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New Books - 06/02
_Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works_ edited by Jenny Penberthy ($45, Univ.
of California) "My life is hung up / in the flood / a wave-blurred /
portrait // Don't fall in love / with this face- / it no longer exists / in
water / we cannot fish." If ever the arrival of a book called for
celebration, here it is. This thick and exhaustively researched volume
gives us at last the full breadth of the fine work of a phenomenal poet.
Niedecker (1903 - 1970) lived much of her life on Black Hawk Island,
Wisconsin, working mundane jobs and writing in relative obscurity. Though
championed by such poets of stature as Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos
Williams, and Robert Creeley, her name has been much less known and her
writing much less published. We can only hope that now more readers will be
able to savor her spare, honest, sometimes challenging, sometimes playful,
truly original work. For a smaller and less expensive (and frankly, a
little more attractively designed) collection of her poetry, look at _The
Granite Pail_ ($14.50, Gnomon), which has been a store favorite here for
years.
_Human Landscapes from My Country_ by Nazim Hikmet ($39.95, Persea Books)
The renowned Turkish poet would have turned 100 this year. To mark the
occasion, the complete text of his much praised epic poem has been published
in English for the first time. Also now available, in a revised and
expanded edition, _Poems of Nazim Hikmet_ ($17.95, Persea) contains 100
poems written by "one of the great poets of social consciousness," as Edward
Hirsch has called him. Imprisoned in Turkey for 13 years then exiled for 13
more, Hikmet is considered the first modern Turkish poet and one of the
important poets of the 20th century.
_Out There Somewhere_ by Simon Ortiz ($16.95, Univ. of Arizona) The title
of this powerful collection is the common Acoma reply when someone comes
looking for someone. As Ortiz explains, he, like many Native people, has
lived out there somewhere -- "away from our original homelands, cultures,
and communities." Much of his work reveals, mourns, and decries this
separation, though he also affirms his bond with his people and land in
songs of praise, honor, and pleasure. His poems and prose pieces can be
harrowing and comical, unaffectedly straightforward and experimental.
_You Never Know_ by Ron Padgett ($14.95, Coffee House) This is a
pleasurable book, sometimes close to silly (it's probably not for everyone),
sometimes fingering sadness. Never pretentious, it talks to you from your
kitchen table (often the odd one that appears in dreams), or at the county
fair (with huffy geese), or in a drawing of the Alps (you'll have to draw a
bridge to get across). Padgett speaks plainly, but his poems aren't plain.
_Swan Electric_ by April Bernard ($22, Norton) In her first collection
since 1993, Bernard offers poems that are wryly passionate, smoothly quirky.
Here are some "disheveled sonnets," an autobiographical sequence about days
in New York's East Village, and a closing series of hallucinatory and often
humorous poems featuring a talking crow, Jimmy Stewart, and William Blake
among others.
_Among the Musk Ox People_ by Mary Ruefle ($12.95, Carnegie Mellon)
Imaginative and often unnerving, Ruefle's poetry can hold its own with that
of Simic and Tate. This is serious play, where chewy ideas pop out of
birdhouses, pemmican, and black umbrellas. There are sighs and laughter,
too. This is her seventh collection.
