Poetry Reviews

A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje
Knopf ($28)

by Bill Tremblay

T.S. Eliot famously said: “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” One of the many pleasures in reading Michael Ondaatje’s new collection, A Year of Last Things, is discovering how he fictionalizes his. One senses a real first person in the poems, and not merely because he uses “I” in some poems and in the prose near the end of the book. But the voice here is largely a special third person capable of being intimate and objective at once. These poems are by Ondaatje but not about him in any limited autobiographical sense, except perhaps when he’s writing about writing; thus they evoke a poetics of the transpersonal, leaving a wake reminiscent of Dickinson’s “zero at the bone.”

This poetics takes shape thanks to Ondaatje’s ability to reach for emotional connections through objects cherished for their talismanic power to evoke the beloved. Take the volume’s opening poem, “Lock”:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities.

The lines carry us forward until we “reach that horizon . . . where you might see your friends.” The poem continues:

How I loved that lock when I saw it
all those summers ago,
                  when we arrived
out of a storm into its evening light,

and gave a stranger some wine
in a tin cup

Even then I wanted
to slip into the wet dark
rectangle and swim on
barefoot to other depths
where nothing could be seen
that was a further story.

“Lock” establishes not only the book’s jump-cut cinematic style but also its romantic sensibility. Ondaatje is all about asking what’s important in life—friendships, encounters, flirtations, intimacies. His feeling for language is set out in “Definition,” which begins “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred/pages of a Sanskrit dictionary”; as he wanders down this path, he brings words, vowels, and accents to

                                      light
from that distant village
reflected in a cloud,
or your lover’s face lit
by the moonlight on a stage

Landscapes nudge the dialect.
In far places travellers know
a faint gesture can mean
desire or scorn,
                                   just as

a sliver of a phrase thrown away
hides charms within its grammar

Throughout A Year of Last Things, Ondaatje montages stories from biographies of artists, composers, philosophers, songs, films, and paintings into “that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know.” “A Cricket in Oplontis 79 CE” fuses the idea of “last things” with the patient work of restoring ancient frescos and mosaics buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius whose “fragments / wrested away from lava / to remember the end of a world / how it had all been.” “Nothing else lasted,” the poem tells us, “as if these might be the only memory / of ourselves when we are gone.” One might ponder this poem as an archeology of the present, with its endless talk of the end times; again, Ondaatje seems to suggest what matters is not the creation of “art” but of memorials to what one loved in life.

The book’s prose sections seem to have been waiting in the wings for their turn, especially the author’s memoir of school days in Sri Lanka entitled “Winchester House.” In it, Ondaatje writes about his writing process, including taking traits from real people to build fictional characters “during the hunt for your own story. As with photographs, the world is deliriously random, inarticulate.” Against this backdrop, he relates how there were “years when we learned to protect ourselves by becoming liars, being devious, never confessing to a crime—in fact, confessing to nothing, good or bad.” He goes on: “Stories, letters, films, memoirs of our youth, are nothing without some real clue or glance toward the truth.”

There is no question that A Year of Last Things is a book of major significance. In its summative penultimate piece, “Estuaries,” Ondaatje tells us,

There are places where language refuses to meet a reader, like cursive scripts that flow as if unawakened, or those lost voices of waterfalls. It can occur even where you attempt to end your story—some improbable place, as a friend once wrote, that you will walk through only after you are dead, your bare feet on an ancient mosaic in Tunis that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.

He takes us to such an improbable place in the collection’s coda-like, final poem, “Talking In A River.” Here, perhaps, a more fitting way to find completion emerges:

You journey beyond the familiar properties, find yourself
before long in anonymous water, nothing audible from shore,
only the shake of reflection like a breaking word.
Is this a different mood of the Black River?
With daylight there is the disguised location of the stars.

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galáxias

Haroldo de Campos
Translated by Odile Cisneros
with Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles Perrone, Christopher Middleton, and Norman Maurice Potter
Ugly Duckling Presse ($20)

by Elizabeth Zuba

Who can explain how these things happen, but somehow just a few short weeks after both Jerome Rothenberg and Marjorie Perloff’s passing, here comes the first full translation of galáxias, the magnum opus of Brazilian luminary Haroldo de Campos — a book that both writers spent decades sounding the bells for. Hooray for the universe for this unexpected and poignant tribute—and hooray for Odile Cisneros, whose English rendering of arguably one of the most acrobatic and multilectical literary texts since James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an absolute triumph.  

But to Rothenberg and Perloff’s point, Campos may still be one of the great literary giants of the twentieth century you’ve never heard of, so here’s a quick recap: Together with his equally brilliant brother Agosto and fellow writer Décio Pignatari, Campos led the concrete poetry revolution in the 1950s and ’60s, writing the manifesto Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry and thrusting Brazil onto the international stage. Serially publishing poems and critical pieces in journals and magazines, his influence as a poet, theorist, and translator was wide-reaching and earth-rattling in all three disciplines; Cuban writer Severo Sarduy called him a “Pound-like patriarch.”

A polymath and polyglot, Campos (sometimes in collaboration with his brother) translated scores of writers into the Portuguese, often for the first time, including Goethe, Pound, Joyce, Mayakovsky, Mallarmé, Dante, Paz, and Homer, not to mention Provençal troubadours, Russian futurists, classical Chinese poets, and the books of Genesis and Ecclesiastes. Regarding Campos’s extraordinary reach, Derrida wrote, “on the horizon of literature, and above all in the intimacy of the language of languages, each time so many languages in each language, I know that Haroldo would have access to that like me, before me, better than me.”

Suffice to say, translation was not a side-hustle for Campos; it was his world view. Also, he didn’t call it translation, but transcreation, or sometimes transillumination, translight, and transluciferation, among other monikers. Proceeding from concepts of concrete poetry, Campos saw words not simply as vehicles for meaning but as little morpheme prisms, abundant and complex in their phonemic and graphic characters, along with potential structural, sonic, and connotative relationalities. For Campos, words, like poetry, do not mean but are. And as such, no word or particular relations of words can ever be made over into another language or anything else, but rather must be born totally anew — reciprocal and parallel yes, but autonomous and equally singular.

It’s hard to give an example of Campos’s transcreation, in that he was transcreating into the Portuguese, but fortunately for us, Cisneros has skillfully adopted Campos’s practice in tackling galáxias. Though the English edition does not include the original Portuguese, here are the volume’s opening lines:

e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso
e aqui me meço quando se vive sob a espécie da viagem o que importa
não é a viagem mas o começo . . .

Now, here’s Cisneros (in collaboration with Suzanne Jill Levine— three of the cantos are collaborations with or contributions by other translators) impressively following his lead:

and here i begin i spin here the beguine i respin and grin to begin
to release and realize life begins not arrives at the end of a trip which is
why i begin to respin . . .

And here’s a very literal translation (of my own), just to give you an idea of Levine and Cisneros’s transcreation in action:

and I begin here and I measure here this beginning and I begin again and I stir and I throw
and here I measure when you live in the form of a journey what matters
is not the journey but the beginning . . .

You can hear how rhythm and sound are imperative for Campos, and the way Levine and Cisneros sustain that sonic intoning, while also reimagining it from the lyrical, paroxytonic rhythm of Portuguese into the more monosyllabic staccato of English. Semantically, their lines deviate from the specific meanings of each word of the original, but reciprocate the overall intention: the biblical-cyclical invocation of a journey as a continual beginning. Visually, the English “in” word-endings lace together in a netlike pattern over the lines just as “eço” does in the Portuguese, as do the little sequin i’s that shimmer about them, graphically recreating the “e” (and) in the original.

There’s yet another transcreation-esque move here you might miss if you don’t know that Campos is an unabashed glutton for sliding door homonyms and wormhole cultural-lectical allusions. Brilliantly, Levine and Cisneros mutate “begin” to “beguine” to conjure both the West Indian dance and the classic Cole Porter song “Begin the Beguine,” evoking concepts of lingual and cultural hegemony that will resurface throughout the text. Campos would be proud. To be clear, these first few lines are among the simplest in galáxias; a discussion of this epic poem and its transcreation would take a book-length critical work.

this is not a travel book because travel is not a book of travel
because a book is travel at best i aver it’s a baedeker of epiphanies
at worst i can swear it’s an epiphany in a baedeker for golden domes of
an orthodox russo-byzantine church set deep in geneva going downhill
on route de malagnou heading to the city center through a glimpsed
vision of the oldtown and canals you could get married whynot with the chinese
lions that some fatherfriar wayfarer returning from a journey a
pilgrimage to oriental missions learned to sculpt at the entrance of the esplanade
of convento de são francisco northern paraíba at the cobblestoned entrance
overflowing eight mouths of portalgates in contained and then scattered
steps drying racks of stone and joão pessoa in the summer rain was not
an island by gauguin bronzing away in the distance paradisiacal peace in an iamb of silks
and hair blowing in the wind plumed quill in the sultry summer and seated in a café

Widely considered his magnum opus, Campos wrote galáxias over the course of two decades, starting in 1963 and publishing the poem in its entirety for the first time in 1984; the 1992 edition was additionally accompanied by an audio recording of sixteen of the cantos, reinforcing the importance of the voco in his total verbivocovisual work. In that later edition, Campos says:

The galáxias situate themselves on the border between poetry and prose. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve . . . but it is the image that prevails, the vision or calling of the epiphanic. . . . This permutational book has, as its semantic backbone, an always recurrent yet varied theme all along: travel as a book and the book as travel (despite the fact that—and for that very reason—it is not exactly a “travel book”. . .).

A series of fifty “galactic cantos” that center loosely around different places Campos has traveled, the work charts not only the poet’s literal journeys around the world, but also the atemporal, multiverse ones he takes by way of spiraling slipstreams of language. Densely covering the right-hand side of the page—absent punctuation, capitalization, stanzas or sections—but balanced with a blank verso not unlike the empty expanse around any galaxy, each canto is in and of itself a lexical and literary cosmic ride that plummets through wormholes of languages, sounds, graphemes, time, and cultural and literary allusions, making it an extraordinary experiment in a Babel-transcendent poetry.

Campos describes the forty-eight cantos that sit between the two beginning-end/end-beginning poems of galáxias as “movable,” each introducing “its ‘difference’ but contain(ing), in itself, like a watermark, the image of the entire book, which can be seen from an Alephic vantagepoint.” Aleph as in A, I asked myself? I looked it up. Probably not. More likely, Alephic as in the mathematical sets that number the infinite. No, I cannot explain that mathematically. But “Alephic” makes a lot of sense as a description for this universe-expanding and yet ultimately contained book—like a subparticle is a thing you can count, but also a way to see forever.

du scheinst ein rotes wort zu faerben through the voice of sophocles through the voice
of hölderlin schiller laughing away goethe smiling illustrious company he must have been
crazy herr hölderlin or he pretended to be because sophocles only meant
you seem worried about something ismene to antigone through the voice of sophocles
one of the most laughable products of pedantry that red-tinted word . . .

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sketch of Buckminster Fuller’s imagined Geoscope, but I’d describe it as a human-size earth model you can stick your head into and experience the whole world happening at once from the inside out; Fuller’s hope was to expand one’s sense of an individual relationship to the world as in fact a series of connections and interrelationships. When the architect Jesse Reiser recently recreated a Geoscope of sorts for a show at Princeton University, it was a totally immersive multimedia experience complete with multiple voices, screens, sounds, cultural references, and views from and of earth. Reading galáxias is a little like that, only instead of a Geoscope, it’s a multiverse scope, and instead of a physical structure, the spaceship is language itself. To say it is an otherworldly experience doesn’t begin to cover the sheer magnitude of the joyful abundance that carries you along.

saffron yellow egg vermillion verging on pompeian lava red you could
say after seeing pompeii the amorini friezes against a ground of
giallorosso but this is rome the roman colors like flags the blue
most fine most frigid of that rarefied january morning the mild winter
that year almost springing in the first greens and reds and tawnygold
and redyellow yolkbisque and carmine and oldancient imperial walls
oldancient baroque palazzi mansionhovels alternating with
villas lei può dirmi dov’è la via del consolato i’m not italian i’m an
amurr’kan from inside a sports car and could you tell me sir where
the swiss airline office is tente de me entender professor por favor . . .

Ultimately, writing and translating were metaphysical enterprises for Campos. In his author’s note to the 1984 publication of galáxias, he writes, “today, retrospectively, I would tend to see it as an epic insinuation that resolved itself as an epiphanic one.” Spinning and colliding all that immense knowledge around in his head—particle-accelerator style—Campos saw endless and perpetual connections between words and sounds, images and ideas, that spoke to some greater truth or meaning. As Cisneros and Sergio de Bessa have written in their introduction to Novas (Northwestern University Press, 2005), a selection of Campos’s writings from poetry to theory, Campos saw, in that wild Geoscope brain of his, that “true meaning could only be glimpsed through prismatic refraction.” Lucky are we who get to strap on our space helmets and touch the multiverse through his transilluminated lens.

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Selected Poems: 1959-2022

Neeli Cherkovski
Lithic Press ($28)

by Zack Kopp

A writer of poems that fill one up like nourishing and enjoyable word-meals, Neeli Cherkovski (born in 1945) continued creating his artfully imaginative verse right until the end of his life on March 19, 2024. The posthumous publication of Cherkovski’s Selected Poems: 1959-2022 represents his long overdue recognition as one of the most essential poets of the Beat Generation. In addition to the searching, haunted poems in this beautifully printed 400-page book, an introduction by Charles Bernstein situates how their author consistently “bows head in respect to disrespect”; while photographs track a life of literary engagement, starting with a picture taken with Lawrence Ferlinghetti around the time Cherkovski’s Ferlinghetti: A Biography (Doubleday, 1979) was published, and one of an even younger version of Cherkovski sitting on a tricycle next to his friend and mentor Charles Bukowski (also on a tricycle).

Perhaps due to having caroused with Bukowski in Los Angeles during the 1960s—adventures recounted not only by Bukowski in poems, stories, and articles (where he commented more than once that Cherkovski would “make a great rabbi someday,” popularizing and belittling him in one swipe) but also in Cherkovski’s landmark biography Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (Random House, 1991)—Cherkovski’s work has often been perceived in the shadow of Bukowski’s, so proper estimation of his own poetic voice has been delayed. The pair shared a winsome dynamic, as can be seen in an early poem in Selected Poems, “THIS ONE BUKOWSKI THREW INTO THE FIREPLACE (WITHOUT READING)”:

Bukowski looks out of his window
he looks out of his Hollywood window
his forty-year window
his Hollywood Park window
Bukowski looks down from his three story window
he can see little children playing below
and he cries because someday they will die
when the fallout crosses the street they will die
and if not the bomb then age or sickness
or some holy accident
he opens the window to let in the air

But beyond Cherkovski’s teen years, the differences between the writers became more pronounced than their similarities. In contrast to Bukowski’s habitually spare voice, Cherkovski writes poetry as if to give the very letters on the page back their lives by turning them into trees again—albeit in a whole other spirit. Take “Leaves,” from 1979:

ONCE THE UNBREAKABLE LEAVES SPOKE A LANGUAGE
THAT FLOWED LIKE PURE CLEAR WATER FROM THE
BREATHLESS LAND ONTO PROSPEROUS FIELDS & SEA-
LINES STRETCHED TO ISLANDS WHERE TALL SWAYING
PALMS BECAME THATCH-ROOFED HOUSES FOR PEOPLE
WHO BELIEVED IN MANY GODS AND IN TONGUES OF
FIRE THAT CALLED FROM DEEP IN THE RESTLESS
OCEAN & THEY KNEW THE NAMES, LONG OBSCURED,
OF PALM GOD AND GRASS GOD AND GOD IN SAND
AND WATER & THE LEAVES FALL LIKE IRON PLATING
ONTO THE AWAKENING PLAIN & DAWN, INDEFINABLE
BEAST, CRAWLS UP THE COASTAL HILLS AND DOWN
TO THE SHORE & ONCE THE CANYON LEAVES DID
NOT REST LIKE TABLETS, ONE RED, ONE YELLOW,
HOLDING WORDS OF A WISDOM MORE SENTIENT, LESS
BELLICOSE, FILLED WITH GREATER UNDERSTANDING
& THOSE WHO PRESSED THEM INTO BOUND VOLUMES
RESTORED OLD ENERGIES TO THE SUN AND PASSED ON

Always seeing more books in the trees, the ocean full of individual drops of liquid, and mercy going in and out of print as time proceeds, Cherkovski offers readers the flash of living language; there is a primordial omniscience in his work, as if the sudden brightness of dinosaur-brained birds is lighting up the pitch-black darkness.

Let’s therefore remember this wizened Bohemian bard who so passionately wrote from his neighborhood of living letters “near San Francisco but not San Francisco but part of San Francisco, frozen in time somewhere in the sixties or maybe the sixty-eight-seventies,” as he once described it in a Facebook post. Besides being a gifted inimitable West Coast poet and a pioneering proselytizer for the writers he dubbed “Whitman’s Wild Children,” he was a lovely person who invited all who met him into the warm embrace of lyric poetry. Let’s remember him, in fact, by heeding the instructions offered in one of the last poems in this volume, “Don’t Forget Me”:

when I am gone
think of me
as you tinker in
the technological forest
find time to draw
my words on your cloud
think of me as
a strip of bark
on an ash tree
as you lead the bees
on a country path

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

learn my odes by heart
remember the timbre
of my voice,
don’t forget me,
I was a poet

come listen
when my spirit rises
on branches
of the last redwood tree
wipe my tears
tell me I’m remembered
lie if you must

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Women on the Moon

Debora Kuan
The Word Works ($19)

by Julia Klahr

In Women on the Moon, Debora Kuan’s vulnerable new poetry collection, the author draws on her Asian-American heritage to explore the gravity rooting a woman’s life in an “imaginary firmament” by invoking the ethereal figure of Chang-e, the Chinese moon goddess. Divided into five “lunar phases” examining the place of women (particularly women of color) in contemporary American society, the book is a refreshing take on modern femininity that finds magic in the banal domesticity of the everyday.

Kuan’s free verse seems to signal the liberty of expansive contemplation, especially in the book’s “Gibbous” section. In recalling the myth of Chang-e’s path to immortality, the author casts a mystical light on her heritage:

Say a woman leaves you for the moon.
Say you discover after turning over the quilted

page, she’s drunken the elixir,
she’s gone—ghost of indented slippers, pulse

thumping beneath your birdless ribcage.

However, Kuan has no less praise for the corporeal, as in the pithy “Magic Lesson”:

. . . every woman
has been sawed in half
at least a dozen times
before sunset.

The book’s opening phase, “Last Quarter Moon: Mothering,” features “Having a Baby at 43,” a poem that portrays the speaker as apprehensive and vulnerable as she grapples with older motherhood. Following recent egregious displays of anti-Asian sentiment, “One Day in America” subtly evokes an Asian American mother’s fears while watching her child:

         when you catch sight of me,
you practice your wave, opening and shutting

your fist in the weighted air. Your nose and chin
and eyes are splattered with dark red

berry purée, as you kick your feet
in your highchair.

Here, Kuan tries to make sense of a horror-filled day in which the Asian-American spa workers to whom her book is dedicated were brutally killed. Kuan reinforces the devastating impact through enjambment, using meaningful line breaks to help carry the movement of thought. Her language, however, remains informal, with a natural cadence that makes it readable despite the difficult content.

The book’s next phase, “Full Moon: Coupling,” includes a foray into end-stopped and end-rhymed verse, where the interlaced quatrains of “Man & Wife” emphasize a sense of burdensome mundanity and exhaustion:

By dinner, we tear our bread with both hands,
forget candles, eat straight from the pan.
We ready our sorrys on hooks by the nightstands,
so we can reach them as quick as we can.

Images of married life’s predictability and dull routine, where “the complaints go on dripping, / stalactites in a dolomite cave,” continue in wry poems like “How to Live with Your Husband,” but in the book’s final section, Kuan’s speaker seems to embrace the joy of the ordinary in a series of still lifes. The brief tercets of “Still Life With Mushroom” feature deft use of alliteration (“cloud of cartilage”), internal rhymes (“the unsteady / shed”), and other poetic devices that suggest a sense of order and acceptance, one summarized in the poem’s poignant final lines:

I have married my life
to lowliness, and I want
to cry aloud with happiness.

Kuan deploys cultural icons as varied as Anna May Wong and Freddie Mercury as she contemplates subjects ranging from female invisibility to racial stereotyping, and  throughout, her singular lens highlights the inequities of American life. In “The Night After You Lose Your Job,” for instance, Kuan’s characterization of a newly unemployed mother embodies an implicit call for greater recognition of society’s overlooked caregivers.

Lyrical, vulnerable and astute, Women on the Moon is a wide-ranging contemporary ode to womanhood. Shedding light on romance and realism while celebrating the contributions of marginalized women, Kuan’s voice advocates for their honest representation with an acuity that speaks volumes.

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The Cheapest France in Town

Seo Jung Hak
Translated by Megan Sungyoon
World Poetry ($20)

by John Bradley

“The value of this book is, at present, the same as the lowest online-exclusive price for a half box of thirty Shin instant noodles,” deadpans Seo Jung Hak in his introduction to The Cheapest France in Town, a collection of prose poems. Even before reading a single poem, the reader has entered Seo’s world of the absurd. The author gleefully takes apart logic in the thirty-four poems (and a foldout poem) in this subversive bilingual edition.

For those who believe that the prose poem has been thoroughly explored, many surprises await. One innovation of Seo’s is to offer two versions of the same prose poem: “There’s Nothing Between Us” and “There’s Nothing Between Barns” appear on the same page, the texts almost identical—but wherever the first uses the word “barn,” the second uses “us.” For example, “The scent of lilac seeping into our faces sent the barn up in flames” in the first becomes “The scent of lilac seeped into our face sent us up in flames” in the second. Such a small change, with a tense shift, produces surreal results.

Even more innovative is the foldout poem at the back of the book that makes a small box (or rather two boxes—one in Korean and one in English). Seo’s obsession with boxes, those reliable tools of consumerism, becomes literal here as the reader is given the opportunity to construct their very own paper box adorned with poetry. One box fold reads: “If you order online, / two copies of the / book / with / his awkward smile / will be delivered / in a paper box.” As Seo enjoys satirizing familiar enticements, he is not above subverting even the title of a poem, that sacrosanct entity so vital to the reader; the title “You’re Necessities” plays with “your” and “you’re,” a distinction that bedevils many English speakers.

Not content with subverting prose poem expectations and language conventions, Hak also problematizes punctuation, mainly by violating the proper use of the comma. While the reader may at first believe these odd commas are typos, Megan Sungyoon points out deeper resonances in her translator’s note: “even an element as small as a comma can completely undermine the sentence structure, catapulting us into unfamiliar syntax.” Here are a few examples of those “catapulting” commas: “You become, a tree,” “The highlight, of the conference was mispronouncing a word,” and “Where is, everyone.” One of the poem titles even includes a comma, “Quite,”—aptly demonstrating how nothing is off limits to Seo.

While there are many references to France in this book, Seo appears to be influenced less by the French Surrealists than by a writer from Prague—Franz Kafka. It would not seem out of place if we were told that Joseph K in The Trial had this experience: “When he opened his lunch he saw the word ‘freedom’ written in black beans.” Unlike Kafka, though, Seo focuses not only on the absurdity of the situation, but on language itself. Noticing the dangerous lunch of their fellow office worker, his colleagues come to his rescue: “By the fast and precise chopsticks of the colleagues, the beans disappeared one bean at a time so ‘freedom’ was turned ‘freed’ and then ‘feed’ and then ‘fed’ and then ‘fd’ and then was completely gone.” Once again, Seo uses humor to resolve the conflict: “one of the colleagues farted once as the price of digesting ‘freedom.’”

Given the challenges of translating such a non-conventional poet, Megan Sungyoon deserves much acclaim. Not only does she maintain clarity despite Seo’s odd diction and non-standard punctuation, she also captures his strange and utterly unique playfulness. Who else but Seo would compare writing a poem to “spitting a seed out of your mouth—phut”?

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Public Abstract

Jane Huffman
The American Poetry Review ($16)

by Erick Verran

Like a Purcell aria, Jane Huffman’s poetry is plaintive, formally numb, and indefatigably self-pitying. Early in Public Abstract, Huffman introduces “my brother death,” the Thanatos to her Hypnos: “Held the broom / Of sleep // Between / My teeth // Until I slept,” she mutters (and readers might note the cover art, Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies).  Recalling the ill lungs with which it begins, this debut collection is by turns caught up short in shallow brushstrokes and morbidly expansive:

I am under-interpreting my symptoms, the doctor says. My interpretation can no longer be trusted. I’m seated in a glass spirometry machine. On one monitor, green lines tick against a dark backdrop. On another, a cursor draws roulettes. It will feel like you’re breathing with your mouth against a brick wall, the doctor says. Air buckles behind my lips. So in love with interpretation, I’m blue in the face from kissing it.

Though koans abound—a goldfish pond, for instance, “Is mostly water / Little gold in it at all / Despite its name”—haibun, which combines narrative prose with haiku, is the main attraction. Haibun was invented in the late 1700s by Bashō during a months-long journey through the Japanese hinterland, as recounted in his travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Huffman, trapped somewhere between agoraphobia (“with the curl / of my ear to the door”) and invalidism (“Mortified to move / My body through // The world // In the way / That it demands”), keeps to the country of her emotional interior, sketching poems that would fit onto envelope paper.

Like Emily Dickinson, who is echoed here, Huffman is neither straightforward nor deliberately cryptic, but rather mysteriously honest. Dickinson, though, for all her proto-modernity, was never this recursive (“I was / small and dizzying. I was dizzy. I rode / in small and dizzying circles”—here she sounds more like Robert Creeley or John Taggart). Huffman’s wish to thank literally everyone in the book’s end pages—university administrators, a twelfth-century troubadour, the family dogs—is perhaps unconsciously snobbish, while in her more maximalist mode she can slip into scholastic preoccupation, as prose experimenters are wont to do:

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

This has all the verve of a dissertation. The more finished poems, labeled revisions or fragments, are the more successful; and when a “failed” sestina abruptly breaks off, like the fugue Bach died writing, the reader lurches after its absence.

Evincing stylistic kinship with Language poets such as Rae Armantrout, Huffman’s instruction, though cold as doctrine, consistently fascinates for its willingness to teeter at the edge of sense; we find her weeping “into the zenith of a rose,” a kiln is said to be “thinking itself warm.” This is impressive, given that the book ultimately concerns the rippling effects of her sibling’s addiction (much like Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec). In the penultimate section, Huffman’s topical absorption reveals itself to be deceptively extempore. One paragraph hides a sad vocabulary drawn from pregnancy, including tied fallopian tubes, the question of viability, and a metal pail. Another rhymes with drowsy lethargy:

I wrote a play, out cold in urgent care. Heated blankets toweling my sweated hair. When staged, the actress playing Mother held a wicker broom for acts two and three, with which she beat and beat the rug—a heavy tapestry rolled across the deck. It jumped with fleas—a cast of tiny specks that leapt with urgent hunger as she swept. Lucidly, I slept. I always do, when in duress (no escape from the world of the page). So I wondered how I would create the effect on stage — what props and practical effects—and who would clean up the mess?

With their diminutive, hardened fragility, there is something a bit Glass Menagerie about Huffman’s poems; and though Public Abstract also feels cobbled together, it coheres with greater sureness than many first collections of poetry. To avoid the pitfalls of the merely cerebral—intelligence for the hell of it—there’s no denying that the live wire of a poem must be grounded in the truth. But truth, with apologies to Keats (and to Huffman, who quotes from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), isn’t beauty ipso facto. Without invention, the unadorned horror of what happened, like one might overhear in a waiting room, will be “private as a runny nose” and as interesting. What so often disappoints about artistic suffering is its obviousness, the way it leans on grief at half the craft. Huffman, however, allows hurt to knock everywhere, to come out with things plainly, in this enviably wise debut. The language countermands—“The lie is that today I want to die”—and this gives life its shape.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

All Tomorrow's Train Rides

Matthew M. Monte
Sixteen Rivers Press ($18)

by Lee Rossi

Yes, you hear an echo—the Velvet Underground playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” their great anthem to indulgence and dissolution. But though it offers less indulgence and more longing, less dissolution and more selflessness, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides—the second book by San Francisco writer Matthew M. Monte—is also great in its own unpredictable way.

A thoughtful, educated writer with associate’s degrees in insomnia, shoplifting, and alcoholism, Monte evidences a fascination with the work of other writers, figures as varied as Gary Snyder, Pierre Reverdy, and Miguel de Cervantes. In “Then I Read Wisława Szymborska” he reports on purchasing one of her books in Paris—at Shakespeare and Co. of course—and retreating to “the silent piano room”:

Where with you, I
Must say I
Feel only
Free

A love poem, isn’t it? Conversely, we find him hating on Jacques Derrida: “Form and Function Letter” mimics William Carlos Williams’s famous “This Is Just To Say,” except that Monte’s apology, which is more j’accuse than je t’aime, is directed at the fabulously indecipherable French philosopher. “This is just to say,” the poet begins, that he doesn’t “mind these synonyms / and metaphors and analogies,” but that he “very much mind[s] the meanings of these tightropes / between conventions, this / high-wire act we call language.” Language is perilous, the poet seems to admit, but “these lines save us / from drowning in your / soup of same.”

Clarity, precision—these are language’s gifts, and we abandon them at our peril. Consider Section V of the title poem, a sequence whose sections are spread throughout the book, in which Monte engages in dialogue with that consummate realist from the pages of Cervantes, Sancho Panza—transformed for the occasion into a Caltrain conductor. Who are these people on the train, Sancho wants to know, who “earn their keep from neither arms nor letters”? And the poet tells him: “the ore is silicon, a fool’s gold for sure. They create other minds from it. So that we don’t need to remember.” “No memory?” exclaims Sancho incredulously, issuing the poet “a private smile” for all the 400-thread-count cotton dress shirts: “Sancho knows / Clothes don’t make the man / Sees the suits for what they are / Variations on the fig leaf.”  

Culture, he insists, is a charade, a theatre of the absurd.

Reality is what Monte wants, in all its clarity and precision—even when what it reveals is harsh or cruel:

Where the utility men
Cut back pine and manzanita
          near the old quarry
They left behind a ragged cross-section of knotted wood
          in the boot-print trail dust
That resisted the motoring blade and its bite

Monte’s passion for the real takes him into unexpected places. Many of these poems come with notes and annotations, some which are straightforward, and others which read like prose poems. Commenting on Don Quixote’s famous discourse on arms and letters, the poet references the GPS coordinates where Quixote spoke, and adds that “the windmills . . . / are spread along a / hill overlooking the Manchegan / plains, offering an excellent view of / things as they are, which are even / easier to see through the pages of / Don Quixote than the bullet train’s / blurring windowscape.” Once again, language and literature lead us closer to reality than our technological culture.

Latitude-longitude designations appear throughout the book, adding a dash of typographic esprít, but there are also other typographical flourishes—long strings of periods enclosed in brackets, for example. As a reader, I’m not sure how to receive these extra-literary excrescences; are they a sendup of erasure, a musical interpolation signaling rests, or a just a new-fangled jokiness? I suspect one can read them all three ways. But without a doubt, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides is a variorum of image and epithet where time and again we encounter this poet’s extraordinary verbal facility. Another poem in sequence, “[Latitude],” “[Longitude],” “[Degrees],” etc., is a list poem offering scores of subjects which contemporary poems do (and in some cases shouldn’t) embrace. Or consider these lines from “Three Sketches from Insomnia”:

              That used-car salesman, memory,
never tells the true mileage or how
pumping the brakes never stops the night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            With histories like these, who needs enemies

For a writer who seems consumed with knowing exactly where he is, these lines signal a refreshing skepsis vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge. It’s there, Monte suggests, but only if your search is dedicated and uncontaminated by self-will. I hear that sort of injunction in these lines from “Reconsider a Meadow”:

But it is states of not-mind
that reconsider a meadow
day after subtle day

above the snowy track and
shallow thaws in sheltered valleys.

Similarly, in “Write Livelihood,” he issues a slight re-formulation of the Buddhist imperative:

You read and say
how many things crystallized in your mind
and we know life found in found words is without parallel.
And though the world is not without its darkness
there is not
so much regret.

What do we find “in found words”? In All Tomorrow’s Train Rides, we find compassion, forgiveness, attention, and insight. We should be so fortunate in everything we read.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Wonder About The

Matthew Cooperman
Middle Creek Publishing ($18)

by Joe Safdie

A reader of Matthew Cooperman’s latest collection, Wonder About The, might “wonder about” its seemingly fragmented title. Ostensibly a portrait of the expansive biodiversity that can be found on the banks of the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, Matthew Cooperman’s Wonder About The also explores fracking, the distance between culture and nature, and the peculiar problems of poems devoted to ecology and the environment. On that last subject, Forrest Gander poses some useful questions in his 2008 essay titled “What Is Eco Poetry”:

Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? If our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic or endlessly juxtaposed and fragmented; if events rarely have discreet beginnings or endings but only layers, duration, and transitions; if natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?

The “interdependency” Gander mentions is very much a concern of Wonder About The; from the beginning, it’s clear that this book doesn’t offer any sort of lazy propaganda. In the first poem, “Thesis,” lines such as “It rolls on as sugar beet, sweet in its labor and sweat in its weight” show Cooperman paying attention to the sounds of his words as well as to the indomitable river. In this expansive vision, humans aren’t separate from their environment, but are charged with the task of striking a balance between how things appear and how we, in turn, are located within the appearance—or as Cooperman puts it in “Another River in Spring” in lines that well represent the exchanges between inner and outer life throughout the book: “what marks the site of your sight // who walks through the door of a river.”

One major concern of ecopoetry is, as critic Nassrullah Mambrol writes, “how the human is situated within its habitat, specifically where (or whether) borders exist between body and world, human and other, space and place.” The peculiar art of perceiving the environment is often a subject of Wonder About The, whether it’s acknowledging that a farmer’s “bright Deere” is “a part of / the field’s design” or the urgent command, presented in progressively larger type, to “look up / look up / look up.” Eyes, in fact, are mentioned often, from “the sense record” being visited “upon our eyes / our ears” to a hard-earned vision of a waterfowl:

my winter eye
unlayers all frost
anneals what distance
     takes

rank glorious muck
rot palimpsesting rye
the duck
the living eye

Cooperman’s eye is sensitive enough also to register the fact that “the number of active oil and gas wells in Colorado almost doubled from 22,228 in 2000 to 43,354 in 2010” while explaining what’s really at stake:

frack is a word to obtain a thing
gas body or oil body
by liquefaction     say water     various solvents
an exchange body     replacement earth
toxic metonomy the force of
forces     engineers     making a new earth writing

In these contexts, the collection’s fragmented title might signal that such unnatural phenomena—“benzene earth man / now embowered with / salt and sand”—challenge traditional grammar’s ability to comprehend or explain them, though it also heeds the dreamier nature of observation, given its provenance from a poem by Theodore Enslin (which Cooperman uses as a section epigraph): “wonder about the / dream a dream’s about wonder will be.”

In his magisterial 2004 study A New Theory for American Poetry, Angus Fletcher posited that “environmental sensitivity demands its own new genre of poetry” and argued that environment poems “are not about the environment, whether natural or social, they are environments.” The inclusion of stunning color photographs of various places the book chronicles, most taken by Cooperman himself, makes it clear that Wonder About The not only adds to those environments, but breaks new ground.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Over the Edge

Norbert Hirschhorn
Holland Park Press (£10)

by Warren Woessner

Poet Norbert Hirschhorn’s parents fled from Austria just before the Holocaust and resettled in New York when Hirschhorn was ten. He went on to become a social services physician who was honored for developing a treatment for cholera; later in life, he started writing poetry and has published several books. His latest collection, Over the Edge, is not an easy read, but it is compelling. The edge that the poet and his parents go over is from normal life as survivors (albeit temporary ones), toward Hirschhorn’s visionary descriptions of what may be waiting on the other side. (Hint: It is not heavenly peace.)

The section of poems entitled “853 Riverside Drive (New York City)” offers an unflinching memoir of death and its precursors, depicting the anything but hopeful strivings of a young emigrant. Hirschhorn helps his mother with the laundry, where he would “edge over to the waist-high / parapet, and imagine myself flying to the next building / over. It was my first sense of suicide.” He is not alone:

Sitting at my 8th grade homework in the alcove by
The kitchen I smelled something strange. I turned.

To see my mother sitting calmly, wearing her new
housecoat, her chair facing the gas-oven door.

Hirchhorn’s father leaves the family but eventually returns to die at 853 Riverside Drive. The poet reviews his father’s body for the last time before it is “lowered into the ground, followed by / dirt, rocks, prayers and perpetual darkness”; in the next stanza, Hirschhorn the medical student compares dissecting a corpse to carving a Thanksgiving turkey. Perhaps as a sort of atonement for his disrespect for his father, Hirschhorn includes a poem titled “Tahara,” a formal death Jewish ritual:

the body laid in a plain pine box.
The family kissed his head in reverence.
Tahara, a gift to the bereaved, done.
The body now ready for burial at sundown.

Some of the most arresting poems in Over the Edge describe conversations with death as vivid dreams, as in the last lines of “The Call,” where we get both sides of the story:

Please, give me some ease.
None to be had.

Then let me ask you something.
Go ahead.

Why does it take me so long to leave the house?
You know, forget this, forget that, recheck the stove,
Go back for the umbrella . . .

You’re afraid you’ll die.
I am afraid.
Good then. Let’s go.

In “I Dream Of Him In Lightness and Dust,” Hirschhorn calls up death as a rather suave fellow, but one the poet would rather not meet:

Before me now, arms outstretched.
I want to fall on his breast, panting, crying,
bury my face in his sweet-smelling neck.

Instead, we press our hands together,
my right hand between his, his between mine.
For this is the manner, this is the custom

how the dead greet the dead.

Dramatic in the best sense of the word, Over the Edge is written to be spoken and meant to be heard. With a physician’s candor and the complex perspectives of a child of survivors, Hirshhorn offers a roadmap to a vacation that few of us want to take.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Night of Loveless Nights

Robert Desnos
Translated by Lewis Warsh
Winter Editions ($20)

by Geoffrey Hagenbuckle

In 1922, the Surrealist prodigy Robert Desnos (1900-1945) threatened his friend and fellow poet Paul Eluard with a knife while speak-walking and sleepwalking, singing under hypnosis or in dreams. Though Surrealism’s dream kingdom has been watered down here in the U.S. to advertising, in his 1929 poem Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos imbued love, death, and jouissance, the “little death,” with that tragic magic of his signature themes. A new edition of this truant poem marks the 50th anniversary of its translation into English by New York School poet Lewis Warsh (1944-2022).

Through an epic drift of shifting moods, motifs, and styles, Desnos constrains or expands Surrealist automatism to include the alexandrine, one of the strictest self-conscious classical meters in rhyme. It’s a form close to prose, at which Desnos excelled; he notoriously composed lengthy automatic prose poems such as Liberty or Love! as well as the deftly opiated novel The Die Is Cast. In Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos splits the difference, displaying endearingly enduring twelve-beat rhyme amidst idyllic lyric while breezily tossing off kiss n’ tell bagatelles in a single languorous love song or run-on billet doux.

Unlike its appearance in the ’70s, the original French text of Night of Loveless Nights is included in this new edition, but if it reveals that some of Warsh’s version seems forced, it’s not from oversight or ineptitude, but rather from compelling the strictest of regimes to meet its own demands. Following Desnos, Warsh teaches rigorous classical verse to lilt, laugh, and utter nonsense (“utter” here being both superlative and verb). Reachy malapropisms arc from the recondite and recherché to the heteroclite and Byzantine:

Like the clouds evening parties are born without reason and
die with this tattoo on top of the left breast: Tomorrow

In its first manifesto, Surrealism stuck to avant-garde schemes without glimpsing lateral or equal dispersion strategies to come. Desnos’s reply to the position he inherited as Surrealist seer was to outdo even his fellow enragées:

One day I met the vulture and the sea hawk.
Their shadows on the sun did not surprise me.
Much later I made out the chalk on the ramparts
The carbon initial of a name I knew.

In its second manifesto, André Breton excommunicated Desnos for essaying rhyme and fairy tales; acting after that as a sleeper agent, Desnos is perhaps the more adored of the two today. His death at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 makes it all the more important that readers revisit him today, with fascism alive and smelling rank in the age of its technical reproduction.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024