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Books - 11/09
A feature from among Titles Recent to the Store
Heather McHugh is an ace detective, a private investigator made public (lucky for us). Her keen agility of eye and mind and pen makes for a poetry that both dazzles and delivers the hard news. Her eighth collection is Upgraded to Serious (oh, how that title spins on its tilted axis), published by Copper Canyon Press ($22). The poems spark with her trademark dark wit ("The man of the moment would kill / to be man of the hour") and intricate music ("Our knowing is a feel / for nuance: our sentience itself / the whole séance"). But this is a poetry deeply etched by existential sadness, too. Few poets can translate our often painful awareness of mortality as sharply as McHugh, who sees so clearly that we are each "just a day-numbered ape / with a clue it was clay." Particularly searing here are her poems ruminating on cruelty, how "the heart / must bear it all, apparently, or burn, or dim." Indeed, these are not easy poems with easy answers, and she is not above beseeching "heaven" (whatever it may be) -- "Teach us to bear life’s senselessness, and our // own insignificance. Let’s call that sanity." This collection is a report from an intelligent, diligent, feeling, and – yes – funny observer. Hers is a welcome sanity.
And now a few books in brief...
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker ($25 Simon & Schuster) OK, yes. This is a novel, and not one written by a poet. But we’ve decided to stretch the boundaries a bit because this novel is very much about poetry. Its protagonist, the charming, awkward, marginally employed, marginally productive poet Paul Chowder, struggles to complete the introduction to his anthology, "Only Rhyme," a funny, enlightening, and moving process in which he ponders poetry past and present, poets living and dead. Aside from its narrative appeal, Baker's novel also includes an extensive and heartfelt examination of metrics, believe it or not. He’ll make you rethink iambic pentameter!
The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems, 1953-1981 by Amelia Rosselli, translated by Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodard ($20 Chelsea Editions) This generous, bilingual volume brings to American readers the work of an Italian poet whose intense, inventive writing rose out of the horrors of 20th century Europe -- "Pistol raised infallible upon return to my country / you begin well and end badly but do not fail. The / tendency to goodness was assigned to the gods. The gods descended / descended and descended dilapidated. // Full of anxiety I began to write, the vagabond of my fortunes."
Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan ($16 BOA) Simply stated and deeply felt, the complex thoughts and emotions in Bryan’s new collection are as shimmery and hard as agates in a stream. The poems are often concerned with aging, music, love, and loss -- the sweet, sad passage of time. But throughout her work she attends also to the slipperiness of language. In her jazzy creation myth titled "Bass Bass," God, having taken a day off from creating, went fishing, she explains. There he discovered that plucking the line made a likable sound, but in his tiredness, he got tangled in the proximity of the words for the fish and the instrument. So, "he invented // Mingus and other people / to show him which way was up."
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