Martin Corless-Smith
Fence Books ($18.95)

by Daniel Tiffany

Martin Corless-Smith’s fifth collection of poetry, English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul, is a deeply companionable book; I was touched by its musicality, its powers of reflection, its candor, its sensuality, its intellectual tastes, but also by its sympathetic and contagious magic: the ability to gather into poetry, despite the reference to “fragments” in its title, the sense of a life, a way of life. Evoking the relation between fragment and panorama, the many elements of this book might be regarded as relics comparable to the elusive (and sometimes counterfeit) sources of the ballad revival of the 18th century. Yet, just as the ballad scandals of the 18th century represented the leading edge of a tumultuous wave of poetic modernization (associated with the promiscuity of vernacular speech), so the self-conscious anachronism of Corless-Smith’s panorama signals the emergence once again of a tension between interiority and the enigma of the surface, between individualism and impersonality—between lyric and ballad.

Although some readers may be inclined to see something vaguely neo-Romantic in Corless-Smith’s work, such speculation would be plausible only if one has in mind the infidel Romanticism associated with Thomas Spence and the radical London Corresponding Society of the early 19th century.

The labourer’s heel must spade
Through roots and ruinous foundations
For his fruit—silent to his own antithesis
Under no old name nor in secure
Bond—no college ties his wit
Nor patron offers order
He may grasp. But to his soil
And simple burial he works
His hours his own—his elements apparent
All efforts are exact—all sober
Air and light until his lapse
To ordinary earth and extraordinary breath

Here is a renegade Romanticism more concerned with making than with speculation, with theworker’s knowledge of the relation between labor, pastoral, and the soul’s breath.

As for poetic models, it might be more helpful to note Corless-Smith’s curious affinities (in diction, sentiment, and naked susceptibility) with certain 18th-century poets (Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, Christopher Smart) whose writing was torn between lyric, ballad, and didactic exigencies. Each of these poets experienced periods of insanity or dissolution (anticipating the similar fates of John Clare and Ivor Gurney), conditions arising in part from the exposure of their work to violent cross-currents between literary and vernacular, or secular and spiritual, poetries. The fragmentation of Corless-Smith’s writing may be read as well—in poetic and cultural terms—as an expression of “madness” in the face of similar tensions in our own time.

Not surprisingly, given the promiscuity of his text, Corless-Smith’s apocryphal model of the soul (traces of which can be found in most of his earlier books) never strays far from the concept and experience of reading: “The language of poetry is infinitely open, and as such is a model of the divine soul.” Over the course of the book, Corless-Smith develops what can only be described as an ontological theory of reading, imitating, translating, imposture and, ultimately, writing: a life suspended between epochs, nations, personae. Yet, since the soul is always somehow corporeal (“the soul conceived in God’s alembic flesh”), meteoric, or mediumistic, one must therefore descend into the flesh of reading—that is, the dwelling, or habitation, of the soul.

Biblio mundi
Two weeks later
The dead now living
that we can never
Touch the soul’s hem

Even more broadly, the poet’s doctrine of the soul (psyche-logos) is also a theory of matter, of society, of landscape: “and our soul is of foliage and standing ponds—the lofty elms—kissing the sand and the penny-loaf—the colour of amber crabshells—and the pink-eared wheat flower.”

To be sure, as the object of its own doctrine of reading, the book is crazed with texts of all kinds: treatise, confession, annal, song, translation (of Trakl, Ronsard, Petrarch, Horace), aphorism, jingle, burden. If the book is indeed a tractatus, Corless-Smith builds his treatise on the soul (in a manner resembling the erotico-philosophical manifestos of Norman O. Brown) from the broken ranks (and words) of philosophers. Yet for Corless-Smith—unlike many poets lingering at the jinxed crossroads of poetry and philosophy—it is never a matter of poetry trying to legitimate itself by citing philosophy, or taking instruction from philosophy, or even looking over its shoulder at philosophy, but rather finding moments when philosophy reveals its inescapably poetic orientation, its ancient familiarity with poetry

More important, however, than the didactic, or miscreant, lyricism of philosophers, are Corliss-Smith’s poetic kin, the “southron” poets—many quoted in the book—from his native Worcestershire, or neighboring counties: Robert Herrick (his eroticism and his daintiness), the forger Chatterton, Cowper, Robert Southey (experimentalist), Ivor Gurney, David Jones. And lest one forget the music of the place, or how it sounds today, recall that the music of Portishead and P. J. Harvey drag Blake’s Jerusalem—and the spell of the West Country—into the present moment. Corless-Smith's rude (and lovely) songs belong in the same company.

At the core of Corless-Smith’s confession and tractatus of the material soul stands a pair of invented personae, embodying different aspects of the poet-philosopher: “Thomas Swan” and “William Williamson.” In Corless-Smith’s previous book, Swallows, an author’s note claims, “During WW2 the poet William Williamson worked as a radio operator on a remote Hebridean island. A series of poetic fragments and long prose pieces were later found written on the walls of his weaver’s cottage.” Corless-Smith appears to be the sole reader of Williamson’s wall-poems, yet this ambiguity—is it a forgery or not—is immaterial (or without material witness) in light of the tenets of the Selenlehre of the English Fragments.

Corless-Smith’s invented (or real) personae are frequently cited in a manner recalling the epigraphic custom of marking the landscape with inscribed tablets (or composing succinct poems in this style). The numerous citations of “W.W.” or “T.C.” in English Fragments indulge in the ancient practice of apostrophe, addressing the passing stranger in a manner recalling the speech act of a beggar (a genre in the tradition of canting songs). Moreover, since “W.W.” and “T.C.” may be regarded as creatures of the authorial imagination, and since the author refers to himself as a “creature” and a monster (“I am become a monster to myself”), one should recall that Dr. Frankenstein’s “creature”—the Gothic counterpart to Corless-Smith’s lyric species—inscribes curious epigraphs in the woods, taunting the scientist as he pursues his tragic invention. Corless-Smith’s English Fragments is a book that will haunt readers for generations to come.

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Susan Briante
Ahsahta Press ($17.50)

by Abby Travis

Utopia Minus is built on a subtle but pervasive distinction. Susan Briante takes her title from Robert Smithson’s A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, in which Smithson discusses a “ruins in reverse,” where “the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. . . . the suburbs exist without a rational past without the ‘big events’ of history. . . . A Utopia minus a bottom.” This gives a haunting sense of inevitability to the future of the suburbs: because they lack a foundation, they also lack intent and direction.

Briante’s poems articulate the stagnancy of a population born and raised in the suburban sprawl—not just that of her own New Jersey and Texas, but everywhere in America—with ease and even a playfulness with the language. While the poems of this collection are often in verse, many break out into sentences and whole paragraphs of prose. And the author is direct and deliberate in image and word choice, which makes her lines resonate all the more. Here is the center of “Nail Guns in the Morning,” in which external tensions build upon one another:

this weather, this fiscal year, this end of empire during which I am reading
the circulars stuck in my screen door, ice waiting
in the highest breath of atmosphere.
It will get to us.

In the next stanza, Briante writes: “I told Farid / I would never write a poem that just said: Stop the War.” But, another stanza later, the poem ends in a burst indicative of the era of Bush: “Stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war.”

These poems push against their margins, just as Briante pushes against the margins of her world and of herself. “How does a tree move when it is angry?” she asks. “I want to be angry like that.” Sometimes, yes, she is angry, but she is never moralizing. Hers is a cultivated anger, informed by sorrow and longing, by personal and cultural memory. In “Isabella,” much of this collides:

Last night’s sleep was shallow, and I dreamt
I flung myself over a group of children
with arms spread until my winter jacket
opened to wings. Men torched
parked cars. Police hurled grenades
across a street. And while we huddled
behind a Gap advertisement near a subway
entrance, my father ran towards
the barricades calling
another woman’s name.

The structure of Utopia Minus adds to these themes. Of the three sections, the first two conclude in three memoranda each, with poems addressed to particular officials: “Dear Madam Secretary of Homeland Security,” “Dear Mr. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,” “Dear Mr. Chairman of Ethics, Leadership and Personnel Policy in the U.S. Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel,” and so on. Despite the imperative that falls into some of these poems (“Pull over. Price what you see. Privatize this rush-hour traffic. Look disappointed”), the first sections build, in lyric images, the tone of expertly handled moral outrage: of urban sprawl and abandoned buildings, of storms building up, all in “the year of the Dixie cup, in the year of the orange construction cone.”

Tellingly, however, the final section turns inward, realizing that memory—despite what it reminds us of—is perhaps what can save a place that has, inevitably, been built into ruin. Take “Up the Road”:

The streets should be shorter
sentences between us.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bring your daughters                         to this place
tell them there was something special,
tell them we were something special,
our struggle has too few chroniclers.

In this final section, the once fluid prose that conveyed stagnation through imagery now fractures and proceeds haltingly, and a storm finally begins to bloom, though still in the distance:

Today I am tired
of being American.           I am done           with advancing.
In the utilitarian insistence of the Midwest, beautiful maps                     show heat
and intensity of storms     red and greengold blossoms cross prairies
on my television screen.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I tell the wind, Hurry.

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Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo
The MIT Press ($34.95)

by Gary Sullivan

If, as according to the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, “All America is nothing but impudent inflated rampantly guideless burgers—trades people,” nowhere is that more true than in the desiccated art of our poetry. This is, after all, a culture that has allowed, inexplicably, the Baroness’s own significant body of English-language poetry to languish in boxes, uncollected and mostly unpublished, until now, 101 years after their author, the most outrageous dada poet of them all, landed on these shores in late June of 1910.

In their introduction to this long-awaited collection, Gammel and Zelazo make much of the Baroness’s prefiguring of any number of art and poetry movements: the punk-DIY aesthetic, beat poetry, ’60s feminist performance art, Canadian sound poetry and, most recently, conceptual writing. They see the Baroness in everything from Madonna’s cone bra to Carolee Schneemann’s “Meat Joy.” They’re right, of course, on all counts. But there’s so, so much more. Opening Body Sweats randomly to one of the 150 poems collected in its pages:

This early in spring—I notice my shouldersweat
Of such rife—penetrating—rank—frank redolence—
As advanced cadaver—fresh myrrhstuffed
Mummy let’s off—maybe.
(Surmise)

I immediately think of Edwin Torres:

Computereen—spits out
cloudy beach hardon              empty squeen
outlines the modern raindrop

dear foamali to manside—what is ecstasy
of the divine free

there’s no one here—transfer son
to foreskin

Torres has had a foot in at least three of the most visible contemporary camps: the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, language writing and, most recently, the Flarflist Collective; but that poem, “To Come,” from his latest collection, YesThing NoThing, feels as if the Baroness wrote it herself, her ghost-digits guiding Torres’s fingers over the keyboard.

Best-known for her frank sexuality (the first poem in Body Sweats is, not surprisingly, “Ejaculation”: “I want to die— / I want to live— // Between this / lovembrace!”), the Baroness was not simply the modernist period’s most body-focused poet. Rather than organize the book chronologically, the book’s editors slot poems into one of ten numbered sections with subtitles designed to emphasize the range of von Freytag-Loringhoven’s oeuvre. So, in addition to “Poems of Love and Longing” and “Poems of Embodiment,” we get “Poems of the City and Consumption,” “Poems of Philosophical Contemplation,” “Visual Poems,” and the rather conference-y “Performing Nature.” One can’t imagine the Baroness herself agreeing to this academically imposed structure on what even the editors refer to as the “uncorsetted” “chaos” of her poems.

But this is not so much a collection of loose and crazy poetry as it is an argument for the weight and import—ultimately, the academic viability—of the Baroness’s work. The editors are careful in who and what they name-check in the introduction: Sylvia Plath but not the more obvious Anne Waldman; Kenneth Goldsmith but not K. Silem Mohammad, whose work far more resembles the Baroness’s in form, content, and all-important spirit; the Four Horsemen but not the far more kindred Canadian bill bissett. Most surprisingly, there is not a single mention of theGurlesque anthology, the one collection of poetry that seems closest in all aspects to the Baroness—she’s practically its patron saint. It’s as though everything Gammel and Zelazo know about the art comes from reading uber-critic Marjorie Perloff—who, you guessed it, is name-checked in the Intro.

The framing of this book aside, the selection of work is incredibly generous, including nearly 300 pages of von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poems and texts and dozens of illustrations in color and black and white, mostly of manuscript pages in the poet’s hand. It would be daunting if the work weren’t so immediate and engaging.

Body
Sweats
Mind
Rags
Agony
Unceasing—

Heartleech
Bloodseeps
Agony
Unceasing—

Life
Pollensweet
Diebitterness
Churn
Unceasing—

Figure
To
Flee—

Shape
Unceasing

Top
Me.

The avid reader will find in these poems at least something connecting this work to just about every genuinely thrilling thing that has happened in American poetry in the last hundred years, from Black Mountain to the Harlem Renaissance to the New York School. And, like them, it still feels as alive and filled with possibility and surprise as it must have when it was first written and performed. This, more than a poem’s craft or even its influence, is what keeps us reading.

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Lorna Dee Cervantes
Wings Press ($16)

by Sharon Olinka

Cynics beware: this book will stir sensual memories, and make even the most jaded reader smile. In a world full of hackneyed love poems, Lorna Dee Cervantes manages to be witty, lyrical, and wise without a trace of self pity or sentimentality. Her voice is direct and natural, like the voice of a friend. Each poem in Ciento is exactly one hundred words long; this almost creates its own form, and Cervantes plays it like a jazz clarinetist out to soar one last time before the set ends.

The first thirteen poems deal with that shadowy time before love is acknowledged, and how the speaker finds herself changing as stagnant energies dissolve. This is expressed beautifully in “100 Words On Being Done”:

I'm done with demons; dying
by the dram. I'm done
with dealing diamonds from my
hand; done doubting the way
destiny pays; done doubling up
on trouble; done with the debits
defining me, dollars dividing me;
done doing it up just
to have it undone; done
denying the outcome. I'm done.
I want bread and your red
arabesques on my neck. I
want the guards at my
borders to grant you entry.

Not only is there a clever use of alliteration, with that pounding “d” like a triumphant drum, it also signals the speaker’s release toward a new world shared with her lover. “I am radiant to imagine you,” says Cervantes in another poem.

And imagine him she does: in salmon, a geode, a full refrigerator, olive oil, a whale, heartwood, a horse, lottery tickets, and many other images. There are also homages to Lorca and Neruda. But from the very first page the reader knows how the story ends: things won't work out. The lover will be gone. In “100 Words, 100 Toys For You” the speaker says, “The villain was our own. Possibly”; in another poem, which mentions wind, there's the disturbing image of an exhausted wind-up doll. Cervantes knows every love has its crest and decline, and if there's sadness in many of the poems there's also humor and gratitude, even if the love becomes a distant memory. A generosity of spirit prevails:

I don't carry a grudge
against the government.
I have the nation of you.
I have your hands and
what they can do. I have
the heart of you—special
core of your purpose and
power. I have the gift
of your sweat stained sage,
your hummingbird's bliss,
sanctuary that you would find
in me. I don't carry
a grudge for any mortal.

Ciento is a book to cherish. Give it to your seventeen-year-old student who just fell in love, or to your grandparents, married forty years. Or when in doubt yourself about love, go to these pages. You will find a worthy voice who speaks to you.

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Forrest Gander
photographs by Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia
New Directions ($15.95)

by Justin Wadland

Climatologists drill core samples from rock, soil, and ice, seeking evidence of the most fleeting of natural phenomena: ancient weather. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that each of the four sections in Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World opens with a poem titled “Evaporation” that simultaneously orients and disorients the reader to what follows.

A noted poet and translator, Gander is drawn to the physical structure of the earth. In 2005, just before beginning this book, he told fellow New Directions author Eliot Weinberger in a conversation published in BOMB Magazine: “For me, besides a lifelong interest in rocks and fossils and a degree in geology, it’s Oppen’s proposal of inquiry into ‘what we stand on,’ in the combined mineral and ethical sense, that matters.” This notion certainly informs the writing gathered inCore Samples from the World, especially the haibun about Gander’s journeys to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile.

Haibun is a condensed prose essay originally developed in Japan as an accompaniment to haiku. Sparse, diary-like entries frame and set the stage for the haiku, often discarding the pronoun “I” and collapsing objective and subjective perspectives so that the reader is invited to witness experiences as they occur. Gander writes in the tradition of his predecessors, notably Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, recounting a pilgrimage into the unknown that at the same time evokes the strangeness within us all, but he also manages to crack open the form using the American idiom.

Twenty poets visit the Summer Palace on the outskirts of Beijing, for example, and as they make their way through the rooms, one “peers around a painted screen and discovers a white-haired man face-down on a table strewn with syringes.” And then comes the haiku, which doesn’t follow the conventional thematic or syllabic requirements but doesn’t need to:

Behind everything
the foreigner sees, something he doesn’t
know how to look for.

In a pattern that persists through the book, the sequence of image and insight jolts to the core. The stunned reader may begin to wonder: Did I ride upon an uneasy horse and see a dust storm blowing across the rocky plains of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture? Will I ever forget that night when Aline Davidoff stretched out on a red-carpeted staircase in a Japanese chintz dress? Why am I haunted by that old man glimpsed on a bicycle in Chile?

Core Samples from the World also contains poetry and photographs. The verses do not describe or comment on the pictures in a traditional ekaphrastic mode, but instead cohabit and resonate within the same emotional space. The four sections each feature the work of one of the three photographers—Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia—who collaborated with Gander on this project. Foglia’s photographs, for example, come from a series called “ReWilding” that shows various people in the southeast who are attempting to live off the land. One depicts an almost naked young girl standing at the entrance of a bark wigwam, another a twenty-something white woman with a fox pelt over her bare shoulder. Here are a few of the accompanying stanzas, chosen almost at random:

Ever eat a blue heron?
Supervisor said there’s no common law
in Virginia. We don’t know how fast it’s going

to happen. Food’s going to be
number one. Next is going to be
ammo. We figure we’ll end up feeding

a lot of outsiders.

These statements resemble snippets a journalist might collect through interviews, but Gander threads and jams the phrases together to conjure the idealism and environmentalism, claustrophobia and xenophobia, divine foolishness and apocalyptic imagination that hold together such communities.

Another section features Raymond Meeks’s photographs from a series called “A Clearing” where men, women, and children mine a bleak landscape with rudimentary tools. The verses seem to speak for the subjects of the photographs, such as a shirtless boy covered in dust and carrying rocks upon his head: “I cannot be discarded, his eyes say.” But they also reveal how impenetrable these scenes may be:

I can be read, say the rocks, but not by you.
The air is burnished, almost mineral, like a thin peel of mica.
Mound in the photograph, iris in the eye.

What does it mean, a cauterized topography?
To salvage rocks the color of all else from all else the color of rock.
I can be read, say her eyes, but not by you.

This last line presumably refers to the photograph of a young woman a few pages on, another worker squinting in a pained yet dignified expression out of the frame—but it could be about any the individuals who reside in the photos and text of this book. While Gander’s work requires close study for the layers of associations and meanings to penetrate, it leaves an impression not unlike the first morning in a foreign land. One moment, things seem to the make sense, and the next, mystery ushers in “eyes from another language.”

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Adele Ne Jame
Manoa Books and El León Literary Arts ($15)

by Zara Raab

Poets weave textures with words that reach back in threads of association through our shared histories. The Lebanese American poet Adele Ne Jame, who has lived for four decades in Hawaii, creates a rich cloth of colors and scents, visions and reflections, in this handsomely produced collection of poems.

However attuned Ne Jame may be to the sounds and syllables of Lebanon refracted through 21st-century America, she translates from the language of her eyes, ears, and skin rather than the Lebanese culture of her grandmother who, a lifetime ago, chose to follow her grandfather from a small Lebanese village and settle with him, as his wife, in New Jersey. An areca leaf, bamboo cones, and fields of wild red anemones coexist in the world of these poems with date palms and fig trees, an uprooted hau tree, stalky purple ginger, and the oak trees of Mamre. The vivid imagery of dazzling blue light follows flying red clouds, wild dandelion and snow.

This blending of textures can be disorientating, at times, as if this poet were not quite present in the world. Ne Jame builds this sensuous texture even from the bricks and mortar of conflict and disappointment. She writes with a thoughtfulness born, one suspects, of a generous nature, and perhaps the ideology of the 1960’s Left Coast. In “A Chouf Lament,” a lament to an historic region of Lebanan ravaged by war, for example, she writes, “So that we might forget / for a moment how, like the fields of // the wild red anemone, we are waving / our songs in the air before night falls.”

The slogan “the personal is political” entered the lexicon of the 1960’s with Carol Hanisch’s famed feminist essay of that title, but its meaning has never been clearer than in Ne Jame’s poem “Cheating.” It is morning; the poet’s grandfather returns to his wife after a night at the gambling house. Only the poem’s title tells us the nature of his betrayal. It is a short poem of eleven lines, but says much about expectations we have for one another, the judgments we make, and contrasted to all of that, the simple truths of our human lives:

the two of them
beyond denial and the gorgeous morning light
flooding just the same through the glass.

Despite the husband’s sheepishness and the wife’s anger, the morning light floods “just the same through the glass” returning us to life. In other family poems here, there is at times very little light, only “sleep and forgetfulness,” as when the poet’s father is “already asleep in the small room / off the kitchen, having given himself up / to the next small loss.” But life goes on even when dreams are lost, or husbands and wives argue—or warring factions in Lebanon kill each other, and houses and relatives in Lebanon must be abandoned.

In “To Haas on Returning from Baalbek,” Ne Jame writes a message of “redemption / out of the unspeakable” from Beirut, where the poet stops in mid-traffic to gaze on the famous statue in Martyrs’ Square of four bronze figures honoring the sixteen people—some Muslins, some Christians—hanged on trumped-up treason charges in 1916 during the Ottoman rule of Lebanon. Ne Jame ponders,

How we manage beauty, if not redemption
out of the unspeakable—
how we love the dead we didn’t know
who somehow shuffle by in our dreams.
Be foolish—let your heart grow larger,
the mystic says. Salt to the wound
that burns and saves.

Quotations from, and references to, many writers and a few philosophers and artists appear in these pages—Federico Garcia Lorca, William Blake, Dante, Chagall, George Eliot, Delmore Schwartz, William Bronk. Rumi, Darwish. But perhaps the most palpable presence is that of the Lebanese American poet Haas Mroue, who died suddenly at the age of forty-one in 2007. Ne Jame borrows his words for an epigraph: “We are all refugees, / we drift through places / like pollen in May.” They are apt lines to preface a collection of poems that does sometimes seem to drift, for a poet at sea in the world. Ne Jame also addresses her title poem to Mroue, a poem in which the poet dreams of a mountain lion stalking her at night, “huge, whirling / figure eights brushing heavily against me.”

This book of fifteen poems, Ne Jame’s fourth book, has an afterword by Hayan Charara, who edited Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2008). In his afterword, Charara cites Naomi Shihab Nye’s description of Ne Jame’s poetry as possessing a solitude that “weaves it spell around you.” This description is apt; Ne Jame sets aside expectations and ideas of an Arab American identity throughout these poems, and creates a sensual, immediate, and generous reality, one that asks you to “let you heart grow larger.”

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Sarah Gorham
Four Way Books ($15.95)

by Nick DePascal

Sarah Gorham's fourth collection of poetry, Bad Daughter, is a varied and dynamic meditation on the many manifestations of family life, from husbands and wives, to sisters, and especially mothers and daughters. Gorham's poems consider these relationships from a multitude of viewpoints, including prayers, deconstructed sonnets and more, all the while working in a lyric style. Gorham has an ear for music and many of the poems have a pleasing sonic quality to them, though at times the lyrical qualities of certain poems take precedence over sense, and the reader can occasionally get lost.

The strongest poems in Bad Daughter subtly evoke an event or emotion with sharp imagery, tight lyricism, and just enough strangeness to challenge the reader, but not elude them completely. "Juncture," for example, begins:

At the join
of sea to sky
a line of whitecaps
hovering

like a row of horseheads,
or ghost parapet
permeable

as in your dream

A series of metaphors describing a particular scene, the images are clear and easily envisioned, and the word choices give the poem an ethereal yet foreboding quality. But the real skill of the poem is the subtle way in which the ending fulfills the promise of the beginning, extending the reach of its imagery to deepen a specific moment of emotional relevance in the speaker's life:

as of late when you lean
against your mother
and there's no

resistance—
she has stood firm
as long as she can

there at the horizon
where the clouds begin.

Thus the emotion evoked by the opening images of the poem is brought to bear on the terrible futility one experiences upon the loss of a parent or the deterioration of their health, deepening it by avoiding the sentimentality inherent in such a situation. By the end of the poem, the mother seems like a part of nature, enshrined forever in the speaker's memory in particular images or scenes.

"High Tea" uses this same sort of strategy, interspersing snatches of conversation about a possible murder with the details of an uncomfortable family meal. It beautifully captures the naivety and innocence of children in the wake of death:

(I dare you to kick her shin. I dare you. She's kicking me.
She's a stupid ass. You're a stupid ass.)

No fighting. There's been a death.

For second helpings, for the plates clattering and scraped.
For more waiting, our bodies like the itchy center of the sun.

Nick. A pocket knife, we think. . .

And then a couple lines later:

Someone may have murdered him.

For the crumbs swept into a bowl. For the napkins folded and piled.
Chairs squealing, candles blown.

There'll be an investigation. Your mouth . . . wait

The linen stiff, the weep forbidden.

Consider for a moment that arresting movement from "Someone may have murdered him" to "For the crumbs swept into a bowl. For the napkins folded and piled." It's as if the victim was murdered because of these trivial dinner table actions; this constant piling of speech onto details creates a very clear tension between the world of high tea and that of the dead man, though the narrative implicit within the poem is never revealed. These jarring shifts in tone also deftly mimic how children interpret, or perhaps fail to interpret, significant events like death. And like "Juncture," it's as much about what is not said as what is said. These particular poems succeed because they bring the reader into a moment with the speaker without being heavy-handed and expository, while at the same time allowing the reader into the world of poem.

At times some of the poems seem a bit too heavy-handed and dry, or else give the reader very little to experience with the speaker. Take "Sixteen," which begins the collection's second section:

Tangerine was her trut
h and tangerine her hair
and may were the toughies
who backed into her fire

Most were but flickers
that lifted her to smoke,
the one I grew to care about
she burned with lines of coke.

Then glanced a tangerine glower
and shed an orange pride
and conjured the toughest boy of all
to push my love aside.

While the poem has a lovely music and some interesting moments, its inclusion in the collection seems a bit baffling. Its title and place at the beginning of a new section seem to indicate that we've moved forward in life, that the speaker is in adolescence, and thus things are changing. Yet the reader is given next to no context in which to see the poem's action, and the specificity of the action and the colors have little meaning for the reader overall. Poems like "Juncture" and "High Tea" build tension and seem to tread lightly on the page; "Sixteen" simply feels clunky by comparison. And there are several other such poems in the collection, which seem to draw the reader out of the poem's world and declare themselves to be poems.

Despite these occasional moments, Gorham's skill in controlling and manipulating voice and tone makes for a number of wholly original and enjoyable poems. Bad Daughter is ultimately a pleasure to read for its sharp imagery, unabashed lyricism, and its deft portraiture of the vagaries of family life.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Cedar Sigo
City Lights Publishers ($13.95)

by Bethany Prosseda

John Wieners, in “A Poem for Record Players,” states, “The scene changes”; it is more than just a matter of coincidence that this line should so aptly describe Cedar Sigo’s collection Stranger in Town. Sigo, whose work is in conversation with poets such as Wieners, Jack Spicer, and Eileen Myles, as well as an array of visual artists and musicians, succeeds in creating an intertextual collection that is as rich as the many sources of inspiration from which it draws.

In this collection, the scenes are ever changing and never fixed. Sigo’s prominent use of reference to location creates a feeling of perpetual movement through the text, and this movement bears strong associations to that of a road trip. In this sense, the reader and his movement through the text can be likened to watching a fixed point through a car window: a never-ending state of approach and departure from a series of objects.

Sigo achieves this state of fluid movement through his distinct use of enjambment and punctuation. The collection’s title poem prominently displays Sigo’s use of such devices:

More than one death

from a square
bottled ink

The MARVEL brand

I enjoy reading signs

through the fog—

—HOTEL HUNTINGTON—

Then that evening

and all of

Fox Plaza was the same white

A permanent

stripe
on my blue bike

I raise my hood

I think there are other lost men

in surrounding blocks

alike in their thinking.

In this poem, Sigo rarely uses punctuation, though he capitalizes some words; the lack of punctuation combined with the use of capitalization allows one line to flow seamlessly into the next, creating a constant state of approach and departure in which we find ourselves looking outward to worldly things—approaching the Hotel Huntington while the Marvel sign is waning in our rearview mirror but is not yet out of sight.

On a larger scale, the collection as a whole functions in the same manner. We may approach and depart from one poem, but we encounter elements of that same poem again at a different point in the collection. One example of this phenomenon occurs in “The Emerald Tablet,” in which Sigo writes, “What I was seeing was half a hotel / so I wrote that down to see the picture better.” Here, we again approach the Hotel Huntington; the effect of this cyclical reference brings to mind driving scenes from old movies in which the background plays on a loop. At times, the cyclical nature of the text can become hypnotizing, perhaps suggesting a commentary on the planned uniformity that characterizes so much urban life.

In this sense Sigo’s Stranger in Town also reflects on queer identity. While the jacket copy states that this theme plays a prominent role in the collection, queer identity is barely visible within the poems themselves. This lack of visibility is in conversation with the uniformity of urbanity. While queer identity is, to a certain extent, visible in contemporary culture, it is not nearly as visible as heterosexual identity. In this manner, Sigo’s collection creates a cyclical, hypnotizing, and planned landscape that mimics the uniformity of our culture. Within this landscape, Sigo’s poems function in a manner similar to graffiti; the text, in its constant state of approach and departure, aims to disrupt its surrounding landscape and thereby dispose of the order upon which it stands.

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Edited by Andrew Schelling
Oxford University Press ($55)

by Graziano Krätli

Religions typically evolve from individual and spontaneous to collective and organized forms of experience. Each time an intensely subjective spiritual awakening solidifies into an increasingly complex and codified set of beliefs, practices, and rituals, a reaction usually occurs, in which one or more individuals cast themselves beyond the pale of orthodoxy, choosing a path of renunciation, retreat, and reflection, or undertaking more active and antagonistic forms of dissent. In the Judeo-Christian world, anchorites, mystics, and martyrs variously represented this reaction in different countries and time periods. In medieval India, a renewal process characterized by unorthodox forms of intimate devotion started between the fifth and the ninth century C.E. with two groups of Tamil poet-saints, the twelve Vaishnava alvars (“immersed in god”) and the sixty-three Shaivite nayanars (“lords, masters, devotees”), whose hymns to Vishnu and Shiva helped define a new spiritual and literary sensibility. Rejecting established forms of dogmatic and ritual mediation in favor of a pure and passionate relationship with a personal god, the new devotional approach gained rapid popularity, especially among the non-brahmanical castes and the lowest strata of the population, spreading across the subcontinent and eventually giving rise to a counter-tradition of spiritual practices and devotional songs known as bhakti. The term itself, explains Andrew Schelling in the introduction to this new anthology, first appeared 2500 years ago in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita, indicating “love or devotion directed to a deity or a god.” More specifically,

the word derives from the Sanskrit verb bhaj, which initially meant to divide, share, or distribute. Over time, the verb came to mean partake, enjoy, participate; to eat, to make love. From such personal colourings it took abstract meanings. To experience, to feel, to adore; to serve, honour, or worship. There is also a noun, bhakta, meaning a votary, a worshipper, a lover.

Often referred to as a movement, bhakti is more a “state-of-the-heart” or, in Schelling’s words, “a prominent countercultural force,” whose philosophical, religious, social, and literary relevance and implications have become the object of frequent scholarly investigation. Most bhaktas were low-caste men and women who rejected social conventions (caste, family, marriage) and orthodox religion (typically Brahmanic Hinduism) to live an itinerant existence, alone or in a group of similarly minded devotees or followers, in pursuit of a direct communion with a personal deity. Their spiritual quests were often characterized by unconventional looks, provocative performances, and ecstatic outbursts of singing and dancing, and in time gave rise to rich and expansive poetic traditions associated with individual figures of poet-saints. Given the lack of manuscript sources, and the fact that bhakti poems originated and circulated for centuries in oral form and in a number of vernacular languages, modern attempts to trace a nucleus of poems to their presumed authors (i.e., the poet-saints they are commonly associated with), and to separate the authentic from the spurious and the apocryphal, have proved largely unsuccessful.

From the far south of the subcontinent, the spiritual counter-tradition spread north, to Kannada-, Telugu-, and Marathi-speaking areas (corresponding to the modern states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, respectively), and eventually reaching the Indo-Gangetic Plain, where bhakti poetry fully flourished between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries. By the end of this period, India had started to develop her own literature in English, and it is largely through this imported medium that bhakti poetry started to circulate and to draw attention as a literary form and tradition, both in India and abroad. Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, such an interest has grown steadily since the 1970s, with new studies and translations being published every year, mostly in India and the United States. The past decade alone has produced editions of Antal, Chokhamela, Kabir, Lal Ded, Mirabai, Ramprasad Sen, Surdas, Tukaram, and others; while the current one has started, quite promisingly, with three major works, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir, Ranjit Hoskote’s I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, and now The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature, edited by Andrew Schelling.

With only one distant antecedent—John Stratton Hawley’s and Mark Juergensmeyer’s 1988Songs of the Saints of India, a more scholarly work which focuses on six northern figures—the Oxford anthology is truly the first attempt to chart the field of bhakti poetry in English translation, and to provide a rich and valuable resource for the general reader. It is a task for which Schelling is uniquely qualified. A poet and prize-winning translator of classical Indian poetry, with teaching appointments in the United States (at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) and India (at Deer Park Institute, Himachal Pradesh), he combines an engaged and insightful perspective with a deep knowledge of the material involved.

Although rich and diverse, such material lends itself to a natural arrangement in four sections—South, West, North, and East—following the geographical progress of bhakti literature across the Indian subcontinent, from sixth-century Tamil poems to contemporary Shakta poetry from Bengal. The first section, largely dominated by A.K. Ramanujan’s scholarship and translations from the Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, documents the growth of an intensely individual, and acutely physical approach to the divine. “The greatest noticeable shift from classical poems of the Tamil anthologies to the emergence of bhakti,” writes Schelling, “occurs in the stance of the poem’s speaker.” Borrowing themes, situations, and settings from classical poetry, bhakti poets of both genders represent the relationship between devotee and divinity in terms of a passionate and forbidden love affair, typically expressed by a woman’s intense longing for a selfishly absent and unreachable male god. The following verses by the ninth-century Shaivite poet Manikkavacakar contain already most of the typical ingredients of a bhakti poem: the furtive and predacious intervention of the god; the devotee’s submission to his will, characterized by physical and psychological abandon; the ecstatic response of the all-possessed; the erotic imagery of the melting wax and the piercing nail; and the devotee’s ultimate indifference to, and rise above, social norms and bonds:

He grabbed me
lest I go astray.

Wax before an unspent fire,
mind melted,
body trembled.

I bowed, I wept,
danced, and cried aloud,
I sang, and I praised him.

. . . . . . . . . .

Love pierced me
like a nail
driven into a green tree.

. . . . . . . . . .

I left shame behind,

took as an ornament
the mockery of local folk.

We will find similar images and themes again and again in the poems of other female poet-saints like the ninth-century alvar Antal (“Like an arrow / from the bow of his eyebrows / the sidelong glance / of him who destroyed Kamsa / enters my heart, / makes me sore with pain, / weak and worn”), the twelfth-century Virasaiva poet Mahadeviyakka (“Cut through, O Lord, / my heart’s greed, / and show me / your way out, / / O lord white as jasmine”), the fourteenth-century varkari guru Muktabai (“Cast off all shame, / and sell yourself / in the marketplace; / then alone / can you hope / to reach the Lord / . . . / Jani says, My Lord / I have become a slut / to reach Your home”), and the sixteenth-century Rajasthani princess Mirabai (“Dark One, don’t go— / when only cinder remains / rub my ash over your body. / . . . / Listen, friend, / the Dark One laughs / and scours my body with ravenous eyes. / Eyebrows are bows, / darting glances are arrows that pierce / a wrecked heart.”

By the time bhakti reached the Indo-Gangetic Plain, it had incorporated elements of Tantrism and Sufism, and the wealth of esoteric references in the work of Lal Ded (a fourteenth-centuryyogini from Kashmir), or the caustic comparativism and “upside language” (ulatbansi) of Kabir (a fifteenth-century Muslim-raised weaver from Varanasi) are a proof of such development. Indeed, their complex and diverse religious backgrounds led to their message often being misinterpreted or misunderstood, and their legacy (beginning with their funeral rites and bodily remains, as a number of colorful legends document) being claimed by both Hindus and Muslims.

Moving East (to Bengal and areas corresponding to the modern-day states of Bihar and Orissa), devotional attitudes changed under the influence of the Gita-govinda, Jayadeva’s twelfth-century poem whose subject (the relationship of Krishna and Radha) and composition (in twelve chapters and twenty-four songs) had a huge impact on bhakti poetry. Although written in Sanskrit, the Gita-govinda drew inspiration from folk songs and in turn inspired vernacular poets who composed songs based on the divine love affair. This may be depicted from alternative points of view (Krishna, Radha, a messenger or a girlfriend), and represents a significant change of sensibility from the female “devotee longing for a male god” perspective of previous poets. A further and more significant development occurred under the influence of Shaktism, a major devotional tradition focused on Shakti or Devi, the Hindu Divine Mother. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, a wave of popular Shaktism spread throughout eastern India with the love songs of Ramprasad Sen and his followers, Kamalakanta Bhattacharya, Mahendranath Bhattacharya, and Najrul Islam, creating a bhakti tradition that continues to this day.

The final section ends with poems and songs recorded in Bengal in the 1970s. Around the same time, Ramanujan in Chicago, Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar in Bombay, and a few other poets in India and abroad were creating a distinctive poetic idiom in English, bridging tradition (i.e., Indian classical poetry) and innovation (European and North American modernism), and often using translation, particularly of bhakti poetry from various vernacular languages, in new and original ways. The trend set by their pioneering work continued over the following decades and is very much alive today, with new versions published regularly by Indian authors in India and abroad, as well as by non-Indian scholars and poets. Yet the contribution of translation to the growth and renovation of contemporary Indian poetry in English has not been fully explored, assessed, or appreciated yet. A comprehensive and timely work like the Oxford anthology, featuring over thirty poets and as many translators, could have offered a richer and more diversified picture of bhakti poetry in English translation.

Unfortunately, Schelling’s choice of translators is not as inclusive or representative as his selection of poets and poems, and consequently a good opportunity is somehow missed. Of the thirty plus poets featured, only three (Janabai, Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen) are represented by more than one translator, and in a couple of instances the predominance of a particular translator feels oddly reductive. For instance, it is understandable—and to some extent inevitable—that Ramanujan dominates the first section (South), but it is far less clear why the next (West) is almost entirely represented by Dilip Chitre’s translations. While the inclusion of material from Chitre’s unpublished anthology of Marathi bhakti poetry is noteworthy, the section is weakened by the absence of other translators of varkari poetry, particularly Arun Kolatkar, whose tight and snappy versions of Janabai, Namdev, and Tukaram have attained a quasi-legendary status (and whose own reputation as poet in English and Marathi has long surpassed Chitre’s).

Similarly, the next section (North) could have gained from a slightly more catholic selection, particularly in regard to Kabir and Mirabai, arguably northern India’s most popular and beloved poet-saints. Yet both poets are somehow shortchanged, although in different ways. In Mirabai’s case, a selection from Schelling’s own collection, For Love of the Dark One, seems hardly representative of a poet whose work has been translated several times in the past three decades, most notably by A. J. Alston (1980), Hawley and Juergensmeyer (1988), Shama Futehally (1994), and Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield (2004). As for Kabir, Schelling first identifies the three main literary traditions in which his poems have been preserved, namely “the Guru Granth of the Sikhs in the Punjab, the Pancavani of the Dadu Panth from Rajasthan, and the Kabir Panth of eastern India, for whom the Bijak is scripture;” then switches gears and adopts Charlotte Vaudeville’s distinction between a “western” (i.e., Punjabi and Rajasthani) and an “eastern” tradition, the former typically “softer [and] more emotional,” the latter “fiercer [and] far more confrontational.” (108) Adding that “the ‘softer, more emotional Kabir’ . . . has been well served by American poet Ezra Pound” (a questionable statement to say the least), Schelling includes all ten of Pound’s versions of Kabir (originally published in The Modern Review in June 1913) and a selection from Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh’s 1983 Bījak of Kabir, to represent the western and the eastern traditions, respectively. Next, besides these two textual traditions of Kabir, Schelling adds another one, originating “from a manuscript that emerged in Bengal in the nineteenth century and was translated into English by Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill.” Published in 1915, the Tagore-Underhill translation has been “influentially available in England and the United States for a hundred years,” especially after Robert Bly reworked forty-four of the one hundred poems selected by Tagore (whose English he considered “hopeless”) in The Kabir Book, which was published in 1971, reprinted many times, expanded in 2004, and popularized through hundreds of public readings. During one of these events, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971, a young Indian poet was so impressed by Bly’s achievement that he put aside his own plans of translating Kabir. It took Arvind Krishna Mehrotra exactly forty years to act oedipally (just like Bly had toward Tagore), and to produce his own Songs of Kabir, which came out in the spring of 2011 and is likely to remain the most innovative and provocative English-language Kabir for some time. (The fact that Mehrotra’s versions came out right before Schelling’s anthology does not justify their exclusion from the latter, since a number of them circulated in magazines long before their publication in book form.) Now let’s backtrack for a second and consider the sources of both the Pound and the Tagore translations. The former was admittedly derived “from the English versions of Kali Mohan Ghose,” a young friend of Tagore. As for the latter, according to Underhill’s introduction, “it has been based upon the printed Hindī text with Bengali translation of Mr. Kshiti Mohan Sen; who has gathered from many sources—sometimes from books and manuscripts, sometimes from the lips of wandering ascetics and minstrels—a large collection of poems and hymns to which Kabir’s name is attached, and carefully sifted the authentic songs from the many spurious works now attributed to him.” Kshiti Mohan Sen’s four-part edition was published in 1910–11, and it is the same source Ghose used for his literal versions. This and the fact that Sen’s sources included variant songs from the Bijak, show how the “western,” the “eastern,” and the “received” tradition, as represented by Schelling, are all genetically related, if not hopelessly tangled.

Apart from the choice of translators, the book could have used a more rigorous critical approach, as well as more thorough editing and copyediting; a few entries read as if they were put together hastily. The British religious writer Evelyn Underhill is correctly identified on page 108, but rather surprisingly becomes “the American anthropologist Ruth Underhill” fifteen pages later. The Virasaiva poets are introduced (on page 28) without mention of the fact that their poems were composed in Kannada rather than Tamil. Jayalal Kaul, Lal Ded’s translator, is omitted from the list of translators at the end of the volume, and occasional spelling inconsistencies (e.g., tantrik, Tantric, and tantric on pages 213, 216, and 217, respectively) and typographical errors further detract the reader’s attention from the content of the book. Nonetheless, The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature is a rich and engaging treasure trove; readers interested in the saga of a unique genre of writing should dive into it today.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Macgregor Card
Fence Books ($16)

by Alexander Dickow

Poetry Is No Joke (But an Endless and Repetitive One)
The quest for originality yields a great deal of hip and hollow idiosyncrasy, and only occasionally, something whose oddity seems driven by an earnest puzzling about language and the world rather than by self-indulgent posturing. One of the symptoms of this more enduring strangeness is the sense of a gradual uncovering or discovering. Things you didn’t notice before turn up to remind you more is there than meets the eye. You can’t open a poem like a present—you don’t just get a poem once you’ve opened it, and in fact, a good poem is a gift you can never (completely) open. As such, it should make interesting noises when you shake it. Macgregor Card is a difficult poet. His poems make wonderful noises when you shake them.

Card conceived his first book, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, as a “companion volume to Karen Weiser’s To Light Out” (Ugly Duckling Press, 2010), according to an author’s note. I have unfortunately not had the occasion to read To Light Out, but I should hope the present review would encourage readers to seek out Weiser’s work in addition to Card’s, since the qualities of the latter no doubt reflect as many qualities in the former. For the moment, and pending a future reading of To Light Out, I’ll discuss Duties alone.

I see, said the blind man
Card borrowed the title of Duties from the 19th-century poet Sydney Dobell, labeled “spasmodic” because of his ostentatious mannerism, of which Card provides an example in an epigraph to his own book:

Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the winter stark,
Oh the level dark,
On the wold, the wold, the wold!

This excessive reliance on repetition might suggest a naïve belief that the device’s expressive potential could compensate for vacuity of content, although Poe’s well-known “Bells” displays the same excess. Card’s peculiar brand of wit suggests that he is sensitive to the parodic potential of the inane and self-deflating hyperbole such devices suggest:

in the song that is so true
no ship moves up to the one star night
without a plan to execute
in perpetuity, no no no no no no no
No, my boy, no no no no no no no no no no no
No no no, my boy, no no no no no no no no no no no
(“That Old Woolly Bloodletting”)

Here, the comical deluge of verbal tics reminiscent of a paternal old man (“no, my boy”) follows an archetypically lyrical evocation involving songs, stars and a ship: such anti-romantic jibes have become a familiar feature of poetry.

But the Dobell epigraph, by suggesting the comedy of our everyday, futile verbal gestures— “Little bit hungry / Yes so am I / Little bit hungry / yes so am I,” one poem concludes spastically—sets a kind of interpretive trap for the unwary reader. It seems to prepare us for a catalogue of contemporary poetry’s rehearsals of Dadaism; it also signals a recuperative project at work throughout the book. Dobell represents a forgotten literary curiosity, mocked by his contemporaries, that the epigraph displays as a potential model. Card’s writing does not resemble Dobell’s, but explores excentric and excessive language, including repetition. As Card writes, “What is there to sing / but a round?”—a statement that suggests Card is not deriding Dobell’s whirling and cyclical iterations, but admires them. Choosing Dobell as a visible literary antecedent reflects Card’s audacious reinvention of the literary past: at the risk of losing his reader, his poems are sprinkled with curiosities like Dobell as well as a few well-known figures. This eclectic and erudite exploration of tradition forms a singularly odd personal library reminiscent of Apollinaire’s Alcools or Pound’s Cantos. For the reader willing to explore this library, Duties reveals a more frankly lyrical worldview than the book’s off-kilter absurdity and apparent fondness for triviality at first suggests.

Let me present a few examples of this apparently haphazard archeology:

I hate to confess
sometimes I feel
volunteered upon
by a formal quality of sky
cowed trust
(“To Friend-tree of Counted Days”)

Card apologizes here for identifying with the expansive sentiment Gerard Manley Hopkins experienced when faced with certain natural patterns which, for the Jesuit poet, reflected the perfection of divine order, and which he referred to as inscape. Card’s “cowed trust” and “formal quality of sky” very likely alludes to Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”: “Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” The allusion suggest a much more obviously lyrical sentiment than Card’s deliberately casual delivery leads the reader to believe; “To Friend-tree of Counted Days”, as the title indicates, is a perfectly recognizable elegiac meditation on a tree and the seasons:

I wish I was not
on a burning tree
but a tree that was
really on fire

The apparent contradiction betrays the implicit metaphorical value of the “burning” tree, whose leaves are turning red in autumn, in which season the poem ends:

What is there to counter
but fall? (emphasis mine)

The idea of countering fall implies a resistance to inexorable change, while the immediately preceding lines echo the theatrum mundi topos, then the End of the Line (death’s “barrier”), the cyclical shape of the seasons, and Horace’s carpe diem:

How long is the comedy
about me?

How far to the barrier
I know?

What is there to sing
but a round?

What is there to seize
but a while?

What is there to counter
but fall?

Even the epigraph to “To Friend-tree of Counted Days” insists on the poem’s preoccupation with sublime elegiac sentiment, quoting the French poet Rene Char. Another atypical reference for American poetry, Char is known for his singularly humorless oracular obscurity. Card playfully presents his hermetic epigraph in English translation, but leaves the title of Char’s poem, “Effacement du peuplier,” in French. The title translates as “The poplar’s erasure” —another elegy.

Say fromage! (or, Vengeance is ours)
Card displays his relationship to France in other poems. His author’s note specifies that the poem “My Donkey, My Dear” “is based on a French nursery rhyme, and the same poem is dedicated to Claire and Olivier Brossard, French friends of Card, who has also produced idiosyncratic translations of contemporary French poets such as Philippe Beck. “Le soleil et le police dog” playfully mixes the two languages. Less obvious is the grammatical meditation at the heart of a two-line “Poem”:

London, it is very ornery
Heathrow Airport, it is a nudist colony

In English, these sentences sound strange. We may read them as appositions: “London” and “it is very ornery” have nothing to do with each other; the name of the city has been randomly inserted at the head of an unrelated proposition. One might otherwise view these as a form of anacoluthon displaying a duplicated grammatical subject: London = it; Heathrow Airport = it. This syntactic arrangement in fact mimics that of the French native speaker with approximate English. In colloquial spoken French, these duplications are so frequent that they do not register as solecisms, though they are discouraged in written French. “Le francais, c’est une langue difficile” translates literally as “French, it is a difficult language”; a sentence like this one is banal among French speakers. The hypothesis is all the more plausible since this “Frenchman” is making disparaging comments about England.

In light of these observations, the title of Card’s book calls for a rereading. The title could refer to a person occupying the English monarchy’s position of Foreign Secretary. It could also designate a Foreign Secretary in the employ of any country, but who happens to be English. But the title might also suggest a paradoxical Englishman who is also a foreigner in England. Hence the poem “Afternoon of a Foreigner,” which parodies Mallarme’s “Afternoon of a Faun”: here, the foreigner is naturally excluded and vilified, as though his foreign speech were unpleasant to the ear:

You ought to learn English and carry a gun
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You may not enter to talk for the night
You may not enter to talk
or enter to rest

All of these secretive games involve matters of translation, a recurrent preoccupation throughout the collection. “Afternoon of a Foreigner” mentions a Roman

about to
Hail / Farewell                                 Hail / Farewell

The explanation for this apparently unmotivated statement, apart from an association betweenhail and the rain mentioned in a previous line, lies in the word vale, which in Latin means both hello and goodbye. Likewise the word salut in French, whose equivocation Rimbaud famously exploited in A Season in Hell: “Cela s’est passé. Je sais aujourd’hui saluer la beaute” (“This occurred. Today I know how to greet / bid farewell to beauty”). “Ursus Memento Mori” plays with both the Latin ursus (bear) and the meanings of the word bear in English. At the end of the poem, Card offers a translation of a pair of latin verses:

Ad astra per aspera, ursi
non numero nisi serenas
To the stars, through hardship
I only mark the hours of the day. (p. 95)

In fact, this is a mistranslation disguising a series of puns. The phrase horas non numero nisi serenas is one of many mottoes written on sundials, but it is already a pun, translating the idiomatic “I count only the sunny hours”, but also the literal “I count only the hours of contentment” (serenas, serene). I have found it translated as “I count only the bright hours,” a fine way to import the ambiguity into English. But Card’s Latin verses replace horas with ursi, so that his lines, translated literally, mean To the stars, through hardship, I only mark the bears of the day. Earlier in the poem, Card attempts another deliberately mistranslated variation on his parodic ursi non numero nisi serenas: “The bear does not speak against the sun.”

These Bears of Time, of course, are not Carebears. This memento mori reminds us repeatedly that we are each one doomed to die: the word “bear” and its many variations disguise a singularly insistent meditation on mortality, wrapped in dense layers of multilingual puns, many of them variations on familiar proverbs in various languages. The hardships mentioned in the Latin are, of course, all of the things in life that are so hard to . . . bear, as the first line of the poem reminds us: “The bears are too much to suffer.” The visual presentation of the poem is odd; a number of words are littered to the left of certain lines:

Come vary my iron plate
bear.        Stand a little closer to me
bear.        Now a little further
bear.        [. . .]

As these positional adjustments suggest, one might say that these marginal jottings are bearing to the left. Or just a little more to the right. Move back. There, you’ve got it: don’t move: say cheese.

But what do bears have to do with time? The bare truth of the matter is that we are all going to croak, like frogs. The French word for bears, ours (pronounced “oorss”) derives directly from the Latin ursus. But the French have a great deal of difficulty with the aspirated h of the English language. Card’s bears might therefore be those of a Frenchman mispronouncing, à la française, the English word hours.

Some readers may find these puns difficult to, er, tolerate. Card himself notes that he can “hardly [barely?] suppress [his] gorge,” which might be a mistranslation of the French j’ai du mal à ne pas rendre gorge, i.e. it’s hard for me to keep from vomiting. Personally, I find these half-hidden word-games delightful.

Friend, Lover, Foreigner, Pariah: the Poet’s many roles
In “Afternoon of a foreigner,” Card exploits the role of the poet-pariah, the troublingly different social element, the eternal Foreigner. Similarly, the final poem opens with “A boy lifting a foreign whistle,” which strikes an ultimately melancholic concluding note. A similar sense of difference and exclusion marks some of the most intense pieces in Duties, such as “Shipfilm,” in which the poet seems to pursue friends who flee from him, poignantly echoing Wyatt’s “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”:

There might be friends along a shore
I will not know unless I follow

There might be friends below the water
Moving toward the other shore

I need to see where they are moving
And why they hurry from me

The forsaken poet then walks into the ocean. Card also invests an inverse role: that of the poet-seducer, the insatiable erotomaniac, who, unlike the repellent pariah, attracts irresistibly. The “Libertine” is featured in several poems sprinkled with allusions to the Don Juan tradition, or to the story of Bluebeard, reimagined as a universal emblem of the unrepentant lover:

Your own colossus I’ll invite
To you, you, libertine
With your beard of friends
You and you and you and you
Speak loudly and stay
Speak loudly to us and stay with us
To see us on our way
To nothing, together

The Libertine’s “beard of friends” designates him as Bluebeard’s symbolic double whose many “wives” represent the lover’s many conquests. Here, Card temporarily fills the avenging role of the “colossus,” the Stone Commander who dines with Don Juan and drags him to hell. The Commander-poet passes sentence, aiming his deadly stone index finger at anonymous members of his audience, as though every reader were a Bluebeard or a Libertine: “You and you and you and you.” Those who “stay” with the Commander are indeed soon sent on their way to “nothing.”

These two roles, the Lover (or the Friend) and the Friendless Foreigner, have a symmetric relationship throughout the book. While the lonely poet of “Shipfilm” walks into the sea in search of friends, in the “Libertine’s Punishment,” we watch as the poet-libertine is “grabbed by the arm” and dragged or sent to the bottom of the sea, in another variation of the Don Juan myth. The poet’s stone heart, like the cement shoes of a Mob victim, sends him to the bottom of the sea:

I was grabbed by the arm near the highway
Then grabbed by the arm near the shore
Until grabbed by the leg near the stone
at the ocean’s floor

The progression suggests a kidnapping, followed by manhandling at the docks, ending in a post-mortem farewell.

The attraction to figures like Bluebeard and Don Juan (particularly via Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, another favorite and recurrent reference) suggests a fascination with folklore and collective myth. “The Sleeping Monk of Innisfree,” for instance, refers to an Irish folktale closely akin to the Rip Van Winkle story, in which a particularly sinful monk of Innisfree gets lost after too much drinking, and awakens many years later in a kneeling position: he had slept (or prayed . . . ) so long that his knees had worn two deep ruts in the stone where he had knelt. Card also enjoys echoing proverbs or quotations which have been absorbed into collective memory. “Once a liar, always a judge” revises the proverbial expression “once a priest, always a priest” and its many variants, but the two terms imply hypocrisy rather than self-identity: those who judge are no better than those they judge; liars are always judges (of other people). In “The Merman’s Gift,” whose title hints at dialogue with another literary, and possibly folkloric source, Card hilariously reinvents JFK’s famous saying, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”:

Proverb not
you are your friend’s own family

but you are your friend’s own family
robinson

This comical proverb equates friendship and shipwreck, as though we wash up on the shores of our friends. But the shipwreck scenario also suggests an ambiguous relationship to friendship borne out in many other poems: “The Rondel Friendship” hints at the power and ambivalence at work in every relationship (“a friend is only a machine / delivering consent”). Every friendship may become a friendshipwreck.

Portrait of the Artist as Professor Cuthbert Calculus
I’ve hardly scratched the surface of Card’s collection of literary allusions. “Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death,” as the title indicates, fuses almost direct quotation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling with a meditation on marriage and fidelity; “I am the Teacher of Athletes” is a quote from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; “The Giant and the Hunchback” may refer to a scene in Rabelais’ Quart livre, or to a play by Alfred Jarry called Par la taille featuring a Giant and a Hunchback; “Yield to Total Elation” is the title of Achilles G. Rizzoli’s series of posthumously published drawings of an imaginary world exhibition; “Studies of Sensation and Event” is the title of an obscure volume by the poet Ebenezer Jones (1843). Many more allusions probably escape me.

Card evidently inherits no canon, but invents his own. One might compare this relationship to the literary past to the foreigner’s relationship to a language and culture “from the outside.” In France, scholars and writers often quote Proust’s remark that the great writer reinvents his own language and makes it into a foreign language, an affirmation popularized by Gilles Deleuze. Card’s handcrafted tradition, distorted proverbs and often cockeyed syntax suggest that he would take Proust’s affirmation quite literally: I’ve already observed how his language often resembles that of the ESL speaker (English as a second language), as though poetry according to Card bore a kinship to flawed translation, or more generally to a kind of perpetual process of happy or tragic misunderstandings. In “Hey Friend,” “A friend says to a corpse, ‘I can sayanything to you, and you can understand,’” denouncing friendship as a kind of one-way communication. (As it turns out, “Hey Friend” concludes “I am about to show you that you cannever have seen me, anywhere”: this friend is anonymous). The friend’s message to a corpse closely resembles Card’s translation into table-ese in “A Chair is Not a Singing Man”:

I know you hear this
“beef needs salt”
But table understands
“                        ”

Duties is littered with similar situations of mistransmission, non-transmission or foggy perception, as if all of this poetry were spoken (and heard) from very far away. The initial phrase of “You jacket!,” a kind of insult-poem, appears in this light as a misspoken jackass, while “Ursus memento mori” resembles an assemblage of translation errors. In the title-poem “Duties of an English Foreign Secretary,” the poet repeats, “I only hear those friends sawing in the fog,” and evokes people who

face perform
the words “light company at four”
and a “mall to leaf through eye-correction
literature at eight” . . .

To “face perform” suggests exaggerated facial expressions destined for a lip-reader who seems unable to decipher a clear message. This lip-reader may be myopic, since this “eye-correction / literature” seems appropriate for the poet’s inability to see his friends through the “fog.”

“Overheard in the Bathysphere” is explicitly written around the conceit of the mistransmitted message. A bathysphere is a submersible device for exploring the depths of the sea (bathus, from the Greek, signifies the deep). This underwater excursion echoes the deep sea poet of “The Libertine’s Punishment” and “Shipfilm” (but the deep-sea voyage is also a companion to the voyage into the clouds evoked in “Gone to Earth”). Inside the bathysphere, sounds seem distorted by the water and the acoustics of the submersible:

Actionable wrong ear
Delay, I thought you said a man field

Like Hergé’s Tryphon Tournesol (alias Cuthbert Calculus, according to the English translation), the poet’s “wrong ear” has apparently misheard the word “minefield” (the poem’s “municipal axe” might likewise refer to “municipal acts”). “I thought you said you were in danger,” the poet later misunderstands. Even the title might be fruitfully misunderstood. The poet mentions an “observation tower / at cross-bathos / with applauding audience,” hinting at an alternate etymology according to which bathysphere derives not from bathus, but from bathos, a Greek concept which corresponds to a sudden shift from the sublime to the trivial or absurd, producing a punchline-effect that comically deflates the initial high-flown gesture. In this sense, the poet finds himself enclosed inside a bubble that makes everything appear absurd or trivial, not unlike a high observation tower from which grand human affairs resemble those of an ant-colony. To be at “cross-bathos” resembles being at “cross-purposes,” working in contrary directions. By analogy, what seems important to so many appears trivial to the bathos-sphere’s inhabitant—and vice-versa, since Card regularly laces his jokes with melancholy.

This reversibility of pathos and bathos might lie somewhere at the heart of Card’s writing, to the extent that it returns us to our initial observations concerning the Sydney Dobell epigraph, which seems at once to lampoon and offer homage to the ridiculed 19th-century poet. Card’s delightful, oddball humor often seems to apologize, as in “To Friend-Tree of Counted Days,” for the book’s intense lyricism. But the book ultimately best rewards the reader sensitive at once to our sad comedy, and to our farcical tragedy.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012