Edited by Dean Rader
99: The Press ($16)

by John Bradley

“Some of the great American poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addresses issues of poverty, class, and capitalism,” writes Dean Rader in his preface to this anthology of poetry inspired by the nation’s continuing economic crisis. “I began to realize,” he continues, “that the aims of poetry and the aims of a democratic country were, if not exactly the same, then profoundly similar,” immediately putting the reader on notice that this is not your usual collection of contemporary American poetry.

In 2011, Rader called for poems on economy, class, and American values his blog 99PoemsForThe99Percent, about the same time that the Occupy Wall Street movement was taking place. The influence of the Occupy movement can be felt in many of the poems here, both directly and indirectly. This provides an urgency to the poems, as seen in Justin Evans’ “Ode to Neruda (Esperanza),” which begins “Because of you / tonight I write / in green ink.” This letter/poem, inspired by Pablo Neruda’s faith in a better future, leads Evans to this blunt assessment:

Mira: I want to believe America is green.

I want to think
America has hope
but I don’t know
if there is enough
green ink in my pen
for all of America.
We are vast like
the blue-green sea
but we despair, languish,
lay weighed down
by our sins. We are
carnivorous dogs
running the streets
devouring everything
that smells like hope.

The poem’s directness, and the affection expressed for Neruda and his ideals, demonstrates what the best poems in this anthology can do—provide insight into our economic woes without lapsing into cliché or easy sentiment.

Ellen Bass’ “My Father’s Day” likewise avoids the pitfalls of addressing economic issues by focusing on her father, who labors, despite physical pain, in a liquor store:

At nine, the drunks are already waiting.
What’s the word? Thunderbird.
What’s the price? Thirty twice.
He slips half-pints of blackberry brandy
into slim brown bags, hefts cases of Pabst
onto the counter. His spine is fused
into a deep curve, neck locked down,
so he has to tip back on his heels
to look you in the face.

It feels impossible to read this poem and not understand the cost of economic inequality. Another poem which speaks volumes on this issue is Jon Davis’ “Preliminary Report from the Committee on Appropriate Postures for the Suffering,” whose title alone warns the reader of what is to come. The voice of authority here informs us that “we have been charged not / with eliminating your suffering but with managing it.” Davis’ tonal control and dark humor fills the entire monologue with pathos.

With a topic as complex as the economy, there are poems here that unfortunately tilt toward slogans. The problem with Erika Moss Gordon’s “Paradelle for the Masses” can be seen in the opening stanza:

We, the ninety-nine percent!
We, the ninety-nine percent!
shouting to one and all.
shouting to one and all.
And the one percent,
all shouting to we ninety nine.

The paradelle, invented by Billy Collins to parody the demands of formal poetry, does not work well here, as without Collins’ satirical tone, the form only intensifies the too-easy emotional stance. Some other poems similarly inspired by Occupy sound like journal entries broken into verse.

The editor of the anthology no doubt would defend these poems by stressing the need for poetic diversity. In the preface, Rader tells us that he looked for “both professional and non-professional poets . . . I wanted to assemble a plurality of writers that showed the range of voices in both poetry and America.” While Rader’s goal is admirable, as well as in keeping with his democratic ideals, it results in a rather uneven collection.

Another problem with the anthology is that the focus blurs at times. There is a poem on the lottery used to draft soldiers for the Vietnam War, one on a Civil War reenactment, one on the Gaza strip, one on how to address a soldier seen at an airport, and one on an unspecified anti-war vigil. While the poems themselves are engaging, the overall effect is of a stew with too many spices. Is the suggestion that economics are at the root of every issue, no matter how removed from the 2008 recession? Or did the editor feel a need to vary the focus at times away from the economy? Some readers may shrug and not care, while others may feel that this is a book overcome by overly broad complaints. Oddly enough, some pundits have noted that one of the reasons that the Occupy movement didn’t endure was that it lacked a single focus. Those involved were united by a broad range of concerns, too broad to galvanize the country. The anthology seems to echo this.

Despite its problems, however, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent still resonates. The poems possess a spirt of defiance and solidarity not often witnessed in American poetry. It can be heard in this line from “The Universe Is Your Country”: “Ten years on the job [at Panera] / and he could not make a loaf / of bread to save himself,” and in this line from “February Was Only Half Over”: “We decided that, after rolling coins, our hands had touched everyone . . .” It can be heard in this statement from “The Product”: “‘What’s going on in this country makes me so upset / that I just feel like I have to go out and, I don’t know, / buy something.’” Even at its darkest moments, this anthology provides hope. In a time of rising cynicism, that’s no small achievement.

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Robin Fulton Macpherson
Marick Press ($16.95)

by Peter McDonald

Two things are certain in Scotland in July: midges in the highlands, and tourists in the urban centers. Edinburgh suffers particularly from the latter. But at the far tag end of the Royal Mile, in a little alley, sits The Scottish Poetry Library, an oasis of leafy books amid the welter.

It was there, on a little shelf all by itself, I came upon A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960-2010 by Robin Fulton Macpherson. The name sounded oddly familiar, so I took a seat in that quiet place and read the back page to get acquainted with the work. Of course! This was the Scottish poet Robin Fulton who was also the renowned translator of Tomas Tranströmer, among other Scandinavian poets, long before the reclusive Swede won the big prize. Macpherson had used Robin Fulton as his authorial name for his entire career as poet, reviewer, and translator, and only when he retired from his teaching post, after thirty-odd years in Norway, did he return to using his family name. Since most literary critics will know him as Fulton, I will call him by that more familiar nom de plume throughout.

A Northern Habitat is a wonderful collection, and it deserves wide readership in the U.S. This compendium is chronological by the publication date of his books so it almost serves as a biography of his evolving work as a poet. Born on the Isle of Arran in 1937, Fulton’s early childhood was indelibly marked by the insular world of a Scottish isle bereft of most all the amenities of a burgeoning 20th century: electricity, motorways, household telephones, and much else. Only the German bombers, flying overhead on gloomy nights during the early 1940s to unleash their fury over Glasgow and surrounding factories, brought the modern world’s mighty technological changes to the door stoops of the crofters’ huts of Arran.

Fulton’s fine eye for the natural image was doubtless formed amid this idyllic scenery, set against a hardscrabble childhood under the cold eye of a strict Presbyter father. That dichotomy in his poems, between the simple facts of the natural image and the detached, often messy realities of human existence, is a singular theme that recurs throughout his poetry. Fellow Scottish poet James McGonigal said Fulton’s formative poems seem “lyrical and melancholy, often with a sense of deep psychological disturbance just beyond the edge of his local landscape.” The opening stanza of his poem “Five” captures this frisson:

the dark is never perfect
your free fall will not
be invisible forever–
how deep is the dark?
not deep enough

It is the reader who has stepped off the ledge, of course, and you’re in it like a lead sinker through the whole free fall. Fulton did not include this poem in his collected poems, though many other poems from Tree-Lines (New Rivers Press, 1974), where “Five” first appeared, are included. It is chosen here specifically to capture something else about Fulton’s poems, an exemplar if you will. Many of his poems simply compel you, as here, to read on to the end like a sleuth in search of some meaning to the words so finely conjured. Fulton has noted of Tranströmer’s work: “It is often said that the enigmatic nature of many of his poems is due to the fact that he hides or omits logical connections.” Fulton might well have been describing his own work. From the book, here is the poem “Something Like a Sky” in its entirety:

Something in us has suddenly cleared.
Like a sky.
Like a still-life, alive.
Behind us, our footsteps and voices.
Behind the walls, a wide silence.
The air is white and open, ready for snow.

Each line forms a single sentence, an image unto itself. Stress and syllable create the tension as the poem here, like the sky, opens up slowly line by line. But upon examination, what exactly in us has suddenly cleared? And how does a still-life (of inert common objects) suddenly come alive? Behind us as well are our voices, yet how then are they also wide with silence? This is quintessential Fulton. His poems are compelling precisely because we can so easily become disoriented in them, like a child lost in a thicket. How to get out? Invariably the arresting way out is to be taken in hand by his disturbingly fresh images and led out of the briars into the open to look back and see the poems whole, like the sky. Wide-eyed, we read on.

In a career spanning forty-five years, Fulton has been surprisingly tight-lipped about his work. Indeed, in one interview he seemed to greatly admire Philip Larkin’s response to how a self-effacing librarian from Hull came to write his poems: “Larkin’s brief and glum remark,” said Fulton, “was rather pleasant in the circumstances: he said something to the effect that most of his poems had been written in and around Hull with a variety of HB pencils and that there wasn’t really much more to be said.” There is something utterly refreshing about this sharp observation, as true of Fulton as Larkin, in our gadget-driven age when so many out-loud poets divulge every last fatuous thought via thumb-clicked media.

What Fulton has shared is that he rarely starts his own poems with pencil and paper. Rather they come into his head more as geometric patterns of language where he works out the structure, the images, and the feel of the poem first. Only when so formed into some semblance of a poem does he commit the words to paper. Fulton clearly has a formalist’s regard for the line break and stanza. He admits to re-working his poems once on paper, and it is perhaps here, on the page, that the majority of his poems find their final structure in stanzas, a form which he uses regularly. He has admitted, too, of being fond of mathematics. This geometric temperament perhaps explains the patterning of his poems on the page; they seem somehow tidy in their varying stanza lengths, syllabics, sentence structures, and so on. What makes them so engaging is his almost musical ability to compose his poems in a way that is never obtrusive, never imposed. He has said: “I like arranging discreet little patterns that help to give shape to a poem, without being rigid.”

Sparrows. Brown snow-flakes in a hurry.
Sudden fruit bending a bare bush. Gone.

Gulls, high, falling up, climbing down, slow-
motion debris from a distant blast.

These two opening stanzas of “Those Who’ll Stay” offer a sense of his musical ear. The lines never go slack, instead are bright and precise, yet sound lively with no monotonous metronome. The whole poem ends with these:

Geese who aimed themselves south are now runes.
They breathe the sky of wonder emblems.

Winter, runeless, opens a large eye
on those who’ll stay. His handclasp is tight.

This stark ending remains familiarly enigmatic; Fulton is at heart lyrical, his poems most often falling within an elegiac mode, infused with a wonder of the natural world. They are also often full of a sort of vague haunting—think wraiths on a moor—his obsessions form and unform in a whirl under a conjuring eye that remains elusive. While many poems are penned in the first person, there is often a sense that he is himself a stranger in them, walking through an uncertain landscape, the path ahead shrouded. From “Two Part Invention”:

I was blind, I watched
September: warm breath
of willow-herb . . .

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

I was deaf, the birch
woke me.

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

In the brain of one
migrating swift I
was seen to be whole . . .

Trees, notably, form an important and constant backdrop to Fulton’s poems, perhaps a faint legacy of filling in the absence of trees of so much of Scotland’s wilderness. Says Fulton: “If someone could scan my soul they might well see traces of a fear of chaos and of a panicky unease about large open unmarked spaces like the moors of Sutherland and Caithness.” The lyric, stanza-bound enclosures of his poems provide some of that sought-for comfort, as trees encompass their bounded fields of pasture. In one poem he asks “how many pages are in a tree” as if trees magically contained within their bark not only the pulp of the parchment upon which his poems are writ, but also the living image of the rootedness they impart to his poems.

Some of his poems like “A Photo of Life and Art” and “Postcard” from his more recent work (1988-2010) play with inventive line breaks in more free-form styles, looking ragged on the page but suiting the staccato pile of images. But these are infrequent. While not averse to the longer poem, most poems in this fine book sit well on one page.

For thirty plus years Fulton served as an instructor at what is now the University of Stavanger, in Norway, teaching many subjects in his native tongue, but oddly not English literature. One might call that an academic career, yet Fulton is entirely self-effacing about these years of teaching, always exacting in his modesty, putting one in mind of T.S. Eliot quietly adding up his sums in that London bank while The Waste Land rattled around. Similarly, there’s a delightful disparity between Fulton’s quiet modesty as an expat Scot and his magnificent body of work where his true craftsmanship of language shines through like a blaze.

Some may remember him as editor for ten years of the seminal Scottish poetry journal Lines Review. Oddly, one of Fulton’s first major publishers back in the 1970s was a U.S. small press, New Rivers Press, that apparently had no fixed address, at one time out of Peter Howard’s Serendipity Bookshop in Berkeley (Tree-Lines, 1974), earlier still (the spaces between the stones, 1971) from a P.O. Box in New York City. But the Scottish Arts Council was farsighted enough back then to see the promise of this then-young Scots talent to fund the publications. One might suppose from this that Fulton would have garnered a broader American following. Sadly he is largely unknown. Counting chapbooks, his poetic output stands at under ten volumes, with many other seminal works of translation, as well as worthy works of criticism on Scottish poets. But it is certain that A Northern Habitat will stand the test of time. It is arguably, the most important book yet from a Scottish poet in this new millennium.

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Roxane Gay
Harper Perennial ($15.99)

by Sally Franson

In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay’s first essay collection and second book released in 2014, the author asserts that the impossibility of perfection should not negate earnest effort when it comes to navigating identity politics. But the “bad” in her feminism serves as absolution for whatever contradictions the reader may encounter in the text. “I regularly fuck it up,” Gay writes in the introduction. “Consider me already knocked off [the pedestal].” She’s only one person, she doesn’t represent every woman, and she’s flawed as all get-out. Okay?

This kind of postmodern, shrugging, “just my opinion” rhetorical move occurs frequently in Gay’s personal essays, but also in her more politicized work. In a piece titled “The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion,” she addresses the debate among feminists surrounding trigger warnings (markers that preface potentially threatening content for those suffering from PTSD) and ultimately argues against their efficacy. Rather than parsing this inefficacy as a rhetorician—a discipline in which Gay holds a Ph.D.—she relies on a performance of common sense. “Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning,” she concludes, and you can almost hear her sigh. “Trigger warnings cannot save me from myself.” She follows up on these vague rhetorical bombs with white space, as if what these bon mots needed was a little room for applause.

This essay, and most of the others, were originally published online, and regardless of Gay’s actual process, much of the writing in this collection possesses the urgent, stream-of-consciousness stylings of something banged out in response to a Twitter invitation to guest blog. For example, in a review of Diana Spechler’s Skinny originally published on Bookslut, Gay admits to Googling Spechler to see if she was overweight like her novel’s protagonist, only to discover she is “thin” and “gorgeous.” This is a problem for reasons Gay cannot articulate: “Her appearance does not matter, but it does,” she writes. She asserts that the book would be better if the protagonist were a hundred pounds overweight rather than thirty, but claims that Spechler was too afraid “to go there.” Where, exactly, Gay doesn’t say, but the ambiguity represents a troubling pattern in this collection. What appears revelatory scrolling down a home page can appear only half-finished in print.

Fortunately, Gay’s lack of precision matters less in the personal essays, and her wry-but-vulnerable persona invites quietude in the reader, and touchstones of shared humanity. Whether describing Scrabble tournaments or devastating incidents of sexual violence, Gay is at her best when creating worlds for readers to enter, in the hopes that they may be transformed. “Books are often far more than just books,” she writes, and while this book has its shortcomings, it also possesses moments of astonishing truth. For that reason, for “bad” feminists everywhere, it might be very good indeed.

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Dorothea Lasky
Liveright ($23.95)

by Gretchen Marquette

Dorothea Lasky’s fourth full-length collection, Rome, thrums with intelligence and uneasy energy. Within the first few pages it becomes clear that we’re in the presence of a speaker who will walk the razor’s edge between edgy and agitated, between vivacious and anxious. It’s difficult to pin this voice down. At times it’s careful and tender, as in her fantastic piece, “The Roman Poets,” and in this earlier poem, “You Were So Blond”:

Your skin was so soft and young
I forgot about having a baby
Or painting my nails with eggcream
I went down to your place and thought about you in your thoughts
Your thoughts are not plain

At other times it’s difficult to decide if her irreverence is meant to shock us into new realizations, or if she’s bored by her own pain; the voice is often tongue-in-cheek, perhaps feigning boredom while at the same time eager to provoke a reaction, as in an early poem in the book, “Why Poetry Can Be Hard for Most People”:

Because life is no more important than eating
Or fucking
Or talking someone into fucking
Or talking someone into something

Lasky’s catalog of the world—her relationships, experiences, and possessions—is rich and detailed. While never opulent for opulence’s sake, one gets the sensation that if this book were an object, it would be something brightly colored, hard and enameled, like a set of impeccable acrylic finger nails (though it would probably cringe to hear itself compared to something so ornamental). This is a book about beauty, but not beauty in its usual forms. The poet repeatedly draws as close to the bone as she possibly can; in “A New Reality,” she writes:

But to think I will never smell your hair in the rain
Is something I cannot bear

All the facts and figures
All the mathematics of an entire generation

All the mathematics in ten layers of being
Will never equal my love for you

The speaker, though, seems incapable of moving past these hurts: “You my horrible star / I can’t help but run to you when you call for me.” At times her loneliness is palpable, as in the poem, “I Know There is Another World”:

Under the palm trees
I know he still waits for me
His blue-green arms outstretched
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I know my children and husband wait for me
In the other world
To give myself over once again

Counteracting this pain are poems in which the speaker demonstrates her own power, as she does in “I Just Hope I Can Sleep”:

I hope that when you spot me in a field of honey
You keep on walking, walking past the honey
And drown yourself in a body of water
No I hope that there is a body of water
Which makes sense to you
An ocean of your own making

Unfortunately, the aesthetic here works to keep the reader at a distance, one figured in the opening line of the book: “Their bloodlust is what made them different from me.” This focus—on difference, or alienation—pervades the work on a deep level. Readers who look for poetry to serve as a bridge between themselves and others—a way to counter the estrangement or alienation they feel—may have a difficult time finding a way in, because Lasky’s interest lies more in examining the gulf between us than in spanning it. This interest often reads as being born out of frustration, but at other times out of curiosity, which is expansive, interesting, and strange. Her poem “The Empty Coliseum” exhibits this sentiment well:

Now I am greying
In the middle of my own and personal library
What to do, was it all a menagerie
Even when I can speak no longer
I will make in full the anonymous I
Or I will make you in full the anonymous I
I will fill the poems with great pain
And then suck out the meat so that they are only
Shells with only the memory of meat
So that they are only the memory of blood

It’s ultimately admirable that Lasky makes the decision not to lighten the emotional timbre of Rome, which is almost overwhelming in its persistence, and wholly unapologetic. She chooses to end the collection with a six-page poem that reiterates the themes introduced in the opening pages of the books—a long poem that somehow we’re not too exhausted to take in, and that continues to acknowledge pain but also allows the speaker to access her center of power. This ultimately leaves us in a place where we can believe that although Lasky has written a coda, she will soon have more to say on the subject.

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Saeed Jones
Coffee House Press ($16)

by Kate Schapira

With fire and ash in all senses, Prelude to Bruise shows how for a gay Black boy becoming a gay Black man, the danger of wanting and being wanted burns into wanting danger:

Singed, then smoked       out: I'm your black matador, blood only

makes me readier.

These poems are thick with textures, acrid with smoke, phrases turned ever tighter:

. . . dream-headed
with my corset still on, stays
slightly less tight, bones against
bones, broken glass on the floor,
dance steps for a waltz
with no partner. Father in my room
looking for more sissy clothes
to burn. Something pink in his fist,
negligee, lace, fishnet, whore.

They are also rooted in a story. It's a story of the forces of destruction—the destruction of black bodies and black selves—built into America, and it surfaces in lines of lust, violence, possession, and power:

Want more, black moor, unmoored, loosed. Limp wrist, broke
wrist, rag doll, thrown. Backseat, head down, headlights, off.

and in lines of compromised love:

I survived on mouthfuls of hyacinth.
My hunger did not apologize.

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

One fogged
night to the next, my palm

pressed against each thrust.
How else to say more

please under the sweat
and heave of their bodies?

Prelude to Bruise is also a story of escape from collusion with those forces of destruction, especially in its long late section "History, according to Boy," with its invocation of the power of turning away. Sometimes the story of escape morphs into myth, as with "Boy Found inside a Wolf":

I'm climbing
out of my father. His love a wet shine

all over me. He knew I would come
to this: one small fist

punching a hole
to daylight.

Myth, here, is a tool to assert the depth and duration of a reality. The poems in Prelude to Bruise enflame, with all flame's consequences of wounding and illumination, but they do not surprise; anyone to whom this story is news has not been listening. The forms they take are considered, deft and purposeful, not inventive. Their phrases are vivid, moving, immersive, not startling. What's important about this story is not that it is new, but that it is old, both current and recurrent, and that its inflictions, discoveries, flares of light and sweet-bitter darknesses have been igniting in American bodies and spirits and feelings and actions. These poems insist on the long and present smolder of the story that gave birth to them. They call down animals and elements to witness it:

A grown man called boy
gone inside himself,

the circle of wolves blinking gold
just beyond the trees.

I am not a boy. I am not
your boy. I am not.

They wish to be heard not just by people to whom they're news but by the wind and the night, by the disaster and the morning after, and by all those to whom the story is burningly familiar.

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Matthea Harvey
Graywolf Press ($25)

by Renoir Gaither

If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, Mattea Harvey’s fifth collection of poetry, combines photographs, silhouettes, sewn images, and poetry with startling originality and depth. Harvey conjures a portmanteau of dazzling wordplay where mermaids, puppet snobs, and glass girls frolic in dreamscapes at once strangely odd and utterly familiar.

Harvey’s poems erect temporary worlds circumscribed by their own playful insouciance. We stumble into them, slightly flummoxed, as one might upon seeing a tinker toy on the bridge of a warship. In the poem “One Way,” we follow the narrator into a devilishly funny poke at the provocation of pointing a finger:

Where the first one came from,
We’ll never know, but once it landed,
it did what arrows do—it pointed.
The headlines read NEW SHAPE DISCOVERED:
ARROW INVENTS THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW.

She then winnows through delightful valences of her arrow metaphor, gently nudging us toward a cloying awareness of the deleterious effects of having things pointed out to us:

Arrows led to purchases.
Arrows led to adieus. A simple shape
had turned us all from cars into ambulances,
keening with intent.

Harvey explores various depths of disappointment and unfulfillment in a group of poems about the lives of women, thinly disguised as mermaids. Using this mythical, feminine figure of longing tinged with tragedy, she carves out images teeming with symbolic import. Each poem is paired with a silhouette of the sea-faring creature, tail fitted with a utensil such a wrench, rake, or Swiss army knife.

In “The Objectified Mermaid,” Harvey imagines her subject as a downward spiraling sex object, photographed and packaged for consumption. Much like the patrons who pay to fondle her tail, we too become voyeurs of her cynical exploitation via Harvey’s provisioning of details such as a standard seaweed bra and glycerine-sprayed scales.

The mermaid trope carries over into the long poem “Telettrofono,” with a mingling of journalese, legalese, and pedestrianism. Structured in eighty sections or “modes,” the poem follows the tragic life of Italian Antonio Meucci, a 19th-century New York immigrant now largely forgotten as the inventor of an early telephone-like device. Harvey’s attention sits squarely on Meucci’s wife, Esterre, whom she envisions as a mermaid who flings herself ashore in search of sound. Harvey’s deft use of alliteration dresses Esterre’s transformation to human with magical fanfare:

I smashed my head through the barrier between sea
and sky and there was the two-ton wave-timpani,
the puffin’s claws click-click-clicking as it skidded
to a stop on the cliff’s edge, rain spanking the sea
until it wailed. I clapped my hands and the claps
echoed back like an answer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Between the third and fourth yes, my tail split
In two, sprouted knees and feet, toes.

In collaboration with sound artist Justin Bennett, Harvey wrote the poem as part of a soundwalk for the STILLSPOTTING NYC: STATEN ISLAND project in New York. The book provides an online link to a full audio recording.

This collection casts a range of poetic forms: prose poetry, erasure, lyric, sonnet, and visual assemblage (poesia visiva). “Stay,” a series of photographed “sculptures” comprised of colorful miniature figurines encapsulated in ice cubes, is one of the more formally arresting “poems” in the collection. Using the title (itself a photograph) and linear arrangement of the ice cubes, one might read this text-less poem as a comment on domestic turmoil and ultimate separation. The spatial arrangement of human figures and chairs suggests isolation, fracture, and loss. Who knows? This poem and others leave ample room for speculation.

And that’s what’s so special about If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?—Harvey invites us inside her voluminous imagination without polemic, although at times her poems are starkly self-conscious. Whether they allow us to pity a hapless Michelin Man tire that sees through the eyes of William Shakespeare or ponder a stereotype tying its shoestrings, we come away savoring her wily irreverence. Many poems here demand multiple readings. A first reading might thwack us over the head; a second might elicit some sigh of relief; a third will confirm how much these poems reward us with the awe—and the protection—of dreams.

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Georges Perec
Translated, introduced, annotated, edited and indexed
by Philip Terry and David Bellos
David R. Godine ($16.95)

by Jeff Bursey

To some readers, the title of this newly translated book by Georges Perec will bring to mind another with the same title, and in a prefatory note Perec acknowledges that earlier work while distinguishing it from his enterprise: “The title, the form, and, to a certain extent, the spirit of these texts are inspired by I Remember by Joe Brainard.”

Published in 1979, Perec’s short work became, as David Bellos explains in the introduction, a surprisingly popular selection from its author’s inventive and amusing oeuvre. Contemporaries of Perec appreciated it—it “quickly became one of France’s most-loved short works”— for its combination of communal nostalgia and playfulness, and I Remember continues to be embraced by “later generations,” even having been reimagined by others as both a stage performance and a movie. Explanations offer themselves—collective memory, the juxtaposition of oddities, and additionally, for Perec readers, windows opened on his other works—but the greatest pleasure people take from I Remember, something like that offered in Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, resides in what it steers clear of offering: there is no plot to involve the emotions, there is no main character you’re badgered to care for, and as for a Great Theme, that is as absent as the letter e in La Disparition, Perec’s novel that refrains from using that vital letter. Meaning resides in the diverse recollections that are far-flung, at times mysterious (helpful notes in the back provide information for contemporary English readers), and set in a particular time period, but this meaning ceaselessly shifts and is, in the end, as visible as a soap bubble but as impossible to seize. The work manages the difficult feat of eluding complete sense while capturing the imagination with its free movement from one subject to another.

As with most works by Perec, there is an Oulipian restraint: “you had to remember something that other people could remember too; and the thing remembered had to have ceased to exist.” At Perec’s request his publishers (originally, and with this edition too) left blank pages at the end so that readers could fill them with their own memories. This openness to extending the text encouraged many variations that, as Bellos relates, took on lives of their own. “The most touching imitation of the formulaic design of I Remember is Harry Mathews’s homage, The Orchard” (Perec dedicated the book to Mathews, who had introduced him to Brainard’s book).

The 479 entries—the 480th is unfinished deliberately—do fit in categories: much is recalled of performances by film actors, musicians, and singers, while cycling, racing and boxing heroes are given in verbal thumbnails: “I remember that the racing driver Sommer was nicknamed ‘the wild boar of the Ardennes’” runs one entry, and in a more familiar vein, “I remember Davy Crockett fur hats.” Jokes can be labored—“I remember: ‘Say it, eh Shaun, pronounced the whale, I’ve a dull fin, but don’t lack purpose’”—or treacherous, like other parts of the work. Philip Terry, the translator, remarks that “Perec’s French is full of hidden puns and references and is never easy to translate—and if it looks easy, I should be especially wary.”

Advertisements, jingles and shows on radio and television were set down over the period of composition (1973-1977) and are often drawn from earlier days. The random recollections appear on the page as distinct units:

– 46 –

I remember the period when the fashion was for black shirts.

– 47 –

I remember crystal radios.

– 48 –

I remember I started a collection of matchboxes and one of cigarette packets.

(In this respect, I Remember brings to mind two other French books: Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, in which events are compressed into brief and laconic newspaper accounts, and Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, a work filled with seemingly unconnected assertions.) What Perec retrieved from the past was, at the same time, general in that others had to stand a chance of sharing the memory, and particular, for though his statements might be mistaken in a detail, still, that remains true to what he recalled. Occasionally he allowed for doubt: “I remember Atlas the Giant (and the dwarf Pierhal?).

Part of the pleasure of reading I Remember is the unexpected encounter with other authors: “I remember that I belonged to a Book Club and that the first book I purchased was Planus by Cendrars” will delight readers of that Swiss-born idiosyncratic writer. When Perec recalls “an anecdote that traced the invention of mayonnaise back to the siege of Port-Mahon (under Napoleon III),” it summons up my reading, years ago, that in I’ll Say She Is!, the first successful Marx Brothers stage show, Groucho, dressed as Napoleon, on hearing “La Marseillaise” declares, “The Mayonnaise! The Army must be dressing!”

The last few years have been good for Georges Perec fans: I Remember comes on the heels of English editions of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Wakefield Press, 2010), The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (Verso, 2011), and La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (Melville House, 2013), and ahead of the newly published Portrait of a Man, his first novel and one not previously published in English. Though the method behind I Remember seems easy to duplicate—today I write I remember Selectric typewriters, and I remember eating a Bar Six, usually at recess—trying to come up with the right 500 entries might be a strain. This work is a treasure chest of associations and an enjoyable light read.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Soumitra Chatterjee
Translated by Arunava Sinha
Supernova ($6.50)

by Graziano Krätli

Soumitra Chatterjee was for Satyajit Ray what Marcello Mastroianni was for Federico Fellini, Jean-Pierre Léaud for François Truffaut, or even (though in a far less problematic way) Klaus Kinski for Werner Herzog—an early and fateful discovery meant to become a source of inspiration, an alter ego and a close friend (or, in Kinski’s case, a “best fiend”). Now approaching eighty, with two cinematic careers under his belt (one largely shaped by his thirty-five year collaboration with Ray, the other following the filmmaker’s premature death in 1992) and a growing presence on stage (crowned, recently, by his first Shakespearean role in a Bengali adaptation of King Lear), Chatterjee is a cultural institution in Kolkata, like the used bookstores or the Coffee House on College Street. The latter venue, conveniently located opposite Presidency College and down the street from Calcutta University (Chatterjee’s alma mater), has long been a favorite meeting place for students and intellectuals, and represents one of Kolkata’s main cultural hubs. Chatterjee recalls how, in the mid-1950s it was for him and his friends like a second home, where adda sessions, or intellectual debates, lasted for hours and focused largely and most passionately on (Bengali) literature and theatre. Cinema, on the other hand, was not taken “all that seriously” yet, and Chatterjee himself “harboured a certain unwillingness to act in films” as a result of his “warped ideas” about cinema, and Bengali cinema in particular. What changed everything—including Chatterjee’s prospects—was the filming of Pather Panchali, one of the most popular and beloved novels in Bengali literature, by a commercial artist who was better known, at the time, as the son of a famous writer and illustrator.

The circumstances of his first meeting with the man who made this change possible are representative of the small, intimate world of Bengali cinema (and culture) at the time. A friend met in the street introduced him to a man who turned out to be Ray’s assistant director and was looking for someone to interpret the lead role in Pather Panchali’s sequel, Aparajito. A few minutes later the three are on a bus bound for the Lake Avenue residence of the Master himself, where the young aspiring actor finds in the barely older but already famous director a kindred spirit. Even though he proved too tall for the role of young Apu (he would have to wait a couple more years before Ray chose him for the title role in the last film of his famous Trilogy), the encounter marked the beginning of a lifelong association and one of the longest and most fruitful collaborations in the history of cinema, resulting in fifteen films in thirty-five years and including such classics as The World of Apu (1959), Charulata (1964), Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), and Distant Thunder (1973), as well as a 1987 documentary on Ray’s father.

Coming soon after two other intimate portraits of the man known to family and friends as Manik da—those of Ray’s still photographer Nemai Ghosh (Manik Da: Memories of Satyajit Ray, 2011) and wife Bijoya (Manik and I: My Life with Satyajit Ray, 2012)—The Master and I strives to subdue the hagiographic impulse and draw a more objective and nuanced portrait of a rich and multidimensional relationship. Despite its reverential and laudatory tones, awkward similes (“Like a good captain, he led from the front,”) and occasional repetitiveness (Ray’s “famous” or “trademark baritone” is mentioned no less than five times), the book achieves its goal largely thanks to the ample selection of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, most of them intended to illustrate the symbiotic character of the master-disciple relationship between the two. Thus we learn that, during the making of Charulata (“The Lonely Wife,” 1964), Ray’s adaptation of a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, Chatterjee had to change his handwriting “in order to write the way people did in the pre-Tagore era.” The fact that this change became permanent (something that Chatterjee refers to as an “extremely important incident in my life”) is almost paralleled, a few pages later, by Ray’s decision to alter the ending of the film as a result of Chatterjee’s criticism. An even more interesting example of their symbiotic relationship and its consequences is provided by Chatterjee’s reaction to Ray’s illustrations of his most popular character, private detective Feluda, in which he finds a resemblance to the filmmaker. To which Ray replies: “‘Really? Several people have told me that I’ve drawn him with you in mind.’”

Symbiosis aside, Chatterjee’s portrait ultimately reveals a more complex, multifaceted and contradictory personality than its devotional agenda is willing to present or acknowledge. On the one hand, it makes a point of showing Ray’s responsiveness to suggestions and criticism, explaining how he would read his screenplays to his close collaborators and ask for their reactions, and generally “listened to people’s opinions with genuine interest.” On the other it gives glimpses of a self-absorbed, maniacally dedicated, detail-oriented artist with a tendency to micromanage and work around the clock. Most revealing, in this respect, are Chatterjee’s remarks on the filming of Baksa Badal (“The Swapped Suitcases”), a comedy for which Ray wrote the screenplay based on a story by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (the author of Pather Panchali and Aparajito):

There’s another point that I might as well make directly. The facts that Manik da’s assistant Netai [Nityananda Dutta] was directing the film and had requested him earnestly to be present were not the only reasons for his visits. The truth is that Manik da never felt confident of the outcome when someone else made a film from his screenplay. He used to be nagged by anxiety, wondering whether the execution would be up to the mark.

Consistent with the overall tone of the book, Ray’s passing is dealt with in a dignified and understated way, without details about the event itself or references to the “inexpressible sadness” in which, according to Amitav Ghosh, Calcutta was sunk upon hearing the tragic news. Instead, once Ray is gone, Chatterjee respectfully abstains from any further references to cinema, ending his memoir with a diminuendo devoted to music, and Western music in particular, as an ultimate example of his Master’s expansive artistic personality and influence.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Susan Sherman
Wings Press ($16)

by Jim Feast

While Susan Sherman’s book of stories Nirvana on Ninth Street is certainly a refreshing and readable volume, a reader might object to it on grounds of truth in advertising. The back cover copy describes the book as a kind of tell-all about Sherman’s neighborhood. Demetria Martínez blurbs it as a text that has “evoked the untamed spirit of the Lower East Side and of the dreamers who live there.” This would make Nirvana on Ninth Street a sort of companion piece to Ed Sanders’s Tales of Beatnik Glory, which traces the transformation of the area from Beatnik stomping grounds to hippie enclave. Truth is, the book is closer in tone to some of Delmore Schwartz’s short stories, such as his piece about a father who retires from a garment factory to become a Lower East Side painter. As with Schwartz, Sherman uses the neighborhood as a setting, not for realistic sketches, but for ingenious parables.

In one piece, for instance, she describes the love affair of Jerald and Geraldine. Jerald “collected people’s faults,” keeping a notebook of his neighbors’ foibles and foolishnesses. He meets Geraldine and she falls for him because she is entranced with the idea of someone enumerating her many weaknesses in a secret diary. Yet blinded by love, Jerald can never bring himself to fill in a single entry on Geraldine. When she eventually learns this, their partnership is over. The story delicately turns on the false expectations people have going into a love affair, which end up determining the whole course of its future.

The framework of the book is that an older character, Rachel, who has lived for decades in the same building on Ninth Street, is reminiscing about the events that have taken place in and around her enchanted tenement. She herself has a bewitched mirror, which does not throw back an exact likeness. When Rachel looks in, “It was as if she were looking simultaneously at a complete stranger and at someone more familiar to her than any image of herself she had ever seen.” Rachel’s memories make for striking stories, proving Sherman is a master at writing adult fairy tales, allegories done in a lapidary style about crushed hearts and roses.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015