is, after all, the most accomplished and overlooked author of fiction, every explanation a myth of origin. At the root of these fabrications is a mad lust for answers, reinforcement of our sureness. In “Ladder,” the absence of a stepladder from its place among “the overgrown yew” leads to our curiosity’s freewheeling. “Who would have stolen it, meaning why— / that splinter trap, sculpture of attrition, bonfire wood?” The inquiry persists until the speaker removes us momentarily

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and asks, “Doesn’t desire bribe the mind for its quenching, / the senses always insist on further investigation?”

To remove anything is to renew something else. The World in Place of Itself is a funeral pyre at the instant of combustion. It is the precise moment where the uncertainty of new is born of the old. Where we find ourselves awake, or asleep, in the fading light of the world we had grown accustomed to—the facsimile of our existence becoming increasingly distorted.

The Most of It

By Mary Ruefle. Seattle, WA / New York, NY:Wave Books, 2008.

Envelope of Night Selected and Uncollected Poems 1966-1990

By Michael Burkard. Cold Spring, NY: Nightboat Books, 2008.

Reviewed by Sarah Maclay

For almost a decade now I have been awaiting a collection of some of my favorite Mary Ruefle poems—longish prose poems, each one a kind of masterpiece, that would appear in spots like the Seneca Review or jubilat, some of which I had the pleasure of hearing aloud in places like Montpelier or Redlands, and yet they were nowhere to be found among the briefer, lineated spells and upheavals and altogether extraordinary incendiary devices in books like Tristimania. And then VerseDaily reprinted “Snow” from The Most of It, and I thought maybe, finally, the book had appeared, and I fell so in love with the poem that I read it, on the first day of class, on several first days of several classes, to something like 100 poetry students (so far), and it begins like this:

Every time it begins to snow, I would like to have sex. No matter if it is snowing lightly and unseriously, or snowing very seriously, well on into the night, I would like to stop whatever manifestation of life I am engaged in and have sex, with the same person, who also sees the snow and heeds it . . .

and then continues for what seems like about 65 lines—if we can think of these as “lines,” or a little over two pages, if one thinks of them more as prose placed in a somewhat narrow, pomegranate-colored poetry-sized book covered vertically with lines of white handwriting that must be held horizontally to be read— as though it had been dared to become an invisible sestina or septina embedded in a prose poem, finding a way to riff through many repetitions of “snow” and “sex”

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and then “birds” and then “graves” and “the dead” and “cold” and “sleepers” as it progressively morphs, turns, voltas from something human and humorous to human and elegiac and finally lands right on the top of the fence between deeply comforting and deeply sad.

Finally they are all out together, these poems I’ve been waiting for, in one place, and I now understand why I had to wait. Rather than dispersing them through several other manuscripts—each, it’s true, its own project (I am very eager to pick up A Little White Shadow, a book of erasures)—they have been collected in a blurbless, pic-less book (see description above) with the simplest of notes about the author, which informs us, among few other things, that she has written ten books of poetry and that this is her first book of prose. Not prose poetry. Prose.

About this, it’s true, I have mixed feelings. On one hand: yes! These are deployed across the page without “lineation.” One could say that, in some cases, they have narrative, story, plots as strange as Pinter. On the other, dag nabbit, I don’t want to let go of my own thinking of them as prose poems, as they are just as likely to be endlessly and elaborately circular and fuguelike and surreal and full of moments that are likely to puncture any notion of prose we’ve ever had—well then, are they essays? Lyric essays? Since prose includes the realm of the essay, clearly, as well as the “story,” and perhaps allows for moments of reflective abstraction?

On a practical note: if we can call this a book of prose, then maybe it can be a radical audience-expanding device, since here is a book that can fall into the “prose” slot as easily as the “poem” slot—which is, in fact, how I found my way to an actual copy of the book, as it was being taught in a class featuring prose by folks like Marquez and Bolano in a place I happened to visit. On the other hand, I worried—I actually worried—that labeling this book “prose” would keep it out of some—forgive me—richly deserved recognition or award in the world of poetry. Granted, this is a somewhat ridiculous worry—a worry that would otherwise not have occurred to me—but this is why. If someone wanted to rub up against the poetry of Mary Ruefle and had never had the pleasure of such an exposure, this is where I would send them first. In the same way we think of Russell Edson as an original—well, actually, of course, in a different way—this book is an original, its own animal, without, as far as I can figure out, parallel or prior examplar. Each piece—since now I am feeling admonished about even what to call each piece—stands alone as its own funny or sad or human or funnysad-human, well, event. Yes, we can call these things events. Repeating events, in fact, because, simply, we can repeat them by re-reading them. It is as though each event is its own small play, a play that could appear alongside each other small play, a play that should be put on, each night, in your brain, in my brain, if we

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can’t find the money for an actual set. Which we don’t have to do. Because these will play just fine if we read them, silently or aloud.

I never say, because I find it ridiculous to, because I find it arrogant to, because, frankly—who knows?—that a book is a classic. I mean, who are we to say?

This one is. And each part of it is. No matter what you call it. About this, oddly, I have no doubt.

Get it.

It is unlike anything you will ever have come across.

And you will never have to feel lonely again.

• “I have a silence in the rain / and I have my horses. / I have my shoes and I have my name . . .” Even in these three short lines from “Untitled” we can see how Michael Burkard slips into the poems of Envelope of Night—the diction is disarmingly straightforward; where he goes with it is not. And here is his penchant for repetition—phrases, words, circling back on themselves as they find their own way forward through the murk; the mileage he gets from the simplest of tools, the willingness to go frameless; a haunted quirkiness, as though one eye is on O’Hara, one ear on Satie.

As I write, the backside of the latest APR is filled with recent Burkard— casual, conversational, endearingly vulnerable as it sidles up to the kinds of exclusions and rejections all writers can relate to. It is long, discursive, and, yes— O’Hara-inflected, and ends with an epiphany that feels somehow ascendant. It is as though the dark arrow of his early work has fanned out into a large wing.

Which is why it makes me so happy that this book collecting earlier work is here at the same time, resurrecting much of what has fallen out of print from his beginnings: the dark arrow preserved, still in flight: ‘The task is to begin more quietly, so in haunting the various evenings you may have the perspective a ghost would have. A ghost who stutters, yes? . . .

This advice, caught in fictional conversation (or notes to self) in “As the Apparition Walked” informs the tone and the method of much of this collection—poet as stuttering ghost.The language itself is simple enough, for the most part—Burkard is not often given to ornamentation or flourish—and his habitual choice of diction is the monosyllabic Anglo Saxon many of us learned as kids.

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But just as these poems feel curiously, peculiarly trustworthy, Burkard seems, himself, to trust the small sets of words and objects and chance correlatives that come to him as he begins each poem—“house,” above all—as he leapfrogs to others that recur as though finding a way into loose, improvised, freed-up ghost sestinas, written into silence, hovering around the silence, tripping over disclosure—simply put and sudden in the way of the non-sequitur, but devastating, somehow. He weaves these words like colors or notes into a chrysalis around an emotional state—not to define it, but to occupy it—and then, fugue-like, he’ll return to them again and again, trusting them to make their relationships known, their raisons d’etre: “Every night the poplars acted red also,” he opens “Every Night,” with a line already full of implication and pregnant with riddle, since “also” implies a world beyond these “poplars” so curiously capable of willing disguise, “because the sun whispered to them its loneliness and glee, / and the conditions loaned it this red light / . . . and so the lake cried out for red . . .”

Elsewhere, he’ll take a scattering of words—“donkey,” “stag,” “mountains,” “field glass,” “loan,” “shade”— and construct a quirky cocoon for “Study for Orange and Black,” in which, O’Hara-like, orange and black do not appear, but blue and gray do. The way the words relate to one another is not what we’d expect—and herein lies their strange power and dark radiance.

The effect is very much like listening to Satie—and here I’m thinking mainly of the gnossiennes and perhaps the darker, more haunted, minor-keyed and sly of the gymnopedies—not the first, most famous one, so much, which resolves a little too cheerily. Like Satie, Burkard keeps returning only to certain notes, leaving out others, leaping, allowing for gaps that may appear at first odd or surprising but become, finally, identified with, necessary to, our experience of this art. He does this, by the way, not just within poems, but over the course of several poems and even books: “White Envelope on Black Sweater” appears as both poem title and as an image in an earlier poem (“A Flower’s Timepiece”), from an earlier book, first as “A white envelope on a black sweater” and, a few lines down as . . . a contagion of snow and white bells, just like that letter I tossed on the bed today, so it may construct its womanly village in the valleys of my sweater.

Curiously, Envelope of Night, also a poem title and phrase within a poem, both echoes and inverts that image.Though we can think of night enveloping us—even enveloping day—in fact, the implication in the poem in which it appears—and, I think, what this book delivers—is an envelope filled with night, full of night.

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That the earliest of these missives dates as far back as 1966 seems not to dull the impact of receipt so many years later. Perhaps, like the gnossiennes, we can imagine them as having been written without time signatures or bar lines, in “absolute time.” (“Gnossienne” is an invented word from around 1893, when the composer was a practicing Gnostic, as a way into “intuitive spirituality” and “deeper wisdom.”) Burkard’s poems, too, glimmer with what feels like a secret knowledge—too secret/sacred, perhaps, to be codified, even to the poem’s speakers—the words are more like exploratory devices used to discover and delimit the sphere of, the shape of, their particular ineffables. And their great and wise and strange use of space and silence is also part of this. If there were a time signature for them, it would not belong to measure, but perhaps to a mildly obsessive use of words to shape a psychological space—to house it, to allow us to occupy it—they are “timeless” but also loose, having burrowed into a vers libre at its most intuitive.

The collection’s introduction marks two events which we can track, if we want, over the course of development that follows—Burkard’s decision to stop drinking, and time spent with Transtromer, who wrote a response to his early poems that became an almost literal touchstone, a “private blurb” of sorts, not just description but directive, comparing the early work to piles of stones he’d seen from the back, while traveling in Egypt, before discovering that they were actually the backside of the Sphinx.Their power, even from the back, was clear.Transtromer wondered what might happen if the poems dared to share their faces.

Myth tells us that the Sphinx might strangle those who passed by and did not guess its riddle. But these poems, for me, anyway, are much more companionable than that. If they are Sphinxlike, they are a Sphinx still trying to formulate its own riddle. The words they use are clues, like scraps pulled out of a grab bag from what is readily available, improvised into a shape that pleases a moment. The song they make, though, pulls from far beyond the quotidian. As Burkard says, “Snow is irrational / and the rare song above the snow insane.”

This is that rare song. It is not insane.

How Beautiful the Beloved

by Gregory Orr. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press 2009.

Reviewed by Gail Wronsky

In a presentation for the Atlanta Constitution/Decatur Book Festival this year, poet Karen Kevorkian’s discussion of the current “ . . .political moment when the use of language is reduced to code designed to obscure meaning” struck me as a beautifully succinct argument on behalf of the kind of poetry found in Gregory

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Orr’s newest book. In such a moment, when life-sustaining health protections can be described by newscasters as “death panels,” it is vitally important that the makers of literature, in addition to pushing experimental envelopes, also commit the outrageous and subversive act of writing with great clarity and lucidity about things that are beyond the reach of mundane bickering and shrill negativity.

How Beautiful The Beloved is in many ways a continuation of the poem sequence Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, Orr’s last book, also published by Copper Canyon, and yet the poems in this collection are even more spare and more certain. Making the argument that “the Book” is “the Body” and that that body is the body of “the Beloved,” the first book, in retrospect, now seems to represent a necessary prelude to the exquisite, unfettered and untroubled, poems of this book.That past was prologue to a book of shimmering insight and profound grace. The poems in How Beautiful . . . don’t need to make arguments; they very accurately and calmly tell us what they know, what is true.

They are “Certain poems / in an uncertain world” (14), speaking with visionary surety and joy about the direct experience of divinity: “azure elixir / That burns our throats to crystal” (64). I’m reminded of the combination of certainty and surprise found in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s wonderful poem “In the Middle of the Road” which offers the epiphany “in the middle of the road there was a stone” seven times in the course of its ten lines.

In the world of Orr’s poems the epiphanic experience is likewise assumed to be a shared one—a given. It is not that all of us have seen the beloved “Faceto-face” (72) as this poet (or the poems’ speaker) has, but we’ve experienced him or her (the poet uses both pronouns, in turns), particularly if we’ve ever sipped any of that azure liqueur, poetry.

“Poem that opened you— / The opposite of a wound. // Didn’t the world / Come pouring through” (90) Orr also assumes that his readers are all poets—which is not to say he assumes only poets will read these poems. Instead, anyone reading the book somehow becomes a poet (the death-of-the-author crowd should love this!). As poets, he tells us, we have work to do: Praising all creation, praising the world: That’s our job—to keep The sweet machine of it Running as smoothly as it can.

With words repairing, where it wears out, Where it breaks down.

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With songs and poems keeping it going.

With whispered endearments greasing its gears. (25) Here I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg’s epigrammatic question and answer, “What is the work? To ease the pain of living.” How wonderful to have a handbook for joy-filled, literate, loving and conscious inhabiting of the eternal world. I believe the beloved is smiling. Allen’s smiling too.

The Histor y of Anonymity

by Jennifer Chang. The VQR Poetry Series. The University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Julia Hansen

“What is // speaking: a voice or a mistake of hearing?”This question arises in the title poem of Jennifer Chang’s first collection, The History of Anonymity, and it is a question that resurfaces (in various forms) throughout the book. Is speaking something one does, or something one hears? When, Chang wonders, does mishearing become constructing? And, once speaking exists, does it exist on its own (as the gerund implies), or is its existence dependent on a speaker/ listener? Such questions of agency, authority, authorship, and identity rest (or lurk) beneath the gorgeous precision of these poems. Chang probes narrative more than she employs it—and these lyrics (be they short, long, or in a series) reveal a fascination with what for Chang are the related processes of constructing and deconstructing selves, language, landscape.

“We see this fascination with assembling and dismantling, with speech and silence, in the following excerpt from the poem “Pastoral”: . . . . . . . . . Something in the field. Coreopsis. I did not mean to say that.Yellow petal, has it wither-gift? Has it gorgeous rash? Leaf-loss and worried sprout, its bursting art. Something in the. Field fallowed and cicada. I did not mean to say.

(ll.11-19)

The poem names (Coreopsis; yellow petal; cicada) and refuses to name, or unnames (something; “I did not mean / to say that”). This constant selfrevision, underscored by the poem’s enjambment, creates a music-box effect: the

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poem winds up, halts, then begins again—often repeating only fragments of its previous utterances. Similar rewriting occurs within the lyric series “A Move to Unction,” where the archetypally-named Sister interrupts the lyric speaker’s telling of events: Mother had bones of wood beams. No, Sister says, steel—she was a skyscraper. That was why Father left her, never warm enough.

Too far from the ground.

(“I float in. I float out.” ll. 7-11) The speaker and Sister disagree over how to represent Mother (wood or steel; too cold or too distant), yet their voices seem to work together on the page even as they assert different metaphors/accounts. These forms of self-erasure, of partial disclosure and dissolution, create an aesthetics equal parts precision and blur. The blur applies to the particulars of self or story, allowing Chang to focus on primary questions: who speaks? who speaks truthfully? how do you speak? what is speaking?

Formally, this collection is impressive. Chang demonstrates a skillful, nuanced understanding of the line and stanza throughout, and draws on historical genres (essays, pastorals) as thoughtful frames for her poems—but it is in the title poem where we see Chang at her finest. “The History of Anonymity” features expansive lines that value their surrounding white space as much their words. It’s exciting to see and hear a poem—in a first collection, no less—that moves with such assurance not only through but into its pauses. “Anonymity is not a name / but an entrance” and “Perhaps anonymity is the ocean floor // without the ocean.”

This poem is an extended, passionate mediation on existence, its title capturing a central tension in the work: the longing to escape the definition(s) of self, and the longing to record the shape, sound, and evolution of thought. Full of necessary questions (And what am I?) and a necessary music (countenance, cliffs, crevice, cold, stone), The History of Anonymity happens at the intersection of silence and voice, making it an important addition to our poetries of identity, while also establishing Jennifer Chang as a rigorous and revelatory poet.

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Tones of the Sacred: Common Prayer

by Fiona Sampson. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2007 Reviewed by Tim Liardet

What immediately strikes the reader of the twenty-five poems that comprise Fiona Sampson’s outstanding third collection Common Prayer is their musicality: Messiaen’s piano throws notes like handfuls of stones to clatter against a glasshouse God. This elegant opening announces the book’s allegiance to sound, and to the relationship between sound and image. Ted Hughes cited Beethoven as the principle shaper of his sensibility as a poet. Daringly, Sampson has “Attitudes of Prayer”, a poem written after Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor, Op131, and a case could be made that Beethoven has influenced her sense of grandeur.

Elsewhere we might conjecture some profoundly English musical influences: this collection offers us the glitter of Britten, the lyricism of a Vaughan Williams.

As its title suggests, the cadence of liturgy is also central.Yet Sampson writes out of the lyric tradition, and six formal quadrameter sonnets, scattered through the book, ring cleanly: “Slim as a nun, I lie along / the margin of a borrowed bed / whose springs are texting, through my bones, / abandon hope […]” In this set the sacred and profane rub shoulders, as if one makes the other necessary.Yet their tempo is a surprising subversion of formal constraint, extracting the liveliest of responses from one of the tightest forms in the English language. Sampson’s sonnets are full of spring, euphony, treble and bass, ignited iambs and sound effects.

What makes Common Prayer so significant is the way in which it upholds the Keatsian notion that the source of metaphor should always be something beautiful; it actively conjures a notion of beauty, drawing on Donne and Marvell as much as it does on Keats.Whatever the subject matter, Sampson always ensures that her poems are rich and elegant. This is as true of her translations of Verlaine and Heine (“Pastorals”) as of the unrhymed sonnets of “Thresholds” or the hypnotic repetitions of a “Nocturne in Blue and Black”.

The book’s signature, however, is the exploded lyric. Extended poems offer a narrative, or explore a set of ideas, without sacrificing their lyric register.

Characteristic is the offset line, which tumbles images down the page with velocity and brio; mirroring the contrariety of consciousness itself. These lines shift from

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movement to silence, silence to movement, Sampson’s ear always attuned to the way every note is resolved in silence.

These exploded lyrics are wonderfully sustained. Their openings can be mesmerising, as in “Fog-bound”:“…the house / drifts / towards a bluish distance / where copses / stain the fog and pearl it.” They can strike the profound with the lightest of touches, as in “Mehr Licht”: “…and you must ask yourself again, / this morning, / how to bear / light […] ” “Trumpeldor Beach” is a study in the optical effects of light and Middle-eastern heat, culture and distance, in which everything is “seen for the first time” and thereby attains a sort of miraculous status. This is Sampson at her very best, taking sensual delight in the world: The modern city, tremoring against an early morning sky, sending itself upward in delicate white flame behind you, is hallucination.

It shifts in light […]

It is the ease of this which is most impressive; the commitment to language and the dextrous fingering of the notes. What begins in a kind of vers libre is finally nailed by the last two iambs. The whole passage has a kind of unashamed, explosive joie de vivre.

Sampson can be moving and intellectual in the space of a single breath; taking in both the realities of sickness and bereavement and the always-present possibility of divine love in a secular world. All this is beautifully orchestrated in seventy short pages.The bedrock which is always returned to, however, is human love: But – I want the miraculous you.

Want the dry hand awkward in my hand […]

It is a theme which is expanded in two visceral studies of hospital life. “Scenes from the Miracle Cabinet” records life and death on the wards; the elegiac “The Plunge” explores in detail the truths “beyond the night-lit corridor.”

Elsewhere, light, another overarching protagonist of Common Prayer, is set against a “…pane of deeper dark in darkness.” Spiritual longing is repeatedly set against human necessity, as Sampson’s diction shifts from the rarefied to the

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attractively demotic: “True, I’m pissed / again. But will the old alloy / always split along these seams— / is this, then, what incarnation means?”

This is an indispensable collection, both cerebral and bursting with emotion; its longing for communion transcendent but immediate. Its individual concerns – from the ecological to the sexual – may be all around us; but in marrying them together Sampson’s poetic project becomes unlike that of any other British poet. In a world that is increasingly commodified we need more books, such as this one, which restore our sense of the sacred.

A New World Voice: Fady Joudah’s The Ear th in the Attic New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Marilyn Hacker

New poets are published daily; still, amidst that plethora it is rare to find a voice, a book, which does not merely promise future accomplishment but delivers a palpable, considerable present achievement. One such is Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic, the first collection of a Palestinian-American poet who is also a physician and a bilingual, now internationally-recognized translator of poetry from the Arabic.

Joudah’s own poems defy classification, not because they perplex, but because of their remarkable power of synthesis. His mode is the lyric, with its concinnity and necessary music, but his lyrics compress, contain and then liberate the matter of narrative: allegory, fable, folktale, parable, documentary. He is a superb, seductive storyteller; still, his reader never knows if the tale into which s/he is led will end with children’s bodies hanging from bayonets (“Atlas”) or with a reconciliatory glass of sage tea (“The Tea and Sage Poem”). Sometimes an anecdote closes in wry humor.Yet Joudah does not “use” the lyric to convey information: rather, it is the information, the content, that is the soul and lifeblood of the form.

The fifteen-poem sequence “Pulse” establishes the scope and framework of the book, as it moves from an American professor theorizing war to “a desert night east of the Atlantic on the verge of rain” and a doctor’s observations of the intimate bystanders of war in their dailiness. These poems have various local habitations, two (although never named) suggest themselves immediately: Darfur, where Joudah worked on a six-month mission with Médecins Sans Frontières, and the omnipresent, impossible “home,” a village in Palestine whose colours, odors, textures and cadences are reflected in any and every other setting – whether an exiled father’s American garden or a refugee camp in the Sudan. Figs, grapes, the sycamore tree, a mule on a dusty road, the distant sea, sage tea. But in

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vivid counterpoint to these images with their risk of nostalgia is the language of a doctor’s unduped intimacy with the human body, and a constant intercourse between bodies and landscape, underlining unbroken connection.

In these poems, there is a pervasive sense of the discrete existence and humanity of the other – whether a grandmother in Darfur, a lover perceived through her own complex history, a patient in an American hospital ward, a parent haunted by the Nakba. Some poems encapsulate a story, not “the poet’s” on a page: “Scarecrow,” in which a peasant woman is stripped to refugee status; the parable of “the humanitarian man” and his dog in “Pulse 14,” a woman’s voice recapturing a distant childhood in “Mother Hair.” As in Darwish’s later books, there is a persistent and pervasive sense of a shifting but individual interlocutor: lyric though these poems are, the poet is addressing, engaging in dialogue, more than his own interiority.

Fady Joudah is on his way to establishing himself as a significant American poet, and a poet of the polyglot Arab diaspora, but also as a “world” poet, as we now think of Adrienne Rich, Adonis, Hans Magnus Ensenzberger, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Adam Zagajewski, Forugh Farrakhzad, George Szirtes, Derek Walcott and Mahmoud Darwish: poets whose work’s implications reach far beyond their own specificities and peregrinations to (potentially) engage an international readership.

Making Music

by Patrick Cotter. Three Spires Press, 2009 Reviewed by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Poet and critic Fred Johnston professed himself jealous, in a review in Kiosque, of some of Patrick Cotter’s earlier work. And so it will be for many poet-readers who will envy as much as enjoy the inventive, exuberant language and delicious surprises that are present in Making Music, Cotter’s second full collection after Perplexed Skin (Arlen House, 2008).

Making Music opens with the poem “Saint Barahane’s Butterflies” which has both a historic and a contemporary feel to its narrative. Barahane was a 5th century Irish hermit-monk and the narrator too is alone in his room with just a butterfly for company. In the poem, the insects of the title are “convulsed on buddleia nectar” and the narrator’s fists “stealth” after them. This vividness of verb usage and joy in language generally is a hallmark of all of Cotter’s work.The opening poem promises much for the reader new to his poetry and s/he embarks confidently into this collection on a journey through language that both informs and delights.

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Cotter enjoys referencing the historic while rooting his poems in a 21st century European aesthetic. In “Protecting the Eaters of Prayers” he echoes the ancient Irish poem about a monk and his cat “Pangur Bán” (“White Pangur”), but this poet’s cat is black and he chases angels, not mice. And here we find the recurring motif of this collection: angels. Patrick Cotter’s angels are not the frothy creations of New Ageists, nor are they the kindly Biblical type – these are the angels of one poet’s imagination and he teaches us about them and their ways with a sort of manic glee. Did you know – for example – that “purring is the approximation of angel speech” (“Protecting the Eaters of Prayers”), or that angels are nationalistic (“Angel Patriot”)? Or that they write books that languish in second-hand bookshops (“All You Need to Know about Books by Angels”)?

It is this sort of imagining that makes vivid self-contained narratives of many of these poems, while also linking them into a unified set. The best of these angel poems is perhaps the hilarious eight part sequence “Journal of a Failed Angel Whisperer” in which a docile angel disrupts the narrator’s life and has the local crows laughing and “shedding quills with slapstick abandon.” It all ends badly for the household of the angel, the whisperer and his motley crew of pets.

Cotter draws on folklore and the Bible to good effect in his work. He has a gift for the tilted angle; the back door is his preferred entrance into events and occurrences. In a poem about a saint’s vision of her wedding (“Saint Catherine of Siena’s Ecstatic Vision of Her Wedding at Grabhall Bay, near Crosshaven, Co. Cork”), Cotter displays his aptitude for approaching things slant and for placing the unusual in a poem and making it work. In this surreal and celebratory piece, for example, the groom offers his bride a slice of foreskin as a wedding ring – “a malleable band of His Holy Flesh,/sliced since infancy” – making it “a holy band of covenant.”

Cotter is an urban poet, as can be seen from an early poem entitled “On Not Being Kavanagh” (meaning rural Ireland’s poet-icon, Patrick Kavanagh).

Still, natural things feature frequently in his work and he has the ability to “bring the scarecrow to the city,” as poet Patrick Deeley said. Where Deeley had a scarecrow, Cotter has “milkseeping dandelions struggling up from dry gutterdirt,” and “a sad little girl” who plays all alone at shop and is poisoned by digitalis leaves because, as a city-dweller, she doesn’t realise they are dangerous (“Rumours”).

This poet likes to write about writing, too, and as a writer who is also a publisher and editor, he is well versed in the many sides of the process. He writes about the aging writer reading his earlier work in “Too Too,” where “the poet must read aloud time and again/the poems he composed when young” – and which the audience lap up – though the poet himself feels like a plagiarist “for being so different a person” from his younger self.

Patrick Cotter is a poet capable of being both playful and serious to excellent effect. His humour can be frenzied at times, in the poems in Making Music, but it

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is a softly done frenzy. He has a gift for creating a rueful narrative voice that milks both sympathy and laughs from the reader. The writing in this collection is always finely crafted; it is conversational but learned, seemingly effortless, and is studded everywhere with the poet’s vast and unusual vocabulary. He is a modern poet in the best sense of that word and he deserves many, many readers.

Mission Work

by Aaron Baker, forward by Stanley Plumly. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Reviewed by Tess Taylor

How do we find language for memory? What does it mean to belong to a lost time, or to a place whose language and cosmos is different than one’s own? What are the challenges of reclaiming such a lost or wholly other space in language? These are questions of diaspora, of exploration, of colonialism and postcolonialism, or as Elizabeth Bishop once put it, these are questions of travel.

In Mission Work, last year’s Bakeless prizewinning manuscript, Aaron Baker embodies his search to cast a lost time and another world in language.The poems retrace years Baker spent as the child of missionaries to the Kuman people, an aboriginal group who live in remote Papua New Guinean highlands. Baker’s book does not merely depict, but engages questions of travel—across time, across culture, across language—at the project’s heart.

In fact, the poems themselves are always aware of themselves as artifacts of the difficult journey of thought into language, and Baker moves not as a nostalgist but as an explorer. For him, there are no ideas but in things, no questions but in moments like the one in which his “neighbor the mudman dances, impervious to pain.“ Baker’s childhood speaker watches but “can’t tell if this is white or black magic, / his gestures to summon or ward me away.” In trying to capture the rich sensory experience imprinted on his childhood self, Baker proposes no rubric for belonging, no single philosophy for staking one’s identity in the sensory world. Instead, he offers lush rhythmic valences, sonic riffs, and landscapes he mines, hoping to “translate / the gloam wrapped mountain’s whisper.” He tries to fathom the paradox that “everywhere I look is home.” For Baker, “memory divides like the first language,” and we, all of us, lack even the words to say how “God is said to love from the other side of the silence.”

Yet language, which divides objects from concepts and cultures from one another also offers Baker—and each of us—the tools of sensory recall. Baker’s poems caress fragments of tale awake that they become tributes, offerings, objects that “worm through speech.” The poems try to acknowledge deep chasms in the world, and also, by moving deftly, to heal them.

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C ontributors ’ N otes

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Yehuda Amichai was born in 1924 in Germany and emigrated to Palestine in 1936. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages, including Chinese, Estonian, and Albanian. Considered one of the most important Hebrew poets of the twentieth century, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Israel Prize, his country’s highest honor. He died in 2000.

Shon Arieh-Lerer’s poems, translations, and articles have appeared in magazines such as Circumference, Modern Poetry in Translation, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chronogram, and World Literature Today. He works on endangered language preservation and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Margo Berdeshevsky's collection of poetry was published by The Sheep Meadow Press (December 2007).

Nicholas Benson’s poetry and translations have appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Calque, and other journals. His translation of Attilio Bertolucci’s Winter Journey was published in 2005 by Free Verse editions of Parlor Press. He was awarded a 2008 NEA Translation Fellowship.

Rosa Berumen is a poet and translator who currently resides in San Diego.

Chana Bloch is co-translator of six books of Hebrew poetry, ancient and contemporary, including the biblical Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (Norton, 2009). Her new collection of poems, Blood Honey, will be published by Autumn House Press in Fall 2009 and won the Poetry Society of America’s Di Castagnola Award. She is the author of three other books of poems, including the prize-winning Mrs. Dumpty.

Cyrus Cassells is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, and More Than Peace and Cypresses. His fifth book, The CrossedOut Swastika, is forthcoming in 2010 from Copper Canyon Press. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) Born into a German-speaking Jewish enclave in Bukowina, then Romania, now Ukraine. Celan is considered by many to be the greatest post-war Germanlanguage poet.

René Char (1907–1988) was influenced by the surrealists, his love of his native Provence, and his social activism. He was an active participant in the French Resistance movement, as well as an outspoken critic of nuclear missile silos in France. He is known for his economy of style, including his aphorisms and his short bursts of prose.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway, Ireland. Her third short fiction collection, Nude, appeared from Salt in September 2009 and launched at the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, the same month. Her poetry pamphlet, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car, was published by Templar Poetry in October 2009. She blogs at http://womenrulewriter.blogspot. com Ye Chun is the author of one book of poetry, Travel over Water (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2005).

Her poems and translations have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Web Conjunctions, Indiana Review, New Letters, Subtropics, and others.

Marsha Boston is a visual artist living and working in Escondido, California. Her work is represented in New York and San Diego galleries. Her work can be seen on her website: www.marshaboston.com

Peter Constantine’s most recent translations are Self’s Murder by Bernhard Schlink (Vintage Books, 2009), Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2008), and The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (Modern Library, 2007). He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov.

His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation.

Peg Boyers is Executive Editor of the humanities quarterly, Salmagundi Magazine and author of two books of poems, Hard Bread and Honey With Tobacco. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Skidmore College.

Patrick Cotter was born in 1963 in Cork, Ireland where he still lives and works for the Munster Literature Centre. His books include Perplexed Skin (Syracuse UP, 2008) and Making Music (Three Spires, 2009).

James Brook is a poet, translator, and editor living in San Francisco. His translations include Panegyric by Guy Debord, Resistance by Victor Serge, My Tired Father and Zenobia by Gellu Naum, Lives of the Gods by Alberto Savinio, and poems by Benjamin Péret. His own poems and essays have appeared in City Lights Review, Exquisite Corpse, Pharos, Gare du Nord, and other journals.

Patricia Crane’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, The Dos Passos Review, and others. She currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

B. H. Boston’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Boston is a Poetry Editor at Poetry International. His latest collection of poems is By All Lights (Tebot Bach, 2009).

Moya Cannon was born in County Donegal, Ireland and now lives in Galway. Her most recent publication is Carrying the Songs: New and selected poems, (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2007).

Chris Cunningham was educated at Stanford University and Duke University where he completed a Ph.D. in Literature. His poems have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as Slate, Iowa Review, Court Green, Southwest Review, and Best New Poets 2006. Twice a Pushcart nominee, he teaches at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.

Nancy Naomi Carlson is author of Kings Highway (WWPH), Complications of the Heart (Texas Review Press), and Imperfect Seal of Lips (Poems & Plays). Carlson is an instructor at the Bethesda Writer’s Center. Her work has appeared in such journals as Agni, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah. These translations are part of Stone Lyre, forthcoming from Tupelo Press.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), a Palestinian, is an essential voice in Arab poetry and literature.

His most recent collection in English, If I Were Another, is available from FSG.

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Stephan Delbos is a New England-born poet living in Prague, the Czech Republic, where he teaches at Charles University and edits The Prague Revue. His poetry and essays have appeared most recently in New Letters, Zoland Poetry, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Rain Taxi.

Regina Derieva was born in Odessa in 1949. She moved from the Soviet Union to Israel, but since 1999, she has lived and worked in Stockholm. In 2004 and 2005, the two volumes of her collected poems, Sobranie Dorog (A Gathering of Roads) were published in Russia. English translations of her poetry have appeared in Artful Dodge, Cross Currents, Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, and Salt and in the collection Alien Matter (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).

Patrick Donnelly’s collection of poems is The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003). He is an Associate Editor at Four Way Books and has taught at Colby College and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Geri Doran is the author of Resin (LSU, 2005). A recipient of the Walt Whitman Award and the Amy Lowell Scholarship, she currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Most recently, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, New England Review, Southern Review, Ninth Letter, and TriQuarterly.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of The Hardship Post, winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Prize (2009), and a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line, 2007). A second collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Award and was published in 2009.

Her third poetry collection, Stateside, will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2010.

Stephen Dunn is the author of numerous books of poetry, winner of Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his volume, Different Hours, and other honors. His work appears in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, and elsewhere.

Jonas Ellerström was born in Sweden in 1958. He is a writer, art critic, translator (mainly of poetry) from the English and the French, and publisher. He has twice received the Karin & Karl Ragnar Gierow Prize from the Swedish Academy. He is currently working with Malena Mörling on an anthology for Trinity University Press’ series The Writer’s World, to be called Swedish Writers on Writing.

Peter Everwine’s most recent books are From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems and Working the Song Fields, versions of Aztec poetry. He lives in Fresno, CA. Gerard Fanning was born in Dublin in 1952. A graduate of University College Dublin, he has published three collections with Dedalus Press. His latest collection is Water & Power. He is a recipient of the Rooney Prize and bursaries from the Arts Council, Ireland.

Anthony Farrington teaches creative writing at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His poetry currently appears in Hanging Loose, Lungfull!, New Orleans Review, RATTLE, and Saint Ann’s Review. His stories are forthcoming or have recently appeared in The Georgia Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Water-Stone Review, and several others. He received fellowships in 2007 and 2009 from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

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Carolyn Forché holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University. She is the author of four books of poetry, and editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. She is recipient of the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Award, bestowed in Stockholm. At present, she is working on a fifth poetry collection and a memoir.

Jeff Friedman’s fifth collection of poems, Working in Flour, has just been accepted for publication

by Carnegie Mellon University Press and will be out in fall 2010. His poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Margie, Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, 5 AM, and The New Republic.

His book of translations, Modern Hebrew Poems of the Bible, is forthcoming from Wolfson Press.

Michelle A. Galo graduated from Hartwick College in 2006 and is nearing completion of an MFA in Poetry with New England College. She lives in eastern New York.

Jacqueline Gens is a co-director of the M.F.A. program in poetry at New England College, which she founded in 2002 with Chard de Niord. For many years, she worked at the Naropa Institute (now University) before joining the staff of the late poet, Allen Ginsberg, in NYC. Her chapbook, Primo Pensiero, was published by Shivastan Press in 2008. She currently lives in southern Vermont where she hosts two poetry radio shows a month for WVEW 107.7 FM, Brattleboro Community Radio.

David Gewanter is author of two poetry books, The Sleep of Reason (Chicago, 2003), finalist for the James Laughlin prize, and In the Belly (Chicago, 1997), awarded the John Zacharis First Book award. He is co-editor with Frank Bidart of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (FSG; Faber, 2003), winner of an Ambassador Book Award (English-Speaking Union–US) and named “Book of the Year” (Contemporary Poetry Review). The recipient of a Witter Bynner fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer’s award, and a Hopwood award, he teaches at Georgetown.

Leah Goldberg was born in Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1911, raised in Kovno, Lithuania, and immigrated to Palestine in 1935. She published nine books of poetry, as well as fiction, a memoir, literary criticism, translations of literature from Russian and English, and a play.

Shortly after her death (Jerusalem, 1970), she received the Israel Prize, one of Israel’s greatest awards of artistic achievement.

Rachel Hadas is the Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University. Her forthcoming book of poems is The Ache of Appetite (Copper Beech Press), and she is coeditor of The Greek Poets from Homer to the Present (Norton, 2009). She is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, memoirs, and translations.

Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of Fishing Secrets of the Dead (Word Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Eclipse, Poet Lore, Fourth River, Atlanta Review, and RHINO. She serves as poetry editor for The Summerset Review and is vice president for marketing at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Marilyn Hacker won the first ever Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Hacker has published translations of poets: Venus Khoury-Ghata, Claire Malroux, Emmanuel Moses, Guy Goffette, and Marie Etienne from French, several of which have appeared in Two Lines:World Writing in Translation.

She is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Essays on Departure and Desesperanto.

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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. Conner’s Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Julia Hansen recently graduated from the University of Virginia with an M.F.A. in poetry writing.

Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and FREE VERSE. James Harms is the author of six books of poetry, most recently After West (2008) and Freeways & Aqueducts (2004) from Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has received an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, among other distinctions, and teaches in the M.F.A. Program at West Virginia University. He also directs the low-residency M.F.A. Program in Poetry at New England College.

Chris Hayes was recently awarded the 2009 Erskine J. Prize for Poetry from Smartish Pace. His work is also current or forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fourth River, and Fifth Wednesday. He lives in Water Valley, MS with his wife and daughter.

Samuel Hazo is the Director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, PA, and McAnulty Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University. He was the Pennsylvania State Poet from 1993 to 2003. His most recent book is The Song of the Horse: A Selection of Poems, 1958-2008.

Brian Henry is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Stripping Point (Counterpath).

His translation of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt) appeared in 2008. His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things is forthcoming from BOA Editions. A Serbian edition of Henry’s poems will appear in 2010.

Nazim Hikmet was born in Salonika in 1902 and grew up in Istanbul. A prolific writer, Hikmet wrote thousands of poems, as well as plays and novels. He was a political prisoner during most of his adult life, imprisoned for his Communist views and outspoken poetry. He was released from prison in 1950, but he was forced to flee the country, escaping by boat to Romania. Stripped of his Turkish citizenship in 1951, he lived the rest of his life in the USSR. He was given Turkish citizenship once again, posthumously, as a symbolic gesture in January 2009.

Ellen Hinsey is the author of Update on the Descent (Notre Dame University/ Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2009), The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University/ Bloodaxe Books), and Cities of Memory, which was chosen for the Yale Series award. She has edited and co-translated The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Paris Review, among others. She has received awards from the Rona Jaffe and Lannan Foundations and is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Paris and teaches at the Ecole Polytechnique and Skidmore College’s Paris program.

Jay Hopler’s first book of poetry, Green Squall, was published by Yale University Press in 2006. He is Assistant Professor of English/ Creative Writing at the University of South Florida.

Magdalena Horvat (poet and translator) was born in 1978 in Skopje, Macedonia. She is the author of the poetry collection, This Is It,Your, and translator of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Her translations of Macedonian and international authors have been published in several anthologies.

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Mark Irwin is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently White City (BOA, 2000), Bright Hunger (BOA, 2004), and Tall If (New Issues, 2008). Recognition for his work includes four Pushcart Prizes, two Colorado Book Awards, and fellowships from Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California. www.markirwinauthor.com Heather Galan James is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at San Diego State University and was an adjunct lecturer in the English Department at Mesa Community College in San Diego, CA. She has been a reader for pacificREVIEW, a literary journal of San Diego State University, and is currently serving with her husband as a Peace Corps Volunteer in El Salvador.

Veronica Jimenez has previously been published in Codices (1992), an anthology published by the Grupo Codice—the faculty of the Philosophy and Humanities departments of the University of Chile—of which she is also a member. She holds a degree in Humanities with mention in Language and Hispanic Literature from the University of Chile. She did her thesis on Cesar Vallejo and currently studies journalism at the University of Chile. Islas Flotantes (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Stratis, 1998) is her first collection to be published.

Mary-Catherine Jones is a freelance writer. In the advertising world, she has won some awards for brands like Target, Southwest Airlines, and Aveda. She recently sold a photograph—of cows.

This was after she moved to the sticks of New Hampshire with her husband and two children from New York City. She is pleased to publish her first poem here in Poetry International.

Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France and Luxembourg for forty years. He now lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry and poetics at SUNY-Albany. He has published over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations, most recently, Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 (SALT Publishing, UK) and Aljibar II (poems, a bilingual edition with French translation by Eric Sarner, Editions PHI, Luxembourg).

Fady Joudah’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, If I Were Another, is out from FSG. He is the recipient of the Yale Series for Younger Poets award in 2007 for The Earth in the Attic.

Chris Juhas teaches English on the island of Phuket, Thailand. He is a musician, a poet, a surfer, a mariner, a student of Jazz, and a teacher of Modern Harmonic Theory. He studied poetry at Loyola Marymount University where he earned a degree in English Literature.

Thomas Kane is a Ph.D candidate in creative writing at the University of Missouri. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Bat City Review, and Parthenon West Review. He edited and co-translated Tomaž Šalamun’s most recent collection of poems, There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair (Counterpath, 2009).

Annie Kantar’s poems and translations have appeared in American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Born Magazine, Post Road, Smartish Pace, Tikkun, and other publications. In 2001-02, she translated Israeli poetry as a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University. She has completed a translation of With This Night, the last collection of poetry that Leah Goldberg published during her lifetime. She lives in Jerusalem.

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J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. Three of the Rosnay translations, “What the Caterpillar Said,” “A girl is going to enter your brain…,” and “I’ve come to the end…,” first appeared in the collection, When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, published by Green Integer Press in 2009.

Jazra Khaleed was born in Grozny, Chechnya in 1979. Today he lives in Athens, writes and publishes exclusively in Greek, and is known as a boxer and poet. Translations of his poetry have appeared in World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, and Modern Poetry in Translation. He is an editor at the new wave Athenian literary magazine Teflon, and has translated German, American, and Australian poetry into Greek.

Fujiwara no Koretsuna (ca. late 12th c.) (Senzaishû 1236/1239) was a mid-ranking courtier.

Koretsuna participated in waka competitions (utawase) in the late 12th - early 13th c. His waka first appeared in the Senzaishû.

Steve Kowit’s essays have appeared in Skeptic, The Literary Review, Poetry International, The New York Quarterly, and Arts and Opinion. His most recent collection of poetry is The First Noble Truth (U Tampa Press). He is the poetry editor of Perigee Literary Journal and is the poetry critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune. His poetry teaching guidebook, In the Palm ofYour Hand:The Poet’s Portable Workshop, is well known.

Joan Larkin’s most recent collection, My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press), received the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. She is also the winner of the Lambda Award for Cold River. She teaches in Drew University’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program in Poetry Writing.

Yan Li is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and painter who lives in Shanghai. He is the author of six books of poetry, including Those Poems May Not Be Too Bad, Twilight Maker, and Give Back to Me, as well as two novels, Bring Mother Back Home and Meet 911.

Tim Liardet is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University in England and has produced six full collections of poetry. His third collection, Competing with the Piano Tuner, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and long-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998, and his fourth, To the God of Rain, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. The Blood Choir 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 shortlisted for the 2006 TS Eliot Prize for the Best Collection of poetry for that year. Priest Skear, a half-collection that turns the drowning of the twenty-three Chinese cocklepickers in 2004 into a political and existential allegory, is due in 2010. The Storm House, a book-length elegy for his brother who died young and in mysterious circumstances, is due from Carcanet the following year.

Frannie Lindsay’s third volume of poetry, Mayweed, will be released by The Word Works in 2010.

Her previous books are Lamb (Perugia, 2006) and Where She Always Was (Utah State University, 2004). She is the 2008 winner of The Missouri Review Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. They have also been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on National Public

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Radio’s Writer’s Almanac. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Kelly Lenox’s poems, translations, and prose appear in Dirty Goat 20, RHINO, Hubbub, and The Drunken Boat. She is co-translator of Voice in the Body (Ljubljana: Litterae Slovenicae, 2006), and Six Slovenian Poets (Lancaster, U.K.: Arc Publications, 2006). She holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a contributing editor for Hunger Mountain Magazine.

James Longenbach’s fourth collection of poems, The Iron Key, will be published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2010. He teaches at the University of Rochester and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program.

Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), was born in Bucharest, Romania. Exiled due to Romania’s antiSemitism during World War II, he was also an artist and innovator of rare livres-objets. He cofounded the Romanian Surrealist Group. In 1952, Luca arrived in France.With his companion, the painter Micheline Catti, he led a life of poverty in Montmartre. Evicted from his apartment, Luca (then aged 80) could no longer bear the stress, and on February 9, 1994, he jumped into the Seine and took his own life. His writings, mostly published by José Corti, include Héros-limite (1970); Le chant de la carpe (1973); Paralipomènes (1976); Théâtre de bouche (1984); La proie s’ombre (1991); La voici la voix silencieuse (1996) and Un loup à travers une loupe (1998).

Anne Marie Macari’s third book, She Heads Into The Wilderness, was published in 2008 by Autumn House Press. She directs the Drew University Low-Residency M.F.A. Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of ‘98.

Sarah Maclay is the author of The White Bride and Whore (both U of Tampa Press). Her poetry and essays have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, VerseDaily, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere.

She teaches creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University and is artistic director of The Third Area: Poetry at Pharmaka.

Nikola Madzirov (poet, essayist, translator) was born in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia. He won the Hubert Burda European poetry award and the prestigious Brothers Miladinov Macedonian poetry prize for the book Relocated Stone in 2007. His poems are translated into twenty languages.

He was selected for the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa in 2008.

Sarah Katherine McCann graduated from Princeton University (BA, English) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A., Poetry). A Fulbright Scholar in 2001, she continues to translate Modern Greek poetry. Her work has been published in many journals including MARGIE, New Voices (ed. Heather McHugh), Broken Bridge Review, South Dakota Review, and Hangin’ Loose.

McCann has been published in an anthology of poetry regarding the life and work of Robert Frost, Visiting Frost, and she has edited a book of poetry by the late American poet and Grecophile, Robert Lax, Tertium Quid (Stride Books). McCann has several translations from the Modern Greek forthcoming in Words Without Borders.

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Shane McCrae went to school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard Law. His poems have appeared in African American Review, New Orleans Review, Colorado Review, Octopus, Anglican Theological Review, and others. He lives in Iowa City and works at Iowa Legal Aid.

Professor Emerita of Rutgers University and teaches in the low-residency Poetry M.F.A. program of Drew University. The poems in the present issue will be included in a chapbook forthcoming from Marick Press, At the Revelation Restaurant.

Stephen D. Miller is an assistant professor of Japanese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is translator of A Pilgrim’s Guide to Forty-Six Temples (Weatherhill

Aldo Palazzeschi (Florence 1885-1974 Rome) had a distinguished career as a writer of essays, stories, novels, and poems. He won particular acclaim for the novels, The Materassi Sisters (1934), The Cuccoli Brothers (1948), and Roma (1953). Palazzeschi’s early avant-garde works, the anti-novel The Man of Smoke (1911), and the volume of poetry, The Arsonist (1910), from which the poem in this issue is taken, were both originally published by F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist press.

Inc., 1990) and editor of Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature (Gay Sunshine Press, 1996).

Rivka Miriam was born in 1952 in Jerusalem where she continues to live and work. She has published twelve books of poetry, two collections of short stories, and two books for children.

Miriam has twice been the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award; she has also received the Goldberg Prize and the Holon Prize, both distinguished awards for Hebrew literature. Her books include Said the Investigator (2005), Miracle Owner, and Other Passers-by (2006), and My Father Commanded Me Not to Die (2007). Miriam has worked for many years as head of Beit Midrash Elul, an important Jerusalem Jewish Studies center. These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam, translated by Linda Zisquit, has just been published by Toby Press.

Lorne Mook teaches at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. His first book of poems, Travelers Without Maps, was published in 2002. His translations have appeared in Literary Imagination, AGNI, and Poetry International 11 (2007).

Valzhyha Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press). She received the Cristal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2004, and in Germany, the Hubert Burda Prize for Eastern-European poets, in 2008.

Currently she is a writer-in-residence at the University of Baltimore.

Malena Mörling is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue and Astoria. She is currently co-editing the anthology Swedish Writers On Writing with Jonas Ellerström, which will be a part of The Writer’s World series from Trinity University Press. She is a Research Associate at The School For Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM and teaching in the Creative Writing Department at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Jesse Nathan is the author of Dinner, a chapbook of poems published by Milk Machine. He’s an editor at McSweeney’s Publishing, the managing editor of the Best American Non-required Reading, and a contributing editor at theRumpus.net. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, Sojourners, the Believer, and elsewhere. He lives in the fog on a hill near the geographic center of San Francisco.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of At the Drive-In Volcano, winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit, winner of the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year, and the Global Filipino Literary Award. New poems appear in Ploughshares, FIELD, and American Poetry Review. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence.

Alicia Ostriker’s most recent volume of poems is The Book of Seventy. Her most recent collection of critical essays is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. Ostriker is

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Francesc Parcerisas is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry, including Still Life with Children, Triumph of the Present, and The Golden Age. Considered the premier Catalan poet of his generation, a “miracle generation” of poets who came of age as Franco’s public banning of the Catalan language came to an end. His own poems have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Basque, Gallego, and Welsh, among others. Among his awards are the 1966 Carles Riba Prize, the 1983 Critics’ Prize for Catalan Poetry, the 1983 Catalan Government Prize for Catalan Literature, the 1992 Lletre d’Or Prize for his volume Triumph of the Present, the 1992 Serra D’Or Critic’s Prize for his Catalan version of Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern, and the 2001 Cavall Verd-Rafael Jaume Prize for his translation of Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos.

Sasha Parmasad was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago where she began performing and writing poetry as a child. She received her B.A. in English Literature and Studio Art at Williams College, MA, in 2002, and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Columbia University, NY, in 2008.

Her first novel, Ink and Sugar, which is a work in progress, won third place in the long fiction category in the First Words South Asian Literary Contest in 2003. Her essay, “To Keep My Body Clean, To Breathe, To Give My Mind Rest,” was published in the volume, Why We Write: The Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change (Routledge, 2006). She lives in New York City where she teaches Creative Writing, paints in her free time, and works towards the completion of a new manuscript.

Robert Peake studied poetry at UC Berkeley and in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University, OR. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Silk Road, and Rattle. He writes about poetry and poetics on his website, www.robertpeake.com.

Deniz Perin is a poet and translator living in San Diego, CA. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines nationwide, including Runes and Atlanta Review. In 2007, she was a recipient of the Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators. Her translation from the Turkish of Ece Temelkuran’s Book of the Edge is forthcoming by Boa Editions, Ltd. in spring 2010.

Stephany Prodromides is the author of Fishnet (forthcoming from Marsh Press), which was a finalist for both the 2008 Center for Book Arts and DIAGRAM chapbook competitions. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Barn Owl Review, Askew, CRATE and Drunken Boat.

Sebastian Reichmann was born in Romania where he published his first books of poetry, Geraldine (1969), and Initial Acceptance (1971). He left Romania in 1973 for Paris where he published prose poems in Minuit (Editions de Minuit), followed by five books of poetry: Pour un

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Complot Mystique (1982), Audience Captive (1988), Balayeur devant sa porte (2000), Le Pont Charles de l’Apocalypse (2003), and Cage centrifuge (2003). Translations of his poems in English appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Shirim, Talisman, and Two Lines. Jerome Rothenberg called him “a nomadic poetpar excellence.” In 2008 in Bucharest, Reichmann published a new book of poetry, The Klimt’s Moquette, in the Romanian language after three decades of writing only in French.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was born in Prague and lived in several places in Europe, including Munich where his relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé began, Worpswede where he met his wife Clara Westhoff, and Paris where under Rodin’s influence, he began his two-part New Poems, published in 1907 and 1908. In 1912, he began the Duino Elegies. Ten years later, in February 1922, while living at the Château de Muzot in Sierre, Switzerland, he completed this work and wrote all 55 of his Sonnets to Orpheus. Thanks to these and other poems, Rilke is widely regarded as the foremost German-language poet of the twentieth century.The twenty-eight poem sequence “Träumen” (“To Dream”) appeared in Rilke’s third collection of poems: Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned), published in 1896.

Ana Ristovic was born in 1972 in Belgrade, Serbia. She studied Serbian language and literature in the Faculty of Philology, Belgrade and has been publishing poetry since the age of eighteen. She has published five books of poetry: Snovidna voda (Dreamwater), 1994; Uže od peska (Rope of sand), 1997; Zabava za dokone kceri (Party for the lazybones daughters), 1999; Život na razglednici (Life on a postcard), 2003; and Oko nule (Round the Zero), 2006. Her poetry has been translated into German, Polish, Slovenian, Macedonian, Slovakian, Swedish, and English. Her first book, Dreamwater, won the 1994 Branko Radicevic award for the best first book of poetry in Serbia; her third book, Party for the lazybones daughters, won the 2000 Branko Miljkovic award; and she received the 2005 Hubert Burda Preis award in Germany for the best younger Eastern European poet.

Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein is Poetry Editor of the Jewish Quarterly in London, England. He is also Associate Editor of the art magazine Kilimanjaro, based in London. He is currently completing a term as a Visiting Scholar at Massey College at the University of Toronto and may be reached at poetry@jewishquarterly.org 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.

Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of poetry, including Poems for the Game of Silence, Poland/1931, Khurbn, and many others. He has edited numerous anthologies, including Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and the three-volumes of Poems for the Millennium. He lives in Encinitas, California.

Tomaž Šalamun has published more than 35 books of poetry in Slovenian and 11 books in English. His many honors include the Preseren Fund Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He also has served as Cultural Attaché to the Slovenian Consulate in New York. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages around the world. Woods and Chalices, translated by Brian Henry, appeared from Harcourt in 2008.

Fiona Sampson has published fifteen books, most recently Common Prayer (Carcanet, 2007), short-listed for the T.S.Eliot Prize, and a book of essays, On Listening (2007). She received the Newdigate Prize and was short-listed for the 2006 Forward Prize (best single poem). A Fellow in Performance and Creativity at the University of Warwick and an Editor of Poetry Review, she contributes regularly to The Guardian, the Irish Times, and other publications.

Minas Savvas, who retired after 38 years as a professor at San Diego State University, is the author of dozens of articles, a volume of his own verse, Scars & Smiles (Diogenes Press), and four books of translations (from the Greek) of the poetry of Yannis Ritsos.

Patty Seyburn received the Green Rose Prize for Hilarity (New Issues, 2009). She is also the author of Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State UP, 2002), Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach, and co-edits POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a hybrid memoir (The Book of Jon) and six books of poetry, most recently Body Clock. Her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light appeared in 2009. She has been the happy recipient of a number of awards, from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Fellowships, The National Poetry Series, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, among others. At present, Sikelianos teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.

Jean-Pierre Rosnay (1926-2009) joined the Resistance as a teen-ager, code-named “Bébé.” He published eight collections of poetry since the 1960s, most recently, Danger: falaises instables (2002) as well as three novels. He was the proprietor of the Club des Poètes in Paris, host of radio and television poetry programs, initiator of dial-a-poem and computer networks, editor of an anthology of poems of the Resistance and of the quarterly Vivre en Poésie. In English translation, his poems have been published in The Chowder Review, Denver Quarterly, Dark Horse, Mid-American Review, Onthebus, Plum Review, Poetry East, Takahe, Sulphur River Literary Review, Thunder Mountain Review, Zeugma and in the anthology The Poetry of Men’s Lives (University of Georgia Press, 2004).

Leonardo Sinisgalli was born in Montemurro in1908. Sinisgalli was an active Italian poet, fiction writer, painter, graphic artist, and essayist until his death in Rome in 1981. Sinisgalli’s books include his early collections of Cuore (1927), 18 poesie (1936), and Campi Elisi (1939), as well as his later works: Il passero e il lebbroso (1970), Mosche in bottiglia (1975) and Dimenticatoio (1978). His prose works include Fiori pari, fiori dispari (1945), Belliboschi (1948), Furor mathematicus (1944), and Horror vacui (1945). Sinisgalli was the founder of Civiltà delle Macchine (1953-1959) magazine and won two Biennale di Venezia awards for his work in documentary film.

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, where he is currently Staff Interviewer. A computer programmer, he lives in Northern California.

Kathleen Snodgrass’s translations of poems by Mexican poets, Fabio Morábito and Luis Miguel Aguilar, have appeared in such journals as Northwest Review, Poetry London, Crazyhorse, and The Marlboro Review.

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David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry, and most recently, The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled, Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled The Auroras. He is also the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.

Aleš Šteger has published four books of poetry, a novel, and a nonfiction book in Slovenian.

He received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry volume of the year, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, and the 2007 Rožanceva Award for the best book of essays written in Slovenian. His work has been translated into German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, Spanish, and other languages. He is a founding editor of the Beletrina publishing house, and he founded the Medana Days of Poetry and Wine festival. The Book of Things, a volume of poetry translated by Brian Henry, will appear from BOA Editions in 2010.

J. Hope Stein is studying at New England College.

Arthur Sze lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His latest book of poetry is The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2009). She writes and translates poetry and non-fiction in English, French, and Chinese. An editor at Cerise Press, she also works as a zheng concertist. She lives in Paris, France and New York City.

Tango of the Regent’s Residence (Senzaishû 1226/1229) served in the household of the Regent Kanezane in the late 12th - early 13th c. She frequently participated in waka competitions (utaawase).

Her style was considered to be “graceful” (yasashiki) by her contemporaries, and she is said to have devoted herself to the Buddhist path in her later years. This poem was included in the Senzaishû, the seventh anthology, compiled between 1183 and 1188.

Tess Taylor was the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident, and she has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work appears widely.

Maria Terrone is the author of two poetry collections: A Secret Room in Fall, co-winner of the McGovern Prize (Ashland Poetry Press) and The Bodies We Were Loaned, as well as a chapbook, American Gothic, Take 2. Her work has appeared in magazines, including Poetry, Atlanta Review, and Hudson Review, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She is Assistant VP for Communications at Queens College in NYC.Visit her at mariaterrone.com Jay Thompson was born in Redwood City, CA, and is currently a student at Washington University in St. Louis. He co-curates the Exploding Swan reading series, co-edits the journal Thermos (thermosmag.com), and has an essay on Barbara Guest forthcoming in Pleiades.

Lynne Thompson’s manuscript, Beg No Pardon, won the 2007 Perugia Press First Book Award and the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Margie, and Rattle. In 2009, her poem, “Voice,” was commissioned by Emory University’s Dance Department.

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Marina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia’s foremost lyrical and lyrically narrative poets, was born in Moscow in 1892. She led a tumultuous life, surviving the Russian Revolution, the Stalin years, the execution of her husband as a Russian spy, and the death of her daughter by starvation in a Moscow orphanage. Her ten collections of lyrical poems are not translated widely in English.

Orhan Veli was born in Istanbul in 1914. He is one of the leading founders of modern Turkish poetry. In the 1940s, he and his friends Oktay Rifat and Melih Cevdet Anday co-founded the Garip (“Strange”) Movement. Their manifesto, which served as the introduction to a collection of their poems published in 1941, stated that the language of poetry must be accessible to a majority of people, no longer merely to the “taste of a minority class.” His wild lifestyle was legendary: he is still known for his heavy drinking, torrential love affairs, and alcohol-induced accidents.

Sasha Vlad is a translator and visual artist living in San Francisco. His translation (with James Brook) of the Romanian surrealist novel, Zenobia, by Gellu Naum, was published by Northwestern University Press in 1995. Other co-translations from the Romanian surrealist poets Ghérasim Luca, Dan Stanciu, and Virgil Teodorescu appeared in Exquisite Corpse and Talisman.

Yona Wallach was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1944 and died in 1985 of breast cancer. With the publication of Things in 1966, she was hailed as a poet of demonic power. The groundbreaking “Tel Aviv Poets” emerged around the journals Achshav and Siman Kriah in the 1960s. She was a frequent contributor to Israeli literary periodicals and won the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for her poetry in 1978. A record of her readings/ musical performances was issued in 1982. Her other books include Two Gardens (1969), Collected Poems (1976), Wild Light (1983), Forms (1985), and Appearance (1985). Subconscious Opens Like a Fan: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach was first published in Israel in 1992 and is now in its 12th printing.

Michael Waters’ recent books include Darling Vulgarity (2006 finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2001), and Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). He teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University M.F.A. Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. He lives in Ocean, NJ. Afaa M. Weaver’s 10th and latest collection of poetry is The Plum Flower Dance (U Pitt, 2007).

His new play is Berea. He studies Chinese and works as a translator of contemporary Chinese poetry. His official website is: www.afaamweaver.com Charles Harper Webb’s book Amplified Dog won the Saltman Prize for Poetry and was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press. Shadow Ball: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. A recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Webb directs Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach.

Jennifer Welsh’s poetry and short stories have been published in L.A. Miscellany and The Truth About the Fact. She received her B.A. at Purdue University and her M.A. at Loyola Marymount University. She is a story editor for a variety of television documentary programming and also serves as the Producing Director of the critically-acclaimed Black Dahlia Theatre.

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. P O E T RY I N T E R N A T I O N A L

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Reed Wilson’s poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He directs the Undergraduate Research Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UCLA, and teaches in the UCLA English Department.

Christian Wiman is the author of three books, most recently Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. His new book of poems, Every Riven Thing, will be published in the fall of 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Chicago where he edits Poetry.

Martin Woodside's work has appeared in Limestone, Poetry Motel, Thought, Guernica, Pacific Review, The Connecticut River Review, The Hazmat Review, and The Cimarron Review. His poetry chapbook, Stationary Landscapes, came out in 2009 from Pudding House Press. The author of five children’s books, he earned an M.A. in English from UC-Davis and an M.F.A. from SDSU. Woodside is currently in Romania on a Fulbright.

Robert Wrigley teaches at the University of Idaho. Beautiful Country, his eighth book of poems, will appear in late 2010 from Penguin Books.

Gail Wronsky is the author of Again the Gemini are in the Orchard (New Poets Series), Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon Press), The Love-talkers (Hollyridge Press), and co-author with Molly Bendall of the Calamity and Belle books of cowgirl poetry, and Poems for Infidels (Red Hen Press).

Wronsky translated the Argentinean poet, Alicia Partnoy in Volando Bajito (Red Hen Press). Her chapbook, Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling: Poems from India, by Hollyridge Press, and Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems), coauthored with Molly Bendall, published by What Books, were released in 2009. She teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where she is Director of Creative Writing and Syntext.

Hai Zi (1964–1989) was born and raised in a farming village in Anhui Province, China. When he was fifteen, he passed the entrance exam to the prestigious Beijing University, and at twenty, he started teaching philosophy and art theory at China University of Political Science and Law. Between 1984 and 1989, he wrote about 200 poems and several epics. He committed suicide in March 1989 by laying himself on a railroad track at Beijing Shanhaiguan. His books published posthumously in China include Earth (1990), Works of Hai Zi and LuoYihe (1991), Poems of Hai Zi (1995), The Complete Works of Hai Zi (1997), Hai Zi (2006), Selected Works of Hai Zi (2006), and Poetry of Hai Zi (2007).

Linda Stern Zisquit has published three full-length collections of poetry, Ritual Bath (Broken Moon Press, Seattle, WA, 1993), Unopened Letters (Sheep Meadow Press, NY, 1996), and most recently The Face in the Window (Sheep Meadow Press, NY, 2004). Her translations from Hebrew poetry include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow Press, 1997) for which she received an NEA Translation Grant. Her translation, These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam, was published by Toby Press in 2009. She has recently completed a new manuscript of poems called Porous. She is Poetry Coordinator for the Shaindy Rudoff M.A. in Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, poetry editor for Maggid, and runs ARTSPACE, an art gallery in Jerusalem representing contemporary Israeli artists.

Ofer Ziv received his B.A from Sarah Lawrence College. He works as Speaker’s Representative at Blue Flower Arts, an agency that represents poet and writers for their appearances. In 2006, he won the Evelyn Lipkin Poetry Prize. This is the first publication of his work.

Nati Zohar is a former Israeli soldier. Zohar lives in Israel and works as a translator. He and poet Jeff Friedman are co-translating an anthology of poems by contemporary Hebrew poets.

Lisa Wujnovich practices poetry and organic vegetable farming. Her first book, This Place Called Us, features poetry centered on her twenty-year-old family farm, Mountain Dell Farm. She is a M.F.A. student in poetry at Drew University. This is her first translation, and she likens it to sorcery.

Bill Yarrow’s poems have appeared in Central Park, blossombones, ditch, Mantis, The Antigonish Review, The Centrifugal Eye, Rio Grande Review, and other print and online journals. He has work forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Pank, and Up the Staircase. He lives in Illinois.

Gon no Sôjô Yôen (1048-1125) (Kin’yôshû 637/680) became a Precept in 1098 and later held a major administrative position at Buddhist temples such as Gangô-ji and Daian-ji in Nara and Kiyomizudera in Kyôto. He became the administrator of Kôfuku-ji in Nara in 1121, and in 1124 was promoted to the rank of Provisional Abbot.This poem was included in the Kin’yôshû, the fifth Japanese imperial anthology, completed between 1124 and 1125.

Ghassan Zaqtan is a Palestinian writer of wide acclaim who has written ten collections of poetry, a novel, a play, and anthologies. He currently lives in Ramallah. His latest poetry collection is Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2008).

Nurit Zarchi was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. A pronounced feminist, Zarchi is a poet, essayist, novelist, and author of books for young readers. She is considered one of the leading voices in contemporary postmodern Israeli fiction and children’s literature. She has been awarded many prestigious prizes for her literary work, including the Bialik Prize and the Prime Minister’s Prize.

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