Joshua Ortega
Jodere Group ($24)

by Alan Deniro

Although it is set in the future, Joshua Ortega's ((Frequencies)) is not a science fiction novel. Judging it as science fiction would lead to a rather unforgiving review: the absence of cohesive world building, the clichéd totalitarian society, and the lackluster use of techno-thriller tropes would leave something to be desired. ((Frequencies)), however, occupies a space behind a different type of imaginary Wallace Line. The novel is essentially creative nonfiction disguised as science fiction, an empowerment narrative in Philip K. Dickian clothing.

It might be worthwhile, with such an odd duck of a book, to discuss its unusual publishing history. A certifiable self-publishing sensation, ((Frequencies)) was picked up by Jodere Group for a 50,000 copy hardcover run. The publisher, whose list is mostly nonfiction, defines itself as "a unique publishing and multimedia avenue for individuals whose mission it is to positively impact the lives of others. We recognize the strength of an original thought, a kind word and a selfless act—and the power of the individuals who possess them. We are committed to providing the support, passion and creativity necessary for these individuals to achieve their goals and their dreams." If one is to understand the novel's intentions, then surely this quotation is an auspicious place to start.

The story (only the first part of a series, alas; the novel ends rather abruptly) has as its premise that "all living creatures...vibrate at a specific frequency which can be measured upon a spectral bandwidth which he called the LIFE—living incorporate frequency emission—spectrum." In the totalitarian Seattle of 2051 they've decided that higher frequencies usually indicate subversive thought; McCready, an agent of a division of the FBI known as the Freemon ("FREquency Emissions MONitor(s)"), investigates and squelches frequency offenders. He becomes embroiled within the inner workings of the Huxton family, founders of the software company Ordosoft™ and Most Important Family in the World. He is assigned to protect daughter Ashley, a free spirit, from strange attacks upon the family, and he begins to open up in her presence. But this character development is itself odd. This future is culturally bankrupt, and the Huxtons are no small part the reason of that. Ashley runs around to "herb cafes" and exclusive clubs and begins to gather vague intimations of a revolution against the frequency hierarchy. It's hard to take this seriously, however, when she ruminates on free choice and politics from a pampered, Tibetan mountaintop estate.

Such oddness, whether intentional or not, doesn't end when the story does; the novel's appendices wear its heart on its pages. Despite the "freeky" appearances and the occasional typographical disruptions (such as the inclusion of Greek symbols, representing frequencies, throughout the text or the insistence on putting a trademark symbol after every mentioned brand name, as in "As the Polaris™ settled onto the roof of the Farmaceutical Solutions™ building, McCready pulled a pack of Kamel® Kloves™ from his trench's front pocket"), ((Frequencies)) is deep down a forthright document. In "Freekspeak: a glossary of frequential terms," the reader comes across, as an example, the following four definitions in sequence:

Canny: n. Cannabis, marijuana
Capoeira: n. A Brazilian martial arts/dance with heavy African influences. Pronounced "Ka-pway-da."
Carnivore: Officially acknowledged in the year 2000, Carnivore is the FBI's e-mail interception and surveillance tool. Essentially a wiretap for the Internet, Carnivore does for American e-mail what Echelon does for the world.
Casa: n. Spanish for "house."

For this reviewer, this verbose crazy quilt is more fascinating than many parts of the novel, though its breakdown in glossary format further demonstrates that we are not in the presence of a science fiction novel (which nearly always tries to put the world building "under the hood" to create a greater mimetic effect). Still, science fictional tropes have been used for far worse purposes (see Newt Gingrich's love of Toynbee and Asimov). ((Frequencies)) is worth reading, if for nothing else than to see how the New Age cogniscenti view science fiction, much in the same way that it is important to see how fundamentalist Christians use science fiction to elaborate on apocalyptic literalisms. In ((Frequencies)), as in those books—even though the political stance could hardly be more different—science fiction is only a tool, rather than a mode of epistemology. All of this somehow makes this first novel more interesting in its flaws than many smooth, ultra-competent novels possess in their strengths.

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Yvonne Vera
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ($18)

by Christopher J. Lee

In The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera describes the sense of courage held by her two sister protagonists as similar to "sliding their hands in the cotton-soft coolness of ash, where, it is possible, a flame might sparkle and burn." This too is an apt description of what reading Yvonne Vera's writing is like. For readers unfamiliar with her work, Vera is a writer from Zimbabwe who has quickly established an international reputation through a series of books published in the 1990s, in particular Butterfly Burning and two novellas that have recently been re-released together as Without a Name and Under the Tongue. In a now signature style that places more emphasis on tone and symbolism than social realism, Vera's new novel guides the reader through an African landscape filled with pervasive beauty and moments of unexpected violence in equal measure. The result is a story that possesses its own sense of courage by choosing to explore emotions over historical detail when the latter would be an easier narrative option.

The Stone Virgins concerns the recent history of Zimbabwe, particularly the period after 1980 when white-minority rule ended following the prolonged Chimurenga liberation struggle. Historically this was a time of uncertainty and political violence between competing African parties. Despite the potential richness of this material for a social novel in the mode of Ousmane Sembene or Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Vera chooses instead to center the meaning of this period on the lives of two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, and through their experiences she underscores the psychological impact this period of transition had on common lives. This is a risky choice, in so far that some readers may be discouraged by the lack of contextual detail to situate the story. But this move also constitutes one of Vera's main contributions as an African writer: to explore the emotional experience accumulated by people and its personal meaning, beyond what surrounding facts of history might tell. In her words, "It is an intimate quest."

Named after English poets and lined with blossoming jacaranda, the streets of Bulawayo provide the initial setting for the novel, conveying senses of history, beauty, and order that contrast with later themes of violence, trauma, and recovery. The story quickly moves to the rural town of Kezi, where Vera invokes the primary events and imagery that define the lives of Thenjiwe and Nonceba. There are three situations in particular: a brief, if passionate, romance between Thenjiwe and a man named Cephas; the death of Thenjiwe and the near-death of Nonceba at the hands of a soldier named Sibaso; and the hospital recovery of Nonceba from this experience. The story is told from the perspectives of these characters, though in Vera's hands, the landscape that surrounds them, real and imagined, plays a crucial role in articulating the meaning of these experiences. In one passage, for example, Vera writes:

Among the rocks. Hidden. Everything is infinite; it is there, not you. The rocks continue in their immortal strength. You are separate. Transient. Human strength rises and wanes. Even at its summit, our strength is not rock: igneous. The mind is perishable. Memory lingers, somewhere, in fragments.

Here the natural world conjures a sense of stability and solace that is not found elsewhere. In a later scene of soldiers, Vera describes their behavior in the following terms:

They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions. Each move meant to shock, to cure the naïve mind. The mind not supposed to survive it, to retell it, but to perish. They flee, those men who witnessed Thandabantu burn. They flee from a pulsing in their own minds.

This frequent juxtaposition between the persistence of nature and man's weakening resolve in the face of violence forms one of the central dramatic tensions of this novel. It fills the emotional space that preoccupies Vera's characters as they attempt to reconcile a traumatic past that is still too recent to comprehend fully.

Vera is known for her lush lyricism, as these passages briefly illustrate, and this approach—though it can lend a certain sluggishness at moments—fits with her concern for charting emotions over factual detail. Her greatest strength is pointing out the connections between eros and violence, the intimacy and consequently the destabilizing effects of both. Such intimacy creates personal connections that can be both fatal and redemptive, as Thenjiwe and Nonceba experience by the end of the novel. This is a realm that is not often articulated in a body of literature that can too frequently lean on—and is too frequently interpreted for—political, cultural, and historical detail. Vera's attempt to move beyond this surface, as expressed through the struggles of her characters, constitutes the main achievement of this intense and challenging novel.

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Alicia Borinsky
Translated by Cola Franzen with the author
Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press ($15.95)

by Amy Havel

As many people know, love and pain can go hand in hand, but Alicia Borinsky brings this idea to a new height of absurdity in All Night Movie. Driven by stunning prose and whirlwind of frenzied action, the novel presents an oddball cast of characters, most of whom have a very skewed sense of tender loving care. The central character is a young woman who goes through a series of transformations amidst a backdrop of urban chaos, which includes an erotically charged telephone booth, several kidnappings, and a cult of angry young women bearing apples. Add to this a variety of narrative techniques consisting of diary entries, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and tango-lyric headlines, and you'll find that the novel's adrenaline alone makes it worth the read.

Matilde Felipa/Bochita/Juana (her name changes in various ways through the story) tries to kill a man that she loves, then moves back to her mother's boarding house, only to realize certain similarities are shared among kin. Love, at least for Juana, her mother, and Juana's lover Pascual Domenico Fracci, follows a seemingly inevitable path toward death, yet the path is also quite circular, with several actions in the story referring to the "cottony and circular future." For example, in another part of the book's landscape, a young striptease artist is kidnapped by a lesbian duo, Raquel and Rosa. The pair glue a uniform onto the girl's body, claiming that it's for her own good, but when "the Scarred Girl" (as she becomes known in the news) is rescued, she seems to want to get back in touch with her captors. In the end, her damaged body is covered with a suit of armor which shines brightly enough for people to see their reflections in it.

Bodily transformation plays a big part in the novel, especially with Juana, whose size changes and facial hair come and go. When she first meets Pascual Domenico and listens to his conversations with a woman named Lucia, she finds that shortly after "timidity and desire had seeped into her body and also without realizing it the very idea of Luica had transformed her. She was now a woman of short stature, chubby, with ankles slightly swollen, flabby muscles, in need of a massage." Later in the novel, she enlarges, then shrinks back to a "normal" size.

Just as bodily transformation indicates a change in the status of love in the character's life, happiness and comfort signal tragedy is about to strike. In a way, this tragedy cannot be avoided and is almost craved. When Juana finds out that Pascual Domenico is alive, she foresees their next meeting: "when she was strong once more and they loved each other anew with an unquestionable and serene love, she would be free to find the pistol again, come into the room, shoot him, steal the key to the door, and leave him on the floor to bleed to death."

In the background of all of this mayhem, the Eva girls, a cult of young women who roam the city, serve as a chorus to the story. While they are not direct participants, they are always around. They appear to follow Juana but never confront her or involve themselves with her:

As happened often, the girls of the Eva cult passed by her with no sign of recognition. They went on singing in blustery fashion, pretending to be crazy, because this week it happened that every one of them was suffering from premenstrual tension and according to a medical prescription had to chant special hymns for the occasion. A gang of boys followed them with signs, bells, and invitations to dances in dark houses where the father of one of them, a short paunchy gentleman, counted ticket after ticket seated at a marble table with a glass of chocolate milk at his left hand.

This small example exemplifies the world that Bornisky presents in the novel: carnivalesque but seamless as a collective vision.

Cola Franzen's translation from the Spanish provides excellent incorporation of tango lyrics, some left intact when they are easily understood by English readers, which successfully maintains the influence of the music and the Latin American atmosphere in the book. At times, the intertwining of the characters and their many transformations becomes confusing, and it takes a while to pick up on what's actually happening because of the flexible reality at hand. However, the many voices that Borinsky has created eventually begin to chime together, and the pleasure of entering this other world really takes off. This world, while on the surface filled with darkness and fear and loneliness, also consists of the promise of change and the abilities of individuals to adapt, by whatever means necessary.

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Ezra Pound
Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

by Steven Moore

An unsympathetic critic might grumble that Pound threw everything but the kitchen sink into his 824-page Cantos, especially since the book ends with a section of "Drafts and Fragments." But in fact Pound did leave a lot out, the best of which has now been gathered by Italian Pound scholar Massimo Bacigalupo for this edition of "Posthumous Cantos." The introduction and notes are in Italian, but the poetry is of course in English, and since there are no plans for an American edition, Canti postumi deserves notice.

The book is divided into eight chronological sections: it begins with the 1917 version of "Three Cantos" published in Poetry, different enough from those eventually published in The Cantos to be preserved. Then we travel from Paris (1920-22) to Rapallo and Venice (1928-37), then sections called "Voices of War" (1940-45) and "Italian Drafts" (1944-45), then outtakes from the great Pisan Cantos (1948), followed by what Pound himself called "Prosaic Verses" (written during his confinement at St. Elizabeths in the 1950s), and finally "Lines for Olga" (1962-72).

Some drafts offer longer versions of incidents that were compressed for the final book version, like a discussion between Pound and Eliot at Verona in 1922 that is merely alluded to in the published version. The couplet "Her name was courage / & is written Olga" from the final page of The Cantos is taken from a lovely 13-line poem published here in tribute to his longtime companion Olga Rudge, the embodiment of Venus invoked at the beginning of his epic. Other verses occur in contexts quite different from those in the final book and will aid Pound scholars in seeing those historical "rhymes" Pound made by yoking various eras together.

And throughout there are beautiful, medallion-bright images that take one's breath away: "Brows cut smoothe as if with a jade-wheel / Cool water of hill-lakes, water calm as the eyes"; "her red head a flask of perfume"; "The air is solid sunlight, apricus, / Sun-fed we dwell there." For all his obfuscation and hare-brained theories, Pound commanded poetic powers that continue to astonish, even in these drafts and outtakes.

There are images in Canti postumi of ruined castles, of "Empires end[ing] in the marsh." The Cantos itself is like a cathedral falling into ruins, attended today only by specialists, ignored by most readers of poetry. Canti postumi may only be fragments shored against those ruins, but these drafts remind us of the greatness of Pound's achievement, and the book even works as a teaser for those uncertain whether they want to take the grand tour. It is well worth seeking out.

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Taha Muhammad Ali
Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin
Ibis Editions ($11.95)

by Kim Jensen

Ibis Editions, based in Jerusalem, is a small literary press which offers work related to the Levant, mainly translations from Hebrew and Arabic. Ibis has published a number of interesting little books in the past few years, including Michael Sells's translation of Ibn 'Arabi's Stations of Desire and The Little Bookseller, Oustaz Ali by Egyptian poet Ahmed Rassim. In 2000, they put out a small but exceptional translation of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali; the volume, entitled Never Mind, includes an introduction by Gabriel Levin, a nice selection of poetry, and a gripping short story called "So What," about an impoverished village boy who longs desperately for a pair of shoes.

Something of a local legend, Taha Muhammad Ali's poetry is well known in the Arab communities of the Galilee and beyond. Born in the village of Saffuriyeh in 1931, Ali was already a young man by the time his village was razed by the Israelis in 1948. Ali became a refugee, settled a year later in nearby Nazareth, and eventually opened a souvenir shop in the souk.

Ali's poetry arises from the fertile yet relentlessly bitter grounds of personal and collective experience. His poems are suffused with imagery from everyday Palestinian life, both before and after "al-Nakbah" (the catastrophe). Combining a literary and colloquial Arabic, his work has taken on a folkloric status in the Galilee. A few of his poems, especially those about his fictional character, Abd al-Hadi, have become popular enough that they have variant verses and lines, as happens when poetry evolves in the oral sphere.

Ali uses a direct language in his poetry, which translates into English quite well. The poems have the story-telling quality reminiscent of such committed poets as Nâzim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, and early Darwish. But their simplicity of language and structure belies a depth and swift lateral movement that make for a powerful undertow, as in exceptional poems such as "Abd El-Hadi Fights a Superpower," "Thrombosis in the Veins of Petroleum," "Fooling the Killers," "Crack in the Skull," and the heartbreaking "Warning":

Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don't aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn't worth
the price of the bullet
(you'd waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn't happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

Oscillating between tender nostalgia and its wounding laconic edge, the poetry's particular Palestinian sorrow finds its echo in the wider registers of the universal.

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Dorothy Barresi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($12.95)

by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Rouge Pulp is Dorothy Barresi's third book of poems, and it is by far her best yet. Eschewing the clumsy and often prosaic narrative structures that fill her previous book (The Post Rapture Diner) and dot her first (All of the Above), Rouge Pulp marries Barresi's ear for witty, fiery language with a series of compact, concise, and fairly lyrical poems that showcase the alternately serious and sardonic voice at the center of the book's universe.

Barresi's first two books were notable for her reliance on personal narrative—one rarely doubted that the person behind the voice was anybody other than Dorothy Barresi, the events anything other than what had actually taken place on the family vacation in 1969. In Rouge Pulp, Barresi also tells stories from her life (the death of her mother provides the book's central focus, and there are a handful to her infant son, Dante), but they're less constricted by the narrative mode. For example, "At the Posh Salon Called Ultra" could have easily turned into a heavy-handed indictment of cultural standards demanding women remain beautiful at any cost, but instead it is just as infectious, guilty, and pleasurable as a trip to "the Posh Salon" really might be, even as the stylist informs you that

... you are worth saving; I assure you,
we have seen worse.

And though it is far from cheap
dreaming yourself into our fashion,

cheer up—it is very becoming.
Girgio, Reynald, Coco—a sweep of curls in the dustpan, clank,

and the past is your natural color.
Pucker up. Bring me the big rollers.

When the sham world blows you kisses,
the real world knows you at last.

The poems in Rouge Pulp are more formally ambitious than anything in Barresi's first two books, as well as more allusive. These are crowded poems: Duke Ellington shows up in a poem about Sylvia Plath's father, "The Heaven of Otto Plath" (and Plath shows up herself on two separate occasions); Hart Crane is mentioned, as are Theodore Roethke, Lenny Bruce, Jackie Kennedy, Richard Speck, Bobby Kennedy, the New Critics, and, in one of the best poems in the book, the stripper Lily St. Cyr. That poem, "Glass Dress," is a good example of the new sort of poetic techniques influencing Barresi's most recent work. The declaration that opens the poem—"Lily St. Cyr is dead"—gets repeated throughout the poem and not always where you'd expect it, creating a dirge-like refrain whose flatness works perfectly with the glittery, gaudy images Barresi swirls around it:

Her generating curves,
her spirals,
her vector rotation of planes and onstage bubble baths
are the swellest immorality for those
wrecked and crippled boys
in the front row.
Lily St. Cyr is dead.
Knock back a whisky. Dim the spot.

The poem's also about the end of innocence, about GIs returning from the war and an America full of "vast warehouses of exhausted capital," and it falls flat only when Barresi overexplains herself, giving us the meaning of "ecdysiast" ("'ecdysis' meaning 'shedding,' / or 'nothing.'") when the simple rejoinder that follows, "It's true," would have been enough.

There are other such moments in Rouge Pulp when Barresi's wish to make sure we get it interrupts the flow of the poem. These mostly occur near the end of the book when the poems begin to sound more and more like the Post Rapture Barresi who hasn't quite loosed herself from the sentence and syntax, from relying on prose sense to do the work that the Barresi of the first half of Rouge Pulp has discovered can be accomplished via aural effects, line breaks, and, at times, inference. Take, for example, "Fifties Song (or, We Are All Born under Eisenhower)," a poem notable in Barresi's corpus for its utter lack of narrative and reliance on anaphora:

Unto the altar of argyle,
Unto the Lenny Bruce of nod,

Unto the spondee of babies,
Unto the lawn mower of fear,

The poem ends: "Unto the bowling alley of family love, / which is none-of-your-goddamned-business. // Unto red meat and milk." And it works—as Barresi's poems often do—as a look back on a baby-boomer childhood through the shattered lens of the present. What Barresi's poems don't often do is use the line as a unit upon which the poem is built. Other poems in Rouge Pulp do similar list-like work less effectively, partly because they don't rely on readily available cultural markers—tweaking, refuting, or aggrandizing them as in "Fifties Song"—and instead depend upon conventional notions of mother-daughter, mother-infant relationships, which often slip into sentimentality.

Still, much of Rouge Pulp is great: innovative, exciting, and most importantly fun (e.g., "Sock Hop with the New Critics"). In her best poems Barresi manages to be as accessible as she is verbally and aurally interesting. The poems want to say things, to make points and spin social commentary, and a handful of them do so with flash and wit and even daring. The best parts of Rouge Pulp significantly complicate Barresi's interest in personal narrative and the cultural framework that influences and orders an individual life. The book is a formal grab-bag: there are four poems that use anaphora, two dramatic monologues, a prose poem, an elegy, and a surreal collage poem ("Little Dreams of War," probably the least Barresi-like poem Barresi has ever written). There's much to be admired in a poet who, two books and two major prizes into her career, displays such a willingness to play with a proven formula, to take risks with her verse and experiment with form and structure. Dorothy Barresi isn't a "new" poet, and Rouge Pulp doesn't herald a new talent, but the book should stand as a model to other poets who find themselves stuck in the rut of their own first or second successes. For all its unevenness, it's an energetic, highly enjoyable collection of poems from a poet sure to go somewhere different next time as well.

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 Translated by Mark Spitzer
Creative Arts Book Company ($14.95)

by Karl Krause

Mark Spitzer's From Absinthe to Abyssinia, a collection of obscure and never before translated works by one of France's most intoxicating poets, sheds a harsh light on a much-admired heroic figure. Along with some essential fragments and poems of Rimbaud's finest period comes a stiff helping of bawdy parodies and letters of the poet's post-literary years. Uncompromisingly comprehensive, this collection offers a few sips of nectar and an adequate sample of the morning after.

One of the highlights of the book is Spitzer's translation of the startlingly inventive "Drunken Boat." Previously translated by the likes of Ted Berrigan, this poem wields the impact of enormous influence, implausibly written around 1875: "I've slammed myself / into Florida's incredible / mixing petals / with panther / eyes and human skin / while under oceanic skies / rainbows reined / the sea-green herds." Rimbaud's arrival at these poetics, in light of his contemporaries, is phenomenal.

Unraveling this mystery, Spitzer presents a number of selected parodies. As his letters have long suggested, Rimbaud inspired his poetic development with a mix of alcohol and rebellion; these poems clearly indicate that he did not simply arrive as a genius poet, but instead developed both confidence and subject from dissatisfaction and ambition. Though enlightening historical documents, however, these works will have limited appeal for sober humors. "He takes a poop then disappears / but beneath the holy / empty moon / his damned poop appears / in a little cesspool / filthy with blood!" The collection concludes with a thorough sample of Rimbaud's letters as an African explorer and slave trader, a body of work largely unknown to the poet's Anglophone audience.

While the original French drafts of these writings are not provided in this volume, Spitzer—who has also translated works by Celine and Georges Bataille, among others—makes his intentions clear from his introduction. Citing comical examples, he intends to set right the errors of previous translations, abandoning rhyme to compensate for the complexity of meaning in Rimbaud. The technique works well for Rimbaud's more telling works, although some of the most illuminating poems in this collection come from Rimbaud's early, melodic, formal studies. Spitzer's tendency to make up for the inadequacies of other translations leads him to some bold presentations, as he opts for the blatant side of double entendres—for example, he transforms "siege" (which has a number of meanings, commonly "seat") to "potty."

From Absinthe to Abyssinia is unlikely to inspire a new generation of Rimbaud enthusiasts, but it will at least set the record straight. And perhaps there is something inspiring here: the knowledge that even boy-genius Rimbaud wrote a few stinkers.

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Yang Lian
Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
Green Integer ($14.95)

by Lucas Klein

Over a decade ago Harvard Sinologist Stephen Owen took on contemporary Chinese literature with his article "The Anxiety of Global Influence—What is World Poetry?," wherein he succeeded, through astonishingly sensible and even-tempered writing, in laying out a pretty bullet-headed point. Now required reading for Chinese poetry courses in English-speaking universities, the article faults Bei Dao and his fellow Misty Poets—poets who were raised on clandestine translations of experimentalist writing from outside China—for not being Chinese enough. The main point of Owen's review is simple: "Poems are made only for audiences," and the audience Misty Poetry is written for is international, not Chinese. He asks, "is this Chinese literature, or literature that began in the Chinese language? For what imaginary audience has this poetry been written?"

Professor Owen's comments were aimed at Bei Dao, certainly the best known of the Misty Poets, but they struck the other Chinese poets affiliated with the underground journal Jintian (Today) as well. Shu Ting, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian, to name only the most renowned, have all in various ways been castigated for doing what for any other tradition would be a bold, futuristic move: casting away the bonds of the past and moving forward into a new literature.

Yang Lian, however, has not simply thrown away his Chineseness. In the late 1980s, Yang Lian wrote Yi, which may be China's first epic poem, incorporating elements of Western Modernism without jettisoning any of the Chinese cultural heritage. Yang Lian takes the Yijing (familiarly known in English as the I Ching or The Book of Changes) as his starting point, and in exacting, difficult, and sometimes hermetic poetry, demands that we re-examine the nature of man's relationship with his surroundings. In its dependence on Chinese traditions—ancient and modern—in thought, motif, and specific reference, Yi is a work that even Professor Owen would find worthy of Chinese literature.

Like the best of classical Chinese literature, the architecture of Yi is impressively tight, though on a much grander scale. Sixty-four poems subdivide into four sections, each with a specific structural purpose. The Yijing, an ancient text of cosmology and divination, outlines sixty-four hexagrams—six-line units—to correspond to human interaction with nature; the hexagrams are each formed out of a pairing from the eight trigrams, in turn representing Heaven, Earth, Mountain, Marsh, Water, Fire, Thunder, and Wind, each of which is composed of the various combinations of three lines of yin or of yang. In following this structure, Yang Lian's poem is necessarily just as complex. As described in his very helpful endnote, "The abstract signs of the Changes are not used but certain images and numbers are indicated in order to preserve the primitive free symbolization of the Changes, like the forms in nature. In internal structure, Heaven and Wind, Earth and Mountain, Water and Marsh, Fire and Thunder, are used to construct four books corresponding to the Four Elements of classical philosophy."

He is here referring to the four books of Yi, each with its own set of hexagrams and an element as thematic coagulant. The sections outline as follows: "The Untrammeled Man Speaks," the Heaven and Wind hexagrams, is based on qi, as much air as the mystic breath of vitality; "In Symmetry with Death," with the Earth and Mountain hexagrams, uses earth as its central imagery; the poems of "Living in Seclusion," running through the Water and Marsh hexagrams, base their poetics on water; and finally there is the redemption of "The Descent," which through the Fire and Thunder hexagrams takes fire as its central element. Each section also illustrates an essential conflict, in the order of Man confronts nature, Man confronts history, Man confronts the self, and Man reaches transcendence.

Yet the overarching structure does not suffocate. While it is meticulously outlined, each individual poem, when taken line-by-line, is refreshingly free-form and organic. Take, for example, Yi's first lines, from "Heaven 1":

Supreme like this: Nameless black rock, ecstatically crashing through
vertical time
The myriad things tranquil like dusk, more free more vast
Sunset's ritual each step a lotus, slowly moves west to death

And indeed, this is what poetry aims for: a crash, though tranquil, through time; the frame gives shape to the expression and the rigidity is softened by the verse. Yang Lian has married freedom to form, achieving what all poets aspire to do.

In Yi, Yang Lian as poet presides over a marriage of Eastern and Western. While the general structure of the poem follows traditional Chinese culture, its roots also reach into the Modernist tradition of Europe and America. The length alone dictates that Yi belongs to the tradition of personal epic extending from Pound's Cantos. Translator Mabel Lee, professor of Chinese at University of Sydney, has published an article illustrating the debt Yi owes to Sunstone, the long poem that defines the poetic maturation of Octavio Paz. Indeed, the two works share a thoroughly modern use of language to investigate the lingering significance of an ancient cosmological text, as well as a cyclical structure to evoke wholeness; the repeated strophe that begins and ends Sunstone—"a course of a river that turns, moves on, / doubles back, and comes full circle, / forever arriving: " (Eliot Weinberger, trans.)—is analogous to the first and last phrase of Yi: "Supreme like this." As Lee writes, "Paz's Sunstone and Yang Lian's Yi have both been inspired by ancient calendars which provided in both cases symbolic and concrete confirmation for their thinking about cyclical time in human history."

Another evident precursor for Yang Lian's Yi is Eliot's Four Quartets. Structurally, both are poems built from four sections, each inspired by the four elements. Likewise, the poems are meditations on time and eternity, the nature of poetry, and the duty of the poet. Similarities even appear in individual lines: "Forever the first," "Where time does not exist life and death do not exist. Each person is a word, in each word there is no distance between hell and heaven," and "I am not on the mountain, I am the mountain" could all have been written into The Four Quartets. The complexity of structure and the darkness of The Waste Land combine in Yi with the high philosophy and meditative essence of Eliot's later work.

While The Four Quartets represents Eliot's Paradiso, Yang Lian does not have a similar Judeo-Christian model to follow; the symbolic order of the China written into Yi is at times so foreign to the Western reader that the section of redemption and transcendence, which we would normally expect to be an upward motion, is titled "The Descent." Although the Euro-American forebears to Yi are important, they are not the whole story. To be sure, this is a modern epic in the Pound tradition, following as it does his definition that an epic is "a long poem containing history." That history now is a foreign history, one which Ezra Pound, even in writing the China Cantos, would have been unable to create.

The Chinese word for epic is in fact a compound word meaning "history poem," so the poem defines its epic nature on its own terms, without needing help from Pound's famous designation. History is indeed at the root of Yi, perhaps nowhere so visibly as in the eight Earth poems of "In Symmetry with Death." The eight poems are written in something approximating the voice of eight figures from ancient Chinese history, with classical quotations throughout. Yang Lian explains these eight figures as personae, or masks, that each human wears at times in his life. But they also have echoes with more recent history, as the poem “Earth 7” illustrates:

History crammed into reverberating walls
Language of the dead
Buzzing circles

The poem's accompanying hexagram is Earth over Thunder, or what the Yijing calls "The image of the Turning Point." If this is the turning point, then, it turns from historical success to failure. The poem's header points to Chen Sheng, described in the notes as

Leader of a peasant rebellion in the Qin dynasty [221-206 BC]. Driven to extremes by the oppressive government of the time, he led an uprising in the marshes. . . . Afterwards when his military might gradually increased he became obsessively suspicious and began to kill off his comrades; he was eventually murdered by his intimate ministers.

For Yang Lian, Chen Sheng is the historical precedent for Chairman Mao Zedong, the walls of today crammed with historical reverberations. Chairman Mao, another peasant who came to power by rebelling against an oppressive government and who killed his comrades in the Cultural Revolution, could just as easily be the subject of this poem. To link two historical figures may be little more than a parlor game, but literature actualizes the unity of past and present:

In fish bellies cut open in the shrieking of foxes is his name
No one guesses his secret fear of ghosts
He stakes all on the handsome face of his head:
King, marquis, general and minister
Would you prefer progeny

For the audience, especially the audience of Chinese readers brought up and brought down in the Cultural Revolution, the secret fear of ghosts not only links Chen Sheng with Chairman Mao, but is also one of the trends against which Yi is a forceful rebellion. Not only did the Cultural Revolution preach forgetting as a means of eradicating ghosts, but China since the 1970s has also treated the ten years of chaos as a mistake best left undiscussed. Yang Lian understands the psychological impossibility of 'ignore it and it will go away', and his Yi is in many ways a fight, if futile, for remembering.

Bending down a huqin is being played
Mottled snakeskin
Eyelids of the dead split
Echoes on walls     Reverberate
Each person forgotten in
The language of the living

Though the Cultural Revolution is never distinctly mentioned anywhere in Yi, no work of consequence from 1980s' China can fully avoid digesting the significance of cataclysmic horror only a decade removed. But while Yi explores many revolutions—psychic, social, natural among them—the topic of political revolution remains on the submerged part of this iceberg. Yi can still be read as an individualist (or even just an individual) response to the Cultural Revolution, confronting the natural world intellectuals were "sent down" to, revisiting the past that both produced and entailed these events, questioning both one's terror and one's guilt, and finally emerging triumphant, as a poet, as a creator. "I created the setting sun in the midst of the vast human river. The flood of the vast setting sun spills into a perfect circle to rest in the sky."

If any redemption can be found in the Cultural Revolution for Yang Lian, it is that Yi embodies the poet's own counter-revolution. Both the foreign and the ancient were made illegal in the Cultural Revolution—"The more ancient, the more counter-revolutionary" was one of the more inane slogans of the day—and yet the foreign and the ancient are the seeds of Yang Lian's oeuvre. That such elements can combine to create what will no doubt come to be seen as one of China's most powerful and important poems is no surprise (just as it is no surprise that it took nearly ten years for such a poem to find publication in English). After all, Yang Lian has turned the personal into the universal, and the universal must now find its audience.

As for whether the intended audience is Chinese or international, the question is hardly relevant anymore. For poetry of this level, the audience needs to find the poem; Yi is not simply a great Chinese poem, but it may just be one of the grandest poetic masterworks to be found in any language's literature. Like the Yijing, Yang Lian's Yi represents a closed circuit, wherein a change in one line, in one hexagram, in one poem, has repercussions and responses in each of the other interdependent elements. The poem is a grandly conceived web where only the architecture and the words maintain superiority. Yi compels a vision of the world in inter-connected change, where a Chinese or international audience is only a matter of the temporary manifestation of the cultural flux. In the end, and at the beginning, it is Yi itself which, while never breaking free of the need for an audience, is still above, transcendent, superior, "Supreme like this."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Donald Revell
Alice James Books ($13.95)

by Hank Lazer

George Oppen, a poet much admired by Donald Revell, concludes in "Route": "I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity." In My Mojave as well as in his previous books, Revell has idiosyncratically pursued a moving and beautiful mode of clarity. As a reader, Revell has been drawn to two seemingly disparate types of clarity: that found in spiritual journals and that found in the nature writing (journals, letters, notes) of Henry David Thoreau. Thus informed, Revell's search for clarity begins to reveal itself as a phenomenology of spirit—a reporting on the movements, lurches, vicissitudes, pain, grief, and sudden blessings of a soulmaking-in-progress.

Oppen's remarks on his motive of poetry are preceded by these two lines: "Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity." For Revell, that search for beautiful construction and for the marvel of the specific involves precision of historical and physical detail: "A stone's throw west of Melville's tomb, my father's / Headstone tilts under one spruce kept alive / By sprinklerheads and a Puerto Rican gardener." Likewise, it involves the kind of historical detail and juxtaposition that in the present becomes exactingly ironic: "And as Charles Darwin good man / Born the very same day as Abraham Lincoln / Wrote 'three species of tyrant-flycatchers / (Are) a form strictly American'."

In "Arcady Again," the opening poem of My Mojave and an explicit link to Revell's previous book Arcady, Revell writes,

God help the man who breathes
With nothing leading him
Here or someplace like it
Inside him which he opens
Wide enough to walk through
And walks through

Note the perfection, paradox, and beauty of Revell's line breaks—how they open up multiple syntaxes and productively different paths of reading/thinking—as well as Revell's determination throughout My Mojave to find such places, such openings in breathing and thinking, as described in "Arcady Again." These places turn out to be sites of wonder, but also often sites of memory and grief—the place to exercise what Charles Darwin, in an odd phrase I recently came across in Rosmarie Waldrop's marvelous writing on what Edmond Jabes calls "grief-muscles."

Though Revell is definitely one of those poets representative of and crucial to the development of a new (or renewed) poetry of spirit, the core writer for his recent work--Henry David Thoreau—points toward an equally strong attachment to glorious specifics of the world of nature and fact. In My Mojave, a book divided into two sections, "Here" and "There," the epigraphs for both sections come from Thoreau: "Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid" and "The knife which slices the bread of Jove ceases to be a knife when this service is rendered." Revell orients us to the "casual" writings of Thoreau, his Journal and his correspondence, more than to the "finished" writing (such as Walden). It is the epiphanic sentence that most attracts Revell, the Thoreau-sentence that becomes like the renewing and mystifying "someplace" in "Arcady Again," the sentence-as-site that reorients and renews our thinking and that educates the making of our (in-progress) souls. Revell's Thoreau at once intensifies our moments of perception and also places us in proximity to a self-annihilating or apocalyptic quality of awareness, the kind of enlightened ending that Thoreau points toward at the end of the second chapter of Walden: "If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career."

With his generous cross references and attachment to other writers, Revell practices the kind of original unoriginality that Robert Duncan insisted upon: an acknowledgement of the communal nature of poetry, and a giving thanks for the words of others that inspire and enable present writing. Revell's poems, particularly extended poems such as "Given Days," demonstrate an admirable stitching together of "his" words and the words of others—a process that makes Revell's poems a verbal quilt composed of treasured scraps reassembled into a new design. As John Cage would have it, Revell's submission to the writing of others—his writing through their words—gives proper priority to self-alteration (rather than the more common emphasis of mainstream poets on self-expression).

While Revell's poems often do point toward his dialogues with other writers, the poem is just as likely to be initiated by an accidental or fortuitous encounter with an odd object or an unusual set of details. In this respect, "My Trip" is an archetypal Revell poem. The key moment of the poem occurs at the midway point:

Next day is no way of knowing,
And the day after is my favorite,
A small museum really perfect
And a good meal in the middle of it.
As I'm leaving,
I notice a donkey on a vase
Biting the arm of a young girl,
And outside on the steps
A silver fish head glistens beside a bottlecap.
Plenty remains.

In sentences that flirt with a deliberate flatness, Revell focuses on the moment when wonder and renewed (and renewing) attentiveness are activated. In this persistent and accurate recording of such moments of transformed attention, he reminds me a bit of David Wilson, the creator of The Museum of Jurassic Technology—a museum designed, as Wilson puts it, "to reintegrate people to wonder" and to celebrate the moments of "delicious confusion ... that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human." As well as their conviction of the fundamental importance of wonder, Revell and Wilson share a Socratic sense of the subversive and pedagogical nature of the experience of wonder. Again in "My Trip," Revell writes,

The work of poetry is trust,
And under the aegis of trust
Nothing could be more effortless.
Hotels show movies.
Walking around even tired
I find my eyes find
Numberless good things
And my ears hear plenty of words
Offered for nothing over the traffic noise
As sharp as sparrows.

It is toward what Revell calls "catching a glimpse of eternity" or perhaps hearing a word or two of renewing mystery "over the traffic noise" that the poems direct our attention. And it is a poetry fully aware that "every blessed thing is elusive." To his credit, Revell resists a formulaic version of spiritual accounting, particularly the all too common contemporary poem dead set on achieving a "wow" ending that, repetitively and compulsively, puts the reader in a preordained hammock of dumb wonder.

Revell's poetry is an oblique and not so oblique struggle with the divine, in one moment "urging God to be God-like / Earth to be worthy a grown man's living there"; in another, in lines that recall the tone and substance of James Wright's best poems, "We're not home yet. / And I'm still new / To my callings: / Teacher, drunkard, absent minister. / I was in Carcassonne once. / I saw two horses there / And God who invented them." But as the concluding lines of the book's title poem indicate, Revell's interactions with the divine are apt to be self-annihilating: "At midday, / My soul wants only to go / The black road which is the white road. / I'm not needed / Like wings in a storm, / And God is the storm." Revell's poetry—part journal, part spiritual autobiography, part day-book—increasingly lays bare the poet's spiritual desires:

Heavenly man
I am scarce to go
And well to stand
In a disused place.

Miserable cardinals comfort
The broken seesaws
And me who wants no comfort
Only to believe.

In Keats's sense, it is a poetry of soul-making, a writing intent on tracking the process of that schooling and that formation:

God eat our suffering
Out of which we churn butter
See
How troubles twin us
The white doe
Afraid
The National Bank
Afraid
Although the soul we have
Is love's doing.

The latter half of My Mojave, "There," features two gorgeous extended poems: "Prolegomena" and "Given Days," as well as the beautifully displayed "Heat Like Murder" (from the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth), a poem that suggests the lyrical erasure and display of Ronald Johnson's RADI OS.

Revell's poetry embodies moments of wonder, reports in an honest phenomenology tenuous and erratic relations to the divine, and weds and welds such moments to the odd specificity of historical fact and suddenly appropriate (and appropriated) writings of predecessors, just as Revell seeks the precise names and descriptions for these moments in their exact present circumstance. He wants to find a music—a lyricism, a beauty of sound—that matches these moments. Increasingly, though, there is an ethical dimension to Revell's spiritual accounting, a desire to live up to his own observation that "in truth there can be no greater reward / For doing well than to be enabled to do well," an ethics tempered by the contingent observation that "all days take instruction from accident."

As in "Given Days," which begins with a poem on September 11, 2001, Revell tries to establish a set of coordinates and signposts—readings and beliefs that might sustain us in times of plagues and lamentation. Revell turns to essential reading: Whitman, the Psalms, the creature poems of D.H. Lawrence. He creates a poetry that sounds like a jazz fugue, as key phrases recur, are recognized, reshaped, improvised upon, moderately transformed, all while they continue to echo with a pleasing familiarity. As Revell acknowledges earlier in My Mojave, "The plot is the stutter / Is why / The wild is why," and this latest book, beautiful as it is, may leave us and perhaps Revell too listening for a more stuttered music, a lyricism less driven by the sentence and more guided by the multiple music of poems such as "Arcady Again," which strains a bit more at the limits of an already known syntax and music.

With My Mojave, Revell demonstrates the great art of when to write and when not to, of what to read and when. He writes a spiritual poetry that feels utterly truthful, giving us a phenomenology of spirit remarkably free of institutions and mostly free of habit. My Mojave will leave both those who have long followed Revell's work and those new to the fold eager to read what's next.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003