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New Books - 04/07
Way More West: New and Selected Poems of Edward Dorn, ($20 Penguin) edited by Michael Rothenberg (see "Readers" above) The late Mr. Dorn was a true iconoclast, a non-cowboy poet of the American West, both as myth and as is. His work ranged from early richly musical evocations of community to biting short social commentary. Only Dorn would condemn the advent of a certain safety device in cars, saying, "Those who let their attention wander / must not be encouraged to survive / by a bag full of air." This book offers a healthy selection from the prolific poet, including excerpts from his psychedelic, philosophical Western epic Gunslinger, and from his final collection, the (essentially) death-bed Chemo Sábe. Dorn's poetry feels as inexorable as weather; full of changes, biting, and lovely.
Indeed I Was Pleased with the World, by Mary Ruefle ($14.95 Carnegie Mellon) "The song that sustains me / has inaudible lyrics. / In all beauty and honesty, // Your guess is as good as mine," writes Mary Ruefle in her tenth volume, but no one's guess is quite like hers. As intense as anise, her mostly brief lyric poems are wry, surreal, and somberly poignant. Little parables, quirky and fearless contemplations, imaginative histories fill the book, which is dedicated to "the woman on the plane who helped me remove my coat." The domestic and the metaphysical, the minute and the cosmic intermingle -- "Will the world be brought in tonight / and given water and hay?" -- with unsettling, pleasing, and moving results.
Little Theatres, by Erin Moure ($13.95 Anansi) The copyright date on this inventive Canadian writer's most recent book is 2005, but it is new to the U.S. (or at least to us). A beautiful, mysterious volume, it can be as clear and sharp as well water or as confounding as a sudden storm. Some of it is bilingual, written in Galician, a language spoken in a corner of Spain, and English. The poems of one such section, "Late Snow of May -- Poemas de Auga," read like folk songs: "Today I married a cat of water. / I had to marry her, She called." Some of the book is written by Elisa Sampedrín, who appears to be an alter-ego (or heteronym, if one thinks of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, whom Ms. Moure "trans-elated" in a previous book). Ms. Sampedrín is the creator of little theatres, a challenging and ultimately touching concept that she writes of in poetry and prose -- "In little theatres there are but faces. Boots are faces, the table is a face, the grass stem has an expression that is facial." This is a haunting and haunted book.
Avocations: On Poets and Poetry, by Sam Hamill ($19.95 Red Hen Press) Poet, editor, translator, Mr. Hamill is also an engaged and thoughtful essayist. Gathered here are reviews, introductions, and essays he wrote during the 1990s. The study and practice of poetry, as he explains, has been his avocation for four decades. He brings to his prose pieces this same sense of ardor and rigor. He is generous with his praise for the work of poets such as John Logan, whose poetry "filled my ears with the music of being alive" when he was a troubled, young Marine, and Richard Wright, "as good as any haiku poet this country has produced." And he is unafraid to criticize those poems he believes have failed, doing so to illustrate what the art demands. Above all, he is an advocate for the timeless and borderless community of poetry and a believer in its power to change the world.
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