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New Books - 12/07
Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems by Alice Oswald ($15
Graywolf) For years we've been asked whether British poet Alice Oswald's books were available in the United States. Now we can say yes. And now we
understand why people have been asking, and why she has won prestigious
awards and been called (by The London Times) an heir to Ted Hughes, Seamus
Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. She certainly deserves to be in their company,
and her work rises out of the history of English poetry, but she also is
clearly her own sort of writer. She is very much a poet of place,
particularly of sea and river -- at the center of this collection is her
lengthy piece "Dart," written in the voices of those drawn to the river
Dart. Her music can seem as flowing as water -- "one step-width water / of
linked stones / trills in the stones / glides in the trills / eels in the
glides / in each eel a fingerwidth of sea." But hers is a varied music, too,
and well serves the subjects of her poems, which are intensely of this world
yet resonate with a supernatural quality.
Haiku Humor: Wit and Folly in Japanese Poems and Prints edited by Stephen Aldiss with Fumiko and Akira Yamamoto ($14.95 Weatherhill) "Taking a nap / looks more refined / when holding a book," an anonymous
author wrote. To look good napping might be one reason to own the book that
contains this charming poem, but a better reason is to read it and the
volume's many delightful others, all accompanied by equally delightful art.
Spanning several centuries, the bilingual collection includes familiar haiku
poets -- Issa, Buson, Basho -- as well as lesser known (at least to American
readers) 20th century writers, such as Yorie -- "A New Year's card / to my
cat / from its vet."
The Grace of Necessity by Samuel Green ($14.95 Carnegie Mellon) Northwest native Sam Green's first full-length collection in several
years offers a combination of short, impressionistic lyrics and poems in
which he shares knowledge gained through attention to the daily life. In the
poem "Wood Splitting" he points out that though he prepares the axe
rigorously, "nearly always / I use the heavy maul, / blunt, clumsy, dull, &
depending / on a sort of cold fury." Some of his poems revolve around a
lovely image. In a series of dated poems, a rural chronicle of sorts, "April
9" reads, in its entirety, "The one early plum / in the orchard has bloomed,
/ the flower girl gone to school / in the dress that she wore / to the
wedding." The poems in this book include new work, and poems from his two
most recent chapbooks. As well as being a poet, Sam Green is a printer and
teacher; he serves the art variously and gracefully. And we're pleased to
say that he will join us to read from his new book on Thursday, February 7,
at 7:30 PM.
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang ($20 Graywolf) In 2004 Mary Jo Bang's son died unexpectedly at the age of 37. The poems that fill this 90-page volume chart the year following his death, providing not so much a particular autobiography as a visceral biography of grief, a time when "the windows of night have been sewn to her eyes." Memory, dreams, nearly fevered imaginings rise as if out of fog and then sink away. Despite the clearly wrenching emotion that lies behind the poems, their tone is even, their language crisp. Bang is strikingly skillful at giving power to each line in her poetry, sometimes illuminating the shock of brokenness with a jarring linebreak -- "I say Come Back and you do / Not do what I want";
sometimes emphasizing stark finality with a closing period -- "This bald
year, frozen now in February." This is the documenting of a harrowing time,
done with artistry and fearlessness.
Sin: Selected Poems of Farugh Farrokhzad translated by Sholeh Wolpé
($22.95 Univ. of Arkansas) What a discovery for those of us in the west. Ms. Farrokhzad is said to be a hugely important Iranian poet, both in her time -- she died in 1967 -- and today. She became famous, infamous, for writing sexual poetry, not something an Iranian woman did. Following a divorce, a nervous breakdown, and electric shock, she continued her career as a poet and later as a filmmaker. Her early poetry is assertively sexual -- "I have sinned a
rapturous sin / beside a body quivering and spent. / I do not know what I
did O God, / in that quiet vacant dark." But as she aged her focus widened,
becoming almost Whitmanesque -- "Lead letters in league cannot salvage petty
thoughts. / My essence is of trees. / A bird long dead counseled me to
remember flight." There is great imaginative energy in her work, as in
"Someone Like No One" where, when this someone comes, he'll "divide the
bread, / and divide the Pepsi, / and divide the City Park, / and divide the
whooping-cough syrup, / and divide the school registration day... / and give us
our share too." The translator's well-annotated biography of the poet shows
a vital, remarkable woman.
Descartes' Loneliness by Allen Grossman ($16.95 New Directions) Philosopher, troubadour, historian, comedian, aging man, Allen Grossman
is a poet of singular voice, one oracular and intimate. "Poetry is a
rigorous science, because it is a path of the considering one," and consider
he does, creating poetry of emotional and intellectual depth. The poems are
death-haunted yet bracingly vibrant, for as "the lightermen answer: 'No
Death, no song.'" Indeed his dead are vigorous presences -- the vividly
drawn Beatrice and Louis of Minneapolis, his parents, make welcome
appearances, while thoughts of his own mortality wash through the book. For
work so saturated with shades and shadow, it is remarkably alive --
"Although nothing imagined is true, / the power of imagining is real."
A couple of lively local collaborations have come our way--
Crawlspace: A Poem by Daniel Comiskey & C.E. Putnam ($14 P.I.S.O.R.) What is it? It's a book with a 3-D cover and it comes with a CD and 3-D glasses to cause the cover images to float above their background. And so do the poems, float above the planes of logic and narrative, that is. In the
poem "Science Fair Dropout" we learn "Your life / is a private club / with
unlimited / privileges that you have / joined -- for life." And also that
"it's impossible / to resist the plasma ball." The delight is in the
language. It all makes a fractured, approximate sense, like overhearing
countless earnest conversations at once. "The Monkey said hello to the Pig,
and the Pig said / 'I don't speak Monkey' in Pig, and then the Monkey said /
'would you like a bite of my sandwich' in Monkey." Indeed, these gentlemen
have done something unusual here, in Monkey and in Pig. The CD features the
text of the book read by the authors over entertaining patches and blends of
movie and TV soundtrack music and ambient sounds. All in all a wonderfully
odd, psychedelic sort of outing.
Who Are We? Investigations & Findings by the Vis-à-Vis Society ($15
Vis-à-vis) Okay, let's start with the Society. Its members are Sierra
Nelson and Rachel Kessler, two-thirds of the highly popular literary
performance group The Typing Explosion. As the Vis-à-Vis Society they have
been presenting "dynamic research" at a wide variety of events in Seattle
and elsewhere, and this quirky chapbook is a combination of survey questions
and results from completed surveys. Like a sidebar in a surrealist USA
Today. Here is one of the five Technology questions -- "If your body could
contain one radio part, which would you prefer? a) Volume knob b) Antenna
c) VU meter d) Preset station buttons." As for the completed surveys, one
on "Primary Emotional State During Bad Habit Action" includes a "Shame
Equation Correlation" of [{P+D}-A] x Se = SQ, helpfully explained by Drs.
Ink and Owning (Nelson and Kessler's other selves). This deep green volume
includes a 33 1/3 rpm record that we haven't heard so can't describe, except
to say that the tracks on the A side are "If You Are Listening" and
"Meditation for Robots," and on the B side are "23%" and "Tiny Parade For
You." An address is provided should you want to have your own survey results
tabulated.
These three recent books of selected poems highlight the breadth of poetry's aesthetic tent--
Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works by Jackson Mac Low (California $34.95) This generous volume is edited by Mac Low's widow, Anne Tardos. Mac Low was a writer who was exceptionally free in crossing aesthetic
boundaries. He was known as a friend and associate of the experimental
composer John Cage, and Mac Low used aspects of chance construction in his
writing. But he also wrote straight-ahead, first-person direct address
poems. Experiments of his included feeding text by Gertrude Stein through a
text-selecting computer program. This book is a horn of plenty for readers
interested in American experimental literature of the 20th (and a little of
the 21st) century.
The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 by Charles Bukowski ($29.95 Ecco) Drinking, screwing, fighting, complaining, enjoying a cigar, enjoying classical music. Charles Bukowski's persona, if not the man
himself, was something else. "A laureate of American low life" is the quote
from Time Magazine used on this book's cover. His plain-spoken poems have
everything to do with the proud, sorry, grumpy characters around him, and
his own proud, sorry, grumpy self. This is the first collection of his
poetry to select from over four decades of Bukowski's prodigious output.
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems by John Ashbery ($34.95 Ecco) This collection is made up of Ashbery's own selection of poetry from his ten most recent books, 1987's April Galleons through 2003's Where Shall I
Wander. Though a contentious figure to some readers of poetry, Ashbery is
probably the most influential living American poet. His work is
ever-challenging, though of late the challenges seem more gentle. There is
great wit in what he writes, great kindness and great sadness, too. To
discern the associations between his lines often requires the reader to make
a leap of mind. It is a leap that, when made successfully, feels like
flying.
And take a look at our December 2007 calendar for a description of David Mason's Ludlow: A Verse-Novel ($18.95 Red Hen).
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