If you see something you'd like, click place an order.
New Books - 01/08
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen edited by Michael Rothenberg
($49.95 Wesleyan) has arrived. Books like this -- hardcover, 800+ pages --
as welcome as they are, are sometimes called doorstops. That could be a use
for the object of it, but truly there is nothing static about the contents.
Whalen was an electrifying and lively character. Involved in the West Coast
beginnings of the Beat Movement and in the San Francisco Renaissance, he
went on to study Zen Buddhism, becoming a Buddhist priest. His poetry
follows a course of chance perceptions and thought, and does so with
sweetness and verve. Philosophy, history, emotion, and wonderful comic wit,
all are woven throughout this gracious embrace of a book. "A lovely day /
Rain has washed the car all beautifully clean / & the battery is completely
dead." Whalen wrote his poetry in notebooks in a beautiful, calligraphic
hand, often incorporating charming sketches and delightful typography.
Several of those pages are reproduced here. This is not a book of poems in
the way a book by W.B. Yeats is. Whalen's poems are not well-wrought objects
loved at arm's length (and this is no knock on Yeats's great work), his work
engages the reader in the immediacy of being a learned person wholly in a
deeply experienced life.
Behind My Eyes ($24.95 Norton) is Li-Young Lee's fourth book of poetry. The poems are written with wonderfully plain language that heightens their surreal and mythic nature. "I'm my mother's apple and that's that. / My
sweetening draws death nearer, it can't be helped. / My bitterness about it
is skin deep." Lee was born a refugee to Chinese parents in Indonesia who
later immigrated to the U.S., experiences that influence much of his work.
The importance of naming rises in many of these poems, including wildly
imaginative names given to games, books, and trains -- "Train number 4, the
Twentieth Century, / has joined The Wind Undisguised / to become The Written
Word." The uncertainty and sadness of being displaced is everywhere palpable
in this book. He ends a litany of adaptive measures taken by refugees with
"what kept you alive / all those years keeps you from living." Love, loss,
and family are paramount -- "the world is full of people, but seldom / is a
person to be found" -- and his lyricism is ever-surprising -- "my favorite
color / is my father's pear trees / in a cloud of bees." Included with the
book is a compact disc of Lee reading several of the poems.
The contemporary formalist poet A.E. Stallings was commissioned to
translate De Rerum Natura, the famous and influential Latin poem of
science and philosophy written around 50 BC by Lucretius. Her version of
The Nature of Things ($15 Penguin) is a vivid and musical text composed of "rhyming fourteeners," that is, fourteen-syllable lines arranged in rhyming couplets. A student of Latin (and Latin translation), she chose that line
length because she found it "roomy enough" to allow a nearly line-by-line
translation of the original. She chose rhyme to emphasize the archaic
quality of the work yet also capture the "honey" of it, meaning that
although it is a fascinating treatise on the way the world works, it is
most definitely poetry -- "Why cannot Nature make a man / So large that he
could wade across the deep to other lands, / Mighty enough to wrench apart
great mountains with this hands / And outlive generations, unless everything
consists / Of certain matter, and this matter limits what exists?"
|
