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Some Recent Arrivals - 10/09
Ever since we read (in one sitting) Adrian Blevins's first full-length book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha (which rightly received the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award), we’ve been scanning the horizon for a new collection. And at last it’s here -- Live from the Homesick Jamboree ($22.95 Wesleyan), an equally marvelous package, its cover the image of a girl with cigarette dangling. Blevins is a fifth-generation Virginian (now transplanted to Maine), and the South spikes her deceptively relaxed, smartly crafted poems like bourbon. Domestic life (on the rocks and smooth) is the frequent focus of her fearless, funny, nearly shocking poems -- no one is spared, most notably herself. But this is not mere melodrama -- it is vigorous, thoughtful, satisfying art. Blevins is a whirlwind, but you will not be destroyed -- you’ll be picked up, tossed, and set down somewhere new, invigorated and grateful for the trip. Here are the beginning lines of her poem “The Imperative Sentence”: “For God's sake wash the windows and stop being so arctic-hearted. / Exercise some and avoid the various sugars. Avoid the sugar of sunshine // with a hat, and the sugar of revenge by kneeling down on your knees // and asking the gods to transform you into the kind of person // who would eagerly shelter the unenlightened boogies walking your neighborhood / with eyes as grave as graves under snow.”
And here, in brief, are several more titles that have crossed the threshold...
The Poetry of Rilke, translated and edited by Edward Snow ($50 North Point) Snow is a favorite translator of Rilke at Open Books, and this 684-page hardcover offers more than 250 poems in Rilke's German and Snow's English, Snow’s informative notes, and an introduction by Adam Zagajewski. If your home is in need of a comprehensive Rilke tome (it’s a rare home that isn't), here it is.
Long Division by Andrea Cohen ($21.95 Salmon) The topics and points-of-view of her poems are numerous, but Cohen's concise language, used like a tool for scientific study, is consistent across the body of the work. “Heights don't frighten me. / It's myself in high places / that's scary -- imagining the worst, / impatient for it.”
The Best American Poetry 2009 ($16 / $35 Scribner) David Lehman's co-editor this year is David Wagoner. The choices as always vary (alphabetically, from Ashbery to Zapruder) and Wagoner's introduction includes ruminations on what is a poem? and on the expectations facing a literary magazine’s editor in the submission process.
Apocalyptic Swing by Gabrielle Calvocoressi ($22.95 Persea) Calvocoressi weaves religion, boxing, and difficult living into muscular poems of suffering -- “You don’t like to see a man get knocked out / cold? Then you’ve never lived in Hartford” -- and tough redemption – “We are all so beautiful / with our faces against the mat.” Pardon us for saying, and with all due respect, her poems pack a wallop.
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