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Books in December 2011
Nine Acres by Nathaniel Perry ($14 APR)
This collection offers deceptive pleasures. You might think that since it's composed entirely of 16-line poems of four four-line stanzas, with rhymes and near-rhymes scattered throughout and each poem ending on a rhyming word, the book would suffer from monotony. Yet that’s not at all the case. The formal constraints press against Perry's lively, agile mind as it celebrates and contends with agrarian life. The resulting poetry has a measured elegance that makes room for surprise. One imagines that farming works this way, a blend of pure routine and the unexpected.
"Introduction"
I'll start this with an ending, or something
like an ending, at least there's tension
and fading
light. In the back field, our neighbor
Lee's long field behind us, we were sliding
along the muddy pasture road
-- the dogs, the boy and I all out
for a walk at dusk -- when a coyote,
bright as tomorrow, opened and shut
and opened again the woods' dark doors
then stilled to stand and look at us.
The dogs trembled and communicated
with a quickening of every muscle
while I tried just to read the animal's
face. But all I got was the starkness
of form: that which hunts before me,
that which is not dark in the darkness.
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Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen ($19.95 Cinco Puntos)
"What does it mean to have a disability poetics?" asks Jennifer Bartlett in her preface. "What was the history of the movement? What about poets, much like myself, who have a disability, but do not align themselves with identity poetry or the disability poetics movement?" Some of the many possible answers to these rich questions are explored in this fascinating anthology, which includes not only a large selection of aesthetically diverse poetry but also essays by or about the poets included. Starting with "Early Voices," which includes the work of Larry Eigner, Vassar Miller, Josephine Miles, and others, the book travels through "The Disability Poetics Movement," featuring such writers as Jim Ferris, Petra Kuppers, and Jillian Weise, then focuses on the "Lyricism of the Body," with work by, among others, Alex Lemon, Brian Teare, and Lisa Gill, and closes with "Towards a New Language of Embodiment," a gathering of writing that leans toward the experimental and includes work by Norma Cole, C.S. Giscombe, David Wolach, and more. As but a small sample, we offer this poem by Ona Gritz --
"Hemiplegia"
Left, my bright half, gets all of it...
soft sharp prickly wet lined.
But press your head agains my right shoulder,
I sense weight but no warmth. Your cheek,
to my right touch, stubble free,
whether or not you shave.
Under my right fingers your silver hair
holds no silk, nor can I feel it part
into single strands. I'll tell you
how I know you in the dark.
Left whispers the details.
Right listens and believes.
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Kintsugi by Thomas Meyer ($14.95 Flood Editions)
Beneath the understated, dark cover of this hand-size volume is a singular, elegant elegy from Thomas Meyer for his long-time partner, the poet, photographer, and publisher Jonathan Williams. The understated appearance of the book dovetails beautifully with Meyer's lovely, grounded approach to his grief. The end of Williams's life is conveyed with touching effect through simple, direct images and language --"I often mistake the watering can for the cat. / For that matter any flux of shadow / seems to be him coming to find me."
The poems are thoughtful, intelligent, wistful. Meyer's soft, even tone calls for the reader to come close, to be utterly engaged with a captivating person who is both reticent and compelled to speak.
from "48 Pieces"
You whom I never dream of I dream of
your tender final sleep
and think of
those kids lost in the woods
praying to a sonnet of angels
to protect them:
Go, my envoy, into
the month spring comes.
Gathered up and let go. Honeysuckle, wysteria.
A river of stars. Hold my hand.
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No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo ($29.95 Belknap / Harvard)
When the Chinese poet, essayist, scholar, and human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, an empty chair on the Oslo stage held his medal. He was, and is, being held in Jinzhou Prison, serving an 11-year sentence for what his government called "incitement to subvert state power." Little of his writing was available in the United States at that time, but now Harvard has published this collection of many of his prose pieces and 15 of his poems, and in April 2012, Graywolf will be bringing out June Fourth Elegies, a gathering of his poetry.
The title No Enemies, No Hatred is drawn from his written response to the charges presented at his 2009 trial -- "I have no enemies, and no hatred.... Hatred only eats away at a person's intelligence and conscience, and an enemy mentality can poison the spirit of an entire people." This volume serves not only as a window into contemporary China but as a stark reminder of the vulnerable treasure that is free speech -- "Whatever the rights issue might be -- security of property, opportunity for self-development, the struggle for human rights or self-rule, a more equitable distribution of society's wealth, or long-term peace in society -- it will rest ultimately on questions of freedom of speech and political freedom." The poems placed throughout the book are as filled with quiet intensity, many written to his wife, Liu Xia, and to others who have mattered deeply to him, like the young protester who was killed at Tiananmen Square --
from "Your Seventeen Years"
...I have learned, from your seventeen years
that a life is a simple and unembellished thing
like a horizonless desert
requiring no water
requiring no adornment of tree or flower
to withstand the ravages of the sun
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Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner ($15 Coffee House)
Yes, we've made room for another novel at the Poem Emporium. Because it's written by a poet, with a poet as its protagonist. And because it's a fine read. Ben Lerner is the author of three collections of poetry -- The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), and Mean Free Path -- all published by Copper Canyon and all inventive books that are as intelligent as they are humane, not to mention beautifully written.
Leaving the Atocha Station, which is also the title of a John Ashbery poem, is crafted with a lighter touch but is clearly from the same skillful hand. A young man is awarded a fellowship to study in Spain (as was the author -- how far this fiction veers into autobiography one can't know, and needn't). He arrives with a rudimentary understanding of Spanish, an underdeveloped project, and pills meant to keep him level, which he augments with unprescribed medication. He is altered -- by displacement, chemistry, language, his own prevarications, and eventually by relationships and events, one tragic. The journey he makes in these pages is as much interior as it is geographical, and his narration of it is moving, compelling, and often quite funny. Lerner's poetry is laced with humor; his novel has delicious ribbons of it. This is a clear-eyed look at the messiness of becoming one's authentic self, presented with candor and affection.
I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life," especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possiblity. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.
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40 Watts by C.D. Wright ($12 Octopus Books)
This paperback release of a limited-edition hardcover is a welcome addition to Wright's work and marks her return to the short lyric. As in her book-length series, most recently the National Book Award-winning One with Others, the poems here contain masterful excisions of detail -- a snippet of conversation, a glimpse into a room, a sifting fragrance -- and from them flows a presence both fleshed and haunting. Just 40 small pages, but they fill the mind.
"Poem with a Dart of Color"
stopped getting the bottled
water then the paper cut off
the phone stopped buying
sunflower seeds essentially
went off grid yet the goldfinch
was back inspecting
her afflicted face
through the unwashed glass
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