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New Books - 03/07
Captivity by Laurie Sheck ($25 Knopf) At once intimately specific and
coolly elliptical, Ms. Sheck's book-length series of poems is a graceful and
bracing meditation on identity and otherness, on the self as captive of --
and at times captivated by -- the mind, the body (particularly the body in
illness), others, and the world. "Thinking is a truceless act," she writes,
"How it holds the injured _yets_ and _thens_ inside it, so many layers of
barter / And resist." Interspersed throughout the volume, and serving to
highlight this notion of outsiderness, are "removes," poems that draw on the
captivity narratives of early America (accounts by settlers of their
abduction by Native Americans) -- "Every day in another language. / As when
we passed a hill where one of their villages once prospered./ .An _apart_
pierces and yet at times I cross a dark most near them. I've been a long
time now / From walls, that grip of certain." This is a quietly powerful
book, beautiful and complex, and filled with lines that bear rereading, and
quoting -- "How to know what shuts what opens. / What consoles does finding
console does losing. / This pastureland all curves and openings leading to
farther openings and closings, / While sentences break in me because I am a
thing that breaks."
Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson ($22 Houghton Mifflin) Art, history, and
science are interwoven with the personal in these richly musical and
metaphysical poems. Ms. Gregerson's subjects range from the
"counter-blossoming" of a spring snow to the training of a falcon to the
torso-like sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz to the properties of magnetic
force, which is "animate, or imitates a soul." She attends to her subjects
by seeing into them and then through them into social, political, and
philosophical landscapes -- "the world you have to live in // is the world
that you have made." Though her vision can be a dark one, it is not without
compassion or reverence. The book's closing poem, "Elegant," is a profound
and skillful examination of, and elaboration on, a recent genetic study of
the roundworm, which found that some cells are programmed to die, thus
revealing "how close to the heart of [life] death / must be." "Death was
not an afterthought.," she writes, "leaves / preserve the tree by learning /
to relinquish it."
Domestic Violence by Eavan Boland ($23.95 W. W. Norton) The unsettling
title of the Dublin-born Ms. Boland's elegant, poignant, and fierce new
collection only partly refers to difficulties within individual households,
pointing as well toward Ireland and Irish history in both broad and personal
terms. "This is an island of waters," she writes, "inland distances / with a
history of want and women who struggled / to make the nothing which was all
they had / into something they could leave behind.' She is particularly
attuned to the lives of women, those who ran the spinning machines, her
mother at the "singing kettle," herself in her native country -- "I remember
the way it was when I was young, / wanting the place to know me at first
glance / and it never did, / it never did." Her poems are music- and
image-rich -- "I drove through Clonakilty in early spring / when the air was
tinged with a color close to vinegar, / a sure sign of rain." Yet they are
absent the tinted lens of nostalgia, their subjects honored by Ms. Boland's
sharp vision and skillful recording. She is a "conservationist," assisted by
"the last / and most fabulous of beasts -- language, language."
One Big Self: An Investigation by C.D. Wright ($15 Copper Canyon Press)
This book-length piece is the result of C.D. Wright's visits to three
Louisiana state prisons with the photographer Deborah Luster. First
published to accompany the photographs, it appears here on its own, a
complex and intense work that crackles with Ms. Wright's unique phrasing,
vision, and intellect. "This is a flock of sorrows, of unoriginal sins..
Your only mirror is one of stainless steel. The image it affords will not
tell whether you are young still or even real." She set out, she explains,
"not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize
immeasurable levels of pain."
What she has done is render vividly and viscerally the prisoners, some
of those whose lives have intersected with theirs, the prisons, the land
that holds them, and to a certain extent the society from which all have
sprung. As with her other writing, she does not remove herself from the
picture, giving the work an added intimacy. She gathers her language from
the words of the guards and the prisoners, as well as from signs, a 19th
century board game, hymns, and other such varied sources. She presents that
language in lists, letters, lyric poems, fragments, prose, and questions and
answers. Though her topic is difficult and sad, the piece offers moments of
tenderness, humor, beauty -- "Dear Child of God, / If you allow me time. To
make a dove. I will spend it / Well.. Working my best memory. Of a bird I
first saw nesting. // In the razor wire." An unusual, drenching, and
thought-provoking book.
Rise Up ($14 Wave), Matthew Rohrer's fourth solo book, is a gathering of
poems presented in a nonchalant, softly comic voice. The speaker often seems
to be an acutely observing bystander -- "police / throughout the city
wearing / new pants, with cargo pockets / because of the increased threat /
it was important to stress." The stance of the poems is more surreal than
emotional, but Mr. Rohrer embraces his environment with lovely imagery.
"Bring blue milk home from / the corner where they / bottle the day." And
his desire to be kind rises often, as when he writes, "Ellen / I say slowly,
I'm sure you will succeed / in your endeavors. Those are / not the words I
planned to say. / I was still awakening from a dream of the distant war."
Matthew Rohrer will be participating in the Seattle Poetry Festival on April
22nd. Visit www.poetryfestival.org or call (206) 706-2624 to learn more.
Kevin Young's fifth collection, For the Confederate Dead ($24.95 Knopf),
opens with "Elegy for Miss Brooks" and closes with "Homage to Phillis
Wheatley," fitting and touching honorings of these two black, female icons
of American poetry. In between are lively, musical, and sometimes mournful
poems that animate both the poet's personal history and our complicated
national one as well. Through imagined voices and his own lyrical one, Mr.
Young creates deeply felt portraits of, among others, a black homesteader,
an outsider artist, a character named Jim Crow, and most powerfully, his own
grief following the death a dear friend -- "I'm cross with God / who goes on
sleeping -- // what I'd give to have / you here & hear you sing." Kevin
Young will read for the Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series on March 13th
at 7:30 PM at the Intiman Theatre. For more information, call (206) 621-2230
or visit www.lectures.org.
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