If you see something you'd like, click place an order.
New Books - 05/04
Happily the latest edition from Library of America's American Poets
Project is Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems ($20). Mr. Fearing published
from the 1920's through the 1950's, a major talent who is sadly
under-appreciated. His compelling, long-lined poems feature a hard-boiled
voice, and he makes no secret of his anti-capitalist, anti-materialist
beliefs. But Fearing's poems do not suffer from stridency. His work includes
collaged voices, rich music, and a (loving) vision of the individual as a
willing composite of cultural and economic forces. Try these lines from
"Dear Beatrice Fairfax": "Foolproof baby with that memorized smile, /
burglarproof baby, fireproof baby with that rehearsed appeal, /
reconditioned, standardized, synchronized, amplified, best-by-test baby with
those push-the-button tears, // Your bigtime sweetheart worships you and you
alone. // all wrapped up in you like the accountant in the trust, like the
banker trusts the judge, like the judge respects protection, like the
gunman needs his needle, like the trust must give and give--"
It's easy to imagine Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan waiting in the wings,
notes Robert Polito in his introduction.
Long a voice of and for innovative writing, Kathleen Fraser has
recently released two new volumes. From Apogee Press comes Discrete
Categories Forced into Coupling ($12.95), a collection threaded with an
almost painterly attention to detail, from which the mind begins its
journey -- "I understood, too, that writing on a lined page, particularly
within the covers of a notebook, has provided me with a landscape of
continuous blue horizons, below which I can sink, above which I may again
rise, so that each line extended and wrapped into the next enacts a kind of
hope." The Canadian press Nomados has published Hi ddevioleth i dde violet
($12), a typographically and linguistically active piece set during
Easter/Passover and bustling with spring and a household waking -- "Shutter
latc / h creaky bang purrs above / trees' abundant smattering / lushness.
Furry / opened by unseeen hand / light greens."
Birds and poets are the primary residents in Snow Water, the latest
collection from Belfast-born Michael Longley ($10.95 Wake Forest). His
affection for both shines clearly, sometimes as elegy, as in his poem in
memory of Kenneth Koch -- "Tuck your head in like a heron and trail behind
you / Your long legs, take to the air above a townland / That encloses
Carrigskeewan and Central Park."
"There is an outside beyond the farthest / thing we can imagine,"
writes Marvin Bell in his latest book, Rampant ($20 Copper Canyon), and
those lines seem to capture the tenor of this work. Several poems occupy
specific places, but the sense throughout is of appearance being only one
aspect of the truth. In "A Sky," a poem concerned with the September 11th
tragedy, ashes fall across history and cultures. "The universal principle,
it took place time and again. / Above the sky falling, there was always
another sky. / . But the new sky was still out of reach, though it seemed
lower." Mr. Bell works in the personal, too, as when he writes about the
intersection of memory and photography -- "I have a cold spot in my brain /
where the light settled."
Scratchy with energy, brazen, coolly blazing, dazzling with
multifarious connections, Macular Hole is Catherine Wagner's second
collection from Fence Books ($12). Her language can be rich -- "the world at
night was twitching and flapping out / from my congress, and I gathered it
in and dreamt / to my outnumberment"; or telegraphic -- "Felt so alert I was
frightened"; or straightforward -- "The reward for buying / Is the bought
thing." A new mother, Ms. Wagner also includes several unsentimental poems
about childbearing -- "Working for another until one is more than exhausted
/ is not the same as having perfect love for him."
|
