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New Books - 03/08
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe ($23.95 Norton) The title of Marie Howe's long anticipated new collection invokes the liturgical calendar and suggests both the dailiness and the mystical found in her clear-spoken poems. While not without humor ("the people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Mart yesterday"), her work is often a vigorous examination of the possibility of living consciously and morally in a world that can be as comforting and comfortable as it can be harsh and harmful. Her poems have an intimacy about them even when they are not personal, though usually they do seem to spring from her own life, illuminating the complicated moments of childhood, marriage, parenthood, citizenship. Throughout, her poetry seeks the sacred in the secular -- "all this time stars in the sky -- in daylight // when I couldn't see them, and at night when, most nights, I didn't look."
George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers edited by Stephen Cope ($19.95 Univ. of California) A gathering of essays and fragments that offers a glimpse into the mind of one of the signal poets of the 20th
century: "I do not mean to prescribe an idea, but to record the experience
of thinking it"; "Those who read nothing live, / It seems to me, / Live in
too short a span of time"; "The parakeet's heart -- / Which must be
microscopic -- / Is filled with a most impertinent / Love, a masterful /
Affection -- "; "As human history accumulates the people come to see 'the
world as a limited whole.' That vision has no answer to it. Perhaps it is
lethal"; "an inconceivably brutal universe; it is possible / that sea
anemones dream continually"; "a poem may be devoted to giving clear meaning
to one word."
Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort ($15 Copper Canyon) Copper Canyon Press, a local treasure, continues its string of interesting, lively books in
translation with this collection of poems written in Belarusian. Mort's poems sparkle with the survivor's grim wit found in the best poetry coming for decades from Eastern Europe and the crumbled Soviet Block. The book starts with this arresting image -- "even our mothers have no idea how we were born / how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world / the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing" Throughout the personal is melded with the political. In a love poem she writes, "it's as if everything that has happened / is nothing but Security which you have to pass through / in order to get into summer." And her work is richly sensual -- "impossible to fall asleep next to this man / at night all that's left of my body / is the music of locusts." The English here is vivid, with thanks going to Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright for the translations.
Whim Man Mammon by Abraham Smith ($14 Action Books) Reading this book might remind you at times of that scary, exhilarating feeling you get when someone swings you around by your arms, your feet off the ground. You're nearly out of control; what gets through to you is visceral, at a tilt,
blurred, and magnified. Set mostly in unromantic rural (think hoeing, guns,
alcohol), the poems come tumbling, scratching, and slipping in language that
is nearly unimpeded by punctuation and extremely musical -- "honey hawk
knocks gin drinks against me / for rights / to the sweet talker's scent."
Their imagery is sharp and oddly right -- "we both split / like summer melon
/ hit by a part / from a washing machine." And though there is an edgy and
unsettling quality to them, the poems are often deeply tender -- "yes the /
bless the / train," begins one, that ends, "the trains / mean peace is in
mosey / blowing plastic bags / one branch higher / my one true love / in
turn a brightened / posture amen."
And take a look at our March 2008 calendar listings for descriptions of Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Figures for a Darkroom Voice; Robert Mittenthal's Value Unmapped; Nico Vassilakis's Text Loses Time; and Sebastian Matthews's We Generous.
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