Uncategorized

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Selected Poems and Translations
of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Selected by Vidyan Ravinthiran
New York Review of Books ($18)

by Graziano Krätli

The premature deaths of Eunice De Souza in 2017 and Meena Alexander one year later have significantly thinned the ranks of anglophone Indian poetry, depriving the world of two major women writers whose birth dates straddled 1947, the watershed year of Indian independence. Born that same year, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra stands out as a poet from that generation whose work continues to find new publishing venues and engage new readers, both in India and abroad.

The latest and most prestigious of these is the NYRB Poets series, now thirty titles strong, which features authors from around the world and includes such names as Apollinaire, Dante, Osip Mandelstam, Henri Michaux, Silvina Ocampo, and Walt Whitman. Until Mehrotra joined these ranks, the only other Indian was A.K. Ramanujan (1929-93), whose contribution showcased his achievement as translator of classical Tamil poetry rather than as poet in his own right. Mehrotra has also appeared in the NYRB pantheon as a translator—in his case of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir, whose irreverent and provocative songs Mehrotra rejuvenated in a version that tops those of many illustrious predecessors (Robert Bly, Pound, and Tagore included). Indeed, for originality and inventiveness, the selection from Songs of Kabir (2011) outshines the other translations featured in the book under review, including versions from the first- and second-century Prākrit of The Absent Traveller (originally published in 1991), and from twentieth-century Hindi (Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala,” Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral), Bengali (Shakti Chattopadhyay), and Gujarati (Pavankumar Jain).

As Vidyan Ravinthiran explains in his editorial note, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Selected Poems and Translations draws from two previous volumes of Mehrotra’s collected poems, one published by Penguin (India) in 2014 and the other by Giramondo (Australia) in 2016. Compared with either of them, this book includes a substantial amount of new work, namely a translation, an elegy for Eunice De Souza, a poem inspired by the tragic death of the poet’s sister, and the sixty-page long sequence “Daughters of Jacob Bridge.” Overall, Ravinthiran’s scrupulous and discerning selection has produced a book that shows, more clearly than a collected edition, Mehrotra’s development and refinement over the past half-century.

Such a process begins in the late 1960s, with a style that is subtly affected by post-war Surrealism and protest poetry, influences that Ravinthiran’s inclusion of two uncollected poems from 1972-74 makes explicit. The second in particular, “Ballad of the Black Feringhee,” is reminiscent of Ginsberg’s “America” in the litany of blunt statements that the poet directs at his own country (“India I was born in the year of your independence,” “India where’s my horoscope,” etc.). By the time Mehrotra published his first collection, however, these influences had been tamed and woven into a richer tapestry, as the five poems from Nine Enclosures (1976) show clearly. The antiquarian extravaganza of “The Sale” reveals a penchant for enumeration, referencing, and cataloging that also emerges from “Songs of the Good Surrealist,” “Index of First Lines,” “Continuities,” and later poems. If we consider the descriptive and normative functions of lists, inventories, maps, and other instruments of colonial rule, Mehrotra’s use of the Surrealistic technique of incongruous and provocative juxtaposition (famously envisioned by Lautréamont as the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table”) undermines and subverts the taxonomic order implied in these poems.

A similar subversive tendency, although supported by different means, characterizes Mehrotra’s descriptive and narrative poems (and most of Mehrotra’s poems are descriptive or narrative to a degree), where a punctilious, evocative visualization (“the air, dry and silvery / At the entrance, is moist and sea-green, furry / To the touch,” from “The Roys”) often leads to a destabilizing or unsettling close. In the most condensed example of this manner (“January,” from Mehrotra’s second collection, Distance in Statute Miles, 1982), a deft camerawork takes the reader from the exterior to the interior of a life in just four telegraphic lines:

The gate wide open; chairs on the lawn;
Circular verandas; a narrow kitchen;
High-ceilinged rooms; arches; alcoves; skylights.
My house luminous; my day burnt to ash.

In his best poems, Mehrotra proves to be a master storyteller with a peculiar taste for the uncanny; this is what makes his poetry a constant pleasure for the reader and an endless, delightful challenge for the critic. Images or impressions from the poet’s past or from his readings, kindled by close observation, often interact kaleidoscopically to convey the eerie impression of a life lived in the flesh as well as in the mind, of which the “house” and the “library” are apt and interchangeable representations. “We belong to the houses we live in” is the spectral, closing line of a poem that begins “Who remembers my dentist father / Now that even his patients are dead” (“Hoopoe”). And “Borges,” an invocation to the muse of all literary writers (“Insomnia brings lucidity, / And a borrowed voice sets the true one / Free”) ends not surprisingly with a call to “lead me . . . to the labyrinth of the earthly / Library.”

Similarly, “The House” invokes various literary landscapes (Grimms' fairy tales, Victorian murder mystery, the golden age of Hindi cinema, and modern psychological thrillers) to evoke—or dissimulate—a very personal memory. Employing the same visual technique featured in “January,” the poem progresses from an exterior view, a stone cottage in the middle of a forest, to an interior suggesting abandonment and decay. Here, however, the striking element is not the bats in the rafters, or their “dung on the floor,” but a dentist’s coat hanging from a nail and “smelling pleasantly / Of chloroform.” The reader has no sooner started asking some obvious questions (why would a dentist practice in the wilderness, and what makes the smell of chloroform pleasant?) than a different imagery raises new questions. Do the muddy sandals, the smoky eyes, and the dentist’s coat belong to the same man who, in the final couplet, “passes before me / In the cheval-glass”? An exquisite example of Empsonian ambiguity, the image combines the occurrence of a phenomenon and its phantasmagorical residue by means of the expression “passes before,” whose spatial and temporal meaning suggests, simultaneously, an apparition passing in front of the poet (i.e., between him and the mirror), and a father preceding his son through the looking-glass (and onto the otherworld).

This thorough and exhaustive selection may not gain Mehrotra’s poetry “a worldwide audience,” as its editor understandably hopes, but it has the potential for securing this major Indian poet an enthusiastic and devoted North American readership.


Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Reflections on The Book of Tea
by Okakura Kakuzo, 1906

by James P. Lenfestey

While removing books from shelves to repaint our family living room a few weeks ago, I rediscovered what was my mother’s copy of a 1956 edition of The Book of Tea. Mother was a skilled gardener and flower arranger; I saved the book from her collection for its beautiful design and feel, but had never read it. I decided I would mail it to a new friend to give to his friend, a traveling tea master—but first I sat down to glance at its contents. I slid the book from its sleeve wrapped with Japanese paper, a light moss green. My fingertips glanced along the woven silk binding to the wrapped Japanese paperboard covers, the creamy endpapers, the almost stiff pages, the inkbrush illustrations. All these drew me slowly into Kakuzo’s succinct descriptions of a two-tradition/two-continent history of philosophy, poetry, art, botany, religion, architecture, tea ceremony practice and flower arranging art, which ended only with the satisfying sadness of completion after several mornings alone with his thoughts.

The book’s stillness and understanding, useful in 1906 and after two World Wars, seem to me helpful now in coping with the unfolding dimensions of our Age of Climate Crisis and now of COVID-19. The quotations below were especially arresting to me, texts I have set beneath each chapter heading centered in boldface, as in the original. Enjoy—best perhaps with seven cups of tea.


THE CUP OF HUMANITY

Teaism is a cult founded upon the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.

. . . when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs of our quenchless search for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse.

Why not consecrate us to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm steam of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotze, the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should not supplement the other.

The East and West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life . . . Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.


THE SCHOOLS OF TEA

Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.

With Luwuh in the middle of the eighth century we have the first apostle of tea. He was born in an age when Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism were seeking mutual synthesis. The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular. Luwuh, a poet, saw in the tea service the same harmony and order which reigned through all things.

Lotung, a T’ang poet, wrote of the 7 cups . . . The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness; the third searches my barren entrails but finds therein five thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration – all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realm of the immortals. The seventh cup—ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves.

Among the Buddhists, the southern Zen sect, which incorporated so much of Taoist doctrines, formulated an elaborate ritual of tea. . . . It was this Zen ritual which finally developed into the Tea-ceremony of Japan in the 15th century.

The tea-room was an oasis in the dreary waste of existence where weary travelers could meet to drink from the common spring of art appreciation.


TAOISM AND ZENNISM

Teaism was Taoism in disguise.

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observed, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade — all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or design. But after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages . . . spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools, and ended by making the hearer wise.

The Tao is in the passage rather than the Path. It is the spirit of cosmic change. . . . It recoils upon itself like the dragon, the beloved symbol of the Taoists. It folds and unfolds as do the clouds.

Chinese historians have always spoken of Taoism as “the art of being in the world,” for It deals with the present . . . The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians and the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of worry and woe.

In art the importance of the same [Taoist] principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up to the full measure of your aesthetic emotion.

One Zen master defined Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky.

To the transcendental insight of the Zen, words were but an incumbrance to thought . . . . the whole idea of Teaism is the result of this Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life. Taoism furnished the basis of aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.


THE TEA ROOM

The Abode of Fancy. The Abode of Vacancy. The Abode of the Unsymmetrical.

The simplicity and purity of the tea-room resulted from emulation of the Zen monastery. . . .

. . . the roji, the garden path that leads from the machiai to the tea-room, signified the first stage of illumination – the passage into self-illumination. The roji was intended to break connection with the outside world, and to produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of aestheticism in the tea-room itself.

What Rikiu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural too.

Zennism, with the Buddhist theory of evanescence and its demands of the mastery of spirit over matter, recognized the house only as a temporary refuge for the body. The body itself was but a hut in the wilderness, a flimsy shelter made by tying together the grasses that grew around – when these ceased to be bound together they again became resolved into the original waste.

Art, to be fully appreciated, must be true to contemporaneous life. It is not that we should ignore the claims of posterity, but that we should try to assimilate them into our consciousness.

In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence.

The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it truly a sanctuary against the vexations of the outer world.


The Red Parrot by Ito Jakuchu

ART APPRECIATION

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colours; the pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

The masters are immortal because their love and fears live in us over and over. It is rather the soul, than the hand, the man than the technique, which appeals to us, – the more human the call the deeper our response.

Nothing is more hallowing that the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity but words cannot voice his delight, for his eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art is akin to religion and ennobles mankind. It is this which makes a masterpiece something sacred.

It is much to be regretted that so much of the apparent enthusiasm of art in the present day has no foundation in real feeling.

We are destroying art in destroying the beautiful in life. Would that some great wizard might from the stem of society shape a mighty harp whose strings would resound to the touch of genius.


FLOWERS

In joy or in sadness, flowers are our constant friends. . . . We have even attempted to speak in the language of flowers . . . It frightens one to conceive of a world bereft of their presence.

When we are laid low in the dust it is they who linger in sorrow over our graves.

. . . the supreme idol, ourselves! Our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him. We boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is Matter that has enslaved us. What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement!

Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars standing in the garden, nodding your heads to the bees as they sing of the dew and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you?

Why were the flowers born so beautiful yet so hapless? . . . The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer.

The ideal lover of flowers is he who visits them in their native haunts, like Taoyuen-ming who sat before a broken bamboo fence in converse with the wild Chrysanthemum.

Change is the only Eternal – why not as welcome Death as Life?

The tea-master deems his duty ended with the selection of the flowers, and leaves them to tell their own story.


TEA-MASTERS

In religion the Future is behind us. In art the Present is eternal.

He only who has lived with beauty can die beautifully.


THE BOOK OF TEA, by Okakura Kakuzo, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont–Tokyo, Japan, ©1956. Originally published in 1906. Illustrations at head of each chapter taken from ink drawings of Sesshu (1420-1506), the greatest of Japanese painters in the same Zen tradition that inspired the tea ceremony. Typography and book design by Kaoru Ogimi. Printed in Japan.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Longer

Michael Blumlein
Tor ($15.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

Longer, by the late San Francisco Bay Area writer Michael Blumlein, offers a fantastic journey to both the stars and to places in the heart. An award-winning writer, Blumlein also worked in the medical field, and though there is medical terminology and some SF jargon in Longer, this last work is filled with the wonder many have come to expect from classic science fiction.

Cav and his wife Gunjita work for a large pharmaceutical company and are on assignment in space. They both have “juved,” which gives them the opportunity to grow young again—back to their twenties—but there is a limit to how many times they are allowed to do this. Meanwhile, something very old and alien has been discovered, an extraterrestrial object that just might tell us something about our place in the universe.

The book is a fun read for those who like stories set in space; it is also replete with social themes. Cav and Gunjita’s interracial marriage provides Blumlein an opportunity to explore many subjects, but Longer is not a diatribe about race or class or injustice. Instead it is about love, science, and wonder, which in fact may be a welcome change for some readers. Not being able to journey to the stars is one of the biggest disappointments of modern times, though it is overshadowed by humanity’s continuing propensity for war and misdistribution of wealth and resources—which has kept some contemporary science fiction writers more earthbound than in days past.

Despite its big and classic themes, Longer is relevant and at times even lyrical, as when Blumlein writes, “He stood in the cupola, gazing at the Milky Way, observing in himself the balance between what he saw and what he felt, between the sensation of cold and his perception of the sensation, and in the latter the balance between awe and terror, which shifted as all things shifted, and which he had experienced his whole life when gazing at the stars and the infinity of space.” Sadly there will be no more from this award-winning writer, but there is a lot he has left that will take us to the future.


Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Spring 2020

INTERVIEWS

Money is a Country: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel discusses her new novel, The Glass Hotel, which is partly based on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Interviewed by Allan Vorda.

All and Always Balance
Kyle Harvey and Jeff Alessandrelli in Conversation

Two poets discuss their work, their community, integrity of self, and the challenges of being a creator in this world.

STORIES OF SELF

Ongoing Arguments with Sarah Manguso
by Scott F. Parker
The river of narrative time isn’t the water but the movement: Sarah Manguso delves into the value of the diary in the final installment of Stories of Self.

Twilight of the Selves: A Walk with David Shields
by Scott F. Parker
Take a walk with the polyvocal David Shields in this, the second in a three-part author conversation series called Stories of Self.

Skepticism and Charitability: A Coffee with Dessa
by Scott F. Parker
We are pleased to present a three-part author conversation series, Stories of Self. Today’s subject is "the Bertrand Russell of hip-hop" herself, Dessa.

FEATURES

The Riches of Kazakh Literature, Part Two: Poetry
by Timothy Walsh
Kazakh poetry is not something new on the world stage; even though it has not gotten the recognition it deserves in the West, it is a poetry with deep roots that predates the founding of the United States by a millennium or so.

The Riches of Kazakh Literature, Part One: Fiction
by Timothy Walsh
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a few Kazakh writers were “discovered” by the West—but this only scratched the surface of the deep literary ore running through this storied crossroads of the world.

Reflections on The Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo, 1906
by James P. Lenfestey
As the coronavirus crisis unfolds, James P. Lenfestey finds wisdom in a 1906 work dedicated to tea.

MIXED GENRE

About Repulsion
Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier
About Repulsion, an EP by Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, is a diaphanous six-track exploration of power dynamics, the intersection of the quotidian and the profound, and the way in which technology creates a fragmented existence with edges of clarity and isolation. Reviewed by Ellen Boyette

POETRY REVIEWS

In Her Feminine Sign
Dunya Mikhail
Written both in Arabic and English, Dunya Mikhail’s In Her Feminine Sign creates a dialogue between East and West and a reflection of the Iraqi poet's exile. Reviewed by Julia Stein

Frayed Light
Yonatan Berg
Berg’s poems presents a personal story beyond and behind the news: the experiences of a young man who grew up in a West Bank settlement and served as a combat soldier before becoming a poet and bibliotherapist. Reviewed by Gwen Ackerman

Utopia Pipe Dream Memory
Anna Gurton-Wachter
Gurton-Wachter’s debut collection, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, is a feminist affirmation of the multivocality of writing, the force of artistic communities, and the visionary as aesthetic principle. Reviewed by Isabel Sobral Campos

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman
Edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell
Kaufman’s work is lush, romantic, and surreal, informed by jazz and by love and by the gritty milieu of a post-World War II San Francisco. Reviewed by Christopher Luna

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Selected Poems and Translations
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
One of the most celebrated Indian poets gets a coveted NYRB volume which includes not only his own poetry, but essential translations of ancient Indian verse. Reviewed by Graziano Krätli

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Figuring
Maria Popova
Astonishing in heft (almost 600 pages), in scope (lives, works, and milieu of selected European and American scientists, artists, and public intellectuals), and in articulation (attending as much to language and imaginative association as biographical fact), Maria Popova's Figuring is an ode to the quality of astonishment itself. Reviewed by Cindra Halm

Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions
David Stephen Calonne
This academic study highlights the poetic work of an important literary figure, one who found her own voice and path and serves as an admirable model for all artists. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

The Beautiful Ones
Prince
Culled from the late musician’s vast archive, The Beautiful Ones is a testament to Prince’s talent and vulnerability. Reviewed by Tatiana Ryckman

Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham
Edited by Laura Kuhn
A handsomely produced book, Love, Icebox consists of unashamedly personal letters that Cage posted to his future life partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, in the early 1940s. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
Selected with an Introduction by Paul Kingsnorth
Wendell Berry
Culled from more than a dozen books, The World-Ending Fire has been thoughtfully assembled by Paul Kingsnorth, and serves as an excellent introduction to Berry’s thought. Reviewed by Robert Zaller

FICTION REVIEWS

His Father’s Disease: Stories
Aruni Kashyap
The ten stories in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease discuss the struggles of finding community and acceptance, whether as a result of sexuality, relocation, or cultural misunderstandings. Reviewed by Michael MacBride

Subduction
Kristen Millares Young
In this debut novel, Kristen Millares Young explores the layers of community encountered by her cipher of a protagonist, who views the society of Neah Bay with the eye of a detached anthropologist. Reviewed by Douglas Cole

Longer
Michael Blumlein
Longer, by the late San Francisco Bay Area writer Michael Blumlein, offers a fantastic journey to both the stars and to places in the heart. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

What Shirt Color is Left?

Fado, Salazar, Pessoa, and Saramago
A Report from Lisbon’s DIS/QUIET Literary Program

by Mike Schneider

Lisbon, aka Lisboa, lies at the expansive mouth of the Tagus River—one of the best big-ship harbors in the world. It has been home to a sea-faring culture since before the Middle Ages and to ship captains like Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 was the first European to complete the perilous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. His journey to India opened trade for cinnamon, ginger, and other spices such as prized tellicherry, the King of Peppers, from the Malabar Coast.

From this commercial bonanza, as we learn in school, Portugal became a world power. Its empire grew to include Brazil, from which Afro-Brazilian traditions of music developed that in the 19th century seeped back across the Atlantic to Lisbon. This musical gumbo, a byproduct of the slave trade, became known as fado. At least a couple hundred years old and often thought of as Lisbon’s traditional music, fado — the Portuguese word for “fate” — can be compared, imperfectly, to the blues. Sung by fadistas accompanied by Portuguese guitars (think 12-string mandolin) fado expresses unattained desire, deep longing, and passionate sorrow.

Not well known—according to ethnomusicologist Rui Vieira Nery, who spoke at the 2019 DIS/QUIET Literary Program—is that fado’s deep yearning for something better, something more than reality is also, inseparably, an expression of radical politics. By the late 19th century, this included Marx, anarchism, and the union movement. By that time, says Nery, Portugal’s leading historian of fado, “fado was essentially a working-class song—very politically committed. You had fados talking about Kropotkin, Bakunin, Marx—and even Lenin later on.”

Now a recognized style of world music as well as a Lisbon tourist attraction, fado arose from a subculture of poverty and violence, adds Nery, in sailors’ bars and brothels, in the back streets of Lisbon’s harbor night-life. Students and intellectuals mixed with working-class Lisbonians, men and women, leading to, for instance, a fado from 1900 that begins: "May 1st!/Forward! Forward!/O soldiers of freedom!/Forward and destroy/National borders and property."

It comes as not much of a surprise, then, that fado went into hiding, became an underground culture, when Antonio Salazar came to power. Taking control in the late 1920s—through a military coup that overthrew a shaky republic—his regime lasted until Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” of the mid-1970s. Less well known than Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, and more subtle in wielding tools of oppression, Salazar was the 20th century’s most enduring dictator.

A well educated, staunchly Catholic, fiercely anti-communist professor of economics and life-long bachelor, Salazar gets historical credit for sagaciously managing Portugal’s economy, which had been on the brink of ruin before a 1926 coup. Harry Potter fans can unknowingly be reminded of Portugal when they think about “Salazar Slytherin.” Not only the reptilian sound of the words led J. K. Rowling to this name for her ultimate antagonist; Rowling taught English as a foreign language in Portugal in the early ’90s and drew on Portugal’s fascist past in creating her fictional world.

As in Spain, where people are still learning, literally, where the bodies of Franco-ist state terrorism are buried, Portugual is still documenting repression during nearly fifty years of Salazar’s regime. How did it happen that most democratic institutions dissolved? The story unfolds in an effectively curated exhibit of photographs, audio, video and original documents at Lisbon’s Aljube Museum of Resistance and Freedom. A Moorish word meaning “waterless well,” the Aljube is a gray, four-story building behind the main cathedral in central Lisbon—almost unnoticeable except for its imposing iron-barred door. Once a Muslim prison, a jail during the Inquisition, the Aljube re-opened as a political prison in 1928. In cells barely big enough for one person, the PIDE (International and State Defense Police) held Lisbonians for interrogation.

Of the more than 3,000 people brought in over several decades, usually for short stretches of a few days that served as firm warning, some were never seen again. Usually identified by informants as “enemies of the state,” often on the basis of overheard conversation, these detainees underwent electric shocks, sleep deprivation, beatings and isolation.

Pessoa’s Disquiet

Until the last months of his life, none of this registered in the literary work of Fernando Pessoa. Still relatively obscure outside the Portuguese-speaking world, Pessoa has gained wide regard since the 1980s as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Until he died in November 1935, likely from a used-up liver, he lived in Lisbon amid the nascent Salazar regime’s increasing authoritarianism.

Pessoa’s most original work, The Book of Disquiet, is a gathering of disconnected ruminations he wrote over more than two decades and left unpublished in a steamer trunk. “This book is the autobiography of someone who never existed,” said Pessoa, writing as Vicente Guedes, one of his many “heteronyms”—fictitious personalities who spoke through him. At various times, Pessoa used more than seventy of these heteronyms in his writing, providing many of them with a distinct backstory.

You can think of them as adult imaginary friends, said Richard Zenith, a leading Pessoa translator and critic who also spoke at the 2019 DIS/QUIET program. The heteronyms, he said, are a mode of self-expression and self-expansion. “They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own,” wrote Pessoa as himself, “and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.”

Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock comes to mind as a parallel, expressing a related sense of self-alienation. Insistently paradoxical, self-abnegating non-affirmation characterizes The Book of Disquiet: “I am the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins that someone, in the midst of building them, grew tired of even wanting to build.” Even to regard this as an attitude seems overly affirmative. “Anything that involves action, be it war or reasoning is false, and anything that involves abdication is false too. If only I knew how not to act and how not to abdicate from action either!”

Seldom does an exclamation point exclaim with greater indifference. For a writer whose writing abjures personality, seeming almost to flee in fear of it—and in this way, ironically, attains its distinction—it’s marvelously apropos that pessoa is the Portuguese word for person. “My scorn for everything is so great that I despise myself; for since I despise other people’s suffering, I also despise my own, and thus I crush my own suffering beneath the weight of my disdain.”

Despite such grandiloquent misanthropy, something that sounds almost like civic pride, if not happiness, radiates on occasion from The Book of Disquiet—usually in passages observing the sun and sky, rain and clouds. “Nothing in the countryside or in nature can give me anything to equal the ragged majesty of the calm moonlit city seen from Graca or São Pedro de Alcântara. For me no flowers can match the endlessly varied colors of Lisbon in the sunlight.”

Frequently compared to San Francisco as a seaport city of hills, vistas, morning fog, and streetcars, Lisbon is a changeable presence in The Book of Disquiet, often vividly rendered. This becomes more apparent in the book’s second phase, begun in 1929, when Bernardo Soares, a different heteronym, still pungently embittered if more connected to worldly reality, takes over from Guedes:

The trams growl and clang around the edges of the square, like large, yellow, mobile matchboxes, into which a child has stuck a spent match at an angle to act as a mast; as they set off they emit a loud, iron-hard whistle. The pigeons wandering about around the central statue are like dark, ever-shifting crumbs at the mercy of a scattering wind.

While writing a trunk-full of pages that didn’t see print until well after his death, Pessoa made a living translating business documents. His flair with words in this professional capacity led to an interesting run-in with the puritanism of the Salazar administration. In 1927, the owner of the business Pessoa worked for acquired exclusive rights to market Coca-Cola in Portugal and asked Pessoa to come up with an advertising slogan.

The story is dramatized in a French short movie with a fado soundtrack, “How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal.” Long before the English-speaking world learned that “Things go better with Coke,” Pessoa arrived at Primeiro estranha-se, depois entranha-se. Literally, “First you’re estranged, then you’re entranced.” More idiomatically, “At first you don’t like it, then it possesses you”—an idea, as Lisbon’s Minister of Health noticed, that sounds like addiction. The result: Coca-Cola was banned from Portugal, which then remained until 1977—after the return of democracy—the only European country where you couldn’t enjoy “the pause that refreshes.”

A more serious intersection between Pessoa and Salazar-ist authorities occurred during the last months of his life. About politics in general, Pessoa the Lisbon citizen maintained a stance largely consistent with his Disquiet heteronyms, Guedes and Soares: indifference to worldly affairs in the manner of Oscar Wilde’s “art for art’s sake” credo. In The Book of Disquiet, politics and current events aren’t merely unmentioned, they’re scorned: “All revolutionaries are as stupid as all reformers.”

Nevertheless, friction developed between Pessoa and Salazar’s New State (Estado Novo). The sticking point was censorship. Strict laws instituted in 1926 required fado lyrics to be approved before being sung in public, reducing the social content of fado to a whimper. Likewise newspaper and magazine articles were subject to pre-screening and several Lisbon publications were shut down.

Pessoa was paying attention, and over his last few years scribbled extensive unpublished notes on Salazar as documented by University of Lisbon historian José Barreto. Though initially accepting, if never enthused, Pessoa arrived in February 1935 at a personal critical mass. Moved as much by anti-Catholicism as curtailments on free speech, the trigger was a bill in the National Assembly, promoted by the Catholic Church and Salazar, to ban Freemasonry in Portugal.

With an inflammatory article in one of Lisbon’s daily papers, Diario de Lisboa, Pessoa left no doubt of his stance not only against state-sanctioned Catholicism but also more broadly—as an unpublished note makes plain—in support of “Man’s dignity and freedom of Mind everywhere in the world.” The Salazar-promoted merger of religion with the state had brought Pessoa to the limits of his aestheticist elitism and forced a deep-seated democratic idealism into the open.

As Barreto observes, the government had been aiming to enlist Pessoa’s intellectual prestige on its side. The state ministry of propaganda (set up in September 1933, six months after Goebbels organized Germany’s Reich ministry of propaganda) had recently given him an award for his poem “Message,” which draws on the faded glory of Portuguese sea-faring and empire to limn a vision of Portugal as a world-leading nation. Probably for that reason, although without explanation, his article wasn’t censored. Titled “Secret Associations,” it ran in a special, sold-out edition of Diario de Lisboa and, at a time of rare open debate about government, had a huge impact.

“I’ve manufactured a bomb for the first time in my life,” wrote Pessoa in another unpublished note, indulging a rare tone of self-satisfaction. After the newspaper special edition appeared, a cultural weekly, O Diablo, one of few remaining public voices of democratic opposition, paid silent tribute by printing Pessoa’s photo on its front page.

In its official newspaper the government ridiculed Pessoa—even though they’d praised him a few days before. “This is what we get when we trust poets.” Articles Pessoa wrote to further explain himself were censored, and he lived the last months of his life feeling he’d been silenced. His writing from that point on became actively hostile to Salazar.

Saramago Looks Back

Forty-nine years later, in the ominous year of Orwell’s title, Pessoa came back to life. With The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago created a rich, historical tapestry of Lisbon in the 1930s, embedded in the sweep of European events, lurching toward fascism. His novel inscribes Pessoa himself, along with one of his main heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, as fictional characters.

By the time this novel was published in 1984, Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” of the 1970s had displaced Salazar’s authoritarian regime. Looking back almost fifty years, the novel tracks European events of 1936, such as the outbreak of Spain’s civil war and Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). It is a ghost story and a tale of befuddled romance as well as historical fiction.

Fundamentally, the novel is intertextually rooted in the writing and literary status of Pessoa: The central character, a medical doctor, returns to Lisbon from many years in Brazil to visit the grave of Pessoa the fictional character. Pessoa, whose funeral occurred before Reis arrives in Lisbon (so as a presence in the novel is an unexplained lingering spirit), appears at will to converse with and sometimes annoy his friend. As readers we know, though the character Reis does not, that he’s a Pessoa invention, doomed to non-being with the author’s passing. In his visits, which occur unannounced and unpredictably, Pessoa seems to goad Reis to question his existence. As Reis (or is it Pessoa?) puts it during their first conversation, “None of us is truly alive or truly dead.”

Within this unusual narrative framework and with an ironic sensibility fitting with fado and The Book of Disquiet, Saramago builds an epic comic satire. Among his targets: middle-class mannerisms, conservative Catholicism, police-state surveillance and 20th-century European fascism. In day and night, rain and sun, Reis wanders Lisbon’s streets, its harbor and neighborhoods, which Saramago renders evocatively.

In a Kafka-esque sub-plot that drives the narrative, Reis out of nowhere receives a police writ requiring him to report for interrogation. As he arrives at police headquarters, he’s perplexed:

They send him up to the second floor, and up he goes, holding the writ like a lamp before him, without it he would not know where to put his feet. This document is a sentence that cannot be read, and he is an illiterate sent to the executioner bearing the message, Chop off my head. The illiterate may go singing, because the day has dawned in glory. Nature, too, is unable to read. When the ax separates the head from his trunk the stars will fall, too late.

His questioning proceeds with understated foreboding—a scene that extends over pages and echoes Raskolnikov’s encounter with his detective inquisitor in Crime and Punishment. As he leaves the station, Reis gains surveillance by a stooge named Victor whose presence is always signaled by the reek of his onion breath.

Saramago’s tone throughout is as if society’s drift toward fascism is a comic opera that will play out because people are occupied with their love affairs and gossip and poets with convincing themselves of the greatness of their verse. Literary critic James Wood praised the tone of Saramago’s fiction “because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant.”

Gradually, the story advances toward a stadium rally for Salazar’s New State. Reis, in a fog of disappointed romance, caught in the flow of people and events, finds himself among the stadium throng. A speaker proclaims the urgency of the need for a national militia; the crowd roars approval. All that remains is to decide shirt color. Realization sets in that black (Mussolini’s Italy), brown (Hitler’s Germany), and blue (Franco’s Spain) are taken. What’s left?

Enough. Let me not reveal too much of this fascinating novel, in which one feels connection to Latin America’s “magical realism” and the meta-fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis evokes not only a perilous period of European history that calls out for wariness in 2019 America, but also many moods of an enduringly beautiful city.

Differently from but with parallels to Pessoa in 1935, Saramago eventually pushed the limits of official tolerance. Politically far left, he leaned toward anarchism and was critical of the Catholic Church, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund. His controversial 1991 novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, reinterpreted the New Testament as an indictment of God. Government disapproval of this work led him to voluntary exile in the Canary Islands for his last twenty years.

Saramago—who, like Pessoa, was not well known outside the Portuguese-speaking world—won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, which cited him as a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” Saramago died in 2010, but not before prominent literary critic Harold Bloom in 2003 dubbed him “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today.”

* * * *

Notes

Sources include: Simon Broughton, “Secret history,” New StatesmanAmerica (Oct. 11, 2007); José Barreto, “Salazar and the New State in the writings of Fernando Pessoa,” Portuguese Studies 24 (2): 169 (2008); Adam Kirsch, “Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act,” The New Yorker (Aug. 28, 2017); “Fado: Portuguese Soul Music,” The Forum, BBC News, World Service (May 5, 2019).

BBC fado program: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csyp4m

DIS/QUIET Literary Program: http://disquietinternational.org/.

Quotations from The Book of Disquiet are from Margaret Jull Costa’s 2017 translation.

Quotations from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are from José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (New York: Harvest, 1992).

* * * *

Mike Schneider, who won the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize in Poetry from Texas Review Press, attended the DIS/QUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, June 23 to July 5, 2019.


Click here to purchase The Book of Disquiet
at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Click here to purchase The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2019/2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Member Screening:
The God Given Talent

Friday, May 15, 6pm to Sunday, May 17, 8pm

Now and then, we offer a little perk for those who contribute to Rain Taxi. While we’re all spending a little bit more time at home than usual, we are pleased to present an online screening of a new documentary about a fascinating poet and visual artist, Charles Curtis Blackwell. We hope you’ll join us in watching it!

ABOUT THE FILM

The God Given Talent: The Creative Life of Charles Curtis Blackwell is a 70-minute tribute to the resilience of the human spirit amidst adversity. Inspired by Gordon Parks, whose “choice of weapons”was the camera, Blackwell picked up the pen and the brush to confront racism, disability, homelessness, and “capitalism at its finest” on the streets of Oakland, CA, becoming “a quintessential jazz poet” in the process. Watch the trailer here.

ABOUT THE SCREENING

This special screening allows Rain Taxi members and subscribers to watch at their leisure at this Exclusive Vimeo Link, anytime from Friday, May 15th at 6pm to Sunday May 17th at 8pm (Central Time). Simply email us by Thursday May 14 to indicate you’d like to see the film, and we’ll send all participants the code to enter to unlock it. Not yet a Member? Become a Member today, and you’ll be all set!

This is a free perk for our Members, offered in collaboration with the good folks at JMG Films. If you enjoy the documentary and would like to send the filmmakers a few bucks, you can do so here.

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK!

We’d love to hear your thoughts — drop us a line after you watch and name your favorite moment from the film, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of a the Rain Taxi chapbook of your choice!

Volume 25, Number 1 Spring 2020 (#97)

To purchase issue #97 using Paypal, click here.

INTERVIEWS

M. J. Nicholls: Fear Anxiety Panic | interviewed by Steven Moore
Toi Derricotte: The Poem Tells Itself | interviewed by Swiss
Hillary Leftwich: Nightmares, Heartbreaks, and Terrible Choices
| interviewed by Zack Kopp
Heidi Czerwiec: Fluid States | interviewed by Molly Sutton Kiefer
Greg Gerke: See What I See | interviewed by Ted Morrissey

FEATURES:

The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS:

Cover art by Harriet Bart

FICTION REVIEWS

American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s | Gary K. Wolfe, ed. | by Chris Barsanti
The Little Blue Kite | Mark Z. Danielewski | by Chris Via
Indelicacy | Amina Cain | by Bethany Catlin
Lanny | Max Porter | by Cindra Halm
Moon Trees and Other Orphans | Leigh Camacho Rourks
| by Linda Stack-Nelson
I Know You Know Who I Am | Peter Kispert | by Mikel Prater
Like Water and Other Stories | Olga Zilberbourg | by Alta Ifland
Chances Are . . . | Richard Russo | by Robert Lane
Serotonin | Michel Houellebecq | by Chris Via
A Storm Blew In From Paradise | Johannes Anyuru | by Poul Houe

COMICS REVIEWS

They Called Us Enemy | George Takei | by George Longenecker

NONFICTION REVIEWS

The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess | Tara McDowell | by Patrick James Dunagan
The Drama of Celebrity | Sharon Marcus | by Ryder W. Miller
Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative | Jane Alison | by Kirby Gann
The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing | Danielle Aubert | by M. Kasper
Little Weirds | Jenny Slate | by Erin Lewenauer
A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor | Miriam Nichols | by Patrick James Dunagan
The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet | David Carlin and Nicole Walker | by Dustin Michael
Crusoe and His Consequences | James Dunkerley | by Ryder W. Miller
The Grave On The Wall | Brandon Shimoda | by William Shultz

POETRY REVIEWS

Nervous System | Rosalie Moffett | by Walter Holland
Lima :: Limón | Natalie Scenters-Zapico | by George Longenecker
Forty-One Objects: Prose Poems | Carsten René Nielsen | by John Bradley
Codex | Joshua Lew McDermott | by Greg Bem
The Problem of the Many | Timothy Donnelly | by Michael Bazzett
Earth | Hannah Brooks-Motl | by Greg Bem
World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins | Kevin Prufer, Robert E. McDounough, eds. | by John Bradley
How To Dress A Fish | Abigail Chabitnoy | by Amanda Kooser
Gulf | Cody Smith | by Stephen Hundley
Shiver | Lynn Martin | by J. Peter Moore

To purchase issue #97 using Paypal, click here.

Harriet Bart

Autobiography detail, photo by Rik Sferra Autobiography, 2011 Mixed media, test tubes, steel, unique artist’s book Ledge with vials: 70 ½ x 6 ¼ x 2 in. Shelf: 36 x 12 in. Ledger (open): 29 ½ x 9 ½ x 1 ½ in. A personal year-by-year history of time and transformation. It is a story told with objects and text that reflect Bart’s long-held interests in cultural memory, history, science and alchemy.

HARRIET BART creates evocative content through the narrative power of objects, the theater of installation, and the intimacy of artists books. She has a deep and abiding interest in the personal and cultural expression of memory; it is at the core of her work. Using bronze and stone, wood and paper, books and words, everyday and found objects, Bart’s work signifies a site, marks an event, and draws attention to imprints of the past as they live in the present.

Bart’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Germany, and she has completed more than a dozen public art commissions in the United States, Japan, and Israel. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, NEA Arts Midwest, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Since 2000, Bart has published numerous fine-press books and mixed media bookworks. She has won three Minnesota Book Awards, most recently in 2015 for Ghost Maps. Her work is included in many museum, university, and private collections. In 2020, the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis will present Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection. Curated by Laura Wertheim Joseph, Abracadabra . . . will be the first retrospective and monograph of her work. Bart is a guest lecturer, curator, and founding member W.A.R.M. and the Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, MN.

Visit her online here. See the full sized "Autobiography" here or visit the Weisman Art Museum fast before the exhibit is gone!

2020 RAIN TAXI READINGS

SEAN HILL

with Erin Lynn Marsh, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Naomi Cohn, and Julian Randall

Monday, February 10, 2020, Plymouth Congregational Church

Plymouth Literary Witnesses opened their 2020 season with an outstanding night of poetry from Sean Hill and some of the alumni of the Northwoods Writers Conference which he directs. The opening poets, Erin Lynn Marsh, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Naomi Cohn, and Julian Randall, shone alongside him. Co-sponsored by Rain Taxi!


 

JEFF ALESSANDRELLI and PAULA CISEWSKI

Thursday, February 20, 2020, The Museum of Russian Art

Not only did attendees get a fantastic reading by two poets, but free access to three amazing exhibits at Minneapolis’ exquisite Museum of Russian Art! Local poet Paula Cisewski, author of The Threatened Everything, Quitter, and Misplaced Sinister read new poems. And visiting poet Jeff Alessandrelli read poems from his new book, Fur Not Light, which takes its inspiration from Russian Absurdist authors.


 

LOUISE ERDRICH

Sunday, March 1, 2020, Plymouth Congregational Church

Fans packed the pews to hear Louise Erdrich read from her new novel The Night Watchman is based on the extraordinary life of Erdrich’s grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. The beloved author met with waves of love and adulation for her brilliant work.

 

SUMMER ISSUE VIRTUAL PARTY

Tuesday, July 21, 2020, Rain Taxi YouTube Channel

Rain Taxi threw a party for its 2020 Summer Print Edition, the 98th issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books! Editor Eric Lorberer hosted the event, which featured cover artist Jil Evans giving a studio tour, James Lenfestey discussing Louise Erdrich, Linda Stack-Nelson on the work of Echo Brown, and poets Tyrone Williams and Xandria Phillips in conversation. Rain Taxi Board member Mary Moore Easter announced the organization’s plan to publish an anthology of black poets of the Twin Cities, in conjunction with Rain Taxi’s Twin Cities Book Festival this October. View the event on YouTube now!

 

THE COMPLETE WORKS FILM SCREENING & DISCUSSION

Tuesday, September 1, 2020, Crowdcast

Rain Taxi presented a free online screening of The Complete Works, a 40-minute film based on the work of one of Canada's greatest writers, bpNichol, over the weekend of Aug 29 - Sept 1. Afterwards, Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer hosted a Q&A with filmmaker Justin Stephenson, poet Derek Beaulieu, and Coach House publisher Alana Wilcox. See the discussion HERE!

 

20TH ANNUAL TWIN CITIES BOOK FESTIVAL

Launched Virtually Saturday, October 15 – 17, 2020

See replays, check out the Minnesota Author Mashup and Chapbook Launch videos, and peruse our online exhibit hall! Visit twincitiesbookfestival.com.

Things That Go

Laura Eve Engel
Octopus Books ($17)

by Greg Bem

The first book of poetry by Laura Eve Engel, Things That Go, is on its surface framed around the biblical tale of Lot’s Wife, who infamously was turned into a pillar of salt as she looked back upon the city of Sodom. The story is both adapted and used as a thematic frame by Engel at various points throughout the collection, though some poems relate more directly than others to the inspiring story.

It takes the book a while to get there, but after a handful of “Lot’s Wife” poems (sharing the same title and interspersed from the beginning of the book to its end), “Lot’s Wife Speaks” brings the metaphor and framing to its greatest elevation: “what is sitting too long at a desk / in the world without moving / what is a burden // to move and keep moving // to be taken / by the blast / by a stillness // by our looking” it reads, sending the poet’s musing out to the reader as a call, a revelation, and a beautiful epiphany. The poem continues to its close with: “is it a burden, god // how / we may become changed.”

The metaphoric use of Lot’s Wife is a subtle experiment concerned with the greater meaning behind that story. Things That Go is further concerned with human movement through time and the tension we humans have when seeking to understand growth, loss, and gain. Movement, as well as the surrounding moments of rest and reflection, can best be understood through Engel’s focus on several connected images, most importantly the desert. Often the deserts of Engel’s visionary world are those within New Mexico (in the book’s “Notes” section, she admits to being inspired by Tony Hillerman’s The Spell of New Mexico and other writings about the place). In a poem arising from Engel’s attraction to the piece of landscape art “The Lightning Field,” she writes “Light makes the desert look like the known desert.” Clarification is what Engel seeks when she talks about moving from place to place, from moment to moment; it is what we do with that movement, how we know, that pushes the book and its focus on Lot’s Wife even further.

In the poem “White Sands,” she writes again of this observation and its importance: “the shifting marked in slowness / or too speedy to be looked directly at // if I were to follow the sun directly / if I were to whirl like what’s left behind.” Moments like these offer a geographical and tangible center to the motion of humanity. Engel utilizes her space and effort for the ever-present poetic “witness,” which in this case is holistic awareness over morality, judgment, and the simplistic allegory of the biblical influences.

In Things That Go, the entirety of the world is moving, and our understanding along with it is moving too—often to our surprise and overwhelmingly beyond full comprehension. At times, the moment itself is enough to think about: “it’s not a bad place to be / out of my own hands // in the dry season / or a love that knows no next move // beyond repeating dunes sections / break apart // the horizon steady” The desert, in other words, is still there, and though out of control, it provides for us, and provides us with itself.

Aside from desert poems, Things That Go features poems about buildings and the built environment, about navigating adulthood and trying to find a belief in the complexity of relationships. The subject matter is enjoyably collected and collectivist: the poet moves through the world and finds value in it. The here and there. The then and the now.

While most of the poems feel accessible in language and tone, some are more prosaic, scrawls for the notebook: “In a Museum, I Am Moved to Contemplate Pack Animals” opens “Lately I’ve been looking at things that hurt me. / Caring, as I do, not at all for art.” There is also occasional abstraction indicative of the poet’s lyrical leanings, as seen in the middle of “Burden of Belonging”: “to whom do some of us / not belong / who hurt some of us so // but here they come again / this history of men.” And then there are poems that flutter across the page with endearing catharsis. In “First Things,” one stanza reads: “on a day like today / with weather / I have you-thoughts”; moments like this charge the book with a holistic human feeling.

A dense and lengthy collection, Things That Go makes a valiant effort at a contemporary reinterpretion of Lot’s Wife, and its strands of imagery, including that robust Southwestern landscape, offer the book an impressive cohesion, providing balance and focus to an excessive range of topics. It is exciting to think about Engel’s next work, which hopefully will continue to provide the reader with exquisite opportunities for their own reflection and sense of wonder.


Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2019/2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020