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New Books - 12/05
NEST OF THISTLES, by Annie Boutelle (Northeastern $14.95)
Ms. Boutelle,
born and raised in Scotland, reflects on her upbringing there, and the
cultural changes that took place with her move to the U.S. A notable change
is in her language. The book includes a glossary to help with the delightful
Scots peppering many of these poems. "Words," addresses her fading
vocabulary directly: "When did I forget how to plowter, how / to be
scunnert, how to look for foozle // under the bed?" Great fun, this
language, and the glossary is quite useful. There is a sweetness
underpinning Ms. Boutelle's recollections, but her childhood clearly
occurred under difficult circumstances. Her Scotland is a grim, hard place.
The hometown, Oban, is described as "old and stern and cut from granite, for
its houses look with contempt at the sea." That difficult landscape is
mirrored in the lives lived. Ms Boutelle refers to a brother who died in
infancy, the early death of her father, and her aging mother's death in many
of these poems. Her affection for place and lost family are deftly expressed
in "Song," which beings, "At night my mother is the washwoman / who bleaches
the clouds, and my father / the baker who kneads and shapes the hills." The
poem ends with the dreamily poignant, "The moon's sorrow undoes the day. /
The chatter of sparrows undoes the night." Ms. Boutelle survived and
celebrates those hard years with wit: "If you can see / Mull it's going to
rain, and if you can't see Mull it's raining." Through vivid imagery and a
deep compassion for place and people she brings her Scotland to life.
JEJURI, by Arun Kolatkar (New York Review of Books $12.95)
This
volume is a welcome addition to the list of "classics" reclaimed by NYRB.
Lauded in his native India when it was published in 1976, Mr. Kolatkar's
book has been practically unknown in the West, though it was written in
English. Jejuri is a series of poems invoking a trip to the town of Jejuri,
a holy site that is at once beautiful and ridiculous, defiled and adored.
These are vivid, moving, humorous, utterly charming poems, somehow both
gently mocking and deeply respectful -- "what is god / and what is stone /
the dividing line / if it exists / is very thin / at jejuri / and every
other stone / is god or his cousin." With refreshingly straightforward yet
often startling writing, the poems take us from the arrival of the bumping
bus filled with pilgrims, through the tours of the decrepit temples -- one
led by the priest's earnest but skeptical young son home on vacation -- to
the endless wait at the station for the departing train: "the booking clerk
believes in the doctrine / of the next train / when conversation turns to
the time / he takes his tongue / hands it to you across / the counter / and
directs you to a superior / intelligence." It's easy to see why Salman
Rushdie called this collection "one of the great treasures of modern Indian
literature." Also included are a helpful introduction and notes.
FACTS ABOUT THE MOON, by Dorianne Laux (Norton $23.95)
The poems of
Ms. Laux's fourth book are stitched with praise, with an almost stunned joy
at being alive. But she makes clear, in her plainspoken but not inelegant
writing, that that praise is edged in pain, the joy hard won. As in her
earlier books, she often turns her eye to the intensities and complexities
of family life ("Terrible thing, the family," she writes, including herself
in the group), and to the wondrous and moving in the everyday. The poolhall,
kitchen, couch, curb, porch, and bed are among her poetry's locales. She
warmly conveys her surprise at the beauty and comfort that can rise with
luck and endurance: "This is what we sometimes get / if we live long enough.
If we are patient / with our lives."
INVOLUNTARY LYRICS, by Aaron Shurin (Omnidawn $14.95)
"Poetic constraints quicken me," writes Mr. Shurin in his one lengthy and
pleasurable foot note for this volume, "foils to my florid sensibility and
voluptuary lexicon." The constraint in this case is that each of his lyrics
uses as end-words the end-words of a Shakespeare sonnet, only reshuffled
(and toyed with at times -- an original "amiss" becomes "a Miss / Thing,"
for example). The involuntary element refers to his letting the day make his
subject -- "The quotidian acts as a given, just as Shakespeare's language is
a given in the poem." And the result? A book of New Wave Elizabethan verse
that is a thrill to read. The poems are sexy, funny, wistful, and elegiac
(AIDS haunts the San Francisco backdrop). Some are hyper-condensed, making
them a puzzle to solve; others are more languid and colloquial, though
always Mr. Shurin's phrasing is inventive and almost physical in its turns.
Here's the start of LXXVI -- "Chill in the air -- yes, _that_ again --
proceed / as if inexorable time had pride / in its new coat / (like I do:
_change, season, damn you, / change / already, I want to wear it!_) or some
such argument / about October and what it remembers of us.."
IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF ANOTHER COUNTRY, by Etel Adnan (City Lights
$14.95)
The latest book from this Lebanon-born poet, fiction writer,
and essayist is a vigorously political and personal collection of prose,
much of it composed of brief poetic paragraphs with repeated headings, such
as "Weather," "People," "Place," "Politics," "Business," or the quite
particular "Household Apples," "My House My Cat My Company." As she explains
in her introduction, Ms. Adnan's paragraphs are "responses" to William Gass'
s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, in which he wrote about an
unnamed place. She follows his structure to write about Beirut, the
troubled, compelling city she left and returned to, as well as about her
life in California and her travels. Her paragraphs can be simple, harsh, and
lovely, at times unsettling and often tinged with anger or sadness -- "I am
always away from something and somewhere. My senses left me one by one to
have a life of their own. If you meet me in the street, don't be sure it is
me. My center is not in the solar system." The volume also includes a
haunting meditation on T.E. Lawrence and closes with a piece called "To Be
in a Time of War," written in 2003, as war in Iraq was beginning, and
composed entirely of infinitives -- "To let dusk fall or rather, shadows
climb. To light the lamps. To avoid the news. To wash one's hands. To dry
them carefully. To shake one's head and everything in it."
FUNNY, by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Wisconsin $14.95)
What a book. Ms.
Hecht takes humor as her focus and she focuses tightly. Most of these poems
begin with or include a familiar joke. Some are shaggy dogs; most are quick,
Henny Youngman-like patter jokes. Her poetry involves, then, occupying the
joke further, after the punch line. For instance, in "Horse Makes a
Decision," she starts with the joke: "Horse walks into a bar, orders a
scotch. / Bartender says, Hey, why the long face?" That's the joke as it's
customarily told. She, however, follows with, "It's who I am" and goes on
from there. The concept is a potentially entertaining one, her realization
of it is often laugh-out-loud good. And extending some jokes is not all she'
s up to. This book is a meditation on humor, and includes at its end
"Afterword: An Essay on the Philosophy of Funny," a prose piece that cites
Plato, Dickinson, Kant, Schopenhauer and others. Ms. Hecht offers the
opinion that poems and jokes are "arts of sudden knowledge., appreciated
when they succeed in snapping us out of our daily trance." Her investigation
of humor is bright and informed, and yields some great aphoristic lines,
such as, "jokes are one part suddenness and one part grief." This book works
as an intelligent exploration of "funny" and is quite often very funny in
the process. The caveat to all this praise is that Ms. Hecht begins each of
the three sections of poems with a sonnet, and the weight of the formal
constraint lies too heavily on what she is trying to say. That minor
complaint is easily brushed aside, though, in a book this rich in
originality and verve.
THE VOICE OF ROBERT DESNOS: SELECTED POEMS, translated by William Kulik
(Sheep Meadow $13.95)
It's very good to have again, after years without,
a readily available book of poetry in English by this spectacular French
surrealist. "If I like trains it's no doubt because they go faster / than
funerals / last tango you're only a bugle-call at the end of / a corridor"
is a fine example of his compelling, almost careening early work. Mr.
Desnos was associated with Andre Breton's Surrealist movement, and as a
young man proved himself capable of writing quick, comic, non-logical,
beautiful poetry. In the 1930's he moved from the word-play-heavy approach
and wrote poetry that melded the dream world and the external world.
"Morning shatters like a stack of plates / In a thousand shards of porcelain
and hours / bells / and waterfalls / On the zinc bar of this very poor
bistro.." The Depression was on, and war was brewing, facts that found their
place in his poetry. "France is a hornet's nest, Europe a rotting field /
and the world a peninsula of my consciousness.." He was a journalist by
trade, and during the war worked with the resistance, finally being taken
prisoner by the Germans in 1944. He was moved to a series of camps and died
of typhus two days after the end of the war. His poems have a warmth, an
embrace so broad he reminds one of Whitman. And he had a seemingly
indomitable will to live. At the end of this book is a translation of a
letter Mr. Desnos wrote to his wife from Buchenwald in 1944, which begins,
"Our suffering would be unbearable if we couldn't think of it as a passing
and sentimental illness." His unwillingness to accept the horrors he
witnessed as being the truth of life is a tribute to his spirit, and the
good humanity that survives in his poems.
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