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New Books - 12/03
The Singing by C. K. Williams ($20 FSG) Barely published before it
received this year's National Book Award, this collection continues Williams 's investigation of humanness, in all its honor and horror-- "reality has put itself so solidly before me / there's little need for mystery. Except for us, for how we take the world / to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself." His mind, "this hive of restlessness," probes the individual and the global, the mundane and the shocking, seeking if not answers, then an understanding.
Eyeshot by Heather McHugh ($20 Wesleyan) A sweet, sweet book entangled all with seeing and being a sight. There is rarely as much joy in reading poetry as when one gets lifted into the Heather McHugh linguistic jet-stream. Gets her drift as it were. McHugh's music, word sense, and wordplay are of the tallest order, but her words are not at the service of frivolity. Or not just that. Nope; a tremendous depth of feeling fills this book. Read the poems out loud. The pleasure's in both the sounds and the soul settled in them.
Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems by Faye Kicknosway ($18.95 Wesleyan) These poems scorch. A number are not for the timid or squeamish. Movingly realistic or skillfully surreal, they are powerful pieces, often about power. They are filled with images of the body, with descriptions of its corrosive lusts, its unending labors, its secretions, smells, and inevitable decay. Gifted in the monologue, Kicknosway has written many, including a series based on the photographs of Walker Evans that was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Her characters, while often degraded or degrading, seem somehow still dignified, free of caricature. She is an artist as well, and her unusual calendar girls appear throughout.
The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry by Rafael Campo ($22.95
Norton) Physician-poet Campo lays out his argument for bringing poetry
into the examining room. Part memoir, part cultural-medical analysis, part anthology of the poetry of illness, Dr. Campo's book suggests not only that poetry can aid the sick but that it has the power to "heal medicine itself" by encouraging compassion and empathy.
I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare ($17 FSG) You'd be hard pressed
to find another book with blurbs by both John Ashbery and Robert Graves. Their joint praise of this 19th century British poet speaks to his originality and influence. Yet for quite some time few volumes of Clare's work have been available. This generous--and definitive--edition is most welcome. Clare was a nature poet with a keen and gentle eye, though he also turned his gaze to childhood and to lost love. Sadly, he suffered from severe depression and was institutionalized for nearly 30 years (see Theodore Roethke's moving poem "Heard in a Violent Ward"). This collection includes Clare's account of his walk home after escaping from an asylum, as well as a helpful chronology, introductory essay, and glossary of terms.
Paean to Place by Lorine Niedecker ($10 Woodland Pattern & Light and Dust) This remarkable poet (a house favorite at Open Books) would have turned 100 this year. To honor the occasion, the publishers have produced a facsimile edition of her stunning, autobiographical poem, originally written out in an autograph book and offered as a gift to a friend. What is it about a book in an author's hand that is so exciting? In Niedecker's case it's not just the intimacy of the handwriting, it's also the knowledge that we are seeing the work exactly as she intended it-- a rare achievement for her. Though this edition would have been better served if the publishers had printed the book in its original size, still we're grateful to have a copy of this gem. Also included is an essay about the poem and the poet by Karl Young.
Two collections of prose by the much loved and still missed Oregonian poet William Stafford have just been published. The University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series offers _The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life_ ($17.95). Gathered from magazines, news-papers, and Stafford's own notes, the pieces resonate with his thoughtful, moral, at times wry voice--"Try to listen to poems in neutral." Milkweed Press has brought out the timely _Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War_ ($16), edited by his son Kim. Early in his life Stafford embraced pacifism and served as a conscientious objector during WWII. This four-part volume includes an excerpt for his memoir about the CO camps, a generous selection of his previously unpublished daily writings, poems, interviews, and essays, all contemplating war, the politics that enable it, and the challenge for an individual to be an instrument of peace. He wrote, "To hold the voice down and the eyes up when facing someone who antagonizes you is a slight weight-once. But in a lifetime it adds up to tons."
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral translated by Ursula K. Le Guin ($34.95
University of New Mexico) Though not nearly as well known or as widely
translated as her fellow Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Mistral was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Her work can be intense, passionate, and imaginative. Le Guin has drawn from all five of Mistral's books and her uncollected work but emphasizes her later poems, resisting the frequently sentimentalized version of Mistral to present what Le Guin sees as Mistral's stronger, "dark, difficult" poetry. Here's an excerpt from "Doors": "To knock on a door disturbs me / every time I do it. / The dry threshold glitters / like a bared sword, / the panels quicken / into fleeing antelope. / I come in as if I were lifting / the cloth from a covered face." This is a bilingual edition.
A Wake for the Living by Radmila Lazic translated by Charles Simic ($14
Graywolf) Irreverent, sexually frank, intense, comic, this contemporary
Serbian writer's poems may remind you of the work of Kim Addonizio--but with an Eastern European flavor. From "Conjugal Bed,": "In my eyes you're a wet matchstick. / I'm a package of meat in the freezer of your chest." In his introduction to this bilingual volume, Simic suggests Lazic is "both out to break taboos and to keep the tradition of women's lyric poetry going."
Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website
($14.95 Sourcebooks) Poetry Daily (www.poems.com) features a new poem eac
h day on its site, with the editors drawing from a variety of contemporary literary magazines and recently published books. For this leap-year's worth of poetry, they've selected work by the well known (John Ashbery, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, Linda Gregg) and the less so (John Brehm, Larissa Szporluk, Matthea Harvey, Mark Turcotte). The resulting anthology is smaller than a laptop and requires no power but mind.
What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland ($14 Graywolf) The door to
the world of Tony Hoagland opens easily--his language often that of contemporary speech--and once there, you'll recognize the place, with its televisions, SUVs, chiropractors, Chinese restaurants. Though not without its days of sun (he's not afraid to write a love poem), the weather in Hoagland is often the cloudbank of the tender curmudgeon that can lead both to the lightning-scorch of cultural criticism and a misty wistfulness as well.
Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty
Verse translated by Red Pine ($18 Copper Canyon) This famous 13th
century anthology has been given deft treatment by both translator and press. Each brief, evocative poem receives its own page as well as a facing page for the original and the translator's helpful annotations.
Note: Red Pine will read from the collection and show slides on January 29 at 7 p.m. at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Tickets to the event, a fundraiser for Copper Canyon Press, are $25 and will be available at Open Books.
Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis ($19.95 Bloomsbury/Tin House) This book collects Ms. Davis's poems of yearning and recollection, which are absolutely shoved along by music and wordplay. Hers is the personal poetry of a lover rich in betrayals, a mother, and a religious soul, all delivered at breakneck pace. So much goes on in these poems that an excerpt would be intolerably misleading. Angry taunts, seductions, and beseeches to the Lord fill this book, and all in a glorious stuttering singsong.
Letters can make for compelling reading. Amazingly two important collections of correspondence have been published within weeks of each other. From Stanford comes _The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov_ ($39.95), an 850-page volume edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi. What began with a cryptic fan letter from "RD" in 1953 blossomed into a deep friendship that eventually was sundered because of the poets' vastly different approaches to the Viet Nam War. Nearly the entire body of their correspondence remains -- amounting to over 450 letters. Wesleyan has published The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky ($65), which spans 35 years. Editor Barry Ahearn's meticulous notes accompany 565 letters from Williams and 162 letters from Zukofsky, replicated here with all their misspellings and odd punctuation. Together these collections offer unprecedented access into the lives of four of America's most profoundly influential poets.
Fall is annuals time. The Best American Poetry 2003 ($16 Scribner) features choices made by guest-editor Yusef Komunyakaa and series editor David Lehman. "Best" is, of course, relative, but this series does gather a
wide range of American poets from a wide range of magazines. The latest
editions of the two most-used marketplace books are in stock now, as well. The cover of the 2004 Poet's Market ($24.99 Writer's Digest) claims "over 1,800 places to publish your poetry." Perhaps it should say "places to try to publish your poetry." Poet's Market also contains essays and interviews by and with writers and editors. The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses 2003-2004 ($35.95 Pushcart) claims "Thousands of Markets for Writers" and it delivers. No articles or interviews here, but lots and lots of publishers, large and small. This book can be fun reading, too, thanks to the great variety and wackiness of many of the listings.
Chemo Sábe ($15 Limberlost) is a chapbook culled from poems Edward Dorn wrote over the two-and-one-half years he lived after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Dorn was known, but not well enough, for beautiful, musical, and acerbic writing: "My tongue has been / my genius and my downfall." These poems deal directly with various drug regimens and their consequences on the body and mind. This is angry, funny, and sad work, as one would expect, but it's all presented in Dorn's highly individual and achingly clear voice. This book is issued in a letterset edition of 650 copies sewn in paper wraps. We have to report that some of the page impressions are quite light; nothing illegible thankfully, but a bit annoying.
The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades ($19.95 U. Alabama) presents a generous collection of poetry by George Starbuck, one of the most original American poets writing (very often metrically regular, rhyming verse) from the 1960's until his death in 1996. His sense of humor was crisp and wicked, and he was strongly political, turning his honed gaze and ear toward the stuff of speech and ridiculous culture. Honestly, any description of George Starbuck's work is a disservice. But try this: his wit and compassion were and are electric.
Poker by Tomaz Salamun ($10 Ugly Duckling) Mr. Salamun seems always to be uncovering, line to line, word to word sometimes, a magical and uncomfortable world. Ah, the pleasures of the Eastern European voice, where one finds everything inevitable and un-anticipatable at once. "Parallel bars Hegel little flowers in nature / are three phenomena of the universe / Moses fell from diapers into history / and in gray socks waits for the West to collapse." This fine, funny, off-kilter book is co-translated by the author and the young American talent, Joshua Beckman.
It's good to have a selection of George Oppen's poetry available again in paperback. Drawn from the recently published New Collected Poems, this Selected Poems ($14.95 New Directions) is edited by Robert Creeley, who has written an introduction. Also included are Oppen's only known essay, a collection of fragments, a chronology, and a selected bibliography.
Collected Poems by Ted Hughes (FSG $50) Hughes, writes Seamus Heaney,
"took on the grief of the generation that preceded him, the generation bound to the dead of the First World War, and transformed it into a healer's vision. And there was something homeopathic about his celebration of plants and creatures, since [his] poems were essentially reminders that we are all part of the same fabric." Nearly 1400 pages deep, this volume stretches from juvenilia through his final and previously uncollected work.
Long considered one of Britain's finest 20th century poets, Basil Bunting was praised by both Pound and Zukofsky, yet his work has been frustratingly hard to find in the U.S. New Directions has remedied the situation by releasing his Complete Poems ($16.95), which includes his Collected Poems and Uncollected Poems.
Back in print at last is Barbara Guest's biography of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Herself Defined: H.D. and Her World ($21.95 Schaffner Press), which Elizabeth Hardwick called a "brilliant literary biography., one of the finest I know." Also available again are the first three volumes of Christopher Logue's vivid, unusual retelling of parts of the Iliad, now combined in one edition, War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad ($16 University of Chicago Press). Copper Canyon Press has brought back John Balaban's translations of Vietnamese folk poetry, Ca Dao Viet Nam ($15), in a revised, expanded bilingual edition. Toward the end of the Viet Nam war, Balaban traveled the countryside, recording not only these songs but also the occasional mortar round.
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