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New Books - 12/04
Return to the City of White Donkeys, by James Tate (Ecco $24.95)
Mr. Tate is the poet of manners for our age. His prosey poems fizz
strangely and beguilingly with the humor, pathos, discomfort, and affection
that arise from social interaction, albeit in the usual Tate-like unusual
circumstances. Revealing conversations are had ("This man named Gordon came
over to me at / a party last week and said he had known me in / a previous
life. 'You were a shepherd,' he said."); boundaries are crossed ("'You're
looking at / your own statue. Isn't that against the law or / something?'");
strangers arrive ("I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory / smoking a cigarette
when a goat appeared beside me."); sometimes the authorities are called
("'You're under arrest," he said. / 'What in the world for?' I asked utterly
/ confused. 'Too much happiness,' he said."), and friendships are formed
("'Do you often attack old men with your fish?' he said. 'You're my very
first,' I said. He reflected / on that for a while, then said, 'Perhaps we
should celebrate to mark the occasion.'"). This is a collection of charming,
odd chucklers, but they're not without their touching moments ("The soul's
mansion is ancient, and / sadly needs repair. Throughout the huge, windy
rooms / a song still lingers, faint murmur or hum, forever, / yesterday, or
never again."
Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, by Eirin Moure [aka Erin Mouré] (House
of Anansi $14.95)
Canadian poet Mouré has created what she calls a "transelation" of
Fernando Pessoa's _The Keeper of Sheep_. Pessoa, a marvelous Portuguese poet
who died in 1935, wrote under several names (in this case, Alberto Caeiro),
hence Ms. Mouré's tinkering with her own name here. She has embraced
Pessoa's work in a way that is faithful to the spirit of the text but not
always to its literal meaning. Thus instead of traipsing around the hills of
rural Portugal in the early 20th century, we are guided along the streets of
contemporary Toronto -- "Let's be natural in ourselves, and calm / in
happiness or difficulty, / And hear creeks when we look, / See hills when
we're walking, / And when those little daily deaths draw close, remember day
ends / and sunset is beautiful, and beautiful the soft night that remains. /
That's how it is, and so it is. // Here on Winnett Avenue and Bond Street
and at Braich-y-Ceunant / and in the dusky world.." But that is not to
suggest that this is not a translation of Pessoa's book -- it is. Indeed, it
is one of the few bilingual editions of his work (Ms. Mouré insisted on the
parallel texts so that her "deflections" would be visible). This is a
movingly intimate and kind collection, both because of the poems and because
of the relationship between the "transelator" and her "master." A fine
example of poetry feeding poetry.
Poems from Ish River Country: Collected Poems and Translations, by Robert
Sund (Shoemaker & Hoard $25)
A bit of history may be in order. Mr. Sund was an essential Northwest
poet. He studied at the U.W. with Theodore Roethke and was from the
generation of David Wagoner, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo. But unlike
them, Mr. Sund stayed outside of the academy. He lived his life in small
towns in Washington State, and his poems are gems of the region and the
person. His imagery was surprising and accurate ("No wind at all. / The sky
is a sailboat, / scarcely moving.") and he was emotionally involved in his
writing ("Of what is done, / take -- and be kind. / I am building a voice
for my grief.") His wrote in the clear American language and diction of
William Carlos Williams and James Wright. Mr. Sund studied classical Chinese
and Japanese poetry, and included in this volume are his versions of Issa,
Buson, Basho, and others. Their influence on his view of life and on his
later poetry is clear, as in the crisp poem "Enough": "Guiding a stray bee /
out of the house -- / Enough work for one day!" For years people have asking
for copies of his out-of-print books. We are truly thankful his wonderful
poems are available again.
After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, translated from the German
by Eavan Boland (Princeton $19.95)
Ms. Boland took the title for this searing anthology from a line by
Wislawa Szymborska -- "After every war somebody must clean up." The nine
German-speaking women poets she has translated here wrote "in the shadow" of
World War II, "an overwhelming historic tragedy [that] marks this work and
drives these poems toward a unique intersection between public and private
expression." As Irish poet Boland states in her strong introduction, her
interest in this writing was "not abstract"; the Troubles in her home
country made her keenly attuned to poetry written out of "violent,
oppressive, and often cruel" times. She was also drawn to work by "those
whom war injures and excludes in a particular way -- in other words, women."
The collection begins with a poem by Rose Ausländer titled "Motherland": "My
Fatherland is dead. / They buried it / in fire // I live / in my
Motherland -- / Word." Though not a large anthology, it is enhanced by
biographical information for each author and a bilingual format -- and the
poems collectively provide depth and resonance, hauntingly so. Included is
this piece, "In This Amethyst," by Nelly Sachs: "Age-old nighttime is /
stored in this amethyst. / An early intelligence of light / set fire to this
sadness / which then still flowed, / still wept. // And still your dying
shines -- / hard violet."
Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951 - 1991, (Turtle
Point $21.95)
This is a generous collection of letters, weighing in at 470 pages, by
Mr. Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was a member of the New
York School. His tone is terrifically chatty, showcasing a liveliness of
mind that absolutely sparkles on the page. He's gossipy and open (from a
letter to John Button, "a step is heard in my bath -- I faint and try to
hide your letter -- the one I'm writing I mean -- it suddenly seemed as big
as a stove --"), and quirkily thoughtful about art and poetry. This from a
letter to Fairfield Porter, "Repeating, even parodying ourselves seems
inevitable; but after a little time has passed, it's often hard to say which
flower bloomed first, and whether one is wax. So much of art is an
exercising of an achieved style.." Reading this collection one feels
welcomed, embraced, and moved along into the wild world of the painters and
poets that were foremost in America's cultural offering of the time. Mr.
Schuyler wrote such funny, bright, caustic, and achingly close-to-the-bone
letters it must often have been a great pleasure, and sometimes a worry, to
have one turn up in the mail. Here's a bundle.
Ariel: The Restored Edition, by Sylvia Plath (Harper Collins $24.95)
Here are the poems of Sylvia Plath's collection as she had them in
manuscript at the time of her suicide. After her death, Ted Hughes edited
the manuscript, removing twelve poems (which he did include in her
_Collected Poems_) and adding fifteen to the collection, which was published
in 1965. The point here presumably is not to seek reason to bash Hughes but
to see the volume that Ms. Plath was preparing for publication. This book
includes, after a non-judgmental and informative foreword by daughter Frieda
Hughes, the poems in their Plath-arranged order, then a facsimile of those
same poems as they were left typed in a binder, some with small editing
notes. To show Ms. Plath's process, there follows facsimiles of four
hand-written and four typed drafts of the poem "Ariel." Included as well are
comments written by Ms. Plath about some of the poems for a BBC interview.
Rounding out the volume are notes by David Semanki on the poems and their
changes. Seeing something of the process behind work which had a large
impact on Twentieth Century poetry in English is valuable. It's valuable,
too, to get a glimpse at the work someone does in order to write a good
poem.
Evil Corn, by Adrian C. Louis (Ellis Press $18) This at once comic,
heart-breaking, and beautiful collection of short prose pieces shows Mr.
Louis to be his same clear-eyed, straight-talking, fearless self. An
enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe, he has edited Native
newspapers and taught on the Pine Ridge Reservation. However 1999 found him
needing to take a teaching position at the "College of Corn" in Minnesota --
"But something about the place gives my bones the heebie-jeebies. Left to
the sun and rain, this land of quaint squares of dark soil sprouts a bright
uniform green from road to road that murders anything natural.. This is
subjugated land, strangely industrial and rural at the same time." He rents
a farmhouse, periodically making the long drive back to the nursing home
where his wife is dying of Alzheimer's -- "Sweet, fractured woman,.take
these sorrowful dances of ragged memory; take these merciless dandelions,
these laughing, yellow songs of toughness mounting weakness." His critical
eye spares no one, certainly not himself, and not his fellow teachers, his
students, America, even God, who is "senile too. His white beard is caked
with Campbell's Chunky Chicken Soup." This is a fierce and gentle book. One
of his beloved dogs recently dead, he stands with the other on a frigid
Minnesota night -- "We're two old curs, palsied by the foul scent of ghosts,
but we are still alive. Despite graveyard blues, despite lonesome boners, we
can still snarl and on some ethereal, yet-to-be stolen prairie, our
ancestors smirk."
The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, by Mary Jo Bang (Grove $13) This, Ms. Bang
's fourth book, gathers together poems based on a wide variety of pieces of
art, works ranging from a David Lynch movie to a Roman painting found on an
architectural fragment. Between those poles one finds the artists Sigmar
Polke (several inclusions), Margaret Bourke-White, Willem de Kooning, and
several others. Ms. Bang is not, happy to say, simply describing pieces of
art, it's more like she is occupying them. Or that she is translating them
as one would poetry from another language. The poems are painterly, layering
the tricks of language -- music, meaning, symbol, and arrangement -- on one
another like pigment on canvas. Her line breaks often cause the sense of a
sentence to turn on itself ("She admits before this she was ever / at the
midnight / of not nearly ready"), like when one color turns another color
into a third. She can be quite funny (a character from a Cindy Sherman
photograph lives in "Grackleville") and can write a lovely image, as in "Let
's pretend // it's a picture illustrating the notion / that beauty is a
bridge / trembling under today.." The certainty one finds in children's
fairy tales is at work in these poems. That, and a kind of oddness and an
occasionally dark tone. "Stand up, sit down / like MissPriss. Do you want a
bit / of sweetness? Or nothing? What a trap. / In every barred box there is
a bonbon. / In the ear, a head-vexing mouse squeak." Excerpting these poems
is a bit like scraping paint from a painting to give an idea what the
painting looks like. Isn't that always the problem in explicating art?
New Books - 11/04
Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco $23.95) The Nobel Laureate
didn't live to see the publication of this volume of new poems. Written out
of "deep old age," they are elegiac, praising, questioning, and
contemplative: "The passing away of people and things is not the only secret
of time. / Which calls us to overcome the temptation of our serfdom. / And
to put on the very edge of the abyss a table, / And on the table, a glass, a
pitcher, and two apples, / So that they magnify the unattainable Now."
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 by Sharon Olds (Knopf $16.95
paperback; $28.95 hardcover) A generous collection of Ms. Olds' intense
poems of family, love, and loss, drawn from all seven of her previously
published volumes.
Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder (Shoemaker & Hoard $22) The first
collection of new poems in two decades from the former Washington State fire
lookout, including a particularly timely section about Mt. St. Helens.
Written in a mix of styles, the volume includes a number of haibun, the
Japanese prose-and-haiku form, and concludes with a response to the
destruction of the giant Buddha sculptures in Afghanistan and to the events
of 9/11/01.
Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great by Nicanor Parra (New
Directions $14.95) The first bilingual collection in 20 years from the
Antipoet (think antimatter) of Chile, filled with charming, irreverent,
political, and touching poems, and some drawings, as well.
In the Dark by Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon $22) The latest from the
octogenarian National Book Award winner. Though her eyesight is failing, she
continues to diligently search and reveal her world with both humor and
sadness.
The Insistence of Beauty by Stephen Dunn (Norton $22.95) In his
plain-spoken but thoughtful way, Dunn investigates the tenuous but insistent
states of love and desire, how they can dissolve and then appear elsewhere.
Rousseau's Boat by Lisa Robertson (Nomados $12) The small but
hardworking press from Vancouver, B.C., has just published a chapbook by
this innovative Canadian writer-- "I am confusing art and decay. /
Elsewhere, fiction is an activity like walking. / Any girl who reads is a
lost girl."
The Unsubscriber by Bill Knott (FSG $20) Mr. Knott has been a
store favorite at Open Books since its inception. He can write a
terrifically caustic short poem ("I wish to be misunderstood; / that is, /
to be understood from your perspective.") and is uniquely imaginative. Only
Knott would write, "Cemetery statuary / should be deciduous," the individual
traces falling from sculptures and tombstones until spring comes and "all
the chisel / foliage should follow, until the whole / museum from within is
risen."
A Defense of Ardor: Essays by Adam Zagajewski (FSG $24) In this
prose collection, the Polish poet writes of literature, fellow poets, and
history-- "Imperishable things drift through the air, mixed with what is
passing: it's someone's job to sort them out."
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