NEW! Review of Fanny Howe

The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life by Fanny Howe. University of California Press, $ 16.95.

Reviewed by Michelle Detorie

The first pages of a poet’s book of prose often contain the key to its overarching concerns. This collection's introduction (an essay in and of itself) finds Fanny Howe providing an auto/biographical context for the pieces that follow, highlighting the importance of her experiences living in and around Boston during the seventies. She describes the ways in which the social and political climate of the period contributed to her experiences as a woman in an interracial marriage and as the mother of racially mixed children.

It should be clear, then, that the The Wedding Dress is much more an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual autobiography than a set of essays that deal exclusively or pedantically with issues of poetry and poetics. Howe’s creative work and personal life are treated as a thematically unified whole. In formal terms, Howe’s meditations on word and life are, as the subtitle suggests, studies, observations, recollections, and imaginings. Technically, these are essays--ten lucid and lyrical essays--but as is increasingly the case among poets and writers considered “experimental,” this genre designation seems inadequate. For example, Howe’s “essay,” “Catholic,” was selected by Lyn Hejinian for inclusion in 2004’s Best American Poetry.

The Wedding Dress is populated by real-life characters--Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel--iconic figures whose actions arouse a sense of wonder in the author. Propelled by questions of faith and Howe’s luminous curiosity, these life studies progress simultaneously toward both resolution and its deferment.

The first essay, “Bewilderment,” introduces a central theme in her artistic imagination: “What I have been thinking about , lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and a politics.” Howe’s interest in bewilderment infuses the entire collection. For Howe, bewilderment is not a state of mind from which she wishes herself released. Rather, “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” Howe’s essays do not operate within the confines of an either/or logic; rather, they explore the potentials inherent in the layers and folds of multiplicities, dualities, complications, and contradictions.

“Immanence,” the essay at the heart of the collection, considers the life of existentialist theologian Edith Stein. Stein, who was raised Jewish and then converted to Catholicism early in her adulthood, eventually became a Carmelite nun. Howe muses on Stein’s written work, both as an academic philosopher and as a religious adept. Though Howe does not mark out a strict dichotomy between the two, she does find evidence of Stein’s transformation--a change that Howe sees manifest in her relationship with language and symbolically represented by the bridal ceremony by which Carmelites enter their order. “She who had started out a skeptical thinker and remained one who used the phenomenological method became a poet who was married to the spirit. The silk white wedding dress she wore at her ceremony . . . was afterwards made into a chasuble.”

Long time readers of Howe’s work have likely wondered about the details of her creative process, and the relationship of that process to her lived experience. To those wonderings The Wedding Dress surely responds, while also inspiring new wonder. The Wedding Dress accomplishes the rare feat of forcing the reader to confront anew familiar themes like language, faith, race, and motherhood.

NEW! Review of Chain

Chain #10.

Reviewed by Jason Oliver Chang

The tenth issue of Chain, TRANSLUCINACION, will attract new readers of this annual publication and strengthen the admiration of readers that ordinarily enjoy the magazine’s brilliance. Editors Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr, along with Thalia Field and Cecilia Vicuna, have rallied artists to grapple with an idea from Andres Ajens, “describ[ing] how translation is a form of reading and writing that creates new work, [and] new conversations.” This is the definition of TRANSLUCINACION, which, like the topic of the previous issue (Dialogue), is also about “cross-cultural encounters [that are] loaded with hope and yet always in danger of doing wrong.” The writers found here show an honest apprehension of translation yet are willing to challenge the limitations of such an apprehension which present exciting results. This exploration into the politics, power, and experience of moving texts through cultural, cognitive, and lingual filters not only brings this creative work into a space of critical imagining, but elevates the dialogue about what can happen with the act of translation. This issue is so rich, that every time I return to it something curious and exciting (re)emerges. This volume offers a trans-disciplinary perspective with many points of access for the unfamiliar reader and immense depth for the experienced.

There are ‘tests’ of poetry moving from Chinese to English to Portuguese to Finnish to Spanish and to French (Charles Bernstein, Haroldo de Campos, Leevi Lehto, Ersto Livon-Grosman, & Traduction Collective A Royaumont). Other tests put the translators of Chuang-Tzu through the Tao of contextual translations; through the noise of the shower, from a cell phone on the street or in a Check-Cashing Office (Allison Cobb & Jen Coleman).

Michael Cueva and Perry Mamaril “Invoke:Evoke” three ancient Philippine verbs, a noun and an adjective with pictures of their beautiful amulets symbolizing secret prayers that encourage the reader, ‘to remember, to endure, nationality (ethnicity), to endure (to be able to), strong.’

Others use the tools of translation as creative partners, like a ‘Teach Yourself Swahili’ text (Albert Flynn Desilver) and ViaVoice software for the Mac (Nada Gordon). The Canadian Erin Moure rewires herself when she translates the Chilean Ajens with an English modeled on Ajens’s sense of resistance to assimilation. Rainer Ganahl translates the cognitive process of learning Arabic into an impressive materiality; or in his words, ‘trying to show what cannot be shown and create some kind of informational congestion where there is really nothing to see ... [representing] the biased and “impossible” task of representing others.’ He also includes a short but dense reference list, which I really appreciated.

One-third through the issue you will find Monica de la Torre bouncing off of Paul Hoover’s poems of performed Spanish authorship. She beautifully (re)inscribes Hoover’s poems into Spanish in order to relinquish them to loose associations to lines from texts by Spanish language authors revealing a poem located within the Spanish language imaginary.

I was glad to find several entries from Hawai‘i including, Hi‘iakaikapoliopele Destroys the Mo‘o Pana‘ewa. I appreciated the use of “informal” Hawai‘i Creole English by Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui in her defiant translation of a traditional Hawaiian tale of female heroism, thus separating herself from Hawaiian language purists. (Ho‘omanawanui is an editor for Oiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal.) Her translation is accompanied by a painting from Matt Kaleiali‘i Ka‘opio depicting Hi‘iaka battling the evil Mo‘o, a depiction that, for me, represents Ho‘omanawanui facing the cultural stigmas of translating Hawaiian.

Jill Magi offers evidence of a “translation event” connecting her work with that of her Estonian father in excerpts from Threads. Majnun Songs, Sections 1-3 by Qays Ibn Al-Mulawwah, Alla Borzova, Denis Hoppe, Michail Kurganstev, and Ann E. Michael show us the translation of nomadic, oral-tradition, Arabic poems into English-language cantata using a Russian mediator. This work constitutes a re-translation that follows a historical geography that contextualizes the composition, “yet [strives] to maintain the tone and content of the Arabic original.” Similarly, Mahwash Shoaib translates a few sections of Kishwar Naheed’s Composition of a Scorched Heart with the aggravations of the “lack of radically embodied translations of her work.” The various drafts illustrate a kind of wandering through the translation experience in an attempt to end up at the beginning. This notion is echoed in Padcha Tuntha-Obas’s Translation in Six Steps: Thai to English. Conversely, Ammiel Alcalay writes of Shimon Ballas’s Outcast in which he reconstructs himself in the politics of translation into something new. With evolution in mind, Adam Degraff and Pamela Lu translate painting into poetry with Thomas Scheibitz’s Judith & Maria.

My two favorite entries are “Imigrayson / Immigration / L’immigration / Immgarasion” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot, A. Isadora Del Vecchio, Abdourahman Idrissa, Kiran Jayaram, and Karen Ohnesorge) and “Translation as Matricide (the Sequel!)” (Heriberto Yepez). I was enthralled with the manner in which the former demonstrated a critique of U.S. immigration policy’s attempt to categorize ‘outsiders’ in relation to ‘insider’ politics. The process of translating Trouillot’s poems was both engaging and rigorously conducted. The latter concludes TRANSLUCINACION with a poetic narrative of the historical coloniality of translation. The non-standard form Yepez uses reflects tonal afterthoughts of his critical narrative and locates the reader within a logic of translation that Chain #10 spends more than 200 pages refuting.

NEW! Review of Dane Zajc

Barren Harvest by Dane Zajc. Translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak.
White Pine Press, $14.

Reviewed by Naomi White

Considered by many as the greatest living Slovenian poet, Dane Zajc is a founding father of Central Europe’s post-World War II modernism. Born in 1929, he was exposed to the violent death of his brothers in the war and forced to survive a meager existence in a war-torn country. Zajc’s poetry is bleak and brutally desolate. Like many other Slovenes, Zajc found literature as a voice of liberation, and has become part of a long line of Slovenian poets who combine literature and politics. Translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak, Barren Harvest is the first comprehensive volume of Zajc’s work to appear in English.

The poems in Barren Harvest are composed in simple language with a repetitious structure. Zajc’s lines are almost mantra-like, as if he is repeating the words to himself, in order to stay sane in the midst of tragedy. His short choppy sentences emphasize each word and allow Zajc’s desolate landscape and stark images to stand alone, without excessive language or experimental structure. Through the use of natural images, such as soil, rain, rocks, and animals, Zajc creates a vivid world of life that contrasts with the chilling images of death that involve people, fire, and broken buildings.

In “Lump of Ashes,” from the 1961 volume Tongue of Soil, Zajc explores the inability of language to express grief by using the image of a mouth on fire, burning down into ashes. The poem reads:

You want to utter a word.
But your mouth is full of ashes.

And instead of a word
A lump of ashes rolls down
Your blackened throat.

Zajc’s poetry does what he says poetry cannot do: verbalize suffering.

Because Barren Harvest selects from all eight of Zajc’s volumes, the evolution of his poetry becomes visible. The poems from his 1958 volume Burnt Grass are his most sparse, presenting images of death and destruction, such as “Barren Harvest,” which begins hauntingly: “I recognize his skull, mother said, / by its beautiful white teeth.” Over the years, Zajc’s poetry becomes more bitter and more complex. Rather than simply providing shocking images, poems such as “Rain” from Snake Killers (1968), vent anger: “But you know the cadavers conveyed upon the night’s glassy / rope / and you hate them with their own hatred.” In “You Are Not” Zajc pointedly accuses his oppressors: “It’s a lie that things exist only to soothe you / with tranquil memories, / because one day your whole world will turn against you.”

Later, in his 1984 volume White, his work seems to take a less pessimistic turn, using natural images to create poems of recover. As if cleansed of the burnt ashes described in previous poems, the pieces in White repeatedly use white imagery, such as snow, milk, goats, and silk, to suggest a sense of purity in his heart. In “Milk,” Zajc demonstrates the end of devastating grief by describing the simple act of milking a cow:

you hear a stream of milk squirting from a cow’s udder
on the white floor
and you no longer wonder what happened to
         the screaming in your mind
you open the door and the sun strikes your face
waterfalls of beam and milky lights

The day-to-day ritual serves to take over the pain, giving a sense of normalcy and routine. Also in White, Zajc begins to experiment with eliminating capitalization and punctuation, giving the pieces a barren, silent feeling, as if stripped of all but the essentials.

Zajc’s poems do not just chronicle his own grieving process, but also address other subjects. There are love poems scattered throughout Barren Harvest, such as “Brown Call,” from Children of the River (1962) and “Golden Hat” from Down Down (1998). Even in these pieces, Zajc uses striking natural imagery, as in “Brown Call”: “The light shining through your body / will run through my body and through my bones. / . . . Because you are the tongue in my mouth.”

Zajc can write about subject matter verging on cliche while maintaining freshness in his language. The clear political statements about the nature of war elude a didactic tone because his approach to death, love, and the insufficiency of language avoids sentimentality by presenting images without commentary. The beautifully tragic poems explore the horrors of modern war while focusing on solitude and isolation with stark, bare images.

NEW! Review of Xantippe

Xantippe #2. $10.

Reviewed by Raechel Anglin

Xantippe: for a magazine whose name references the fifth-century wife of Socrates, known as a scolding shrew, this youthful magazine is a delightfully open, wide-ranging, and accepting adventure in poetry. In its second issue, Xantippe presents the poetry of twenty authors, ranging from the newly published to the poetically established, and concludes with five poetry reviews. On its title page, Xantippe declares itself out of Oakland, California; comfortable in its location, the magazine is brimming with Californian writers, including Julie Carr and Jennifer Scappertone. Not to suggest that Xantippe is geographically limited, as poetry hails from Paris, New York, Colorado. More importantly, Xantippe evidences a breadth of poetic styles.

Sleek in its photographic black and white cover and metallic blue typeset, Xantippe seems to advertise a smooth ride through its pages, which it delivers. Given that the cover’s photo issues from an apparently abandoned suburban setting that is “Quitting, Closing, Moving to Baghdad,” one might be worried that the poetry will also be vaguely political. Xantippe, however, focuses on narrative, language, and style, not a political agenda. Reaching Laynie Browne’s “Welcome 67946, Looting,” a poem with a directly political theme, refreshes and fulfills the cover-art promise, without overbearing election-year yammering.

Overall, Xantippe evinces a flair for the philosophical question, a conceptual interest in endings, and a welcome focus on the poetic sequence. Opening with five poems by Killarney Clary, this issue offers charm in delicate prose poems, as well as a poetic introduction to “telling,” to “Charts outside of saying,” to “Not rush hour--not any hour really--the ordinary wonder of people going one way or another.” Xantippe moves through the ordinary, through detail that often feels concrete and honest, even in syntactic disjunction and dissolution. In her second poem, Clary queries: “What is weight? The cab smells like honey.” Here, she exemplifies Xantippe’s interest in balancing questioning with the tangible. When Clary says, “born with a tendency to laugh, born smart, born at least,” she could be speaking about Xantippe.

Highlights of this issue include:

Joseph Lease’s poem “My Sister Life,” which skims through metaphor, is light-filled and fulfilling. Lease also offers the first sequence of the magazine, “Self-Portrait as the Downhill Slide,” an approachable experience of narrative build-up. He paves the way for Carol Snow’s “from Karesansui” and Donna de la Perriere’s “Occupational Marks and Other Signs,” among other poetic sequences.

Julie Carr’s selections from Mead: An Epithalamion are dramatically diverse, including fantastic lines like “I thought of you as a circle caught within a rectangle, / which meant there was space around you but you couldn’t get to it.” Her poems are feminine and observant, sketched across “a permanently ruptured sky.”

Laura Mullen’s “A Noun’s Meant” is the longest selection in Xantippe, and it earns its space. Mullen dances with and across narrative, so that:

You are reading
                   broken into
What we see her seeing what she sees

In what might otherwise be taken for a declaration            shining a
division representing breath guides another arc . . .

Denise Newman’s poem “Good Zeal,” a lovely exploration in narrative, builds through beautiful clarity:

not that I’m in hell
there’s just no where private
to cry, so I must let him hug me with the wet
yellow rubber gloves waiting by the sink
into a devastating poem that is “a peak of pleasure.

Glen C. Silva’s review of The Frequencies by Noah Eli Gordon is daring in voice and completely engaging. He instructs, “Put on your favorite record or radio station, open this book, and dance,” and after his hopeful and humorous review, we are inclined to do so.

Other highlights include Geoffrey Nutter’s “Journey by Train”; Tom Thompson’s “Mode et Accessoires Femmes”; and Elizabeth Robinson’s “Tracks.”

Xantippe is a solid new magazine, which manages both to explore its sense of self and to retain an awareness of its innocence--an equilibrium that produces enjoyable reading. At $10, Xantippe is well worth ordering from xantippemag@yahoo.com or Xantippe, P.O Box 20997, Oakland, CA 94620-0997.

NEW! Essay/review on Jesper Svenbro

Three-Toed Gull: Selected Poems by Jesper Svenbro, translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson. Northwestern University Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Kevin Hart

“On the night of October 27, 1981, the Soviet submarine U-137 ran aground in Gåsefjärden (Goose Bay), a prohibited military area on Sweden’s southeastern coast, and finally had to accept the Swedish navy’s assistance in order to be able to return to international waters.” So begins the translator’s note to Jesper Svenbro’s poem “Coastal Defense.” It is as though John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson have stood on either side of a heavy anchor and then thrown it from the poem they are translating. For the poem pitches and heaves from its first words:

The incident of the Soviet submarine in Goose Bay
raises the issue of how we want our archipelago poetry to look:
older metaphorical defenses from the fifties
may of course still have a function to fill
but a modern lyric coastal defense obviously must work
on entirely new premises, at once more efficient and discreet.

How does poetry provide a coastal defense? By shielding Swedish from attack by Russian, Danish, Norwegian, French, German and that most invasive of all modern languages, English. Of course, the fact that we read “Coastal Defense” in English translation suggests that no amount of border control, no matter how “efficient and discreet” it is, can keep the “thirty-kilometer boundary” intact. And since Svenbro’s poetry is profoundly concerned with “the roughness of language,” as he puts it in another poem, we receive it in English more surely at the level of concept than at the tactile levels of reading and writing.

For anglophone readers at least, the most celebrated “coastal defense” of Swedish poetry was deployed by Tomas Tranströmer in the 1950s. “Storm,” the first part of “Autumnal Archipelago” from his 17 Dikter (1954), is exemplary:

Here the walker suddenly meets the giant
oak tree, like a petrified elk whose crown is
furlongs wide before the September ocean’s
      murky green fortress.

Northern storm. The season when rowanberry
clusters swell. Awake in the darkness, listen:
constellations stamping inside their stalls, high
     over the tree-tops.
          (trans. Robin Fulton)

Visually precise, and more than a little baroque, these stanzas indicate the “older metaphorical defenses” that Svenbro has in mind. When Tranströmer returns to the same Baltic seascape twenty years later in Östersjöar (1974), his language has been loosened up and stripped down:

There are days when the Baltic is a calm endless roof.
Dream your naïve dreams then about someone coming crawling on
      the roof trying to sort out the flag lines,
trying to hoist
the rag--

the flag which is so eroded by the wind and blackened by the funnels
      and bleached by the sun it can be everyone’s.

For all that, Tranströmer’s poetics have not fundamentally changed over the decades. Nor has his relation to Swedish. Asked to specify the nature of Tranströmer’s Swedishness when the poet won the 1990 Neustadt Prize, Lasse Söderberg quoted Carl Jonas Love Almquist (1793-1866) on a quality that the latter held to be essential to being Swedish--poverty: “To be poor is to be restricted to one’s own resources.” Restriction generates concentration in Tranströmer, Söderberg observes, and again quotes Almquist as saying that in general the Swede “has very much the manner of seeing quickly and straight through things, which customarily is called sound Swedish sense” (Söderberg, “The Swedishness of Tomas Tranströmer,” trans. Lief Sjöberg, World Literature Today 64: 4 (1990), 576.)

Svenbro would agree. He makes the same point, with a nod towards Tranströmer (and his success overseas), in “Coastal Defense”:

Swedish literature’s long-standing prioritizing of the air force
has gradually resulted in a visually advanced poetry
that has done well at international air displays,
but acoustic poetry has found itself in a backwater
forcing the navy to require subsidies for antisubmarine poems.

The elemental poverty of Tranströmer’s language, its reliance on a minimal Swedish vocabulary, has made it resistant to translation. In “The Station,” for example, the sound and texture of domkyrkoklocklang are lost in “peal of cathedral bells.” On the other hand, the visual brilliance of the poetry, its sense of gazing down upon a landscape or seascape from a great height, has encouraged translation. A poem such as “Vermeer” has a strong appeal in English as well as in Swedish. In “From March 1979” the speaker is weary of those who speak “words but no language” and goes to “the snow-covered island” where he comes upon “the tracks of deer’s hooves in the snow” which are, he says, “Language but no words.” Tranströmer’s poetics rebel against the doctrinal (in politics as in religion) and seek the apophatic (as a response to nature more than to the divine). By contrast, Svenbro wants what we might call “language with words” or “words with language.” His is “acoustic poetry” not only because it reads well at “the increasingly popular poetry readings” in Sweden but also, and more importantly, because it figures the voice as being completely at home in the written word.

Svenbro’s early poems frequently make sudden shifts from one register or perspective or time frame to another. Hence the feeling of pitching and heaving at the start of “Coastal Defense” when we pass from a prosaic statement about a foreign submarine to questions of poetics and literary history and then back to a children’s game, Sänka skepp or “sink-a-ship.” Anything but breathless in its recording of mutations, the voice in the poem remains dry and laconic. Svenbro takes pleasure in managing a difficult balancing act while appearing almost indifferent to the risks he takes. What makes the act so impressive is that there is nowhere smooth and steady on which to stand. We have been alerted that this is the case by the opening poem of Three-Toed Gull, “A Critique of Pure Representation”:

In order to restore to the words their semantic roughness
I told myself that there was no difference
between the stone I held in my hand and the word “stone”
clattering in language: I love the roughness of language
which marks its own presence and I claim passionately
that love of language in this sense
means resistance to pure repression.

In a gesture familiar to readers of la nouvelle critique, “pure representation” becomes “pure repression.” A more instructive recollection would be Francis Ponge’s prose poem about a pebble, “Le galet,” from Le parti pris des choses (1942), and the passage of Maurice Blanchot’s important essay “La littérature et le droit à la mort” (1947-48) that touches on it.

Blanchot argues that literary language searches for the moment before literature, when the stone is still a stone. A poem gives us the word “stone” but the word is drained of the stone’s being. How then to capture the stoniness of the stone? “My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things, too, are a kind of nature--this is given to me and gives me more than I can understand. Just now the reality of words was an obstacle. Now, it is my only chance. . . Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trail of the ink, the book. Yes, happily language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist” (Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” trans. Lydia Davis, The Work of Fire (Stanford UP, 1995), 327-28). Svenbro would like to stop here, insisting on “the kinship of the stone / with the hard and obstinate word ‘stone’.” Blanchot, however, goes further and observes that the poem places us in touch less with the earth than with what precedes and succeeds it: “It is not beyond the world, but neither is it the world itself: it is the presence of things before the world exists, their perseverance after the world has disappeared, the stubbornness of what remains when everything vanishes and the dumbfoundedness of what appears when nothing exists” (328). So Blanchot’s récits explore the approach of the Outside, the ceaseless generation of being as non-being and of non-being as being, while Svenbro’s poems are committed to the possibility of words “representing themselves, / before their validity is extended to comprise the things / that together . . . / constitute what we mean by the ‘world’.” The poem is spoken--a voice trembles and syllables vibrate; it is a body of air before it becomes a body of meaning.

If there is a unity of material reality and language, there are also crevasses between them through which one can fall. “Classic Experiment” risks “taking our stand in a simile near the middle of the Iliad / where the snowflakes are falling thick.” Immediately we slide from outside the poem to deep inside it: “the wind has calmed down, / the landscape with its ridges and woods, fences and fields / appears behind curtains of falling snow.” Standing in the middle of the poem, without continuing to read, the snow does not stop. “Soon the roads leading into the simile will be totally blocked!” Svenbro exclaims in mock horror. (American readers will recall a similar move made right at home in Kenneth Koch’s “The Railway Stationery.”) Another poem, “Cynegetics,” amusingly relates the story of students having to hunt for the Greek verb thereúo, “I hunt,” and then finding themselves being hunted in book XIX of the Odyssey:

          Up to now
We had only hunted with hesitation, unsuccessfully,
While the aorist designated a completed action--
In the past, the present, and the future.
Branches were broken, big piles of leaves were rustling,
From now on we would be successful in “hunting,” our tracking sense
Surpassing even that of dogs as we localized
The Wild Boar behind an unusually dense thicket
Right out at the end of the text. There it was!

And now the students find themselves being hunted:

“we were being hunted” here in the passive, fled
and surely would have been goners had not Ulysses,
age fourteen, taken his stand in the path
and stabbed the boar with his spear in the aorist indicative.

Poets are often identified by their daytime jobs. X is “librarian and poet,” Y is “scholar and poet,” while Z is “mortician and poet.” The Australian poet A. D. Hope once pointedly observed, “These are the sort of people who would call Jesus of Nazareth ‘Carpenter and Prophet’!” True enough, except that Svenbro explicitly courts being styled in a double manner. He never disguises the fact that he is a scholar of ancient Greek literature (his appointment is at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris), and he plays up--and plays around with--the figure of poet as scholar. Even so, one should be careful not to tie “scholar” and “poet” too close to one another in his case. “Pedestal,” for instance, is not a poem written in school; it concerns change and sadness, and has nothing of the footnote about it. Nonetheless it circles around the statue of Phrasikleia, which has been the subject of acute scholarly attention by Svenbro. Facets of his poems are illuminated by the quiet and beautiful essays in Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Cornell UP, 1993). Only some facets, though: the poetry is finally independent of the scholarship. That said, a recent uncollected study, “Eyerite: The Greek Alphabet and its Metaphysics of Presence,” brings retrospective clarification to his emphasis on “acoustic poetry,” while also placing him in a critical relation with Jacques Derrida’s account of the relation of subjectivity and speech in La voix et le phénomène (1967).

Like all good poets, Svenbro does not “develop.” If his poems change in their preoccupations and technique it is imperceptibly, like waves slowly advancing over a beach. Loose monologues in the first-person, given to anecdote and sudden shifts, remain constant throughout the book. And yet by the end of Three-Toed Gull one hears a voice that is less content with conceptual agility and more given to the darker tones of experience. Here the flatness of the language, its absolute refusal of “older metaphorical defenses,” conducts an implied weight of experience rather than providing a stage for meta-critical play. At times there are small epiphanies that recall Eugenio Montale’s lampi and that verge on a poetics of redemption. Thus “Frascati”: “The Frascati wine was on our table, / sparkling in a sunbeam. / As I remember its transparency, so many years later, / it changed our vision completely.” Self-reflection still occurs, even in the splendid last poem of the collection, “The Starlings.” One autumn evening in Rome a flock of starlings settles on the trees in the Via Ottaviano. They are “chattering, quarreling and laughing,” and inevitably the poet thinks of Virgil’s description of the souls of the dead in book VI of the Aeneid:

The souls of the dead have gathered in the trees.
Their number is incredible, suddenly it seems ghastly:
is this what it will be like?
For a moment I am a prisoner
of the poem I am writing.
There must be an exit.

So the poem stalls for an instant, fascinated as much with the Aeneid as with itself. There is no “linguistic moment,” though, no pitching and heaving, no slide to the Sibyl or Charon. The spell is broken in a commonplace and human way--by a soldier who comes up to speak with the poet. The recovery allows the poem to modulate into an elegy for Ludovica Koch, a scholar of Gunnar Ekelöf:

I seem to detect your lively gaze.
And we shall see how the starlings come flying
across the field in teeming swarms.
They will come from Rome and spend the day out here
where they will eat snails, worms, and seeds
and suddenly they will fly up from a field
as at a given signal
and make us look at the sun.

No gesture is more common or more tempting than the last one, especially for someone trained in Classics. Yet the moment of transcendence is not easily won. The poem has been embedded in the immanence of Rome and its history: Svenbro walks through the modern city, ponders Virgil, recalls his friend who spent time in Rome, her love for Ekelöf who wrote of Rome in a volume of translations, Elective Affinities, a title that recalls Goethe and, inevitably, his sojourn in the eternal city. Svenbro is a poet of historical strata and their dislocations, whether brutal or minute, and perhaps no other poet writing today is more at ease in negotiating the fault lines that are revealed when one looks beneath the surface of the earth on which one stands or the time in which one lives.

NEW! Review of Skanky Possum #10

Skanky Possum #10

Reviewed by Zackary Sholem Berger

“Before you go any further, read the instructions,” writes Catherine Kasper in “Manual Instruction,” the poem that feels like the true introduction of Skanky Possum #10. Kasper has three pieces in this issue, each with a title in near-bureaucratese that assumes additional dimensions in her hands--the other two are called “Border Declarations” and “Citizens’ Leaflets.” What are the instructions presented here, in a no-nonsense second person? It’s something of a tease, because what we are given are actually pre-instructions: “They have been composed with you / specifically in mind”; “They are presented in a neat, linear fashion / effortless to follow; there is a visual image / so that your emulation can be nothing less than / exemplary. In some cases, everything / cannot be anticipated.” The last lines are a step into concreteness:

It has been assumed, of course,
that you’ve purified the water, that you possess a newly-
charged generator, that you have previous
experience striking a match.

But since everything that’s been said up to now about the “instructions” centers on the ability of the recipient to understand and fulfill them, one might think that the water, generator, and struck match are as much representations of mental or psychological states as indicators of coming adventure.

The second person is a tricky form of address, as anyone knows who’s tried to have a simple conversation without putting their foot in their mouth. This poem doesn’t entirely avoid the pitfalls. There is a sameness and unclarity about the diction. (“They understand you are / important, busy, and so they have been written / to make your life easy.” Are the two “they”s referring to the instructions themselves, or is the first gesturing toward some authority in the wings? This is a confusing repetition.) When it’s said of the instructions, at one point, that “they jump right to the specifics / and provide the essentials without cluttering / your household, or increasing your consumption,” the reader is confused by the last word’s sudden broadening of reference. (What is “increasing one’s consumption,” and--assuming what’s meant is the purchase of goods and not the virulence of tuberculosis--are we meant to understand it as a good or bad thing?) These criticisms are worth making because the poem is worth reading, the “pre-instructions” of sufficient suggestiveness that the reader wonders what the instructions themselves might be.

As with the previous issue, this issue of Skanky Possum includes many different kinds of work: both studied prose poem and seemingly tossed-off bon mot, love poetry sensitive to every gust of wind and broad parody. It’s not clear whether these juxtapositions were planned or unplanned, whether there’s any unifying theme for the issue aside from a generous crop of poetry from different sizes and species. In any case, there’s another point of similarity with the last issue: the best poems are the simplest--whether that’s defined by number of lines or the paucity of formal, theoretical, jokey, or political infrastructure. Or, for that matter, by the ability of the poet to convince the reader of such simplicity, while hiding the true complexities underneath the surface.

Thus Jerome Rothenberg’s “The Burning Babe,” in two parts, can indeed be read as a detailed contemporary reworking of Robert Southwell’s well-known nativity poem. But it’s just as possible, and even more immediately worthwhile, to be naively introduced (in the first part) to the “babe / is infant boy / he sings,” who “flies into your dream,” a babe with whom we can “somehow muddle through,” and whose own hand, mystically and connectedly, in response to our own hand’s being raised with the threat of violence, “bursts / like worlds emerging / into flame.” With that introduction, the second part (a skeletonizing, or slimming-down, of the Southwell depiction), leading to a universal tragedy in its conclusion--

a babe dissolved
like molten iron
casts himself

into a pit
where others fall
& vanish

bathed with blood

--can plausibly (or perhaps this is wishful thinking on the part of this reviewer, always seeking consolation), in light of the first part, be re-interpreted as a possibility for redemption: the babe’s sympathetic fire-of-compassion is present and possible even in the mass grave.

The simplicity of Thomas Fink’s “Frigate” is of the cunning variety: it characterizes the average reader’s cast of mind while cajoling or seducing its own reader into that very mentality--or a substantially altered version of it. “There’s something new / and learned // before you read / the page / every time you // meet a picture,” the poem begins, with less than perfect clarity. But the image at its close brings things into focus: “We hear ‘lunch’ / and picture / the yellow word, / bubble-lettered, / with sandwich, / with salad / next to it.” Why “lunch” is a yellow word, and bubble-lettered: well, that’s the difference between the canonical “reading of the page” and what the poem is allowed to sneak in around the edges. (And what sort of frigate will the reader of this poem see in her mind’s eye, steaming away from this page of poetry?)

The last poems I’d like to mention are those motivated by the whimsical and personable intelligence of Duncan McNaughton. The simplicity I’ve been talking about here is best paired with an allergy to cliche, the use of sensory realia in the service of the level gaze. The accidents of love and sex are here evidenced by single objects--“a pair of gold shoes,” the ‘araq that’s “good, remorseless”; “the hem of her slip”--but in combination with psychological sensitivity (“the relation / between magnetism and electricity / is it a happy union, or is it torment?”) and a nimble lightness which enables him to leap from culture to culture, from Arabia to Pan to J-Lo, in the space of one poem (“An immunity”). He’s a guy I’d like to know more about, and figure out the connections personal and poetic between the modest-but-inviting dedications (“to the uncertain,” reads one of them) at the end of these poems.

NEW! Simon Perchik poem

Simon Perchik

*

You wait as if every river
begins in ice, then moonlight
seeping slowly through

--you don’t wait! the coffee
is sweeping all Earth
on its side, both poles

flowing into the equator
and what you swallow
is already shoreline

huddled around this table
and your lips in the open
the way small stones are left

to help the dead wander back
as the dim light they make
and any morning now.

The Best Australian Poems 2003

(Black Inc., 2003), edited by Peter Craven, is 360 pages long--longer than century-spanning anthologies like Peter Porter's The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse--and therefore does a number on what can be called "the best." Critics reviewing The Best American Poetry frequently mention that poets in the U.S. never produce 75 great poems in a single year, so it's rather difficult to justify that Australia (which publishes 1/10 of the number of poetry books that the U.S. does in a year) needs an annual of this size. That in itself is a reason to read it.

I'm reviewing The Best Australian Poems 2004 (Black Inc.) as well as The Best Australian Poetry 2004 (University of Queensland Press) for Australian Book Review, so I've been reading the 2003 editions, which happen to be the inaugural editions in both series. Since many readers of Verse share an interest in Australian poetry but probably do not know about these new series, I thought I'd introduce them briefly in case anyone would like to seek them out.

As can be inferred from its title, the UQP series is modeled after The Best American Poetry in that it presents one poem each by 40 poets and offers explanatory notes alongside the usual bios. The Black Inc. series offers a sizeable batch of poems by each poet, thus resembling an anthology more than an annual. Oddly, the inaugural volumes in the series are edited by critics, not poets (Peter Craven and Martin Duwell), and the second volumes are edited by poets (Les Murray and Anthony Lawrence). Zero of the four volumes is edited by a woman. Craven was initially going to edit The Best Australian Poems every year, but apparently that plan has been scrapped. The Best Australian Poetry has a guest editor and two series editors (again connecting it to The Best American Poetry).

Concerns about "the best" aside, a 360-page book of Australian poetry must have some excellent poems even if it limits itself to a single year. There is interesting work by John Tranter, Emma Lew, Kevin Hart, John Kinsella, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, M.T.C. Cronin, Gig Ryan, Peter Minter, Craig Sherborne, Javant Biarujia, Peter Rose, and the novelist/poet David Malouf.

But I'd like to call attention to some stunning poems about the latest war in Iraq by Robert Adamson and Jennifer Maiden, which are offered a strange counterpoint by some Bruce Dawe poems.

Adamson is a poet whose work I've admired for a long time, for its commitment to lyricism, the natural world, and politics (including "current events"). Critics often mention the Black Mountain Poets in general and Robert Duncan in particular when discussing Adamson, whose Paper Bark Press has published outstanding books by Australian poets like Kevin Hart, Gig Ryan, Peter Minter, and Michael Brennan as well as the American poet Devin Johnston.

Some of Adamson's poems in this book focus on birds during war (they remind me of Hayden Carruth's poems "When Howitzers Began" and "The Birds of Vietnam").

Here's the epigraph and ending of Adamson's "Flag-Tailed Bird of Paradise":

"George W. Bush instructed 'the enemy' to hold up white flags and stand twenty metres away from their tanks, promising that if they did, they would be spared."

Flunkies fed them
and sultans hovered about them, marvelling
at how they became extraordinary in their deformities,
their cream-coloured plumage shot
through with pale, beautiful rainbows,
their eyes enormous, pink, their tail-flags heavy--
almost too heavy to hold up, but not theirs to withhold.

And here's the end of Adamson's "The Goldfinches of Baghdad":

The ones who cannot speak burn
along with the articulate; the creatures
who are oblivious of prayer, along with the ones
who lament to their God. Falcons on their silver chains,
and the children of the falcon trainer smother
in the smoke of burning feathers and human flesh.
We must sing or die. Singing death as our songs feed the flame.

I haven't read much of Jennifer Maiden's work--probably a book and some magazine and anthology selections in the late 1990s--but her poems in The Best Australian Poems 2003 make me want to read all of her books (and kick myself for not doing so earlier).

Maiden's "George Jeffreys" sequence breaks down into five parts:

1. George Jeffreys Woke Up in Kabul
2. George Jeffreys Woke Up in Kandahar
3. George Jeffreys Woke Up in London
4. George Jeffreys Woke Up in Berlin
5. George Jeffreys Woke Up in The White House

Wherever George Jeffreys woke up, "George Bush Junior was on the TV, obsessed / as usual with Baghdad."

Maiden is admirably incisive (and funny) throughout, and she must be the first Australian (and maybe American) poet to write about Scott Ritter:

Ex-Arms-Inspector Ritter
expressed an angle that he did not
care about Iraq but just cared that
America would be destroyed, degraded
by lies about Baghdad as dangerous.

The poem's final section begins:

George Jeffreys woke up in the White House.
George Bush Junior was on the TV, obsessed
as usual with Baghdad. And choking
on a pretzel. Who, thought Jeffreys,
would choke twice on a pretzel?
        And who
would leave him twice alone?

After Jeffreys saves Bush with the Heimlich manuever, they watch Condaleeza Rice on TV:

         W said,
'You know, Condy thinks it's okay
to just blow people up with a C.I.A.
missile where ever they are, or who.
She just said that and no one
minded much, maybe your Human Rights
outfit, or another one.
        You know, George, you
let me live because you knew
that if I live long enough the rest
of capitalism's probably over, hey, my
sort of capitalism, anyway, that dirty
puritan profit and revenge thing...'

Maiden's "Costume Jewellery" bears this epigraph:

"Let's get one thing straight. You're behind the counter because you have to work for $6.00 an hour. I'm on this side asking to see the good jewellery because I make considerably more." --reported remark by U.S. National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice to shop assistant who had pulled out some costume jewellery on seeing her.

The poem itself is a more effective demolition job than any work of journalism I've read on C.R., perhaps because Maiden juxtaposes ("clusters") details so quickly, deftly, humorously.

Bruce Dawe's "Umm Qasr" presents a (presumably American) soldier's thoughts in an ABAB rhyme scheme:

We thought that there'd be flowers along the way
and crowds of glad Iraqis lining streets
(they hanged a woman who waved to us today).

Though I admire the attempt, I think the form mars the poem because it facilitates too many vague descriptions that could apply to any war. And the form does not curb wordiness (e.g., the "that" in line one).

Along similar lines, Dawe's "What Is All War But a Wasting?" opens with the following stanza:

What is all war but a wasting,
And peace like a dream between wars,
An odd restless dream of heart-aching
From which men are forever awaking
To find blood on their innocent paws ...?

Is there a single original thought in those lines?

Dawe's "Flight 93" seems to buy into the "ordinary American heroes on 9/11" story perpetuated by the mainstream U.S. media:

today the Congressional building stands
as it stood then because
those citizen-passengers with one accord
chose certain death in rural Pennsylvania.

Aside from offering little to no sonic pleasure, the poem offers no real thinking--just received ideas in the form of a tribute. Although every anti-war poem is in some sense universal, Dawe's approach in these poems seems too accommodating, too decorous. Perhaps they seem too generalized because the poet has not done the difficult thinking (and research) that Maiden and Adamson have done.

For me, the truly best poems in Martin Duwell's The Best Australian Poetry (which generally leans toward the lyric anecdote) are Jordie Albiston's "Apostrophe," M.T.C. Cronin's "The Flower, the Thing," John Kinsella's "Lyrical Unification in Gambier," Emma Lew's "The Clover Seed Hex," and Peter Rose's "Late Edition."

Robert Adamson and Jennifer Maiden are also represented. Adamson's "Elegy" is in Craven's volume, too, making it twice a "best" poem of 2003. Maiden's "Missing Elvis" mentions "George of the Lethal Injection" a la Elvis:

There is something Elvis-like
in winsome, dyslectic mumbles, but
his vocal tone is better than
his father's: not so prim,
so childlike and super-ego ridden.
W.'s nose is sharper, looks
more deadly than Senior's, like a beak
built to tear not peck, his mouth
a drier, twitchier line. Baghdad
is already bombed again.

The book's web site: http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=0702234206

NEW! Review of Douglas Messerli

First Words by Douglas Messerli. Green Integer, $10.95.

Reviewed by Richard C Scheiwe

Douglas Messerli, the prolific writer of poetry and dramas, anthologizer, and publisher of Green Integer Press, has published a book of poetry that escapes the conventional descriptions of language poetry, a movement with which Messerli has typically been associated. The poems in his recent book, First Words, have the requisite wordplay and syntactical manipulation, but speak in a lyrical tradition, seemingly taking themselves away from the reader’s expectations of Messerli’s earlier work. The overt attention to language and its interaction with the interior/exterior (with what’s going on within the poem and with what’s going on outside the poem in the reader’s mind) is apparent from one’s first experience of the book.

In the book’s epigraph, Messerli illustrates an anecdote that comes to set the tone for the book as a whole: a tone of local ambiguity, and a preference for the poet to stave off his ultimate choice of (what one could assume) his best words, only to realize when the words come that they are not necessarily Messerli’s chosen best words, rather words that come out almost by a thoughtful consideration intermixed with chance. The epigraph shows Messerli as a baby, and his parents in long anticipation for his first words. But, rather than unconsciously taking the prevailing route of “mamma” or “dadda,” the baby Messerli waits until he and his parents are at a drive-in movie, and, upon his father leaving to get some ice-cream cones at intermission, Messerli finally announcing “bring me back a chocolate one.” A sentence at that, and not a mere word. And, conscious or unconscious, this is his first use of language.

The language of First Words comes after the reader is able to absorb the poems and after the slight conflict between the lyrical style balances out with the more language-driven side. As with the first poem of the book “Icarus,” the wordplay at first is jarring, but is shortly resolved as necessarily stylistic. The reader willingly accepts it is the drive of the poem: “the way / sometimes / sometimes / goes forward / the way / silence— / this is what / it is still.” Messerli asks the reader to give him (the poet) leeway with the wordplay/manipulation of “sometimes / sometimes” and also with the breakoff after “the way / silence—.” The two phrases, taken together, could overpower the reader, or confuse, because they are pushing two different syntactical prosodies: on the one hand, “sometimes / sometimes” is a play on the part of speech of the given word; on the other hand, the lack of punctuation before “the way / silence—” and its subsequent dash (mimicking the feel of silence) are manipulations the poet uses as his own freedom, as a writer. If this language and freedom were not so consistent and convincing throughout the book, it would be hard for Messerli to keep his language together. But he is able to keep it together, and simple wordplay becomes not so simple: it becomes its own language.

A lot of attention has been drawn to the fact that these poems began as exercises, taking the first few words or so from another poet and embedding them in the poems of First Words. But as Messerli began these poems as exercises, they metamorphosed into something very personal, and they became ultimately a reflection of his own despair, as the back cover states. It would be somewhat difficult to find the entrenched words Messerli used as jumping-off points, but it remains difficult because of how much these poems became his own, and how much the words of other poets are so insignificant in lieu of his style and substance in these poems. One poem that is hard to forget, and which most readers will walk away with, is “The Resolved”:

I resolved, found
center, it is
a tree beyond view
the weather reaches

only as wind, deadened
by the insistent
nothing between

something feeling
and the walk to.

In this poem, Messerli is attempting a more lyrical address to his augmented aesthetic. The importance of “a tree beyond view / the weather reaches // only as wind” resounds throughout the book because, if these new poems are words to/out of despair, how can one reach them and the true nature of despair only through poetry? To Messerli, it is beside the point. It is the fact that he can begin to reach them with poetry, and that this is the vehicle (with language not words) he is using to get at “the insistent / nothing between // something feeling / and the walk to.” The “walk to ” is language for Messerli, and he has found that first words come in media res, whether they be his first words ever spoken, or the first words on the way to seeking out despair, and evolving his style.

NEW! Review of Christine Hume

Alaskaphrenia by Christine Hume. New Issues, $14.

Reviewed by Heidi Lynn Staples

Christine Hume’s first collection, Musca Domestica, presented a remarkably coherent set of motifs and themes that articulate a governing aesthetic. Her second book Alaskaphrenia offers readers another ambitious articulation of philosophical insight and rich meditation on human consciousness.

Like Wallace Stevens, who famously wrote of a Florida-of-the-mind, Hume uses the landscape as a trope through which to communicate her poetics. She presents two concerns most salient within her project: an evocation of the poetic imagination--like other wild places--as host to fracture, refraction, variation, and mutability (to name a few of the more familiar species), and an implied caveat that the “Cliff-dripped blinking” fecundity of associative logic where “Cold will be holy,” “Wild will be holy,” has been rendered fragile by an approach that fences off the imagination with convention, that drills for modernist code, and that exploits until “Everything goes to prospect.” Implicitly and explicitly, Hume pursues a perpetually transforming (and transformative) consciousness. She asserts the poetic over the narrative, the circular over the linear, the process over the product, the mutable over the monumental: “Therefore, I dumpstered the novel and did not threaten any sodden hills with bombs.”

Not content to rest on her binaries, Hume resists a prescribed lyricism--notably, the collection offers no traditionally formal verse--but instead, she infuses the prosaic with the poetic. For example, Alaskaphrenia’s reader encounters institutional forms and documents transformed by a lyric imagination. Examine these titles: “Comprehension Questions,” “Dialogue Among Unincorporated Towns Concerning Alaska’s Resources,” “Do’s and Don’ts About Fur,” “Brochure,” “Diagram Explanatory of Lucency,” “Index of Observations on Pioneering Portraiture, “Translation Key to ‘Exercises and Dialogues II,’” “Explanation,” and “Instructions for All Parties A.K.A.” Within paper-work’s flourescent-lit partitioned cubicles of bureaucratized consciousness, Hume riddles in her chains hikes the freeze.

By which I mean, word-play and metamorphosizing metaphors took this reader on quite a journey. Hume, by her own description, has “adopted an Alaskan ear long before; with it, it’s not unusual to hear from inside the hammer: stampeded terrain, yea, avalanche.” Perhaps by Alaskan ear she means that within the common phrase and association handed down in traditional iambs, Hume hears meanings thunderous with possibilities. Read darefully the following lines from “No Less Remarkable Is the Metamorphosis of the Mastodon:”

“Under these circulations
You could not wear cirrus the way cows do

Always your mange meant to be smoke
molting, moonglow

You own the smoke, its slow muzzle
Involuntary growl
in sheep’s clothing.”

A close look reveals intricate hilarity married to portent. The associative logic refracts the poetry’s tone; thus, although words like ‘cirrus’ ‘mange’ ‘moonglow’ and ‘growl’ come from a familiar body of poetic diction and cast a pervading shade of portent, the poem’s logic and wordplay turn the tone with a sharp, glittering bit of cracking up--check out how she moves from ‘circulations’ to its aural echo ‘cirrus’ and from the then implied ‘cloud’ to its seek-sound-cousin ‘cow.’ She goes on to superimpose the cloud image with ‘smoke’ and then echoes the cow’s lowing in ‘molting, moonglow’ (‘mo,’ ‘moo,’ ‘low’). Finally, she conflates the cloud and the cow in the image of a smoke’s muzzle. At this moment in the poem, the Mastodon of the title becomes many things at once, as the decentered description freezes many times as one; the muzzle becomes smoke, cloud, extinct pre-historic animal and that sadly terrifying implement of modern man, the smoking gun.

Hume’s felicitious aural patterning puts a sensational spangle and spin on her words. Her poems reward and reworld multiple readings with deeper ever and more pleasurable mystery. Less interestingly, the poems often close with an overly familiar evocation of profundity and/or gravitas. The concluding sentiment or perhaps merely the final word of a poem goes a bit frequently and too gently into the night--words like ‘ecstasy,’ ‘insane,’ ‘spirits,’ and ‘blood’ simply fail to surprise as arrival points for a poem. What strikes me as frustratingly ironic about repeatedly portentous endings in a book is that their ordinariness as an artistic gesture (conventional as they are) simply seems at odds with the augury they connote.

That said, Alaskaphrenia offers a dynamic tonality across the collection, and Christine Hume has again given us ingenious forms, suggestive syntax, transformative metaphors, and exquisite wordplay. In her palpable lands, “The mist possesses authentic talk.”

NEW! Anthony Robinson poem

Anthony Robinson

“THERE IS A CLOUD OUT MY WINDOW THAT LOOKS VERY MUCH LIKE THE FACE OF GABE GUDDING”


And it is not my window, but the window of the cat of friends

Andrew came over to retrieve his book and his wife is someone I used to despise

These things

These things, observations I suppose,

Are healthy.

*

I am still not a reasonable man and I am one to despise. My despiseability knows no bounds.

Neither attractive nor particularly brilliant, I still love little things like Doug Powell’s beautiful book, Tea.

I don’t particularly like the drink that men call tea. I prefer coffee drunk in my own small town that I despise and love in the way a man can only love his kid brother who picks too many fights and acts like an asshole in public. I love this town because it’s mine and it’s in this town I drank and fucked and failed and.

Assholes, like Gabe Guddings, are numerous. They are so numerous, in fact, that there are more assholes than there are people because all mammals have assholes. The same holds true for many non-mammals.

Kent Johnson is an asshole, but he is lovable, though I’ve never loved him in a family way, nor in a bath-house way. I’ve loved him in a far away way like a son who was bad.

I am a bad son and I haven’t loved a woman in a physical way for nearly 14 months and before that another 14 months and the gestation period of my sexual couplings is fourteen months--more than a human baby’s gestation but much less than that of an elephant.

I became fat to provide an excuse for my lack of coupling. Alice Toklas, Andrew told me today (just minutes after I read his book and the dedication that slammed my beloved/hated hometown) that Toklas uses too much butter and is unhealthy.

It is unhealthy to live with Gertrude Stein. I am sure of this.

It is not unhealthy to cook with three tablespoons of lard. It is about living. Doug Powell said this in his book. The part about the living, not the lard.

*

Gabe Gudding Cloud has morphed into Can of Beer Cloud, and then Tamale Cloud, and then Elk Antler Cloud.

*

I think I am in love and it’s fucking terrifying. Only the anonymous people on the street deserve my love. Everyone else is in the wrong business.

I’m trying to be a good son. My vision has been obscured by “the compacts of sluts.”

The compact compacts I make with compact people impact my tacky tactless life.

O, you ... O elbow and hymn. O drudge and bastille-stormed Nancy. O, you un-Franced, much frenched like a fancy lambchop. O

I’ll push you off the map.

NEW! Review of Elizabeth Treadwell

Chantry by Elizabeth Treadwell. Chax. $16.

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

In Chantry, Elizabeth Treadwell has devised an unusual structure. Interspersing poems (often without stanza breaks), prose poems, and hybrids of the two, Chantry begins with a three-page prose poetry sequence, moves on to eight texts of a page or less, then fills the 50-page middle section (of about 90 pages) with four long texts in a row, including a self-styled “novelette” (“codes of the very femininity”). The remaining pieces are short, except for a six-page “hybrid” near the book’s end. If the center of gravity is in the center, the entire collection, undivided by sections, possesses great density; this involves a piling of relentlessly disparate, often vertiginously surreal images, consistently strained or fractured grammar, and challenging allusions. And do not look to T.S. Eliot-style footnotes or explanatory passages like Susan Howe’s for assistance.

“Torn/town,” just shy of 20 pages, is the book’s longest poem. As in “Europe” and other poems collected in The Tennis Court Oath (1962) about a decade before first-generation Language Poets learned from this phase of John Ashbery’s work, violently interrupted sentences evince the pathos of a pulverized (“torn”) speaking subject: “And during the past week I’d.” “The heart is commonly.” Disruption of grammar and syntax marks the poem’s first sentence, which features not only stammering repetition of subjects and the removal of crucial punctuation but independent clauses set ambiguously beside fragments: “I I have been constant any future tragedies he he died for the sea rose-water redhead.” The initial declaration of constancy is ironically undercut by the impossibility of confidence about syntactical relations.

A sprinkling of proper names with historical and mythological allusiveness (“Troy,” “Adam,” “Adonis,” “Cherokee,” “Cassandra,” “Isis,” “Myrmidon”) and dates (1209, 1542, 1907) seems to suggest that historical data could be unearthed. However, the “serpentine” progression of bits of language “torn” from a “town’s” context, from causal chains, gives “inches of cities,” if that much: “Clementine serpentine but this is not a history!” At times, the co-presence of histories and geographies is asserted: “Spiral Japan: postcard ice cream both single and Mesopotamian. Where is.”

Various passages signifying violence are moments of linguistic energy: “Electronvolt frontier confection. Everyday whip, reestablish, thrall. In semidetached contusion mangle. Quit tirade tire--underpaid massacre.” “Confection” retains the signification of movement and heat in the expected “convection,” and it conveys the notion, implied elsewhere in the poem and book, that sweetness serves as a rationale or front for (male) dominance. The play of “contusion”/confusion in relation to “mangle” has a similar effect of “semi-”attachment and “semidetachment.” Alongside the idea that to stop shouting is to admit fatigue and find that energy needed to act violently is not cost-effective, part of “tirade” is “lost” in “tire” and then is “found” again in the last syllable of “underpaid.” These instances of linguistic play in “Torn/ town” and other long texts in Chantry are “readable” in ways that many other passages are not: “mental transitive 1907: no child stars / six petitions correspond.” Unless one happens to know what “petitions” were made in 1907 (and where and why), this line will have little interest, even if one senses that the concept of the “child star” emerged after that year.

A salient example of Treadwell’s shorter pieces is the unindented, single-paragraph, roughly half-page prose poem, “composition.” Here is roughly the first third:

waitress of mercy glance in the hollow tube underwear glen. dear calamity profile, hunky bearer of wand and limbs. Newton’s alchemical harpooned state dreams like argyle roughage. she was a literalist in the tradition of wander mer. time being nonsense water, vapid arcane hands translate the ice floes though had jumped bikini wooden.

Because “glance” has no “s” at the end, we can surmise that the first unit of the prose poem is a fragment, not a sentence, and “waitress of mercy,” like the three words prior to the final “glen,” is an adjectival phrase modifying the main noun. (Long adjectival phrases are common in this and other texts in Chantry.) But “glance” might be a verb of command without a comma preceding it. This first sentence might be described as surrealism run amok. The literal absurdity of “underwear” in the form of a “hollow tube” plays against the plausible, figurative sense of penis as “tube,” but is an “underwear glen” a dresser, a closet, or just an environment where the “waitress” encounters men? Does her “glance” embody the “mercy” with which she has been tagged, or does it have a different impact--perhaps anxiety, as indicated by the appositive beginning the second “sentence” that suggests that looking at the “hunk” with “wand” (“tube”?) involves the likelihood (“profile”) of “calamity”?

The word “wand” in the second sentence reaches over to “alchemical” in the third (and “wander” in the fourth), but why is “Newton’s . . . state” aligned with alchemy rather than hard science? The poet’s verbal “dream” magic may be denying the separation of science and magic, just as “argyle roughage” declines to separate food and clothing: a “waitress” “serves” “underwear.” It follows the “literalist . . . tradition” of a “wandering” sea/mother (French: “mer”/”mere”) in the sense that Gertrude Stein, as interpreted by Lyn Hejinian and others, privileged metonymy--a continual displacement that honors surface interactions and questions large symbolic unities--over metaphor. The body of water/maternal “origin” of this linguistic movement through “time” does not yield primordial sense, but the priority of language as material, hence “nonsense.” To settle intentionally for an “arcane” simplification, “vapor” “translates” “ice” into “water.” According to the logic of this “nonsense” and its grammatical ambiguity, either a layer of meaning (“bikini”) can be “jumped” (over), but “woodenly,” or the “bikini” itself should be regarded as “wooden,” an impediment either to translation or a more immediate reading that questions translation as limitation.

In its concentration on extremity of disjunction between words, phrases, and larger units, complication of imagery, and grammatical/syntactical deregulation, as well as on development of prose/poetic structures, Chantry induces considerable readerly anxiety, some skepticism, and (for me) pleasure in the struggle to stretch past habits of reception and perception. These features mark Chantry as a promising elaboration of the important concerns and innovations of Elizabeth Treadwell’s Language forebears.

NEW! John Latta poems

John Latta

Three Poems


GAP

Gap-tooth’d and blue, I

Dive the slurry stretches of

Sky, sky myself and goatish.

I want a minstrelsy wench.

I want a slender Russian

Apple-picker to chuck green

Granny Smiths at me, beginning

With a zhili byli, one

Way to momentarily lock up

A sizeable piece of continuum.

Or snatch the booger’d Starres

Downe and pluck a handy

Something, something like a muddy

Drench of ale, wise-making

And tragickal-like. Inestimable my

Pudeurs in th’amorous repudiate dark.


LOUD

Loud’s my hangdog sonata, I

Pee roilingly into th’ebon bowl,

Night foaming up a translunary

Crescendo against whatever be feeble,

Be duff’d. Earth’s an erratic,

A boulder-dropp’d crumb out

The glacier’s maw. Milky Way

Extend’d a pedicle and fill’d

It with itself the way

A paramecium moves, as if

To say it never met

A ne plus ultra it

Didn’t like. --So’s your old

Man. My crabbed signature nebulaic

Trailing off into semantic froth

Looks like spit on water.


KUDOS AND XYSTER

Clatter in the dailies is

All box-score debt load,

Kudos to the weimaraner, noogies

To the wisenheimer, all stalked

By the back-lit escutcheon

Of th’undiplomatickal eye. Don’t call

Me Linnaeus, who never left

Uppsala, who claim’d the swallow

Winter’d under water. I am

Not fond of Liars. Armed

With a xyster to debone

The keister of one Criminal

Secretary who downs Rums in

The Field. He shalt not

Have nothing good chepe, he

Shalt never have my boy.

NEW! Review of Skanky Possum #9

Skanky Possum #9.

Reviewed by Zackary Sholem Berger

The most successful poems in Skanky Possum #9 (Autumn/Winter 2003-2004) do not grab you by the collar and pin you to the wall behind your reading chair, nor do they suicide-bomb you with political accusations or scatological evocations. Rather, they insinuate, as does Andy Schuck’s “Fence”:

to wait and wire
material
as in debate:
jumping and shifting
to show intruders in
to avoid answering
questions
before one repairs
a boundary

That’s the beginning. Perhaps I can be forgiven if I see a hint of a criticism of “Mending Wall”--Frost (or his narrator) doesn’t answer any questions himself, does he, before he goes off repairing the wall? He just does it, with the help of his neighbor, and only later criticizes that neighbor. But if “good fences make good neighbors” is such a foolish saying, says Schuck’s poem in response, why not question the boundary before one goes off to repair it? “Fence” continues, itself straddling multiple possible meanings, cataloging the roles a fence can play, until ending with an enlightening compromise:

to jump over
shifting ground
to restrict
repairs
one commits
to

The fence, that is, is its own division, setting itself apart from the surrounding landscape so that our limited ability to “commit” might have a limited and more realistic realm of operations.

Avery E.D. Burns’s Ambulatory Refrains is also excerpted in this issue, and the title of his collection is appropriate for these deceptively simple, epigrammatic poems, balancing irony and contradiction in a way reminiscent of A.R. Ammons’s shorter works. “I want what you want / you want what I want,” begins the first, a stalemate which is both gridlock and compromise, and the last, in its entirety, reads as follows:

my heart is wild
and I must rest

pebbles sound
waves

within searing
without

my heart is wild
and I must rest

This poem is not narrative, but momental--almost a palindrome, but at any rate something that should be read (if it were possible) all at once, without regard to the relationships between pebbles and waves, within and without, wildness and rest: is the one cause of or caused by the other? Burns does not tell us, and he has faith enough in his few lines to grant us that uncertainty. This, of course, means that his poems dance dangerously close to the edge of sentimentality, as in the “house in a heart” of the second poem in the series, like a “house on the hill”: with all modern conveniences, but “yours for a song.”

The third poem here is most arresting and thought-provoking, starting with a ringing image (“coins spilt / on a table // the feel for one / thing over another / reels”) and suggesting, albeit in a tone almost too oblique to be called suggestion, that there is a universe of emotional connections that can be understood in terms of “barter”: “... what shifts / from shells / & drilled stones / to hearts / strung on a rope / of sand.” If it’s not clear whose hearts these are, and why they’re on a rope, maybe that’s the point: the jingling of coins and the speed of barter can overwhelm our “feel for one thing over another.”

It is mostly the poems by Burns which save this issue from its weakest poems, tired attempts to epater les bourgeois or strenuously contrived, self-righteous political commentary. It’s the poet’s paradox: when so much is going on and life and death seem to hang in the balance, the fewest words carefully placed can work wondrous simplicity.

NEW! Review of J.H. Prynne

Furtherance by J. H. Prynne. The Figures, $14.

Reviewed by David Shepard

To proclaim J.H. Prynne the “most important poet of the 20th century” may not have been Randall Stevenson’s intent, but the subsequent furor over the misunderstanding of his words demonstrated Prynne’s significance. Given the century’s variety of poetic activity, it is unreasonable to select one poet as its best, but the scope of Prynne’s latest book, Furtherance, suggests he might at least claim to exemplify the period. In this intriguing collection of his last four published poems--“Red D Gypsum,” “Pearls that Were,” “Triodes,” and “Unanswering Rational Shore”--he employs postmodern techniques and ideas in a Modernist poetic project to depict the twentieth century in the structure and sense of his poems.

One of Prynne’s main projects has been to collect and represent bodies of knowledge into a comprehensive whole, as illustrated in “Red D Gypsum” and echoed in “Unanswering Rational Shore.” With its complex vocabulary, the former joins human, animal, and earth in a single system by illustrating their mutual effects upon one another. We “trek inter-plate reversion to earth buy out” to find a pure state under a “flawless glucose shimmering sky” formed from a basic sugar and illustrating untapped potential. Prynne uses the motif of analogous circulatory systems within organisms, rivers, and ecosystems to illustrate the way they function through exchange. Humans impose value judgments upon the earth through the act of speech and economics, both methods of inscribing meaning, but the environment acts reciprocally. At the end, “set lichen” becomes a “set ikon,” while “vivid strips of tree bark circle the room,” silencing a speaker, and the sky is “broken.” The whole is reached through the collection of human, animal, and geological into a system.

It is for this project that he includes elements of postmodernism. The use of science and social science moves outside lyric voice subjectivity into apparent objectivity. Never satisfied to speak from one point-of-view, he embraces multiple perspectives, as in “Triodes” with its two archetypal narrators, Pandora and Irene. When a first-person speaker does emerge, he is limited by his sexism: he calls the women “chicks” and assesses a “giant classical nipple” as “not ... to die for.” No single subjectivity is prized in an effort to represent them all. This multiplicity leads to postmodern irresolution via an acceptance of multiple points-of-view. As Jeremy Noel-Tod says, “Prynne’s work is inclusively honest about the confusion of trying to see life whole”; the apparent collages of “Red D Gypsum” and “Unanswering Rational Shore” represent the information overload that confronts residents of the developed world. Likewise, Prynne does not simplify or exclude to propose a solution; as in “Pearls that Were,” there is “no pica among these withered leaves to bind up the sunken floor.” With “leaves” being the book’s paper, the line asserts that the function of this poetry is not to solve problems, reiterating the impossibility of reaching a conclusion without exclusion.

Furthermore, like many postmodern artists, Prynne repudiates modernist elitism, using eclectic vocabulary from countless different sciences and humanities for its precision, with the secondary purpose of educating the audience. On one level, the poems become vocabulary lessons with utilitarian educational value; as he says in “Unanswering Rational Shore,” they “may contain nutrients.” One representative line, “Lutine falsetto belies the gravamen of a loose quadratic, before this court ... of currency fonts” invokes medicine, music, mathematics, economics, and print. Unlike other modernists such as Eliot, Prynne uses few mythological allusions. Pandora and Irene from “Triodes” are made archaic, rather than universal, through their juxtaposition with modern conflicts. At the end, Pandora is consigned to a portrait. Such allusions otherwise tend to be a vehicle for demonstrating the poet’s knowledge of mythology, with the requirement that the reader be similarly intelligent. Prynne makes no such assumption but seeks to educate.

We can therefore read Prynne’s use of complex vocabulary as an attempt to recoup F.R. Leavis’s organic community and recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons. He reclaims this language for poetry and causes readers to incorporate these words into their vocabulary. This moves language closer to the organic whole Leavis believed permanently lost: by incorporating terms from each discourse, Prynne returns this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower. At the same time, it also gives his poems the flavor of a modernist nostalgia for lost wholes rather than a postmodern acceptance of fragmentation.

For this reason, Prynne’s poetry is modernist in spirit. Unlike a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet (to whose poems his bear a superficial resemblance), he does not fragment the self into its influences by representing its speech as unrelated phrases. Instead, Prynne steps outside the self into multiple points of view and apparently objective realities of science. These poems also have a strong sense of originality and even emotion. “Red D Gypsum” leaves us with “vocal folds glowing deep unwinding did they forage out reparted sound shift, closing did the canted ferox inter-vocalic tissue,” conveying desperation in the effort of speaking, while the “closing” suggests the finality of its impossibility. The placement of these words is quite novel in its complexity, and we are drawn into ideas rather than forced to confront words as non-representational objects, pieces of an illusory whole. Prynne is not a pure postmodernist, then, but takes a more classical view of the function of language.

However, there is no denying that he has learned from his predecessors and found lessons in the past sixty years of poetry. This is why Furtherance is so compelling. By fulfilling his modernist project of totalization with postmodern irresolution and avoidance of a single subjectivity, Prynne collects from two periods at odds with each other. He can be called representative of the twentieth century because this book encompasses both of its major movements, its general feeling, and a good portion of its knowledge.

NEW! Jennifer Tynes poem

Jennifer Tynes

HOUSES ARE STILL STANDING

No one traveling through the country

eats at the side of the road. A blanket demeans

a body with small stains that carry across the lawn.

It doesn’t scream anything in particular

when I buy condoms from the machine. In a very primitive way

we knew what was coming. After our excursion through

the Alleghenies, indelicate dreamlife in which cancers

grind each other in the wash.

Growing out of the practice of gathering long tables

to my chest, my gratitude for the idea that attaches itself

to the animal is no longer bore out

by any solid article. I take your hand.

NEW! Review of Prageeta Sharma

The Opening Question by Prageeta Sharma. Fence, $12.

Reviewed by Kathleen Ossip

When you open a new book of poems, it’s easy to be distracted by technology. Is this book suitably equipped with the latest up-to-dates (and if so, which brands?), or is it dustily and earnestly furnished with the artifacts of a bygone day, for which we may sometimes cherish a lazy nostalgia?

But technological demonstrations quickly grow boring unless the content engages, and so totting up gizmos is ultimately a sad way to approach a book. Sure, you can’t separate content from technology, but don’t forget that both are in play, and that a mere display of “look what gadget I just bought” without content is unlikely to matter for any length of time. In The Opening Question Prageeta Sharma uses many of the technologies of the present period style to make meaning around the Big Deals: Culture and Otherness, Death, Love, Violence, Power.

One of the current technologies that Sharma makes the most of is a relaxed surrealism. Any poet sensitive to the countless stimuli of contemporary life and smart enough to cope with the complete human range of emotions and blessed with a capacious imagination will find realism a pretty paltry implement. Sharma’s variant has a sweet gravity, as in the opening lines of the opening poem, “Calendar”:

Separated into parts for an afternoon or the day of the week--
I had a right to conceal,
I had a right to an apron--I was used for a gemstone,
for a social climber’s pocket watch--
an influence of human affairs to an earnest and awestruck constellation;
ear-shaped, we poets are ear-shaped like harps.

Less widespread is another of the tasks Sharma seems to be set on: to remake (or re-re-make) the sentence, to render it absolutely fluid and supple enough to mold around the author’s sensibility and every impulse:

That dream, she said, with the Indian child in it, sleeping
on a small sofa, dream she said, alongside his shoulder,
he wept, almost, as if they were at the train again,
the while ankle left for good, it sank under the tracks
the rat jumps upon tracks for the last rites, a meal
so pleasant, his slacks lazy underneath, perhaps,
she spoke this aloud, he is the man, he tips his hat,
the inhibited manner, could there be a Sufi in this crowd?

Imagine your fifth-grade teacher trying to diagram that one! But how else could the poet pack her fragmentation with so much connection?

Language here, no matter how ornamental, serves the poet’s astutely complex meaning; for this reason, Marianne Moore came to mind several times as I was reading. The refrain of “Catalogue of Swindles and Perversions” alerts us to a careful precision (“Do not pervert another phrase”) while “A Most Feeling Girl” reads like an ars poetica, signaling readers (or formulating for herself) that her technology doesn’t operate in cold impersonal space:

One last time, study
The dream for its feeling.

The feeling girl felt
this to be the truest,
and the most accurate
creed to feeling.

Yes, what’s noteworthy is how skillfully Sharma plies her tools to capture feeling. In “Speech Turns Orange” the feeling she tackles is gloom, the play of acceptance and detachment delicious:

What day is this that lacks so much comfort?
There came some grief in the form of an owl,
it struck me that my mind was jumping from place
to place hooting melancholia. I won’t have it here
so I flung it out into the open like economic recovery
for the poor museum. I don’t want to be the poor museum.

How necessary, and how wonderful, these technologies--this disjunction, these imaginative leaps, which allow Sharma to avoid both self-pity and sterility and to allow all the nuances of the emotion, and the reaction to that emotion, to emerge like a bas-relief.

Similarly, “Miraculous Food for Once” is a marvelously joyful love poem, Donne-ian in its momentum and its conviction, to which the only fitting reaction is a sunny smile:

how provocative and alluring
verse and tree, lamb and locket,
gently daring without a pull of resignation--
not hot oven, not branded in doom
or silence, my valentine is forthcoming,
Basque, on horses and on time.

This poem does not depict or describe a love affair; it embodies the emotions of one. “About” has little to do with it. The nouns (tree, lamb, locket, horses) aren’t 3-D stage settings in a field, they are verbal objects in the poem, at least 4-D and richer-colored for their lack of (realistic) context.

As an Indian-American poet, Sharma also writes of cultural disconnects, lovingly and wryly. Some of the most valuable poems in the book are those in which she studies her heritage, what it means to be other in two cultures. “Family” reads like Ionesco but in service of the individual who struggles against pigeonholing. “There are silverfish bugs across the windowsill / in the white house” it begins, and then recites the numbing litany of belonging, especially in a culture tainted by empire:

This is my house. I am a child. He is Jug Dish. We are an Indian
family with Indian friends from India. Jug Dish studies English poetry.
I study English poetry, I point west to take a stab at a silverfish.
The mountain of ink is paint, there is memory here, for friends
of the Indian community ...

At the end, “The family hands me over to that silverfish.” But this quoting of an individual poem outside of the rich ground of the whole book doesn’t do justice to Sharma’s intricate understanding. In other pieces, a cast of characters prisms up to paint a foreign, familiar world that contains multitudes.

The title The Opening Question hints at a searching, a quest. Fable-style, “Questions” suggests that, from birth, this poet’s quest was for truth via language, not for truth first and language later: “I am forward with my questions: / How do you stay alive? How do you move to its rhythm? How can you / press down?” Staying alive and moving to its rhythms is a fine definition of Sharma’s poetry. I finished her book feeling lucky to be reading in an age when the technology is in place and Prageeta Sharma deft enough with it to produce this volume of truly charming, truly interesting poems.

NEW! Review of Mario Petrucci

Heavy Water: A Poem for Chernobyl by Mario Petrucci. Enitharmon/Dufours, 8.95 pounds.

Reviewed by Brendan O’Connor

A physicist before he was a poet, Mario Petrucci is intimately familiar with the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox, probably the best-known “thought experiment” in modern physics. In Petrucci’s words:

Only a physicist, perhaps, would decide to put a cat in a box with no more company than a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, a hammer and a vial of Prussic Acid ... The set-up is that if the atom decays, it activates the Geiger counter which then causes the hammer to strike the vial and release the cyanide, killing the cat.

What’s the point? Since we (the observers outside the box) have no way of knowing whether the atom has decayed or not, we cannot say with any certainty whether the cat is alive or dead before opening the lid of the box. Therefore, for us the cat “is neither dead nor alive, but a mathematical blending, or admixture, of both ‘states.’” The experiment, though never actually performed, is meant as a neat illustration of the Quantum-Mechanical principle that the act of observation itself alters the state of a system. But it leaves us with an unsettling intuition about the building blocks of nature, which, it might seem, are leading double lives (like the cat, permanently in limbo) when we’re not looking.

Such is the case with Petrucci’s Chernobyl survivors--although the term “survivor” is problematic in this instance--who resemble Yeats’s Byzantine phantasm, “an image, man or shade, / shade more than man, more image than a shade,” neither alive in the sense they used to be, nor truly dead, though they carry and disperse the seeds of death. The figures in Heavy Water are keenly aware of the ironic dimensions of their tragedy: rather than claiming their lives at once, radiation sickness takes months or years to devour them, leaving them in the cat’s position. These people haven’t survived, exactly, but they aren’t exactly dead, either. In this context, we encounter a “Soldier” who wonders bitterly at “this, a strange war. You get killed / when you get back,” and the “Sleepwalkers,” women laborers irradiated as a result of the disaster, “paying / respects at the bright coffin of themselves.” Petrucci achieves some of his finest effects by giving us an opportunity to ponder the absurdity of his speakers’ “death-in-life and life-in-death,” perhaps nowhere better than in the first poem, where he imagines “The Man Buried With Chernobyl” stirring from his grave beneath the reactor, “lift[ing] / from his calcined mould like a grit jelly.” It is a remarkable image of organic memory surfacing to confront the legacy of industrialized terror, and a fitting way for Petrucci to inaugurate his project of bearing witness to Chernobyl’s dead.

The nagging question about Heavy Water is not, fortunately, “Is this poetry necessary?” If a book of poetry can be said to be “necessary” in any meaningful sense of the word, surely Heavy Water is a necessary book, bringing its readers face-to-face with a forgotten tragedy and operating simultaneously as elegy and prophecy. We might, however, pose the inverse question to Petrucci and other contemporary poets of witness: “Is this necessarily poetry?” That is, does it have to be poetry? What is there about Heavy Water, for example, to set it apart from a work of investigative journalism? The author draws heavily on a book called Voices from Chernobyl, composed of interviews with “survivors” of the disaster, and in an interview of his own (in Jacket), praises the Russian author’s “uninvasive sensibility.” Petrucci’s work of poetic witness often seems to privilege such a sensibility. Indeed, in certain poems, the author exhibits a formal commitment to presenting the reader with the least embellished version of events possible. One can imagine Petrucci making this choice out of respect for the survivors’ testimonies (which must remain the “definitive” account of the tragedy) and a sense that the stories must speak for themselves, beyond his “poor ability to add or detract.” As a result, however, the situations described in the poems are sometimes more interesting than the poems themselves, as in a tale of “Two Neighbours” arguing about whether or not to eat contaminated produce:

They tell us--bury
your cucumbers. You--
you eat them.

You were not in the War.

So for you Chernobyl
is less than a cucumber.

It was a good crop.

And so on. The concept is intriguing, but the language might as well be a recorded conversation between two not-especially-articulate farmers. They have a right to tell their stories and be heard on their own terms, of course, but one might argue that journalism is a more appropriate (and arguably far more effective) medium for unvarnished testimony than poetry. Certain other poems in Heavy Water (“Spring,” “Rite,” “The Room,” and “A Name” to name a few) fall victim to the same tendency towards flat, declarative sentences, clipped imperatives, and flaccid dialogue. Happily, there are moments in Petrucci’s “survivor” poems when less is more, and his weary speakers hit just the right note. Take, for example, the peasants “painting door-planks and fences with / parting notes” as they evacuate their homes (in “Soldier”). The poet’s careful framing of these victims’ last utterances in the eyes of a soldier, whose coming spells his own death sentence, gives them a special poignancy:

’10 May. Dawn. By donkey and cart.’
‘May 24. There is pilaf in the blue pan.’

‘Don’t kill our Zhuchok. He’s a good dog--4th June.’
‘June 1st. Forgive us, house.’

That being said, the really interesting poems in Heavy Water are those in which Petrucci sustains a note of skepticism with regard to the possibility of the reader (or the author) understanding much of anything in the aftermath of the meltdown. A particularly vicious, oafish character named “Ivan” scorns “your microphones. / That pity in your eyes like small print,” suggesting that anyone’s experience of the disaster is finally irretrievable, in spite of Petrucci’s efforts to write footnotes to Chernobyl in “small print.”

Heavy Water is most compelling when the author steps away from the wreckage, in effect, and acknowledges his own distance from the events. In a series of lyrics evocative of the turbulence of salvage operations, Petrucci puts on his physicist’s lab coat once again and emerges to size up the damage in the bold, dispassionate language of science: “See--the stacked / borders of fault analysis / are losing their crisp definitions / to rain,” his speaker observes in “Box,” a sort of concrete poem that weaves fragments of testimony into the shape of a double helix. On the very next page, (“_ _ _”) the physicist lends his expertise to tease out the implications of Chernobyl for the previous speaker’s DNA:

and then we come to Gamma
           which can home in on

one strand of DNA and tie
          a knot in it that takes

generations to unravel

and, in so doing, contributes his own perspective to the still-unfolding story.

The fusion of lyrical and clinical perspectives results in the most original and accomplished poems in the book, such as “Ukritye” and “Exposures,” which remind the reader of newsreels on fast-forward, the author scrambling to keep up with the nightmarish flood of images sprung wholesale from his subjects’ memories--yet straining to make sense of it all through the lens of science. In “Chain of Decay,” a jarringly minimalist poem listing radioactive isotopes, the types of radiation they emit, and their half-lives, the final couplet--“Uranium-235 / 703.8 million years”--arrives with the devastating loneliness we associate with Gary Snyder’s lyrics. The camera pulls back at the very end and pauses just long enough to give us a feeling for the enormity of time: poetry on a geological scale. That Petrucci succeeds so well in certain of these poems suggests a new track for poets of witness: by coming to terms with their own subjectivity, they can make the (cruelly silenced) voices of their subjects resound all the louder in their poems.