If you see something you'd like, click place an order.
New Books - 09/07
Little Boat by Jean Valentine ($22.95 Wesleyan) What a pleasure to have yet another exceptional book by Jean Valentine -- a little boat bearing her
crisp, shining poems. It's the pleasure that comes from reading work that is
generous in its intimacy and in its expectations of the reader -- work that
offers and requires care and attention. Spare, dreamlike, and muscled with
emotion, her poems are precise and resonant, their focus often loss. There
is about them an unadorned, questing spirituality, as well as a sense of
ethics born of deep honesty. They are remarkably personal poems yet
relatively empty of personal detail, thus opening themselves to all. Here in
its entirety is the poem "Hospital: Scraps" -- "Scraps of hard feelings /
left on the floor / winter material // But out the window / sun on the snow
/ Dressmaker's pins / -- somebody's soul / a feminine glint in the trees."
The Drug of Art by Ivan Blatný ($15 Ugly Duckling) Ivan Blatný's saga
matches his poetry for oddity and a charmed persistence. A well-known Czech
poet, he announced his defection from Czechoslovakia while traveling in
England in 1948. He was off-and-on institutionalized in asylums in England,
declared dead on Czech radio, and finally rediscovered when a British woman
contacted the Czech writer and publisher, Josef Skvorecký, regarding a man
in a local mental institution who was writing poems on scraps of paper in a
language she could not understand. The resulting book of poems convinced
Blatný's physicians that he really was a poet, which got him a private room
and a typewriter. The poetry is always haunting, from the outward looking
early work, translated to retain its regularly structured rhythms and
rhymes, to the wonderfully gentle and wildly agile free verse that came
later. "A group of factory buildings may be called a plant / God the
linguist teaches us to breathe." A sweet nostalgia inhabits much of his
poetry. Mr. Blatný was a true eccentric, at times writing in Czech, English,
French, and German in a single poem. This book draws from seven of his
collections and involves five translators.
No Real Light by Joe Wenderoth ($14 Wave) As its title suggests, Joe
Wenderoth's latest book is often a dark one, but that doesn't mean it
doesn't offer illumination or even a sort of warmth. At its best, the poetry
in it is transcendent, giving neither answers nor relief but offering a
visceral truth that moves beyond its sometimes difficult details. Frequently
plain-spoken and deceptively simple, these are ultimately philosophical
poems, written out of and about "the grim intelligence / we cannot help but
to call our own." They can catch their readers up short, suddenly bringing
us to that "deep halt / in the laughter / that got us here." Like the
ocean-worn stones in the opening piece, they acknowledge "the always
diminishing shape of origin," hard knowledge to have. But then, "freedom
from intelligence is over-rated."
Bad Bad by Chelsey Minnis ($14 Fence) This typographically challenging
(more on that soon) book comes like a storm comes-energetic, frightening,
and refreshing. Minnis begins with 67 short "prefaces," epigrammatic lines
and sentences proclaiming comic, mocking, and caustic poetics -- "'Poetry
writing' is a hardship / like crying because you don't like the wallpaper.";
"I want to write a poem because I don't feel very boring! / But I will feel
like a stuffed leopard because of the praise." She is a master of the
surprising simile and metaphor, and this collection is rife with them. The
title poem, a love poem that contains some cross-dressing and spanking,
includes "so / fontanel / to be with you." Fontanel? Soft, warm, vulnerable,
and sexy to say out loud, but who else would think to use it in this manner?
Now, about the typography-many of her poems are long, but with relatively
few words. Often her pages are taken up by lines of punctuation, most often
series of periods. Her words and phrases settle in interesting places but,
unlike the use of white space by Barbara Guest, for instance, Minnis's text
rides along on a kind of undulating, calming series of rows. At first this
can be distracting but, in time, the structure of the pages ends up
balancing her sharp, often riotous, self-focus, rage and punchy eroticism.
Finally, the presentation of her poems becomes impossible to imagine any
other way.
The Book of Fables by W.S. Merwin ($20 Copper Canyon) This collection combines two long out-of-print books, The Miner's Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977), featuring Merwin's short, enigmatic prose pieces. Certainly the voices of Kafka and Borges echo here. The pieces run from one brief paragraph to thirteen pages, and are by turns grounded,
mythic, and quite fantastical. Kudos to Copper Canyon for continuing to
place Merwin's unavailable work back in the hands of his readers.
The Poems of Catullus translated by Peter Green ($16.95 Univ. of
California) The work of the ancient Roman poet Catullus was passionate --
"odi et amo," I hate and I love, he famously wrote -- witty, biting, and on
occasion astoundingly lewd. Peter Green has created a volume that is part
poetry collection, part historical study, part lesson in Latin metrics. As
he points out in his introduction, few contemporary readers of translations
know the original language, so he has sought to convey both the structure of
the Latin poems and the energy and flavor of their meaning, being true to
them yet also making them vigorous in the 21st century.
The Best American Poetry 2007 edited by Heather McHugh ($16 paper, $30 hardcover Scribner) We've just unpacked the latest edition of the Best
American series, an always eagerly anticipated volume that provides a
snapshot of the American poetic zeitgeist taken by one the country's
foremost poets. In this case, it is Seattle's own Heather McHugh, and those
her know her keen and playful mind are more than ready to read her version
of the traditional accompanying essay as well as the poems she's selected. A
glance at the table of contents shows some aesthetic breadth, from Louise
Glück to Christian Bök; Donald Hall to Rae Armantrout, with plenty of lesser
known but soon to be better known poets as well.
And take a look at our September 2007 calendar for a write-up of Nance Van Winckel's book No Starling ($12.95 paper; $27 hardcover Univ. of Washington).
|
