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New Books - 11/07
Time and Materials by Robert Hass ($22.95 Ecco)
The mutability of the world underlies Robert Hass’s first collection in a decade -– “The object of this poem is to report a theft, / in progress, of everything / that is not these words / and their disposition on the page.” His broad intelligence and depth of emotion create poems from dream, family stories that might be true, and historical fact -– it seems that he isn’t leaving anything out. Hass’s poetry ranges from brief, evocative lyrics to prose-like discourses on the insanity of war. Maturity, elegance, love, and sadness are reflected throughout. “Beauty is a little unendurable, / I mean, getting used to it is unendurable.” This book reads like a great, and very human, work of art.
In the Pines by Alice Notley ($18 Penguin)
“If you detest everything about your society, you say, why are you / writing? // It is time to change writing completely.” The power in Alice Notley’s new book comes not from aggression but from a brave yielding -– to deep vision, dream, ghosts, subconscious and conscience rising -– singing -– through writing that is part prose, part poetry, at times straightforward, at others elliptical and fractured, and frequently a mystical dialogue. Reading her work is a drenching experience, a moving, confusing, profound one that causes some dormant string to vibrate. Hers is an unusual music, unsettling, compelling, and passionate -– “My lady shadow, I’m stumbling away / opening locks.”
Field-Russia by Gennady Aygi ($15.95 New Directions)
Gennady Aygi was born in 1934 in a Chuvash village in the former Soviet Union. For political reasons, his work remained mostly unpublished in his home country, even as it was translated and praised abroad. And what fine and haunting work it is, spare and innovative, at once grief-laden and embracing, and filled with repeated, almost iconic images of the land -– “beyond the fence in mist-forest / the voice of the cuckoo / as if in ever-quieter-unquietness / in the distant father-people / long / and long ago / my father / (in the crowd -– billowing / with procession-and-singing).” This collection, translated from the Russian by Peter France, gathers two complete “books” from what Aygi considered his “life-book,” as well as a poem in honor of Raoul Wallenberg, and a prose tribute to Paul Celan, whose work carries the silence and syntactical challenges present in Aygi’s. An interview with the poet and an afterword by the translator are enlightening and welcome additions.
And take a look at our November 2007 calendar for descriptions of Now by Molly Tenenbaum ($16 Bear Star Press); Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore ($13.95 MARGIE); Modern Life by Matthea Harvey ($14 Graywolf); and My Soviet Union by Michael Dumanis ($14.95 Univ. of Massachusetts).
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