Poetry Reviews

Motherfield

Julia Cimafiejeva
Translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib 
Deep Vellum ($18.95)

motherfield

by Jessica Johnson

The first collection available in English by Belarusian poet, translator, and editor Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield begins with approximately thirty pages of the author’s year-long protest diary, composed in English during a mass uprising around the 2020 presidential election in Belarus; authoritarian leader Alexandr Lukashenko, in power since 1994, retained it in elections the E.U. deemed illegitimate. Cimafiejeva’s poems, translated from Belarusian by the impressive team of Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib, follow the diary, concluding with a single poem composed in English.

The diary feels written for the gaze of readers outside the events, possibly as a record in case something happens to the author. For some American readers, it will hold flashes of recognition—particularly the difficult feelings that come from continuing literary life and experiencing respites of comfort and safety during a political crisis—as well as an abundance of chilling occurrences that don’t (yet) happen here (for example, widespread internet outages as a government tactic).

Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements. Of the dubious polling station where she will cast her vote, Cimafiejeva writes, “Every election day in Lukashenka’s Belarus has turned into a demonstration of the cheap and vulgar aesthetics of his power.” Her description settles on a

teenage girl in a pseudo-folk costume with a wreath on her head . . . singing about her love for the Motherland, passionately clenching a microphone. Her Russian song checks off the golden wheat fields, the big blue lakes, and the slender white storks flying over our heads. She sings that we all live safely and peacefully in our beloved Belarus.

Here Cimafiejeva shows the propagandist’s Russian-language vision of the Motherland, one that the poems will meaningfully subvert to include ecological disaster, disconnection, and stifled expression. Cimafiejeva was born in 1981 in a region of Belarus that became part of the Chernobyl zone during her childhood. Her poetry develops, often through extended metaphor, a concept of bleak, devastated embodiment with disrupted relationships between past and future, land and people, people and language.

In the opening poem, “The Stone of Fear,” the speaker’s inheritance is “a trust fund / of fear” in the form of a stone. The stone is mute and without memory, “an eternally slow-growing / embryo.” To nurse it, its inheritors must “unlearn” how to breathe, “how to say what needs to be said.” In place of nurture and natural cycles of rebirth, Cimafiejeva finds intergenerational reproduction of something wrong.

While ecological devastation, absence of language, and reproductive bodies feature in the metaphors that drive many of these poems, references to Chernobyl also appear more literally. In “Rocking the Devil,” children swing their feet at a bus stop bench; it begins to rain and the girls stick out their tongues, but no one knows the raindrops are “disastrous,” that they’ve already permeated the scene’s vibrant flora. When the bus takes the girls away, the trees wave goodbye. Similarly, “1986” is written from the perspective of a “we” who had to leave houses, crops, and graves. Strangers dismantle their homes and what remains of their lives in the ancestral village; when they come back to visit, the land does not forgive them.

If the diary operates in one register of documentary, the poems work in others, but several moments in the poems call back to the diary. “My First City, Zhlobin” portrays a steel-producing town as a body that nurtures ruin:

I fear your children, Zhlobin,
the steel-cast children
of Zhlobin
nursed by the factory’s
smoggy tits.

The speaker here, fed on the factory’s black milk, emits rust, whereas the body in Cimafiejeva’s diary observation “I feel safe inside the body of a crowd”—the body of people gathered in protest, sharing water and food and generally looking after each other—can be read as a counterpoint to the blighted bodies of the poems.

Also thought-provoking is the diary entry for October 17-18, when Cimafiejeva and her husband, a novelist, are at a literary festival launching their books. He draws a crowd, but she doesn’t. She writes, “My new poetry book was published a few days before the election. It was the worst time: no one is interested in a tiny poetry book when the main news is deaths, beatings, and detentions. But there is no other time.” This moment highlights the question of poetry’s connection to lived and recorded history, a question enacted again by the arrangement of the book itself.

That arrangement comes to a crescendo with “My European Poem,” which closes the book. It speaks to the possibility of being read by an international audience and being placed among writers working in less challenging political conditions. Of Belarusian history, Cimafiejeva writes,

When I tell it in English,
I want to pretend that I am you,
That I don’t have that painful experience
Of constant protesting and constant failing,
That nasty feeling of frustration and dismay.

In the end the speaker keeps a “beaten hope” that “builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.” This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names.

Yet if Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future.

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Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Translated by David Colmer
New York Review Books ($18)

Wijnberg

by Thomas Moody

Walking on the beach he gets an idea
and immediately guesses its incorrectness
                                                —“Method”

Nachoem M. Wijnberg’s poetry possesses the disconcerting quality of being at once extraordinarily strange and very close to the feeling of life as it is actually lived. Wijnberg brings the world close to us (and it is a sweeping world he attends to: religious and philosophical investigations, encounters with historical figures, and domestic affairs of the most trivial nature) by being exact about the indecisiveness of the human will and by favoring the processes of our understanding of experience over the particulars of experience itself. Take “Letter to the Corinthians”:

Awareness of the world as well as ourselves
is as difficult for us as self-awareness for fish or foxes
although they in their behavior take their own existence
into account as we do the existence of the world.

These poems deal with the obstacles we face in “taking into account . . . the existence of the world”: the incompatibility of desires, the misapplication of attention, the strangeness of the other (particularly when the other is familiar), and the oddity of the revealed self. Here’s the opening to “Replying”:

Starting with what is the same for everyone

or can be (can everyone come over here),
looking at oneself and leaving out what reminds
one of oneself
to be able to say what can be said

without waiting until the same thing has been said in reply.

Understanding and loving, so that one of the two
can rest while the other watches.
Having the courage to say when no one is there:

how I wanted to live is incomprehensible to me
but maybe not to everyone.

Wijnberg is a professor of business studies at the University of Amsterdam; value systems, and our attempts to ascribe them coherently, are recurring themes throughout his poetry (“Continuing with what I do, recognizing what might be important enough to / justify putting everything I have into it — both of those are brave, aren’t they?”). Over the course of the twenty volumes collected here, from 1989’s The Simulation of Creation to 2022’s Naming Names, there is arguably little in the way of formal inventiveness—we are presented with songs, jokes, parables and ghazals—however, Wijnberg’s approach doesn’t require new forms to astonish; his singular voice makes existing forms seem new.

This is due partly to Wijnberg’s casual poetic register, which flattens any hierarchy of concepts and abolishes the mind’s value rankings of the quotidian and the profound. “Power and Knowledge and Justice,” a meditation on the existence of God, reduces the divine to a doorman “who does have power / over you but not much, and you can take a lot of it away by walking off and / standing somewhere else.” The poem opens:

Imagine there is someone far away who has almost no power but loves us—
our existence matters to him and he wants to know as much as possible about
each of us.
Or else he could have power but has set the condition that he only wants to
know that much if he doesn’t have to have power.
If you have had a lot of power, you can never give it back entirely, you still
know something about how it works.

Such cursory language unmoors us; it reproduces the disorientation we experience when thinking about such enigmatic concepts. Much of this is achieved through Wijnberg’s syntax, which employs a bewildering repetition of pronouns (especially “it”) with their exact referents often difficult to determine, as well as run-on sentences and other devices to produce complex layers of meaning. Take, for instance, the short poem “What an Actor the World Has Lost in You”:

An actor on another actor: he turned from left to right and stopped, at the
same time gesturing with his hand.
Being an actor was unbearably lonely if no one noticed him doing it, the chill
from its beauty went right through me.
Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that, a bad
actor can do it now and then, only a very good actor can do it all the time.
They are acting and they go on for too long or stop suddenly and you can see
they’re glad to be allowed to stop.

We are never entirely certain what any of the four “its” are. The poem seems to turn on the line “Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that,” but Wijnberg leaves us unsure as to which of the referents in the previous lines “that” refers to. This uncertainty destabilizes us as readers, but it replicates our understanding of the world as we experience it, and the accompanying feelings of surprise, confusion, and disorientation. To create such ambiguity through simplicity is Wijnberg’s greatest talent as a poet.

Increasing this uncertainty is the way the logic of many of these poems progress. Wijnberg’s associations often have no obvious point of contrast or connection; his declarative sentences are always slightly askew and his statements are just shy of making sense—close enough to be intelligible, far away enough to be obscure: “A poem must be about something; otherwise no one can say / if the poem is superfluous if it is about him. // What can he say, what is in his heart: a poem if one is bigger than the other, / disappointed if it is not a good poem.” His poems register the large impact of small differences.

They also make innovative use of those things we normally associate with poetic effect. Wijnberg’s rare similes are paradoxical in nature: “like wanting to fight / far above your weight, / but not against someone else”; “More reason to assume / someone is the Messiah / when he arrives / like someone politely leaving / at the earliest possible moment.” He also has an obvious talent for aphorism—“Where words mean something, Ghalib’s are law”; “No one knows what desire is until Ghalib says something about it. / He reads the history of the world and when he is finished, he says what is / missing”—though he rarely utilizes it, perhaps because this kind of rhetoric tends to take the reader out of the poem, or make us realize we are in a poem, devolving the feeling of lived experience into literature about it.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of Wijnberg’s most convincing and effective modes is that of the parable. Take “Laziness and Patience,” which echoes the Biblical story of the prodigal son:

The three sons of the father who says that when he dies,
The entire inheritance will go to the laziest son.

A judge has to find out which of the sons is the laziest.

The first son says: I go quiet when I think someone loves me.

That’s not bad, especially the haste, like someone
who has come to tell someone they don’t love them.

The second son says: my father has worked hard his whole life
to say that the inheritance goes to the laziest son

and that it’s up to a judge to find out which son 
is laziest. If it was more I know what I’d do,

says the third son to the woman he spends the inheritance with
in just one night. The woman tells the judge.

The judge asks the son: how did you know that she was the woman
who would tell me about it?  

Auden wrote that anyone who attempts to interpret a parable only ends up revealing themselves, but Wijnberg’s poetry compels us to try by asking us to find our bearings in disorientation. Here as elsewhere we might conclude that Modernity, with its pitch of distraction, its savagery masked in convenience, and its slogan- and corporate argot-riddled double-speak, forces us into constantly making sense of the world through the nonsensical. Confusion is our natural state, Wijnberg’s poetry confirms, and where we find meaning.

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Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Ronald Johnson
The Song Cave ($18.95)

by Ross Hair

First published in 1969, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Ronald Johnson’s third book of poetry, consolidates the strengths of his earlier work while foreshadowing his epic poem ARK, which he began writing in 1970. The book is comprised of two parts; the first, “A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees,” consists of a selection of poems from Johnson’s 1964 debut volume of the same title, and the second, “The Different Musics,” collects poems Johnson wrote between 1966 and 1967. The title of Johnson’s book is taken from the Valley conjured in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Eleanora”—an idyllic place where, amidst its “thousands of forest trees” and “many millions of fragrant flowers,” the story’s narrator dwells with his cousin Eleanor and her mother.

Existing somewhere between scrupulously observed fact and visionary transmutation, the worlds evoked in “A Line of Poetry” are not only as luxuriant as Poe’s Valley, but also as utopic. “This is the Garden,” Johnson writes in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” “where all is a poet’s / topiary. Where even the trees / shall have tongues, green aviaries, / to rustle at his will”:

Here—

both lines of poetry, rows
of trees,
shall spring all

seasons
out ‘of the lust of

the earth,
without
a formal seed’.

In “Four Orphic Poems” we find the poet evoking Thoreau—one of several Transcendentalists that inform the poems in Johnson’s Valley—as they attempt to read the Book of Nature:

& I (like
Thoreau) sit here engrossed,

‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

As well as reading nature’s “green / script,” Johnson also reads what others before him (poets, botanists, painters, composers, scientists) have written about it. Thus, throughout the book he liberally quotes the words of others, plotting his transplanted material on the page with the care of a gardener who seeks “clear space // to cultivate // the Wild, Espaliered, Tangled, / Clipped // estate.” However, compared to the open field collage poetics of the Black Mountain poets, Johnson foregoes extemporization for a more proportioned, more serene approach to composition that circumvents the bluster his older peers could be prone to.

As much as the poems comprising “The Different Musics” continue Johnson’s fascination for the “sweet proportion / & order” of both micro- and macrocosm, they also more explicitly acknowledge the sensual, erotic forces—the “rude / & stammering / organs”—by which “NATURE CONSPIRES.” Whereas in “A Line of Poetry” we find sowers, including Johnny Appleseed, casting their seeds in dark fields, and sunflowers “heavy in the head, with / seed,” in “The Different Musics” propagation assumes more phallic proportions. This is evident in Johnson’s series of ekphrastic poems on the dream-like jungle scenes created by French painter Henri Rousseau. “The Snake Charmer,” for example, depicts Rousseau’s eponymous subject, a “flautist of the sinuous phallus,” amidst a lush amatory landscape wherein “two pale fox-gloves secretly erect themselves, // deeper within the thicket” and “soft, foliaceous / labials” suggest fellatio.

The erotic charge of “The Different Musics,” and the new perspective it brings to Johnson’s cosmopoiesis, recalls the transfiguration that the Valley in Poe’s “Eleanora” undergoes following the sexual awakening of the story’s young protagonists. “A change fell upon all things,” Poe’s narrator writes: “And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us.” As the young lovers’ sexual awareness burgeons and grows, new strange flowers blossom on the trees in the Valley and “ruby-red asphodel” (an omen of morality) grows where before were only daisies.

In “The Different Musics” this correspondence between sexual agency and a heightened perception of “the great grassy world” is evident in “Letters to Walt Whitman,” a suite of ten poems that answer the poet’s Leaves of Grass. “But I have come O Walt,” Johnson writes in Letter III, “for the interchange, promised, of calamus, / masculine, sweet-smelling root, / between us”:

Calamus, ‘sweet flag’,
that still thrusts itself up,

that seasonally thrusts itself up for lovers.

This “interchange” often occurs via homonyms and double-entendres. In Letter II, for example, “the vast organic slough / of the earth, / the exquisite eye / —as myriad upon myriad of dandelions— // seeding itself on the air,” adumbrates the ejaculatory act implicit in the foregoing exhortation: “I have come O Whitman.” At the same time, such dissemination also speaks to “the intimate kernel,” the germinal life force, of the “ample prairie” that is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “The intimate kernel putting forth final leaf // from The Valley Of The Many-Colored Grasses.” Here, “leaf” suggests both a “stalk of grass” and the page of a book: Whitman’s, Johnson’s, and Nature’s.

Johnson writes in “Letters to Walt Whitman” of having “lain in the open night // till my shoulders felt twin roots, & the tree of my sight / swayed, / among the stars.” A similar fusion is evoked in Johnson’s earlier poem, which quotes Henry David Thoreau’s elegiac essay “Autumnal Tints”:

            ‘When Men Will Lie Down
                        as Gracefully & as Ripe—

            with such an Indian-summer serenity
            will shed their bodies
            as they do their hair & nails’.

Fall leaves, Thoreau (dying of tuberculosis at the time) writes, “teach us how to die.” For, Johnson, however, who omits a portion of Thoreau’s original text—“One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully”—this image of recumbent men shuns the hubris of immortality for the more modest grace and fecundity of seasonal time and change; the “subtler harmonies, coming of growth /  & of death.”

The reclining figures in both of Johnson’s poems are repeated on the cover of this beautiful new edition of Valley, which uses a photograph by Johnson’s friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s multiple-exposure technique makes his male subject appear to fuse with (or dissolve into) the rocky terrain about him. If this recalls the way in which the poet in “The Different Musics,” searching the dictionary, humbly finds “among DUST / vapor, storm, breath, smoke: // ‘the earthly remains of bodies once alive— / a confusion— / a single particle, as of earth,’” it also reiterates the affirmation that Johnson expresses throughout his book for the largesse of life itself. To have this book finally back in print, and reminding us of such verities, is simply a splendid thing.

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Quarantine Highway

Millicent Borges Accardi
Flowersong Press ($16)

by Hilary Sideris

Quarantine Highway, the fourth poetry collection by the Portuguese-American poet Millicent Borges Accardi, was written in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a group of thirty Latinx poets participated in a challenge organized by the organization CantoMundo—writing, reading, and riffing on each other’s poems for thirty days. Borges Accardi captures the sheer panic and magical thinking of that time when Covid was at its most mysterious and deadly, and she shows us a community coming together to document and process the absurdity (and, at times, the strange beauty) of pandemic life, taking comfort and inspiration from each other’s raw emotions and rough drafts.        

In the poem “Yes, It’s Difficult,” Borges Accardi lapses into nostalgia for the pre-pandemic world of unfettered travel and spontaneous shows of affection: “it was how we did things then, / dirty and up close and we breathed on each other / sighing air, sipping in fine water droplets.” The poet daydreams of travel in “She Can Do What She has to Do,” finding herself “in a café that I know does not exist, / on a corner in make-believe Paris,” where she watches people pass in the plaza. “Thank you,” she tells the imaginary garçon,

I would love a piece of cheese and some
bread. The drink is cool, so I feel as if
the story of my life can go on forever.

Not surprisingly, a reckoning with fragility and the monotony of living a cautious life dominates the collection. In “All It Takes,” the poet fights off an ant infestation, while outside, bodies stack up in refrigerated trucks. Borges Accardi’s gaze falls on a line of ants carrying their dead across her kitchen floor:

You drink cod liver oil and chant
Go home go home go home as the
ants pick up their dead and march
backwards to their queen.

Even as she attempts to ward off the invaders, the poet recognizes that they, too, are members of a community facing an existential threat. But the kitchen is also a site of hope: Cooking and baking are rituals that engage Borges Accardi in a sensual world where well-being is possible. “One Season, My Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions” describes the pleasure of preparing a spicy Portuguese dish:

To be bright red is to want things to happen.
I know this and make Piri Piri, to be held
carefully, to be used later.
The nuances of honey and bitter, roll
about my tongue as I add the sauce to
our lives.                                     

The poem’s title, like quite a few other titles in this collection, is a line written by a fellow poet—in this case, Juan Luis Guzmán—during the month-long exchange that produced Quarantine Highway. This is a book that shows how poetry matters during a time of crisis, how we can keep writing and remember to breathe through a shared sense of culture and community.

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Old Love Skin

Voices from Contemporary Africa

Edited by Nyashadzashe Chikumbu
Mukana Press ($15.95)

by Mbizo Chirasha

Old Love Skin, a collection edited by the energetic griotic Zimbabwean poet Nyashadzashe Chikumbu, is a rainbow of vibrant African voices, a rainbow that rises Mandela from the royal caves of Qunu. It is renaissance that sings to the bones of Nkrumah waKwame sleeping saliently in the lush meadows of heavenly bliss; it is real poetry smoked by ancient ghosts and love angels upon the zenith of Kilimanjaro and fontanelles of Chimanimani mountains, real poetry of Chimurenga grandchildren watering the literary pastures with the rain of organic allegory. It is real poetry strangling ghosts of warlords in Nzere. It is real poetry floating with the gigantic spirit of Nefertiti in White and Blue Nile and Nzinga walking onto the beauty of pyramid rubbles, with Nyamhita Nyanda Nehanda strutting onto the spiritual podium of chimurenga gods. It is real poetry smacking the yellow-orange hypocritical faces of colonial mood and smashing the spiking python tails of post-independence African dictatorships wearing the sheep’s fair coat. It is the love of love and hate of love. And it is the hate of hate and the love of hate. Old Love Skin is a cousin of dramatic irony, satire maybe, or the grandchild of African paradox.

Alvin Kathemb’s poem “Contingencies” well represents the body politic of the collection:

She carries a condom in her purse in case of rape.
When I saw it, I asked, teasing?
expecting some joke or frisky comment—
“You never know when the craving will strike”—
something in that vein.

“Contingencies” depicts the modern trends of sex, population control, and the nausea of recolonization/mental slavery in the name of civilization and modernism. The poem is a graphic presentation of the erosion of ancient African morals that decried sex before the performance of matrimonial rites as exercised by the generations of the past in real Africa. Kathemb takes aim at today’s moral decadence and social rot in comparison to past cultural values and traditional rites, and by prologuing with three of his poems, the anthology sets up a discussion between modern problems and the puzzles of old Africa.

In the nerve-raving verses of “Gaana” by Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, the memory and psyche of the poet are twinned with the reader’s poetic ear. In this political/revolutionary volley presented as a Christmas/valentine present—what a dramatic irony—we see the reincarnation of old literary revolutionary voices such as Léopold Senghor, Jack Mapanje, and Christopher Okgibo, with their ironic/satiric yearnings for freedom during days of colonial madness when Africa was grinding under crude Anglo-Euro colonial iron fist rule. Yes, the African griot on the Old Love Skin podium sings to the current pseudo- revolutionary-tyrranical-autocratic African leadership that never repented from shenanigans of self-hate, greed, killing, war, and decadence. Kwaku, the young muse, recites raw resistance to the machinations of neocolonialism that has reared its unfriendly double heads unto Africa, sliding Africa into dire impoverishment, cultural adultery, and political discord:

I want to get a pet one day—a cat, maybe or a dog—& name it after my country, so each poem I write for it, is also for my country. I want a messy pet—a beautiful pet a pet that’s a metaphor for my country. That when I say my pet tore my life apart today, I also mean—my country tore my life apart. When I say my pet is beautiful, I also am saying—my country is beautiful. When it steals my fish, I say what I say. When it brings me fish, I know there’s a bargain—something taken, something I won’t know of. When it breaks my heart, I know it is my country & I cannot unlove it—when it kills me, I won’t know

Kwaku Dade’s “To Aluah I” is a powerful, painful, and erotic, but so lovely, love-nostalgic epistle. The poet is writing a memory, a long-ago letter to someone she/he knows, a love lost. Sometimes the lover is enjoying afterlife in heaven’s chambers or burning already in the merciless red-hot charcoal chalices of hell; otherwise the poet speaks to his mother who was swallowed by the untamed legends of the world on the day of his birth. Maybe the poet is speaking to a country lost in the decadence of war or the discord of political greed, a country with slums as its wounds and poverty as its boils, a country with a name but no longer living, a dead/lost country. And again, the poem is an elegy, a heart-thumping epitaph, an epistle of memories, a sad love story:

In my mind, you lurk about the house. You splash in the bathtub, tap on the ceramic, you are in the hall, in the kitchen, in the hallways. But the walls whisper to me that I am lying. I step into these your motions, and I find only a brush of cold under my skin. In our backyard, your hand touches mine, pegging clothes on the drying lines, and longings inside you transfer into me. But the passing breeze screams into my face that you are not here. In the sky, asperatus clouds form you, naked, in a bed of bubbles. You stare back at me with famished eyes with a hint of detestation. And sunlight pours through it all. And it rains. I remember us sleeping on our Tamale bed. Our son sleeps between us, and when the void of dreams takes him, I climb over to you; I brush my cheeks against the silk of your stomach

This anthology is also a display of bravery and resurrection of lost hopes. The verses within it are in sync with “old love skin”—how deep and broad the title is, though it is anchored by rims of precision and grids of literary simplicity. Pusetso Lame, the versatile genius of the land of Batswana, comes out with guns blazing; the crudity and the bravery in her verse is a portrayal of Africa believed, Africa disbelieved, Africa loved and hated, Africa hopeful and hopeless. Pusetso’s militant-but-logical verse is optimistic and thus reminds us that Old Love Skin is a revolution to replace the old with the new—or swap the rotten new with the sane/fresh old. Lame speaks to women’s fear of seeing their graves. She stands with/for the victims of violence, victims of fear, and victims of hate, and she wants them to rise. As usual, poets are dynamic perception-changers and life-savers, and Lame’s words offer a rebirth, a renewal, a rekindle, a resurrection, and an uprising:

When all you can see is a worthless being Trying to resurrect from a grave that keeps digging itself deeper and deeper Like rain droplets, I’d slowly but surely wipe away all the pains from yesterday’s rejections When all the doors before you have been closed even before your existence

Old Love Skin can be read as symbolizing a rebirth of the old wine skin adage, or maybe its replacement: the reincarnation, the memory, the rise of ancestors of letters or another literary revolution, a non-violent resistance with fistfights dressed in cloves of mushroom, bullets loaded in petals of roses or petals of blood—and iconic literary prowess.

Zimbabwean poet Energy Mavaza was born and bred in that land of contradiction, the land of embrace and bruises, the land of scenic beauty and political ugliness, the land that requires today’s corruption sanitizers as it needed yesterday’s colonial fumigators before the shrill of the cockerel in 1980. Mavaza, the new of the old Shimmer Chinodya (author of the award-winning novel Harvest of Thorns, a novel that predicted the colonial present of the country under siege and the future of a republic that was to greedily drink its own eggs of economic and political freedom), brings back to this poetic podium a searing verse :

That winters’ sun shone so bright, Thawed hearts in melanin delight. Hope swallowed in ballot box, Hope in Africa? What a paradox. For nature nurtures its own well. It adorns wild peppermints with green, Climbers scale up rocks and boughs Embracing the bush to keep the axe at bay. Landscape painted in scattered thistles in gloom-bloom as they shudder To the August gust. The firm rooted tastes November dew. Thistles appease in summer breeze, Whispering dry rumours to the prickly leaves. Roots ferret beneath for moisture but the ancestors stare licks our hope up. Zealous ploughers did much about nothing Silos awaited nocuous for stores but Dust, the response to what we sowed, Shrubs and thorns too. No one knows what they fed on We will reap what we did not sow Bountiful harvest of thorns We didn’t toil for

Old Love Skin is a theme-based display of poetic gems equalized by the sweet/slow/fresh/smooth flow of a young river pouring into the tired/sober/ harsh but motherly pigeon-infested old river. It is a unique African story told by brave-militant wordsmiths who divorced their play with androids and stereos and got initiated by poignant metaphor, crude pliers of irony, and sharp, double-edged razor blades of satire.

Some of these word-soldiers were trained in the style of Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka; others are great-grandchildren of Senghor and Mapanje; many of them copy the lyricism of Dambudzo Marechera; and still others drank Victorian and metaphysical poetics, maybe some African Canterbury Tales. Old Love Skin is a yearn for freedom, a rebirth, a resurrection, a revolution, a resistance of the bad old, and an embrace of the good new—as well as a chant against the rotten new and an embrace of the good old.

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Two Poets of the American Now

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Franny Choi
Ecco ($27.99)

Concentrate

Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press ($17)

by Walter Holland

Franny Choi and Courtney Faye Taylor are two compelling poets of our fraught political moment who succeed in capturing the pulse of the American now. The two poets take different paths; in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi offers an expansive meditation on our troubled society and its dystopian state, while Taylor, in Concentrate, channels heartrending research about one forgotten victim of racial injustice into a larger indictment of American institutional racism.

“Good Morning America” provides a sense of Choi’s provocative and well-crafted political verse:

Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath
of another bad massacre, and I’ve got
plenty of seats. Come in, I whisper

to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder,
to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.
Dispatches from Kenosha,

Louisville, Atlanta, arrive, arrive
like a steady kickdrum of sparrows
spatchcocked by gravity, little nevers,

little couldn’ts; too late to stop the video,

too late, too late.

Choi deftly captures here the tumult of our American moment; in this, she joins poets such as Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, and Justin Phillip Reed. The image of sparrows “spatchcocked”—literally split open at the spine to lay flat—evokes images of police brutality, mass murder, and other events that have indeed become a  “steady kickdrum” of injustice. We’ve seen the smartphone videos surface with endless evidence of American racism at work.

The poems in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On are spare in language and brutally direct; Choi’s honest style of attack gives her poetry stinging irony. However, Choi doesn’t preach. Her instinct is to avoid commentary and instead to use her keen eye and ear to lay out the facts. In an age during which the very nature of truth and fact have been contested, Choi captures the moral conundrum implicit in Hans Christen Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Andersen does in his parable, Choi challenges the reader to see the truth behind our delusions, spin, and split seams of absurd reasoning. She reveals the truth hidden under the imaginary cloth of our showy malfeasance.

Choi’s list poem “Things That Already Go Past Borders” is a perfect example. The title immediately undermines our simplistic belief that building a physical border wall will prevent all future threats. “Things That Already Go Past Borders” begins:

trade deals; pathogens; specific
passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car
parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some
insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music
at the right volume; headlights; human
remains; wireless signals; all manner
of money; of memory; people

This mix of abstract and concrete nouns suggests the insoluble paradox of trying to keep out of the country “trade deals” and “vegetables,” or “religion” and “human remains.” The irony is heightened when we consider how ubiquitous American culture has already become, spreading globally despite the efforts of the most advanced of nations.   

In “Science Fiction Poetry,” Choi is again ironic. The tag at the start of each line is “Dystopia of,” and by repeating the word, Choi plays with hyperbole and understatement to undermine the term’s grim prophecy. The Oxford Englsh Dictionary defines “dystopia” as an “imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Choi contrasts this “imagined state” of “great suffering or injustice” with what we see today in plain sight—for example, the contrast between the discomfort of sitting “all day in an air-conditioned conference hall with no sweater” and the suffering of “houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block.” She continues: “Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live” and “Dystopia very lonely on Mother’s Day.”  

In the end, Choi points out how, historically, this dystopian self-delusion has been cyclical and generational. She draws on the struggles of her Korean grandmother and great-grandmother and her own childhood memories of discrimination in the U.S. Like Andersen, Choi points to the bizarre paradox between what truth tells us and what American society would have us imagine, and reveals how we equivocate between our claims to morality and our already existing semi-totalitarian injustice. Through poetry that is stunningly well-crafted and fresh, Choi bares the naked realities under our thinnest of ethical pretensions.

• • • 

In 1973, the author Alice Walker searched through the overgrowth of a segregated cemetery, the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida, before stumbling upon the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, a literary star of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was rescued from her anonymity and recognized as a victim of cultural and economic racism. In a like manner, poet Courtney Faye Taylor, in her new book Concentrate, searches the impoverished cemetery of Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, California. She is looking for the grave of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot to death in Los Angeles for supposedly shoplifting a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Soon Ja Du, the fifty-one-year-old woman who shot Harlins in the back of the head, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison, but her sentence was suspended to five years of probation and community service with a restitution of $500. Du’s light sentencing was one of the events that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Taylor never finds Harlins’s grave—her remains were allegedly exhumed in a cemetery scheme to dispose of minorities in mass unmarked “piles” while burying lucrative customers in traditional graves.        

The title of Taylor’s book, Concentrate, is a provocative one: It refers partly to the fact that the bottle of orange juice Harlins was accused of stealing was the cheap concentrate variety, not the tonier kind that is a staple of middle-class suburbanites far beyond America’s food deserts. Concentrate has several definitions, according to Merriam-Webster: “to bring or direct toward a common center or objective, i.e., focus”; “to gather into one body, mass, or force”; and “to focus one’s powers, efforts, or attentions.” Indeed, Taylor has sharply focused on a singular objective: to concentrate on the undiluted truth and formidable outrage that Harlins’s death provokes to this day.

Through prose poems, found poems, essayistic freeform, and visual imagery from leaflets and in collages, Taylor seeks to restore Harlins’s dignity and bring the injustice of her death back to national attention. As with the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new effort is being made to preserve the memory of victims of injustice such as Treyvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to draw the focus of a nation too often distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer number of episodes of racist violence which play out and disappear in our daily news cycles.

In the poem “Arizona?” we are introduced to Taylor’s beloved Aunt Notrie. As a young adolescent girl, Taylor listens to her aunt give her “The Talk”: that discomforting lecture about how Black boys and girls in America must navigate a racist society to ensure their survival. While Notrie does Taylor’s hair, she implores the child “<*keep still now*” as Taylor replies “>I’m trying to.” Notrie tells Taylor to “concentrate” on the story of Latasha Harlins and her death in order to drive home the dangers Black people face on a daily basis should they not practice passive and deferential behavior around whites.  Taylor says she is “trying to” keep still when her aunt says:

<Ain’t about trying, it’s about doing. How
else you plan to survive? Live a life of
trying and you just end up tried . . .
All that child was tryna buy
was a drink.

                                                <Arizona?

<South Central.

Aunt Notrie mentions the death of Trayvon Martin to point out that this threat is real to all Black children regardless of gender:

<Boys ain’t the only cause of chalk-
ines. You got that allergy to sixteenth
birthdays too, understand?—*sit up
straight*—This was OJ.

Taylor’s language is concise, and her tone is direct—her messages are sobering but poignant. Harlins died at fifteen. Trayvon Martin died at seventeen carrying Skittles in his pocket. Taylor is told she may never reach sixteen just for being a target of white suspicion.

In “A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set,” the racist assumptions behind surveys of both white and Black women, in the magazines Country Living and Ebony/Jet respectively, are revealed. The women must identify their three greatest fears: The white women list “1. Nuclear war in US / 2. Child dying of terminal illness / 3. Terminal illness of self,” while the Black women list “1. Dogs / 2. Ghosts / 3. CCTV.” Taylor’s take on this is nothing short of dazzling:             

Stereotypes are centipedes at ease
in bowls of bleach. Or liberation lit

with wicks, and then Katrina—that’s
a stereotype. When company’s mixed. I’ll pet

king shepherds, adore mausoleums, suck my
teeth in corner store camcorders, although

privately—under nouveau R&B and the tutelage of
quick weaves—the Chesimard in me counts horror on

a matte black abacus. There is no fear on
earth that has ever gone unhad or

unbereaved, but the Diaspora won’t have it be
known that dogs, ghosts, and CCTV are

a melody defining out costs, copywriting our loss.

The lethal music of Taylor’s language, with its internal rhymes and unfettered consonance, is evident: “lit” joins with “wicks,” “R&B” with “quick weaves,” and “unbereaved” with “CCTV.” We hear the speaker’s sharp sarcasm as she points out the angry undercurrent of her thoughts, which must be suppressed in mixed company; we hear too how she silently counts the many racist horrors through history on her “black abacus.” Concentrate inventively inserts edgy, caustic observation under the veneer of a complicit understanding. In language that festers as though buried alive, Taylor succeeds in disturbing even the most silent of cemeteries and in resurrecting the desecrated dead.

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Water Has Many Colors

Kiriti Sengupta
Illustrated by Rochishnu Sanyal
Hawakal Publishers

by Malashri Lal

Water, that formless, colorless, life-sustaining essence that pervades our being—how does one inscribe it in poetry? In his new collection, Kiriti Sengupta answers in a series of meditations that flow with an enchanting fluidity. The poems dwell on eternal themes such as home, belonging, relationships, and community, but these appear in ephemeral light as though transcending the ordinary and enticing the reader to follow paths of self-discovery.  

Reading Water Has Many Colors, I was reminded of these evocative lines in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.” Here too, the surface calm of controlled structures rests over a subliminal, surging angst, enlivening a crisp duality in which emotions and experiences are transformative, yet the speaker yearns for more change.

This tenuous hold of troubling dualities appears in various ways under Sengupta’s scrutiny. Understandably, the notion of home is questioned: “Dwelling is a slingshot: more it / draws me in, further I fling it way.” While this suggests a perennial odyssey of sorts, Sengupta offers domestic details with roots in cultural practice: “Ma’s healing touch” and a “tiepin from a fiancée” defy the resolution to unhouse oneself from tethers. Who will pay the cost of losing a sense of belonging? Embedded in these poems are complex discourses on location and dislocation, diaspora and homeland, partitions and fragmentations.  These mega-events are condensed into haunting lines on memory and forgetting. The brief poem “Ma” is stark—“In the kitchen / her bangles / play a carillon”—yet the sound of that music will echo in the parallel memories of readers.

Sometimes memory travels to a collective space, such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919—a space marked by bullet holes on a brick wall and the darkness of a well that engulfed hapless women. Revisiting this traumatic event, Sengupta pins his sight on the incongruous item left by a tourist in “The Bottle,” a pensive commentary on a tragic past now pigeonholed into history. The poems “Hibiscus” and “Nostalgia invoke, respectively, the Marxist writer Sukanta Bhattacharya and the educationist Samantak Das, but here, too, disjunctions creep in that elevate historical observation into a poetry of elegiac force. 

Mythology also gets examined in the pages of Water Has Many Colors, as in the poem “When a Woman Conquers God,” a riff on the Bengali Manasamangal Kavya. In the original story, Manasa, the snake goddess, is both challenged and propitiated by Behula, who wants her dead husband revived after the goddess has destroyed him. Behula succeeds and is upheld as the epitome of wifely devotion, whereas Manasa remains a deity to be feared and propitiated with “the left hand.” Sengupta places this story in the realm of alternative power structures, contrasting ideas of divinity and hierarchies, thereby couching the legend in modern political discourse. Sengupta’s poem “Urvashi” similarly recasts the image of a siren (apsara) figure; Tagore also wrote a lyrical poem about Urvashi, yet in presenting female desire, the famed Nobel Laureate looked towards the domestic ideal, whereas Sengupta’s Behula and Urvashi challenge this, bringing his poems closer to the contemporary idiom of feminist choice. 

From myth to the cinema is not such a long journey, especially when one reads about the film diva Rekha and her makeover from the simple “Bhanurekha”; the poet seems quite spellbound in describing her “mystique” and “luminescence.” The actor, director, and talk show host Simi Grewal, clad in white, is another aspect of Bollywood glamour Sengupta engages; it’s a tale of light, image, sound, and “cut” that poetry can mimic in words.  

From epics and movies to succinct one-liners, Sengupta suits his poetic form to the subject, just as the folk idiom reminds us that water takes shape from the container in which it is held. The series “Bucolic Bengal” picks out contrasts in nature while hinting that the pastoral idyll is merely spectral; lines such as “kites are born of chimeras” and “mien limns the reality” deliberately pitch elusive, expandable images, stretching the reader’s imagination. On the other hand, the series “Monostich” uses the terse one-line stanza to invoke an inwardness. For example: “What if I am mute or loud?” This poem, “Prayer,” gestures towards multiple meanings; the line may suggest the silent intimacy of grace, but could also allude to mass religiosity.

Water Has Many Colors leaves the reader dazzled by the variety of styles and subjects, an effect reinforced by the captivating art of Rochishnu Sanyal. No line is out of place in the poems or the drawings, and an amazing synergy joins each pairing. The book captures the frenzied pace of modernity yet urges a philosophic acceptance through the enduring image of water. Chronology rolls into timelessness, fragments blend into periodic wholeness, and images float like waves washing up on the shores. This is a celebration of life’s plenitude.

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How to Communicate

John Lee Clark
W. W. Norton & Company ($29.95)

by Stephanie Burt                          

If you’re a poet—and if you work hard and make attentive, patient discoveries—you can expand the range of what a poem can do by finding new forms, new sets of moves that your language can make. If you’ve had unusual experience—lived an unusual, lucky, or difficult life, say—you can expand the range of what a poem can show and say by building that experience into your poems. If there’s a group of people like you whose experience isn’t represented in poems—or if it’s not represented often, or particularly well—you can do important political work by representing it. And if you’ve got access to an unusual conjunction of languages, ways to use words and to make yourself understood—say, Thai and Croatian, or Spanish, Catalan, and Cantonese, or the special talk of the Parisian underworld—you might be able to expand the range of what poems can do by translating, adapting, or making truly new work in a target language using what you learned from your source.

John Lee Clark is all four kinds of poet at once. This first book of Clark’s own poems (he edited the anthology Deaf American Poetry, published by Gallaudet University Press in 2009) does not just reflect (whatever that means) his experience as a DeafBlind creator, moving in Deaf and DeafBlind cultures as well as in other literary circles. It also shows new forms, new ways to use English, as in Clark’s slateku, dependent on puns generated by the two-sided slate used in pre-electronic Braille. Clark’s work imports into English new kinds of intimacy, sarcasm, and communal defense, from American Sign Language and from the less common language Protactile, used (as the name implies) by DeafBlind people who communicate via touch.

These kinds of translation reflect Clark’s life in between languages. He considers how to frame his tactile, translated, uncommonly embodied and uncommonly mediated day-to-day so that people like me (nondisabled, non-Deaf) can dive in.  And I want to dive in. He’s writing at once for people like me and to bolster like-minded figures, and he’s funny, angry, inviting, tender, genuine: “I have been filmed and photographed for free,” he writes in a prose poem with pointers to John Clare. “It costs so much to smile…. I would that I were a dragonfly curled up between your finger and your thumb.”

That’s a Clark original. Here’s a sample translation, from the Protactile of Oscar Chacon: “At the base of your forearm, the lumberjack is surprised. Still standing! What’s going on? Rubbing chin.” And here are lines sliced from an elegy in monostichs for the DeafBlind creator Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739): “He made a calculating machine with strings and pins and called it Palpable Arithmetic…. Go on feel what it says.” This caustically titled volume also covers the near-dissolution of a marriage, Clark’s life as a son and a father, and his early education—it’s got range. It’s got centuries of history. It’s got portraits, too: the teacher “Mrs. Schultz,” for example, who tried and failed to understand “the Clark boy,” and “The Politician,” whose signed faux pas puts John F. Kennedy’s famous jelly-doughnut remark in the shade (I won’t spoil the joke: read the book).

Is it okay to say, of a DeafBlind writer, that his work sounds like nothing else? Because, to this hearing reader, it’s true. Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English—in print, to the ear, on the fingertip—can do. He’s got puns, euphonies, wordplays, cleverly arranged syllabics, as in those slateku: “Hollywood / Smoothly wraps / Hollywood / Soothingly warps.” And he’s also funny, sometimes exhausted, and more often exasperated in a way that you might recognize if anyone has ever called you “brave” for attempting to live your daily life: “Let go of my arm. I will not wait / until I’m the last person on the plane.” Or: “Can’t I pick my nose / without it being a miracle?”

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Two New Translations of Max Jacob's Poetry

The Central Laboratory
Max Jacob
Translated by Alexander Dickow
Wakefield Press ($22.95)

The Dice Cup
Max Jacob
Translated by Ian Seed
Wakefield Press ($19.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan    

With only relatively brief selections of work readily available to Anglophone readers, the French poet Max Jacob, who died of pneumonia in a Nazi internment camp in 1944, has nonetheless long held an exalted status. These new translations of two of Jacob’s major collections should be recognized as welcome and essential: The Dice Cup (1917), Jacob’s unprecedented contribution to the development of the prose poem, and The Central Laboratory (1921), a collection that spans nearly two decades, together encompass most of his early poetic work. As recounted in Roseanna Warren’s enjoyably thorough Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (W.W. Norton, 2020), this extraordinary flowering was buoyed by Jacob’s friendships with Picasso, Apollinaire, and many others in the Parisian avant-garde—though he was often at odds with his fellow groundbreakers as well, such as his on-again, off-again prose poem rivalry with Pierre Reverdy.  

Born in 1876 into a bourgeois ethnically Jewish family in Brittany, Jacob scorned provincial mediocrity by absconding to Paris. There, he embraced the artistic city life that filled small streets and neighborhood hovels. Later in life, Jacob moved through the echelons of the upper class, mingling with art dealers and other patrons. Inner conflict about his homosexuality may have played a part in his deeply invested conversion to the Catholic faith, though he claimed it was due to a mystical vision. With Jacob’s enthusiasms as constant as his general dissatisfaction, it’s no wonder his poems display the influence of these shifting life experiences, often at a dizzying pace. As translator Alexander Dickow notes in his introduction to The Central Laboratory, “Jacob cannot act as unequivocal role model or poster boy for any particular identity: he is too full of contrasts and contradictions for that”; as a result, his “extraordinary life has long overshadowed his work.”                            

The frenetic shifting throughout The Central Laboratory—from line to line in individual poems (with an abundance of esoteric references and wordplay) and between forms from poem to poem (ballads, nursery rhymes, experimental collage)—continually surprises and challenges the reader. For instance, consider:

Perigal-Nohor

Someone’s patched up the azure of my sky
My nuptials had two lions standing by
And then Saint Catherine lifted her blade
To prune my honey-colored shrubs in braids—
Two castles on which little towers dwell—
The little castle tower’s scrofules swell.
It’s all that was left in this capitol
With bits of garden scattered here and there
And we could see your coifs of lace as well
Madame Adamunzipper
The color of kipper
Madame Mirabeau, Madame Mirabelle
Nebuchadnezzar’s mother, truth to tell.
Now sailboats returned to this cathedral
One with gold and the other with coal tar
The third one catching fire carried Abelard
While the sea seemed somewhat vegetal
I write in letters that are capital:
I’ll never be but a novice in art
The novices’ necklaces we wear crowns
The one who’s crowned amounts to he who crowns.                            

Jacob moves freely between sense and nonsense, beautifying the confusing, and at times, he delights in nothing less than the joy of how words sound. Yet, there is also  glorious hubris (“my sky”), cheeky insight (as in the closing claim), and a sparkling intellect throughout, all of which showcase Jacob’s depths as well as wordplay.  

As can be felt in the inventive lines above, Dickow’s translation of the Laboratory is generally quite fine, though there are occasional odd decisions. “Barège n’est pas Baume-les-Dames!” becomes “Bombay is not Ramagundam!”  which is defended in a footnote: “Jacob mentions Barèges, a town in Southwestern France, and Baume-les-Dames, a town in Burgundy. I felt that Indian names with similar sonorities and rhythms might be more evocative for Anglophone readers.” This might hold true for some Anglophone readers, but most would not recognize Ramagundam any more than Baume-les-Dames—and Jacob was naming French locales, after all. Why exoticize the work? In another instance, “La fenêtre: un cigare au coin de l’univers” is rendered as “Window: cigar that dangles from the cosmic lip”—a rather overtly poetic flourish for the clearer “cigar resting on the corner of the universe,” disrupting what would seem the more striking image Jacob perhaps intended of the universe as cosmic ashtray.

Though the prose poems in The Dice Cup might be less formally challenging for today’s readers than the dizzy verses in The Central Laboratory, Ian Seed’s new translations, like Dickow’s, provide an opening for digging deeper into Jacob’s poetics. Dickow leads the way, citing Robert Guiette’s 1976 critical study La Vie de Max Jacob based upon interviews with Jacob in the 1920s, noting how the poet “framed his poetics precisely in terms of ‘disappointment [déception]’” and took triumphant glee in how “the reader was slid from place to place until there was nothing left.” He goes on to describe Jacob’s work overall as “the art of sabotaging readers’ expectations, of producing doubt and disorientation, perhaps even sadness or a slight sense of having been jilted.”  Indeed, given the relative comfort most readers feel when faced with a piece of short prose (as it may contain the hint of a narrative, characters and actions assigned to them, etc.), it is jilting indeed to have none of the comfortable associations of one’s reading experience go as expected. Take this short piece: 

The House of the Guillotined

To Paimpol! You cross the hills in the evening. The roofs of the news houses in evening blue and sea blue. A room at the hotel for so many from the smart set. Now for a life of great pursuits. All these little bladders on the sidewalk come from pretend rabbits: a servant blows them up and we take a shot at them: there is but one true rabbit: he’s old and seated: “Where’s René?” “He puts in an appearance from time to time.” René puts rubber soles on his shoes to act out the role of the old rabbit, and we sit down at the table facing Paimpol, facing the port and the evening hills. There’s a lady who knows the hostess’s secret: “It was in Paimpol last year at this time that . . .” The lady rises, her eyes full of tears. What a scene!”

Of course, Jacob has no intentions of his poem aligning with readerly expectations. Paraphrasing Jacob’s own remarks, Seed relates how “The prose poem ‘transplants’ components of reality into a realm where we can ‘situate’ those components in relation to one another, offering us alternative versions of reality, which in this case is not something fixed and stable, any more than one’s personality is.”

With both collections, the intent is to throw the reader off balance and to have that experience offer delight. Dickow cites a 1907 letter of Jacob’s that draws an interesting contrast: “surprise is a stable state,” he writes, whereas “pleasure is in movement; the spectator must be tossed to and fro; aesthetic emotion is doubt. Doubt is obtainable through the coupling of that which is incompatible (and without producing stable surprise) . . . in poetry, interest is born of doubt between reality and the imagination . . . Doubt, that is art!” None of Jacob’s poems, whether in prose or rhymed verse, are intended to be too easily digestible; he intends to confound. Seed reminds us in a footnote that, “In his Art Poetique, Jacob famously declared, ‘Personality is only a persistent error.’” In his social life, Jacob continually presented a refreshed reimagining of his self to the various scenes through which he swirled. His poetry likewise remains dedicated to the constant reimagining of the world.   

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psalmbook

Laura Walker
Apogee Press ($18.95)

by John Bradley

The King James version of the Book of Psalms is a profound and intimidating text with layers of musicality, history, and spirituality. Most poets would avoid using this imposing work as a source of literary invention. Not so with Laura Walker’s psalmbook, which offers sixty-nine poems, all titled “psalms,” that draw inspiration from the Book of Psalms. Walker manages to preserve a sense of prayer while also reshaping the psalm into something new—a significant literary achievement.

One of the most notable attributes of Walker’s psalms is their fragmented state. They feel like translations from scraps of ancient papyri. Here is “psalm 142” in its entirety:

sound poured round our heads



like trouble



or gravel

The fragmentary nature of the poem is augmented by the use of the lower case, as well as the space between the lines, heightened by the oversize page (the book measures 7.5 x 9 inches). The spacing slows the reader, asks for the poem to be read again, and then asks us to meditate on the resonances.

Another innovation in psalmbook is Walker’s use of the second person. Unlike “Lord” or “God” in the King James Book of Psalms, “you” builds intimacy and uncertainty: “i see you there / or think i do” While this “you” usually seems to be used for a divine presence, at times there’s ambiguity: “i see you lying in the dark,” in “psalm 5,” could be speaking of a human presence. This ambiguity is unresolved in the adjacent lines: “tracing another cliff, another toppled island / on your bedroom wall :”.

Walker brings her psalms into modernity: “listen— / i will talk to you in the morning / by the washing machine.” Here the human need for spirituality is placed in the mundane world of laundry. Walker often blends Biblical and contemporary language. In “psalm 99” (there are poems in psalmbook with the same psalm number, indicating that some of the Biblical psalms inspired more than one poem) we hear both the King James-like language—“your name is a plucked thing in my mouth”—and contemporary language—“perched on a fence with your pant leg rolled up.” Perhaps the “plucked thing” could be a mouth harp. As the psalms continue, however, we encounter something unfamiliar, something surreal:  

perched on a fence with your pant leg rolled up,
holding a flag or an apple, milk-creased creature
against your thigh

No matter what this “milk-creased creature” might be, Walker suggests that the language we use in our daily lives—“your pant leg rolled up” or “holding a flag”—is just as worthy as King James English in creating a prayer.

The cover of psalmbook, showing scraps of ink-inscribed ancient papyri, evokes salvaged pieces of a holy text. It also evokes, as does the text of this book, what survives of Sappho’s poetry. Perhaps this allusion is intentional, though the yearning in Sappho’s poetry is more concerned with earthly love. Yet its fragmentary nature, as in psalmbook, furthers that yearning.

Walker’s psalms will no doubt lead some readers back to the Book of Psalms, and that’s all to the good. But psalmbook stands on its own, steeped in absence and mystery, such as in “psalm 85,” which is all of three words and a punctuation mark: “i remember you :”.

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