Molly Peacock
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ($26.95)

by Corinne Robins

Cornucopia, a collection centered on the richness of love and pain, examines the role of woman as sex object from the female point of view, its elegant verse forms laying out for the reader the joys and burdens of familial and sensual love. Sex is the all-inclusive road, the way. On the book jacket, Robert Creeley states the book proves Molly Peacock's "genius for saying the most necessary things." He's right: Cornucopia offers the reader a kind of "wisdom poetry", poems whose insights inspire a momentary pause created by the light of recognition. But there are no moral adages here. In Peacock's work nothing is allowed to remain abstract. Her wisdom and morality are grounded in an unsparing sensuality that in turn is grounded in exactitude. The reach of her body, the richness of her experience, leads her to conclude, "Life's cache is flesh, flesh, flesh."

The artist Matisse once explained that he didn't paint objects but the relations between objects, and this same facility is the source of the power of Peacock's narrative poems. To name two examples, "Subway Vespers" and "Good-bye Hello in the East Village" offer transitional situations transformed by the poet's personal insight, insight born of a sharp-eyed unflinching honesty that delights in self-discovery. Both are story poems, but the stories turn in upon themselves, hinged by an underlying philosophical morality. Then there are the poems that are the poet's dialogues with herself, poems that go beyond questions of morality. From the new poems in the volume, The Land Of The Shí, "Repair" describes our inner breakdowns, minor losses, and self-destructions that take place over the "dim peeling of years." Peacock is unsparing of herself and her readers when it comes to the psychic damage that piles up over our heads. From the ironic "Repair" on the one hand, and the frightening "The Hunt" on the other, she sums up extremes of the human condition—inescapable conditions that apply to us all.

Peacock has opted to pack her rather savage insights into the most refined and formal verse forms. The rhymes are often a miracle of fancy footwork, where sound balances the poet's fractured search for how to construct a spiritual world from sensual information. Seductive earthy metaphors appear within the framework of carefully wrought sonnets. She dares to use words like "soul"; it is no accident that one of her earlier books was titled Raw Heaven. Such seemingly old-fashioned language should only momentarily disarm. Peacock is a religious poet in the tradition of John Donne, a poet involved with the before and after life, describing herself as the "kind of Person who stops to look" at road kill. Always for her, seeing equals feeling. Peacock has her eyes fixed on what's around, celebrating the lovely gaiety of animals in the poem "Petting and Being a Pet," for example, which leads her to discover our own need for touch—that "touch makes being make sense."

The making sense of life through language is for Peacock the poet's job. It is not merely for their verbal felicity that people treasure certain handfuls of words. The words in Peacock's arsenal takes us by surprise as they ask and answer question of human experience that continue to haunt. No doubt this is what Robert Creeley means by delighting in Molly Peacock's genius "for saying the most necessary things."

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

Merrill Gilfillan
Adventures in Poetry/Zephyr Press ($12.50)

by Dale Smith

November 5: The Seasons arrives with the first cold blast of fall air. The poems extend song with objectivist clarity, relating attention impressed by the physical world. They are lovely, light on the surface, but packed beneath with minute particulars of place, memory and art, resembling layered deposits of compost. "1958," the poet's 13th year, is a poem of recollection. The notational compiling of images conjures the sensual condition of a child's geographic placement in time, but without any nostalgic intrusions.

Found a frog.
Went to dancing lessons.
Read books I got
for Christmas.

Sledding on
Jackson's hill. Woodcock
for dinner. Listened
to radio. Played

on pond. Went
to a dance. Skating
at Uncle D's. Making
a whistle. Played

"Count and Capture."
Learning Morse code.
Ice thawing. Mended
fletching on arrows.

This is an "I remember" poem, but the leading verb of each sentence activates the energy of the line. There's no bog in rhetoric. Instead, the mimetic simplicity of childhood is attained by the reduction to action and image.

No proposals. The focus is domestic, personal. There is sensuous delight in language and landscape. Observe the clarity of image, the quick movement from natural detail to human relation in this fragment from "Five Landscapes":

Teal flush
across inkblue water,
over Charolais bulls.
Let the young remember
the old, the old
forget the young,
the dead the living.

The levity and casual command of Gilfillan's poems work out of an attention to the complexity of environment. Not environment in the Green Peace sense, but ones that relate the morphology of personal space. The precise choice of his words also shows an inward poetic ecology where language moves from material utterance toward emotional values. With few words to waste, he strives for a quality of art that registers feeling in the syllabic restraint of his lines. Language is the mediating force between him and his natural, or noetic, environments.

Writing, as he practices it, seeks proper relations. In the first movement of "Systole Variations," he writes:

The straits of July.

A strange moth in the keyhole.

The summer deep
as of piles or hills
of leaves or snow.

Bring it over
through the solid month
that mouse-colored horse
you wish to sell.

We aren't beat on the head with social causes, though what constitutes proper relations are subtly given here. There's an easy appreciation of the cycle of return and dissolution. "What a face / on that barred owl / dead beside the road—" he writes in "A Nap by the Kickapoo." Life. Death. Rhythm. Etc. But the art of it—making oneself capable—that's the trick, or the acceptance.

The long, final sequence, "The Seasons," appropriately ends this fine book. Jaggedly moving, these quick takes morph into revelation. They set into the play of words the patterns of weather, plants, labor and memory. Poetry here is derived from mundane—certainly rural, not urban—sources. Lists reveal a rhythm for each season, a sense of the poet's preoccupations. In "Summer," for instance, we read:

June 21 to July 6:
Weed rice.
Plant mulberries
to sprout new saplings.
Plant hemp.
Plant late red hibiscus.

Come winter, the focus shifts:

January 6 to January 20:
Pick mulberry leaves. Chill
silkworm eggs. Catch snow-water.

It's as if one's post-its or calendar entries could be transformed to the level of art. Which of course they can, and are, here. The so-called subject of a poem, Gilfillan shows us, can be anything. It's the ability of the poet to see from within that finds energy in the routines of every day. The poet practices art in order to see and hear, to find in his imagination what forms speak to him. The word to stress is practice. How to see or how to listen in a poem is the point. His poems aren't pumped full of attitude or irony. There aren't any social proposals. There is instead an almost moral emphasis—expressed directly through the work—on the responsibilities to domestic space, one's own language and patient listening.

Summer coffee
sweet in the slot
between crickets
and cicadas.

... ...

Such
such catbird
sings

we set
our dark blue
pencil down.

His is an objectivist, occult preoccupation, finding relations in things. William Carlos Williams had the "no ideas but in things" wrap down long ago. But the environment of things here in the all-inclusive seasons relies also on prosody, careful timing, the physical rhythm and resilience of his pacing.

We climbed the hill
(a mountain-hill, Big Sur)
with bedrolls and a bag
of avocados and slept
up there one night.

The "up" in the final line lets this stanza swing in the vernacular of Gilfillan's Ohio-bred voice. Resilience of voice and heart, the quick grasp of mind for the particulars of environment-these qualities, among many, make rich his seemingly casual surfaces. The difficulty of this achievement is immense, and seldom praised. But the point of such life-long labor in art slips into his Seasons with sudden, eye-opening clarity: "To seek that which was lost / without knowing seeking / or that it was ever gone.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

Erín Moure
Anansi Press ($12.95)
by Laura Mullen

The system of beauty—our little gamine—is about to crash. —from "Georgette"

The Canadian poet Erín Moure's new book is so brave, has so much truly lively wit, and is so completely fresh it makes a lot of contemporary American poetry look like dorm furniture from Target: instantly charming and easy to discard. But...seriously. In her twelfth book, Moure sets a wise and politically well-informed playfulness to the very serious task of opening spaces to speak from, to be human in, and from which to recognize the humanity of others. Seriously, Moure—as she notes of Clarice Lispector—"does not construct her reader as a receptacle of authorial direct speech but engages readers in the word's enactment / folding" and the effort to "speak in the difficult tongue." Seriously, starting with its title (which begins the work of finding out the complicated site of a feminine "citizen"), the book is on a headlong, headstrong, career: intersecting language at angles that widen its freedoms and set in motion new possibilities.

Rapture as rupture, O Cidadán is a polyphonic echo chamber in which desire(s) for truth make crucial an intertextual and necessarily on-going effort extended over time. Starting where love 'bursts' a failure to hear, the book proceeds by that careful and wild—that conscious and ecstatic—emphasis on sensation, understanding, and memory which is so characteristic of Moure's writing. Inside and outside are, as always, at issue—but the poet has never pressed so hard at the limits of language and world for the fullest communication. Images, diagrams and disappearing fonts, screen or screamplays, strike-outs, and re(re)iterations are all put to the arduous/ardorous task of arriving at a knowledge which is subject to an ethical accountability and open to revision. "A kind of movement, then, lisp-ecto-real. // Which beckons the whole notion of 'outside' into the field of inquiry and unseats it." Here an ongoing process produces deep pages: layers of thinking and thinking again make for a radically dialogic text in which the author's words and the thoughts of other writers are in conversation and community. Here poetry becomes a place wide as the world, where anything can happen and everything is passionately considered. Here, where the relation of word to word and human to human is challenged, an open self finds out its otherness:

To persist
somatic coalesce does imbue a fetter
wherein "I am" reiteration's frank motel

which is a fold or distal not proximal
carina vaginae whose "the shudder" lies

that thing drawn 'cross us like
a scar or want         is "us"

falls homily             to iterate is to endure
"us" only visible as the frame delects

a change or mitt in these "conditions"
is my homily

Possible's believer         conjures belief
field guns or gone (could not read over her shoulder)

behold-en

election obéissance crowd assault

As she goes "beyond measure," slipping past or shattering the borders of forms, names, languages, national boundaries, and genres, Moure brings to and from her wide travels an exemplary presence, challenging our understanding of difference and putting all totalities in question. In the very serious play of the poet our doubts become us, our silences speak, and hesitation becomes eloquent, as we attempt to echolocate identities and a citizenship outside the destroyed horizon of nation or country, aiming at discovering our largest human rights.

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Susan M. Shultz
Potes & Poets Press ($12.95)

by Hank Lazer

It is just as easy to exaggerate or caricature the do's and don'ts of innovative poetry as it is to satirize the "show don't tell" and "find your own voice" premises of more mainstream poetry. If much innovative poetry, particularly Language poetry and its blurry aftermath, involves a swerving away from personally expressive writing and the voicing of personal lyrical epiphanies, one might begin, quite profitably, to study recent innovative poetry that quite clearly no longer pays such rigid attention to such dutiful avoidances. In fact, one could argue that much of the most interesting poetry today stems from the tension of how to situate the personal and the autobiographical within a writing practice nonetheless committed to the heuristics of new forms.

Beginning with Lyn Hejinian's My Life (1980), what Ron Silliman has called "the new sentence" has proven to be a particularly malleable and engaging form within which to explore new expressions and contextualizations of the personal and autobiographical. Susan Schultz's Memory Cards & Adoption Papers arrives as an important new example of a superbly engaging exploration at the intersection of sentence-based poetry and the writing of (among other things) personal history.

In this book beautifully designed by Gaye Chan, the cards of memory can be shuffled and dealt in many ways. Memory Cards is deliberately not presented chronologically, though the cards do get sorted somewhat by category: Mother, Places, Ruptures, Words, Losses, and Epitaphs. In the first Mother-card, Schultz writes, "Misunderstanding becomes our pas de deux, both a step and a negation." The cards—Schultz's pages and paragraphs, her arranging of the sentences—are not exactly a setting things right, but a setting in context. That, in fact, may be the wonder and the appeal of "new sentence" compositions: the democracy of the sentence (each sentence an equal citizen of the text); a rich new realism, a new writing of culture and history, made possible through juxtaposition unconcerned with continuity, the extensions of an argument, nor illustrations of a point. Schultz's sentence (quoted above) links to the following four sentences: "Pas du tout. Oom pa pa. Meter to our mother-daughter-epic. The buttons were there to be pushed, and we the sensitive software." The multi-faceted paths of sound, of pun, of pronouncement become ways of assembling complex but non-totalizing perspectives.

Schultz acknowledges, "Poetry comes of memory, though in the wrong hands..." And even though the poetry of memory—the personal anecdotal poetry so common today—is (and has been) in such disrepute among writers valuing new forms and rhetorics for poetry, Schultz has the courage not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the commitment to explore new ways of writing personal and familial memory. In fact, she writes a book very much about the politics, culture, and emotions of babies—of families and expectations, of mothers and mothering, of trying to get pregnant, of miscarrying, and of adopting. But her stories are not the neatly contained epiphanies of most contemporary "personal" poetry. Instead, they are held within a much richer, more multi-faceted text of families, violence, wars, abuse, and the collision of cultures, especially of east and west. What's at stake in Schultz's book is nothing less audacious than how to see, think, and feel—to see the world and one's "own" life, and what to say about it. To make sense of it, but not too much nor too glib a form of sense. Or, as one page has it, the task of happiness might begin in the "grip" that sentences might acquire: "The happiness project depends on clarity, for clarity is a kind of happiness, a kind in clarity, in happiness, and to know this is to aim for sentences sure of their terrain..." Though she writes—

I have earned my clarity, as my happiness, through process of reduction, restriction of wandering through concentration on this one, this image I have of my mother in North Africa drinking spiked wine and dancing naked in the moonlight. She who has not yet come upon her happiness waits it out in the opacities of autumn, seven years past my father's death, the leaves a bright orange and yellow that November, his clarity, a gift that can only be called happiness.

Schultz's writing aims for a clarity that does not come from singleness of purpose nor from a single, focused image. The clarity she seeks is that of personal history suspended and placed in the complexity of historical and cultural circumstance—a sentencing that makes clarity at best a momentary (and rapidly disappearing) experience.

Memory Cards is a widely ranging book—nomadic in both the range of its attention and geographically as seen in the author's travels (as well as in her home, Oahu, as the site of travelers). It is a poetry restlessly observing, changing directions, and questioning its own utility and value: "There are outlets that are not malls. Though the price of our being falls like the Dow. We cannot confiscate hatred or put it in a pen, or erase its inscriptions. But recognition alters, like photons when they're measured, like scenes their plays. Play off this transposition. If the key fits, use it." Schultz's poetry attends to the altering and altered recognition, to the precise measurings of change, the knowing as a kind of wobbling step: "Rhythm, not rhyme, tempo, not time. I placed a dime in Tennessee and it accrued value until it became a Honda plant. While her mother, schizophrenic, dies by degrees. For this is loss by attrition. Where the self was, now there is another. Some acquire the habit of being themselves. Others learn to play at consistency, like Groucho. We all step on cobblestones from time to time."

The book's concluding section, Adoption Papers, begins with surreal collisions, juxtapositions, substitutions, and violence that is both the world from which and into which Sangha is adopted:

I kicked her in the stomach, but I didn't use force. The victim's mother married her rapist before sentencing, attends weekly prayer services for him. He was a good biology teacher: I'd put my daughter in his classroom even now. At Angkor Wat, a boy sniffs glue because I want to forget, sells his body for more. On the News Hour website, a transcription replaces Angkor with encore. Repetition is history's force: misheard history an anarchy of substitutions. Encore for Angkor, Watts for Wat, farce for force; anger's elegies abandoned like the killing fields. The man who played Dith Pran was murdered for his watch in California.

Through this killing field of substitution, amnesia, and force, Adoption Papers moves through the bureaucratic horrors and emotional twists and turns of the adoption process as Schultz and her husband Bryant adopt Sangha, a Cambodian baby.

Out of this world emerges a poetics and ethics of seeing and being:

To know when denial helps and when it corrodes. To embrace privation without wishing for its good health. To toast its marriage to history and know they will not dissolve, one into the other, like the surf's wash into sand, even when dusk enforces mergers. To incorporate without creating an empire; to take an empire down without destroying ours. To create an ultrazone of fun within whatever ruins encroach on us. To make a practice of watching different worlds exhumed and then revised at the point of a laser. To make evident what cannot yet be said, that peace in our time is impossible, that justice is a stick without a carrot. To pray for a cobbled treaty between us and the outside.

It is an ethics that demands a facility for juxtaposition—perhaps a historicized and culturally acute form of negative capability? Conditions that might require a writer to conclude, "I write in prose because I'm a lyric poet."

Shultz's book—and her extraordinary work as editor of Tinfish magazine and Tinfish Press—provides ample evidence that the new—the significantly new, or the cooking up of significant fusions—will come from independent outposts, from unlikely places that will temper one in a requisite independence and industry.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming
Edited by Gardner Dozois
St. Martin's Press ($17.95)

Supermen: Tale of the Post-Human Future
Edited by Gardner Dozois
St. Martin's Press ($17.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

In the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson won many of the major science fiction awards for his Mars series (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) which chronicles the terraforming, or planet altering, of Mars. Despite Mars not being fully explored at the beginning of the series, the colonists start the process to create an atmosphere and oceans on the Red Planet. The series was shocking for anyone who hoped that we would do better by the next planet we inhabited.

Terraforming is not a new idea, and other authors have taken up the theme (such as Pamela Sargent in a series about terraforming Venus), but in detail and precision, Robinson described what many would like to do to our closest neighbor in space. Though forces arise to combat the terraformers in his series, the battle is lost and only remnants of the pristine Martian environment are saved. Robinson's series is thus a sobering reminder that if we think of ourselves as environmentalists, we would want to preserve Mars or at least treat it like a wilderness, rather than like the Frontiers of old which we have destroyed.

In Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, editor Gardner Dozois anthologizes stories that have been written about terraforming other planets. As Dozois points out in his introduction the word terraforming was coined by Jack Williamson in the early 1940s, and Mars was also terraformed in Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars (1951), but the stories included here don't begin until 1955, with most of them written in the eighties and nineties. Dozois has assembled stories by many of the famous science fiction writers, but there are also works by the lesser-known writers of the more recent generations of story tellers.

Confronted with a barren, dangerous, and probably sterile solar system, many science fiction writers chose to terraform some of our celestial neighbors in order to tell their stories. Mercury is heated to high temperatures by the sun, Venus has been turned into a furnace by a runaway greenhouse effect, Mars is an ice box, and Jupiter and most of the other planets are gas giants. In the interest of saving lives and making the planets more hospitable, many storytellers in Worldmakers argue that we should change their environments to more suitable conditions. But there are also some stories, ironically Robinson's and Sargent's, with characters that object to the terraforming.

Dozois also points out that making these changes could be potentially dangerous, and in fact it is the danger which makes some of the philosophical stories exciting. But the stories show that even if we try to terraform the planets of the solar system, we may not necessarily be successful at doing so. "Ecopoesis" by Geoffrey Landis, one of the more memorable stories in Worldmakers, details how the planet Mars will become frozen again if the carbon dioxide escapes the atmosphere. Then there are the politics involved, and the human failings; as the worlds change, so do some of the characters—some even changing sex and identities.

In Supermen: Tales of a Post-Human Future, Dozois explores an alternative to terraforming: "pantropy," or the technological altering of human beings to adapt to new worlds, futures, or hostile environments. Though it is a struggle to apply the values of environmentalism to developments in space exploration, commercialization and militarization, Deep Ecologists should in theory applaud the pantropics. Unfortunately, this is not the collection of anti-terraforming stories one would hope; the anti-terraforming arguments are not developed with equal elaboration. The follow-up anthology could have better focused on pantropy by addressing the problems of terraforming rather than by dwelling on the strangeness of the future. Imaginary worlds are lost in the process.

What environmentalists can take from these stories is that there are worlds to save; environmental efforts seem even more necessary when Dozois likens our changing of the Earth to terraforming a new planet. The difference here is that we are not even able to protect the Earth from the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion, while the imaginary terraformers of fiction are making deliberate plans to alter worlds. These fascinating tales of our "post-human" future indeed have much to say about the present.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

Baudolino
Umberto Eco
Harcourt ($27)

Also Discussed in this Essay:

The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
Harvest Books ($15)

The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce
Umberto Eco
Harvard University Press ($15)

by Summer Block

Mundus Senescit: Umberto Eco recreates the Middle Ages

Umberto Eco's recent historical novel Baudolino opens with a sort of gibberish made up of Latin, German, Italian, and English, a gleeful combination of inside jokes, puns, and scholarly winks and nods. The tale, written on top of an earlier history that has been scratched off the parchment but occasionally peeks through, is a story in a story in a story on a story. If that sounds complicated—well, it is. Trickster Baudolino, an unreliable narrator by his own unreliable report, tells his long life story to Niketas, an historian whom Baudolino hopes will be able to give shape and meaning to an otherwise almost-random-series of events and decisions. From the very beginning, Eco is playing with myth, truth, history, and storytelling—and tackling a project far more lofty than Niketas'.

With the recent publication of Baudolino, Umberto Eco returns to writing fiction set in the Middle Ages—and creates an ultimate symbol for medieval thought and history, in its own time and in our own. Eco's concern for medieval philosophy, present in both his popular and scholarly works, is in fact a sort of nostalgia for a time now much maligned and misunderstood, a forgotten kingdom of intellect and imagination. Very much a realist, Eco never suggests we can—or should—return to a medieval mindset (Society for Creative Anachronism aside, no one who truly knows the Middle Ages could ever wish to live it over.) But in medieval thought he finds an elegant system, though one that was obsessed with its own eventual irrelevance and decay. In his essays, he expounds on the tension that exists between medieval and modern thought; in his novel The Name of the Rose, he heralds the emergence of the modern man; in his new Baudolino, the book itself is a symbol for medieval thought, its triumphs, its failures, and its eventual decline.

Baudolino starts realistically enough, with the adoption of the young peasant Baudolino by the emperor Frederick. Baudolino becomes a symbol of the new social mobility of the late Middle Ages, when urban centers and burgeoning nations created footholds for merchants and even peasants in the upper classes. Quick-witted and gifted with languages, Baudolino is sent to study in Paris, where he meets up with a group of friends (characters that are sadly never much developed). Baudolino falls in love twice, marries, takes part in battles and sieges, and generally leads a remarkable—but believable—life.

Our hero, however, is obsessed with the myth of Prester John, a legendary king and priest who rules a mythical empire in the east. Prester John's story begins to take on a life of its own when Baudolino shares the tale with his classmates, each of whom contributes to the kingdom whatever vision they hope to find there (for a Jewish scholar, it is the lost tribes of Israel; for a romantic poet, it is a cherished woman). Soon, they devise a letter in which Prester John describes to Frederick his fabulous kingdom, and its most fabulous treasure—the fabled Holy Grail. What begins as a political ploy spins out of hand, as copies of the letter—all altered slightly from the original—spread out. As the lie disseminates, history becomes entwined with myth. Baudolino and his friends soon set off to find this mythical land—a land they themselves invented—and find there precisely what they expected. The word becomes the world, and the last half of the book is as full of monsters and magic as any fantasy novel. Not surprisingly, Baudolino makes some bold assertions about language and reality, but none so bold as the very model of the book itself-as Baudolino's world fades into the sunset of dreams, so too does the whole medieval world, its philosophical models and ideas, even our perception of it, clouded by myth and time.

Mundus senescit: The medieval world anticipates its own decline

Just two years after the publication of The Name of the Rose, Eco laid out his own version of the medieval system in his slim volume The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, in which he makes a convincing argument for Joyce as a medieval man—or, more appropriately, a man in whom a basic medieval understanding warred with a modern sensibility. This battle between the medieval and the modern, of course, is as much a hallmark of Eco as of Joyce, and one doesn't have to think too far ahead to watch Eco carry out the same sort of drama he attributes to Joyce. In this essay, Eco devotes a section to "The Medieval Model," in which he presents a sort of "Middle Ages for dummies," a simplified, practical key to medieval thinking. Naturally, the section says as much about Eco as it does about either Joyce or medieval writers; in this section, we learn what to expect in Eco's historical fiction.

"The medieval thinker," Eco begins, "cannot conceive, explain, or manage the world without inserting into the framework of an Order." True enough. It's easy today to imagine the Middle Ages as a time of great intellectual chaos, even stupidity. In fact, the Middle Ages was a time of great intellectual rigor and passion, born out of a need to bring order to the chaos unfolding in religion and politics, the ravages of disease and greed, the uncertainties of a changing world. When errors were made—and they often were—they were not the result of chaos, but the result of an excess of reason. When the order is primary, stubborn details that do not fit must be altered or disregarded. Yet this reason-before-reality system is not evidence of faulty thinking, only of different goals. Their reliance on systems, after all, was no less a liability than the modern thinker's, who cannot explain the whole for the tyranny of details.

All around was unrest and dissolution, but still there remained immense intellectual potential. The world was waiting to be remade. Classical thinkers, while still respected, were to be assimilated or ultimately discarded; after Christianity, all thought and experience was new again, waiting to be explained, classified, and ultimately redeemed.

In his essay, Eco contrasts medieval order with the disorder of modernity and post-modernity—a jumble of signs and references, a movement "from the ordered cosmos of scholasticism to the verbal image of an expanding universe." Still, within this ordered cosmos a wilderness is contained, a "grid of allusions." "The medieval mind," Eco goes on, "does not fear innovation, it conceals changes under the form of commentaries." This dialogue among texts, part of "an unlimited chain of relations between creatures and events," unfolds as "history telling itself to itself." This very idea of speaker and reference is at the heart of Baudolino, where the character tells his history—and, by extension, the story of the whole medieval period—to another, and the story is spread and changed even as the world it depicts diminishes and gradually passes away.

Eco cites here the common medieval wisdom, "Mundus senescit" (which he refers to in both The Name of the Rose and Baudolino as well). The Latin phrase sums up the basic medieval nostalgia, the preoccupation with age and decay; then, too, it describes the eventual decline of the medieval system under the pressures of modern thought. Eco uses it to invoke the way the very notion of the "Middle Ages" has declined in popular imagination, straying off into myths of King Arthur and dragons, the real substance and detail of everyday life increasingly difficult to imagine.

Mundus senescit: Eco charts the passing of the medieval era

Language, storytelling, detail, and order are all embedded in Eco's first medieval novel, The Name of the Rose. In this mystery story, a forward-thinking monk and his apprentice are called to an abbey—and its vast library—to solve a series of murders. Using signs, the monk William interprets the clues in the natural world, coming to conclusions in a thoroughly modern way. He maneuvers through the ordered library, itself a model of an ordered world, and masters it; finally, the ordered library is itself destroyed and its knowledge forever lost. Naturally, it is easy to see in this story an allegory for the dissolution of the medieval philosophical system and the rise to prominence of the scientific method and all it entails. Eco is quick to complicate the matter, however, by telling The Name of the Rose in a series of frames—William's apprentice, Adso, tells the story, which is supposedly found in manuscript form, an "Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century." This self-conscious list of references naturally calls into doubt the veracity of the text and its translation; already the ordered intellectual world of the Middle Ages is on shaky ground.

Adso opens his story meditating on "the disaster of an aging world," its unruliness and vice. He remembers fondly his teacher, the monk William, a man who could "read the great book of nature," though perhaps also sensing that William is the sort of modern man of science, of detail, that is bringing down the order he mourns. The story progresses, all contained in the space of only a few days, in the small space of one abbey. Following these unities of place and time, The Name of the Rose is a small work, but one that contains hints of bigger things. The murder weapon—a poisoned book—is the first sign that The Name of the Rose is more than just a mystery novel. The book presages the work that Eco will produce in time. In fact, a list of monsters, found in an illuminated library text, alludes to precisely the same sort of monsters that appear in the flesh in the great, sprawling adventures of Baudolino, stories whose only unity is in their own telling.

The Name of the Rose is a relentlessly practical book. After all, there is a murder to solve, and that sort of directedness does not allow the wild game of allusions that leads Baudolino everywhere but to the point. Yet at the end there is a key, a way to unlock the mysteries of the library and tear down its rigid order. Adso stumbles on this clue almost by mistake, causing William to exclaim, "Why, of course . . . the discourse is presumed de dicto and not de re." Of words and not of things: this little line is the key to more than just the mystery. In Baudolino, Eco will create a vast system of allusions, lies, jokes, puns, myths—a world of words and not of things, a modern system of texts that defy any order.

Mundus senescit: The medieval world fades into obscurity

Enter Baudolino, Eco's return to fiction and the culmination of his nostalgia, his predictions, his games, and his lessons. Baudolino is full of everything—history, magic, philosophy, science, theology. There are debates about the nature of the vacuum, the nature of the Grail, the nature of the Trinity. It is as if Eco meant this book to be a compendium of everything medieval, every idea, every system, a real, wide world fading to memory and myth. In The Name of the Rose, the book did it; here, the book is it, the lesson, the device, the universe. (Medieval literature, too, is replete with frame stories, dream visions, and unreliable narrators.)

If The Name of the Rose is the Middle Ages that was, Baudolino is the Middle Ages that we see now, looking backwards, its details dissolving into myths and misconceptions and generalities. When Baudolino and his companions ride off to find a place they made up themselves, Eco refutes the very notion of the accurate and the real. Baudolino's lies become reality, while annihilating the very possibility of reality and order, annihilating the library of The Name of the Rose, annihilating itself. You can imagine the giddiness with which the wise semiotics professor employs language to simultaneously create and destroy, to usher in a modernity of information and communication and dissolve forever the stately calm of the medieval system.

While The Name of the Rose is small in scope, Baudolino is huge. It tackles every issue: war and peace, the creation and dissolution of cities, the creation and dissolution of kingdoms. These issues were at the forefront of the medieval consciousness as well; the birth of nations, the need to bring fractured and warring kin groups together for "national" interests, the rise of urban power centers and the university elite, the violent conflict between Church and state—all of these demanded a system of political and religious thought that could put order to chaos.

Authenticity is at the very heart of Baudolino, where much of the plot hinges on phony relics. Baudolino even carries a phony Grail, one he himself fabricated, and comes to guard it through years of wandering torment with the passion of a believer. In Eco's world, believing makes it so, whether it is a phony relic or a phony kingdom. "When you say something you've imagined, and others then say that's exactly how it is, you end up believing it yourself," Baudolino explains to Niketas. Baudolino uses his fabulous stories to deceive, to seduce, to entertain, and to encourage—and the listener has an eager ear, because he is waiting to be lied to. Often, Baudolino lies out of a sense of duty; of three phony relics, the supposed bodies of the Magi, he says it was "up to me to give those three bodies a new Bethlehem." And you believe him, because you can hear in his voice how much he wants to believe himself.

The mythical kingdom of Prester John may or may not be real, but real is no longer a category worth considering. Previously, in the medieval system, the world was organized and ranked, a great chain of being that accounted for all things. Baudolino represents a new world of half-truths and relativity, a world without organization or rank. At the end of his life, Baudolino is bound to his lies, committed to living out the truth he made. He lives in his own mad dreams and wills them into reality. Whether this is a punishment for lying or a gift for genius, one can't say.

Baudolino is certainly a novel of the head and not the heart. The characters are more allegorical than personal, the allusions and cleverness make it hard to feel a bond of affect with the characters. Yet Eco intended to make Baudolino not only an allegory for medievalism and its decline, but a lesson about truth and memory. Again and again, reading the novel, you want to ask, "How could that obviously phony letter fool them all?" But we are all fooled by narratives of our own devising, sometimes heroically, sometimes tragically. Eco, too, is a victim of his wildest dreams, for while he struggles to save medieval scholasticism from the dustbin of history, he takes another step toward fabulous obscurity.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

by Joel Turnipseed

Murray Bail is a patient writer, having published just four books of fiction at sixty, a mark almost to be aimed at for its deliberateness. Unfortunately, his fame here has taken an equal leisure. Twenty-seven years have passed since the publication of his most famous story, "The Drover's Wife," which has been widely-anthologized abroad and was included in his first Australian collection, Contemporary Portraits, also out in 1975. This lapse is lamentable, since Bail shines best in his short stories. Camouflage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20) combines the contents of that original selection with some newer stories for debut in America.

"Launch," perhaps would have been the better word, since the collection opens with the parabolic tale of "Seduction of My Sister." Here a young man comes to the grim realization of his fate—as hopeless middleman between things and their possessors. But how it comes: in a succession of wild losses, none of whose value he esteems until everything is broken or gone, including his sister. These things land in the hands of the new neighbor Gordon Gill, a kid who knows how to coax without asking:

From the beginning, I began to see, I was doing all the work. To Gordon I suggested we change positions. Operating in darkness near our back door I could do my bit with my eyes shut, whereas on his side light was absolutely essential, he pointed out. "Without proper light I've no idea what's coming my way." I'm at the receiving end, let's not forget, he actually said. Besides, he pointed out, we have each attained a degree of efficiency in our respective roles. "Isn't that right?" he said to her, alongside.

And so go, over the roof in ever-hilarious, ante-raising amplitude, the things of his family's life: Caruso 78s, coins, a birdcage, stuffed fox, tennis racquet and toaster. The transition from the insidiousness of class in child's play, enacted in an inspired rebellion against the ennui of youth's afternoons, to the story's magic conclusion is nothing short of masterful. In the end, the young narrator's congenital lack of expectation is rendered in a beautiful, ecstatic moment of recognition—a spark of longing. It is a hushed surprise of quiet wonder that shouldn't, and can't, be spoiled.

If "Seduction of My Sister" rummages the garage and attic in a sustained arc of loss, Bail's first novel, Homesickness, travels the world looking for tropes to send home as postcards, and finds them in abundance on four continents: a Collection of Pygmies; Ramanujan's red-phone theorems and Wiener's calligraphic Taylor's series; Traveler's Geneologies; Corrugated Iron; a bathtub with drains at both ends, straddling the equator; Lenin's gold fillings. The premise is clear from the outset: examine a nation's pretensions by sending its denizens abroad. And yet, Bail's museums and vagrants, for all their cleverness and exuberant inventiveness, most frequently trip over themselves in a cheap joke, as in Bail's nod to Lautréamont's surrealism in the Museum Of Handicrafts, in which the broken remains of Empire lie in state in Kenya, most peculiarly:

They passed two objects which had been combined: an early Singer sewing machine and an umbrella. To save space the umbrella had been opened, revealing its construction, and placed on the machine, but someone without thinking or to demonstrate the jabbering needle, had got it tangled and mutilated something terrible.

This is just one in a long series of jokes, many of which are genuine used-bookstore groaners, such as Bail's pun on the exhibits of an Ecuadorian leg museum: "Civilization and its contents." Still, he gets in some great ones—as when he calls airplane voices "that Esperanto of steadiness which rises at the end"—and they are frequent enough to sustain the journey.

As for the characters in Homesickness, I kept trying to remember whether a doctor was among them, they seemed so frail with life. Too frequently are they mere occasions for brilliant observations and opinions: brief essays with cocks and cigarettes, passports and cuckolding wives and a lawn half a continent away, waiting to be mowed. Like the vatted brains in Bail's museum of genius, I wondered about his travelers: "If I hooked them up to a speaker, would they scream?" Detail is frequently the begetter of place and character—and delirious detail abounds in Homesickness—but somehow all this fails to live up to the kind of facticity that a Balzac or, more fantastically, Melville would have shored up into reality.

Failure, probably, is the wrong judgment, because Bail does succeed in his analogical imaginings, at giving substance to his story. Unquestionably, he can pack a lot of life, its shock and recognition, into the off-hand. Take this gem from world-traveler Borelli's uncle, remarked when the two pay tribute at Richard Burton's London tomb: "It's immovable yet it's a monument to a great traveler. That's the paradox; one that you won't forget."

Paradox. It's hard to see what else the hurtling mess of Homesickness could lead to. Like the succession of museums and continents, we never stay long enough in any one consciousness, or place, to let one imagining take hold; instead, a quick succession of minor masterpieces. Here is Bail's description of Borelli's uncle: "He was sixty-four, with his own teeth, was skinny, as sharp angled (in knees, elbows and nose) as the letters L and K: unfolding, he snapped and crackled like a carpenter's rule."

Brilliant language and keen observations leading to—what exactly? The expected result: museum fry. It has been said of Bail that, "for him, realism in fiction fails to record the subtleties of reality." I don't know whether this counts as praise, since in this he is just one more inheritor of an old problem in the novel, one whose difficulty has only become more urgent as we have invited the intense consciousness of dreams (or, alternatively, the most skeptical of our philosophic doubts) into our most everyday art, a trouble earlier diagnosed by Mary McCarthy: "We know the real world exists, but we can no longer imagine it." One wishes that Bail's travelers had his patience, and moved at a pace that was pedestrian in the best sense: peripatetic, wandering, observant at the pace of two friends on a stroll. Instead, we end the novel as they do-disoriented and exhausted.

Oddly and by contrast, Bail succeeds wildly at capturing both the strangeness of the world and the vitality of its characters in the brief Borgesian elaborations of "Huebler," the most fun of the stories in Camouflage. Determined to help Douglas Huebler, a photographer, in his ambitious task of photographing the existence of everyone alive, the narrator offers help in identifying the first twenty-three, as defined by such recherché (and McSweeney's-anticipating) qualities as:

1. At least one person who always has the last word.

7. At least one person who thinks words are as concrete as objects.

17. At least one person whose existence was foreordained.

22. At least one person whose unique sexual capacities have no outlet.

If it seems unlikely that a short story should contain more real characters and more deeply-felt moments than an entire novel, consider this brilliant moment of Suggested Person Number 2, Rivera, who is "one person who would rather be almost anyone else," a moment during which the overbearing architect finally sees his son:

It was his face. He saw his faults duplicated, smoothly growing. It was what other people must have seen. They were conspicuous: obviously father, son. For Rivera it was an intrusion; he felt like suddenly hitting his son hard across the face. He wanted to; strange, weak man. He went sullen and fiddled with a spoon.

If he could sever, disassociate. That became his immediate, hopeless wish. To be someone-almost anyone-else. Then all the signs displayed in the young face opposite could not point to him.

All twenty-three of Bail's people approximate this quality of genius. The short tale of Karl Schultz—one who will outlive art—is a parable worthy of Kafka. Another of the lives pays silent tribute to Bernhard and Wittgenstein ("Concrete."). And finally, the Twenty-Third person, "for whom reality is richer than the artist's fantasies." Huebler?

There's an uneasiness about Huebler's undertaking that spans all of Bail's works: the means of Huebler's art. For a writer so intensely visual, Bail has an angry obsession with photography. The most loathsome of Homesickness' characters is the obliquely anagrammatic Kaddok, who wears his camera like a weapon, and who is so bumblingly inane he manages to trip over the equator while setting up a shot. Bail can be acidly observant when he is railing against Daguerre's heresy, as in this scene at the Tate: "Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and Tourism are all related. I doubt now whether one can do without the other." In another scene Bail states, "Oh and Commercialism, never one to be left out: two multinationals, Kodak and the Kraft Corporation, had joined forces to sponsor a European food photographic competition, 'Say Cheese!"

Elsewhere, Bail states categorically, "Photography: Melancholia." The origin of this complaint can only be guessed: a deep inner anguish over f-stops and emulsions; the artist's revulsion at the banal machinery of vision and its reproductive processes—a kind of unrelenting paean to Walter Benjamin, sung for future graduate students.

If the failure of character can be considered the chief fault of Homesickness, Bail's second novel opens with promise enough in compensation. Holden's Performance is the coming-of-age story of Holden Shadbolt and the city Adelaide. It says something about Bail, however, that it's uncertain which of these two develops more, or demands more sympathy. Holden endures a broad succession of manipulators, all preceded, following the death of his father, by two startling entrances into his life: a photographic memory and a would-be stepfather, the unscrupulous and storytelling Corporal Frank McBee.

Unfortunately, Holden soon turns out as unaffecting as Kaddok's Pentax. Still, we are treated to Bail's gift of Adelaide by his presence, from the early backstory of his father's work on its trams—

...encouraged by the puritanical streets, the brown trams always went forward in straight lines, scattering traffic and pedestrians like minor objections or side-issues, and somehow this suggested the overwhelming logic of plain thinking. There always seemed to be a tram opening up a clear path to the distant goal of Truth.

—to the city's post-tram disorder; the insatiable thirsts of McBee in his successes; and Holden, at book's end, standing watch over the peroxide paranoia of the State:

Standing on special running-boards... Shadbolt became a reincarnation of his father working his way along the outside of trams. His position though was more unpredictable. There were no regular stops. The aim was to escort the Head of Government in profile in a steady sliding motion, the way a coin is passed before a sceptical crowd, yet rapid enough to foil a sniper on a rooftop aiming to intersect his hairline sights.

Here and throughout, Bail shows gifts of description that stand equal to that of Bellow or Delillo, but not quite with the humanity of the former or the sustained pitch in tuning an idea to its story of the latter. In the end, Holden's Performance feels like one of the sexier sport cars being sold by McBee: you suspect something's going to go mysteriously wrong, no one will know how to fix it, and a thing of beauty will sit on the blocks awaiting a die-hard enthusiast with the patience to master it.

And then there is Eucalyptus—a forest of language in which readers can become joyfully lost. Bail's only necessary novel, Eucalyptus is a wonder. It relates the story of Ellen, and her life in an encyclopedic landscape of eucalypts carefully cultivated by her father Holland on his outback ranch. The plants are stubbornly singular, thriving in strange soil, cultivated by intelligence and passion—and thus Eucalyptus is also the story of stories. Bail's ability to weave story within story, metaphor within metaphor, is displayed here with a mastery hinted at in his previous novels, but they contained nothing like this:

What is frail falls away; stories that take root become like things, misshapen things with an illogical core, which pass through many hands without wearing out or falling to pieces, remaining in essence the same, adjusting here and there at the edges, nothing more, as families or forests reproduce ever changing appearances of themselves; the geology of fable. In Alexandria, eucalypts were grown in front of houses to ward off evil spirits, including fatal diseases.

Eucalyptus takes firm root in its premise: the man who can successfully name each species of E. on Holland's ranch can take possession of it through marriage to Ellen, who is herself more beautiful than any other woman in the outback. After many failures, a man of significant promise arrives, Mr. Cave. Whether he is a better suitor for Ellen or her father is a question from the start, however, as we guess from his first visit:

Mr. Cave shifted in his seat. "Mind you, (studying eucalypts has) given me a life of sorts." He began nodding. "Everything is a comparison," he said for no apparent reason. Ellen had been standing by the window. It was odd how two men repeatedly put down blocks of matter and left it at that. In tone and steadiness they were tarpaulined trucks with heavy loads, now and then changing down a gear, rather than light and sprightly birds, hopping from one bit of colour to another.

As Mr. Cave walks the paddocks with Holland, he takes no notice of Ellen. His platonic interest points up, in his ways as well as name, a paradox in life and stories: how should it be that our attentions to the straightforward, the logical, the catalogued taxonomies—ideal structures placed on the world to give it light—should so devastatingly leave dark shadows within us? As he steadfastly, but with an equally leisured confidence, marches with Ellen's father through the stark light of the paddocks, he is not stippled by even a leaf of doubt. And so we, as well as Ellen, begin to despair as Cave trots off his task: E. signata, E. maidenii, E. nubilis...

But Ellen stumbles upon another man, unannounced to her father, and her discovery of him is a puzzle to the very end, one which delights from its inception. He was lying in the bush, unshaven, disheveled, obviously worn—

Concerning the bodies of men, the visible areas: they have the scars. Men tend to accumulate them, almost as women wear jewelry. To carry a scar is to carry a story. The very suggestion can extend a person. Beneath every scar, then—a story, unfortunately.

The man, unnamed throughout, proceeds to weave his sad art—his stories—into the paddocks of eucalyptus and into Ellen's life. And this is the task of the nameless storyteller: to name each eucalypt without uttering its nomenclature, to tell its story directly in the language of our lives—not in the parallel figuring of Mr. Cave, whose Latinate naming is at best the seed for metaphor. Ellen's engagement with the stranger's stories, despite their crookedness, their oblique falsehoods seeding a straighter truth, culminates in a fugue of desperation whose glorious resolution is Bail's greatest accomplishment.

Camouflage closes with the title story, in which the forty-year-old piano tuner Eric Banerjee discovers in painting indiscernible patterns on a desert Aerodrome during World War II, an unexpected joy in abandonment to large forces: the burning presence of the unpainted hangar, the loudmouthed freedom of Americans, and the great undertow of fate sweeping against personal agency in time of war. In what may be the most straightforward and quiet of his stories, Bail creates a living doubt:

Any sign of life was at mid-distance; and all so quiet it was as if he was going deaf.

Not that he wanted disturbance, disruption, surprise and so on. A certain order was necessary in his line of work. These thoughts he kept to himself. Yet increasingly he felt a dissatisfaction, as though he had all along been avoiding something which was actually closer to the true surface of life.

The twenty pages of "Camouflage" feel riskier in what they leave behind than the hundreds of pages of novelistic gambles Bail packed into Homesickness and Holden's Performance, and they pay off more handsomely. I felt as aware in this story's aftermath of the up-and-down nature of Bail's work—now its vertiginous heights, then its uncertain plummets—as Banerjee felt when surveying his own humble art during the flight that ends his story, and Bail's collection:

Everything was clearer, yet not really. Plane's shadow: fleeting, religious. In the silence he was aware of his heart-beats, as if he hadn't noticed them before.

Now the earth in all its hardness and boulder unevenness came forward in a rush.

Briefly he wondered whether he—his life—could have turned out differently. Its many parts appeared to converge, in visibility later described as "near perfect".

In his insistent vision, his increasing power to turn the scattered encyclopedia of everyday mundanities into metaphor and story, Murray Bail's work at its best does seem to be a convergence: the shaping of a vision that is turning out "near perfect" fiction.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other
Etel Adnan
Post Apollo Press ($13)

from the warring factions
Ammiel Alcalay
Beyond Baroque Books ($12)

by Fanny Howe

October 2002, America. Standard Time began this week; as ever it marks the random nature of time. Early nights. Emptying trees. Tragic news from around the world. Questions around dinner tables. Children hunched over homework.

What are we going to do? Our sense of things is absolutely lonely. A planet in space, no up, no down. A little lighted dot in a bag of darkness. "A heuristics of fear," is what Hans Jonas called it. "Lucky it wasn't me" is a person's daily thought after reading the papers.

In a matter of weeks everyone will have forgotten all of the events of this month, and on back into the year before. But I am not sure that memory is the way to salvage belief because it, too, has the status of fiction now. Culture is kitsch—a few spicy dishes and a color code for dress-ware, Christmas cards from a grandmother who lives in another country.

•   •   •

Etel Adnan grew up as the child of a Syrian Muslim and a Greek Christian between Beirut and Damascus, and endured the Lebanese Civil War before emigrating to the United States. Her book, There, is an act of confrontation with the above unhappy view of our world now and its origins and results. That is, it examines the repetition of the same eruptions and emotions and questions. What is the effect of knowing on what I do? Why am I named what I am? Where is there when I am always here?

Her landscape, dry but surprising, could be somewhere in Southern California. Militarism haunts it, and creates an anxiety that is all shadow. But shadows are not the same as obstacles. And many dreads are malformed shadows of the actual, not the actual itself. This is the real problem that Adnan wants to solve in her writing—which shadow is formed by the real, and what is the real?

Adnan is also a serious painter, and some of the difficulties of art enter into her narrative. Is there any way to make form and substance the same without dividing them? Where is color, if not both behind and before the color beside it? How would you get from white to color and back to white again on one canvas without making them all the same? Only by relationship.

Absurdly absurd this absurdity. Shadows, old companions, speak their own immensity. Why should I desire to undo Nature's simplest law—how can I remove your shadow from your body, and what good would that do to the nations I care for?

Adnan asks questions that she (thankfully) doesn't dare to answer. They are about the female and the male, the you and the she and the I and the he, being divided although made of identical substances. In the Psalms there is a similar vacillation between subjects (I-he-you) that puts this book, including its drawn desert face, into the ancient realm of the absolutely uncertain.

For Adnan the mercurial nature of the pronoun does not prove that a person is an invention of culture and perspective, but instead shows that we each contain the evil and good deeds of all our ancestors—that they are us. You are a hater and a lover, a warrior and a woman. It is not a matter of relativity but of non-dualism. The enemy is embedded in the face of every approaching friend.

I hated you for so long in the inner territory that we inhabited together that you're now the negative print of my identity (no, not a shadow), the unwanted companion who becomes, o tragedy!, love's very substance.

. . .

from the warring factions by Ammiel Alcalay takes a different approach to the same landscape and archaeology. This approach could be called post-modern. Formally it proceeds from recent American poetics and seems free from neo-gnostic self-examination and doubt.

Alcalay grew up in Boston and now lives in New York. He is a poet, translator, critic, scholar, teacher, and journalist; his specialties are the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Levantine culture generally. He spent many years out of the country in ex-Yugoslavia and Jerusalem and has maintained intense friendships across the years and borders.

This book is an excellent example of the thinking that is emerging from a post-Cold War generation. It could be used as a manual for trying to understand the way popular, ancient, and literary languages are "sampled" by writers who desire a new transnational consciousness.

The first part of the book is broken into five sections, each one being a kind of homage to a forensic anthropologist named William Haglund, who investigated and trained others to investigate the corpses of people killed in massacres from Rwanda to Argentina. Alcalay imagines Haglund tracing evidence of what happened in the dust and on car wheels, saying he "could have been Virgil mapping out his descent through the circles of hell."

This investigative activity is what Alcalay is himself doing, by resuscitating anonymous voices and writings from a variety of cultural eruptions. The writings are not ironic or lyrical:

As part of their effort, statistical charts were prepared recording total daily shelling activity; daily numbers of persons killed; daily numbers of persons wounded; and combined reported shelling activity and casualties by day and by week. . .

But lyrical moments come in very short, spoken clips: "Or the frontier then, along with some angels falling."

The second part of the book is a long and rewarding interview with Benjamin Hollander. Despite Alcalay's realism, it is strangely optimistic. From his breadth of curiosity and generous sharing of what he knows, a kind of hope in the human ability to transcend history emerges. He combines anecdotes with opinions, observations with results.

As an American in Israeli society with a Sephardic consciousness and an awareness of the Palestinian perspective, I found myself in a unique position. I could pass for white and was privy to all kinds of racist behavior that people couldn't imagine I would object to. This experience was formative for me, and it re-inscribed things that I was certainly aware of growing up in the United States but which were only driven home for me by being in Israel/Palestine. And it was through the Mizrahi and Palestinian activists and artists that I befriended—through the work they produced and the movements they created—that I began to grasp the true sequence of cultural permission and transmission in the formation of knowledge as a collective endeavor, rather than the way we are usually taught such things proceed—through acts of singular perseverance or genius.

In the final part of the book, Alcalay (a proponent of communalism and full disclosure) tells us which writers he drew his sentences from, and explains the politics behind this method. One of the most articulate and fully developed accounts of literary sampling, it illuminates the first part of the book the way notes by Robert Smithson would unveil the spiral jetty or other of his earthworks.

From the warring factions is a book without questions, and substantively unlike Adnan's There for this very reason. It is a book that answers itself, and in this way it is a useful and complete book for our time—a kind of textbook which concludes with the statement: "By making words and languages reorient themselves across time and face each other under new conditions, my intention is to re-awaken the ancient force of poetry-as fact and testimony."

And Adnan's ruminative, beautiful book ends:

From the primeval waters we arose—you and I, from the beginning we went on a search and when the gardens grew we looked together for a shade, didn't we?

From the desire to live we arose and built nations, didn't we?

. . . then the trees stared at their own bareness and we didn't come to their aid, did we?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003