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The Lifeblood of Consciousness, of Love and Loss: Stephen Massimilla on Ruth Danon’s Limitless Tiny Boat (BlazeVox, 2015)

Book Review

BY STEPHEN MASSIMILLA

From the Spring 2018 Issue of Pratik:

To read the original article on the Pratik bog, CLICK HERE.

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Ruth Danon’s work may seem to be by turns “postmodern” and “Surreal,” but the allure of her style never displaces the sense of a living, breathing presence in the sea of fragmentation. This is the paradoxical wonder of Limitless Tiny Boat: What from a certain perspective is vast, strange, abstract, and ungraspable is, at the same time, spare, heartfelt, and irreducibly human. And the drama and trepidation of the heart is often conveyed in, beside, or through what is tellingly quotidian—the food slowly chewed, “the gloves, partly worn,” “bees in the garden and wasps in the wall.”

I must say there is a special harbor in my own heart for a book that opens with “dead fish / against the pilings.” Amidst such concrete evocation, Danon charts the journey of the self through, to quote the first title, “Something Larger than the Self I Don’t Understand.” Here all understanding is inseparable from unsettlement. Heading out is an act of fleeing, and arriving is a shadowy, solitary experience. Danon’s boat image serves as a vessel, one that becomes, at different times, a bed, a plane, a cradle, a room. It often morphs into another container or frame of reference, ultimately the poem itself “carried along by random / waves.” Water is the medium of reality, of experience; and loneliness and thirst are part of the passenger’s condition, the human condition. These are in turn expressions of desire, which (in the poem “Desire”) is a vast, unstable structure, like language itself. “I wanted all of it,” the speaker asserts in “Duration”: “A home / you could say.” The longing for stability here is almost tangible, but there is something unstable in the structure in and through which it is realized: “the sentence pushes / against the line.”

Still, how can we come to terms with desire? It is both a part of us and not. In “Outward,” where boat imagery and building imagery both figure, “Desire / is interfering with me.” And what if that desire is often for the immediacy of experience? The speaker goes on to consider the moment toward which things tend: “how to account for it /without falsifying the record.” But who is even doing the speaking, given that “I is not a name”? Any notion that this poem is an abstract exploration of dis-solution or a heady exercise in deconstruction runs up against the emotional and sensual immediacy of Danon’s work. The apprehension of “The water still to cross” is too strong to be merely an idea, and there is also the fact of now, the intense reality of “this. Acute. / This certainty.”

What we both can and cannot grasp is not only the self, the sea, and the moment at hand. We move through a variety of times and climes. There are the clouds, which could begin or end anywhere and  “could be below us if we happen to be on a plane” (“Without Prepositions We Cannot Understand Clouds”), and the sun “bleaching out the scarred and pitted wood” (“Bearing the Weight of Snow”). Danon invites us to question where almost anything begins or ends. And are our lives, our desires, as unfathomable as the entire universe?

The second section of the book, entitled Echoes, explores the mythic and “scientific” dimensions of this theme of limitlessness, and of its lovers and discontents. The nymph Echo herself “(a creature of desire and longing, much like ourselves),” is, we are told, now a singularity, a black hole, a phenomenon out of math and physics. This claim is as quirky and funny as it is painful. The mythical lover Echo has become as disembodied as she once was physical, and as contemporary as she once was ancient Greek: “Now she is mapped acoustically and calibrated digitally. She is everywhere and nowhere, and we see that was always the plan” (”Preface”). In the poem “Singularity,” this poor neglected nymph is reduced to the formal components of the poem that describes her diminution—that is, to “Anaphora // And // Rhyme.” Even this is hardly the end of her painful transformation. In “Echo’s calling,” her longing returns “as speech fractured // in air.” An elemental sense of loss also comes through in the short poem “Echo’s Pain”:

Echo is phantom limb. She shivers
as if she exists. She has never forgotten
her body or how much she loved it.

Indeed, this whole book is haunted by echoes of an out-of-body experience. Witness the ghostly, inchoate figures hovering in the oceanic realm on the cover (an image by Danon’s husband, the painter Gary Buckendorf). But surprisingly, Echo’s journey is still far from over. In “Echo Over,” she becomes not only sound moving though air, not only memory, but “The memory of memory.” Her echoing cannot be over, not as long as she is echoing all over again.

Entitled Code Blue, the third section of Limitless Tiny Boat almost takes us under. Here we plummet to the hibernal depths of “Living in the Cold” and of “Writing the Disaster.” The latter poem (after Blanchot) is full of cold and hurt and desperation: “Something’s so wrong in the house of birds,” it begins—only later to conclude with little sense of restoration or recompense: “I know myself only for what I was at the time / And that was not enough.” Lost opportunity, consternation, and desperation are palpable here, as in the poem “Crossing,” where the speaker recalls her anxious effort to make it to her dying mother’s deathbed in time by flying over the Tappan Zee Bridge—a bridge that she feels is about to collapse. She still swings from it in her nightmares to this day.

I love these occasions when the speaker plumbs the abyss. I am reminded of the plea at the end of the earlier poem “Piracy,” where poignancies of mythos, metaphor, and utterance come together startlingly: “I will give you whatever I have. I will return what I took. I will hold out my hands, I will never name names. I will throw down my gloves. I will take you on, I will hoist sails, fly flags, wear white in the dark.” Even if this is an importunate gesture in a dream, it reads as something that had to be said.

In fact, insofar as dream-work and word-work are the products of desire, we are always on the verge of returning what we took, holding out our hands, coming full circle. The entire paradoxical journey of life—and of Limitless Tiny Boat—is one inseparable from the processes of language and dreams. Words, Danon’s speaker affirms, “are the only boat I have.” This journey of paradox, of sensitive intelligence, catches at every impulse, every snag—be it of love, of danger, of pain, of the opportunity and loss glimpsed in every moment. We are carried along amidst objects and narratives that struggle to take shape before they dissolve. This dreamlike process, which defines every waking moment, is not the upshot of a stylistic decision: It is the lifeblood of consciousness, of love and loss, of suffering and joy, of poetry itself.

In the lead-up to the holidays, we’re happy to bring you this interview with Annelies Zijderveld about her book Steeped: Recipes Infused with Tea (Andrews McMeal, 2015), a cookbook that focuses on the full potential cooking with tea, the elixir of the poets. In fact, the book contains occasional snippets of poetry.

The contents move from a “Tea Primer” that references literary, cultural, definitional, and related matters to a “Tea Cooking Cabinet” that enumerates the virtues of a range of teas and tisanes to a section on methodologies to a rainbow of recipes metaphorically spanning the day, from chapters with such titles as “Morning Tea” (breakfast items) on through “Midday Tea” and “Afternoon Tea” to “High Tea” and “Sweet Tea” (dessert items). Each section is subdivided to cover (for instance) “Bites, “Side Dishes,” “Baked” items, “Cold” items, and “Comfort” items. The rose-and-gold-covered volume is also full of lovely, well-styled photographs.

Steeped: Recipes Infused with Tea

Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeal, 2015

ISBN: 1449464971

What gave you the idea for a book focusing on recipes that call for tea?

It all started out as a comment a friend of mine in the culinary profession made that I should write this book. I didn’t think I had a tea cookbook in me, but once the idea for the work was planted, it germinated and flourished into a full book. Up until then, I had tinkered with tea as an ingredient, making recipes like my Green Tea Granola, created for a bake sale and the Spring Rolls with Black Tea Dipping Sauce, created for a birthday potluck (of my friend who would end up shooting Steeped several years later, if you can believe it.).

You have included poetry having to do with tea in Steeped. Could you tell us more about how you selected these poems, and what their role is?

I love poetry and knew from the start, I wanted to tease poetry into the cookbook as a different perspective of telling the story of what tea evokes in the tea lover and snapshots of how tea is appreciated around the world, through international poetry. Anna Akhmatova describes briefly the Russian way of taking tea while Gary Snyder gives a glimpse into more of an American experience (hint: tea is for everyone). I found this wonderful quote from Tagore but couldn’t find its original source so it was struck from the book. A few other instances were right on the edge– I wasn’t sure we would be able to include the snippet from a Rilke letter, but the permission arrived just in time! Jane Kenyon is the poetry mentor who never was. She is possibly my favorite poet as her work moves me with its quiet glimpses of everyday life, often with the undercurrent of deeper truths so rich in poetry. My editor and I were both elated when Donald Hall gave approval to include parts of her work in the book. I liked how she is a constant at the beginning of each chapter which created a cadence for the full day of steeping tea into food. The range of multicultural expressions about tea was an important consideration. Sometimes, though the approvals didn’t come through, and I erred on the side of copyright caution.

You mention in your book that Lapsang souchong is the gold standard of teas with which to cook. Do you still like it more than, say, Matcha (which is very versatile and all the rage today)? Please explain.

Oh, Lapsang Souchong, I cannot quit thee! But seriously, this black tea is smoked over fir tree root for an aroma I love to describe as a campfire in a cup. While it is used to smoke duck or salmon, I do think it is not stretched far enough and that’s why I consider it to be my favorite tea with which to cook. You don’t need a lot to imbue an untraceable edge of the exotic in your food or you can up the ante and go for the bold smoky flavor. Many people find its flavor in the cup off-putting, but when I encountered them on book tour, I tried to encourage them to give Lapsang Souchong another chance. It really shines in cooking (plus it’s a wonderful real food substitute for ingredient mystery that is “liquid smoke”). I do love matcha and I’m glad it’s time really has come to the U.S. but I find it an obvious choice for cooking with tea. It’s easy. If you look at matcha, it resembles the consistency of a spice like ground cinnamon and has the kitsch factor of turning whatever it’s added to, green. Lapsang Souchong is a question mark then, or a brave exclamation point to the cooking with tea question.

Who are your favorite classic and contemporary poets, or the ones that have influenced you the most?

This is such a hard question to answer because poetry collections are like music albums. I might really love one album, but now be as keen on more recent work. A song on one album might stand out and need to be memorized. So, if I may, I’m going to side-step a bit here. Part of a poem by Mark Strand compelled me to write poetry professionally– it showed me the absolute fun and complexity od adjusting words just so. Up until then, I had written for many years but privately. That poem spun me around! The book Rose by Li-Young Lee never stops captivating me with its beauty. Alberto Rios and Yehuda Amichai bind me with the spells of their wordplay and magical realism. The lyrical wordplay of Ross Gay (that poem about figs inCatalogue of Unabashed Gratitude  or the dog in Bringing the Shovel Down– that dog haunts me still!) and Carol Frost (all of her honeycombs, bees and mother poems) are transfixing. Lucille Clifton is a master of brevity and narrative. “Perejil” by Rita Dove still takes my breath away, as does “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche. The gorgeous work of Rilke and Keats, along with Donne were starting points for me… And then we come back to Kenyon. I picked up Constance at Green Apple Books and several pages in, ordered the rest of her work from the bookstore. She is the first poet I read front to back, wanting to better understand how her poetry changed as she kept writing and what stayed the same– I wanted to see that development and learn from it, so you could say I studied her books. I can’t forget Martin Espada or Sharon Olds or Gabriel by Edward Hirsch. I have a soft spot for international poets and especially Jaroslav Seifert as well as Milosz and of course, Neruda. This is an incomplete list, but it’s a stab of an attempt at an answer.

How about your favorite chefs and cookbook authors?

If I had to pick a chef whose food is everything I want to eat it would be Suzanne Goin. I like the way she thinks about flavors and her recipes sometimes involve several parts, but you always know they will deliver. Jeremy Fox is another chef whose food inspires me. Ottolenghi and Michael Solomonov can do no wrong (which I realize is hyperbolic, but we did travel to Philadelphia for a big birthday just so I could welcome a new decade at Zahav. So worth it). I’m a curious cook and pulled notably toward spice blends and ingredients that I’ve never encountered before. I appreciate how Nigel Slater approaches cooking. I like how Alice Medrich is so precise with her wording in her recipes and it’s as if she is right there in the kitchen with you telling you not to beat the batter one more time. Melissa Clark nails what to eat with such grace. I’m a sucker for learning new things and find Julia Turshen and Samin Nosrat great teachers in written form. Did I mention I’m obsessed with Mexican food and am a student of it?

How did you develop an interest in culinary poetry, and how much of your own work falls into that category?

Culinary poetry came about as a response to trying to make space for two of my passions which until that point competed for my attention. By marrying both, poetry, which for me gets so easily drowned out by food, could have a voice in the matter. I would say that a small portion of my poetry falls within the category of food poetry– it’s what you will see most online, but I have a few projects I’m working on outside of the digital space that only, if ever, dip a toe into the food poetry pool.

What were the principle challenges that your book project entailed? Did it take you a long time to find a publisher? How about developing the recipes to being with? Was coming up with an organizational strategy a challenge? How about the writing in general, and the photography and the design process?

I wanted Steeped to be cohesive, approachable, artful, and instructive. My agent shopped the proposal around and Andrews McMeel came on board pretty quickly. I started out having about 25 recipes mostly finished and ready to be tested. The sample table of contents submitted to my publisher in the beginning was almost fully baked from a concept standpoint with a few changes along the way. Organizing the book was the easy part as the book resembled a skeleton and it became clear what colors should be used where to flesh out the book’s progress for the reader. I organized the recipes around the tea to be the core ingredient as a way to ensure it would not be lopsided with too many Lapsang Souchong recipes, as an example. What’s wonderful about a cookbook is that some days, I could sit down and write, write, write. Other days were spent researching for the right poetry snippets. Still, other days would be mostly kitchen days. I loved that flow of ever-changing patterns with all of the activities being creative. The design was done internally at my publisher’s and they would consult me on things like the cover. We shot the book in the span of about two weeks, so that involved a completely other kind of creativity–one grappling with light and shadow, colored textiles and tableware.

Are there particular recipes in Steeped that you’d like to highlight at this time, for this occasion (or that you think the poetry fans on this site should start with)?

First of all there are no plum recipes. Dear, sweet William Carlos Williams. I feel like “This is Just to Say” is the entry poem into the food poetry world, but alas, no plum recipes. Instead, I’d suggest starting with the White Bean Walnut Toasts, the Chamomile Corn Chowder and the Masala Chai Applesauce for winter. Some recipes I’ve been craving lately include the Salted Almond Ice Cream with Masala Chai Magic Shell and the Earl Grey Whey Soda or the Green Tea Broccoli Soup.

Could you say a few words about your “food poet” project?

I started the food poet blog back in 2007 when I was studying toward an MFA in poetry at New England College and traveling for work (at a tea company) to food festivals and tradeshows. I desired to combine my two keenest interests in a place where they could symbiotically live. At any given moment, there might be a food poem, recipe, interview with a poet, or essay on art or travel ideas on the blog. I try to operate under the idea that if it’s my happy place, perhaps it will be someone else’s happy place too. The food poet was selected by Alimentum Journal as one of their favorite food blogs, which is always great to find your work appreciated, isn’t it?

We know you’ve been attending the AWP conference for years even though not many cookbook authors attend that conference. Can you say a few words about how you’ve been promoting Steeped and which promotional pushes have been interesting and/or worked out well?

I’m so glad you asked this question. I have loved being the sole cookbook author at AWP. Poets and writers need to eat and often times, enjoy the act of cooking. It’s been such a joy to connect with tea drinking readers and cooks at AWP and I loved pushing the boundaries of what a cookbook might encompass by including poetry. I’m a firm believer that poetry is for the people and that if they haven’t yet found poetry is for them, perhaps it’s because they haven’t yet met a poem that sets their mind on fire. Seeding poetry through a cookbook and then seeding a cookbook into a mainly literary conference resembles my desire to blur the lines with the goal of connecting.

Dana Gioia, 99 Poems: New and Selected.

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf, 2016. 194 pages

(This review was written in the fall of 2016)

Dana Gioia—the author of numerous volumes of poems, translations, literary criticism, and essays, as well as a book editor and lyricist—is one of the most important figures in contemporary letters. Having served as chair of the NEA, poetry editor of Italian Americana (1994-2003), and Poet Laureate of California, he has long sought to bring poetry and poetry appreciation to a wide audience. As his 2015 essay “Poetry as Enchantment” suggests, he, like Blake, Rilke, Pound, and Stevens, sees poetry in light of the central role it once played in public life: as a means of addressing our basic cultural and spiritual predicament. Gioia’s beautiful collection, 99 Poems: New and Selected, can serve as a perfect introduction to his poetic work as a whole. It attests to the range and sophistication of his forms and themes. Organized into seven thematic sections, each incorporating work from the poet’s wide-ranging career, 99 Poems strikes notes of gravity and humor, disappointment and wonder, skepticism and celebration, grief and joy.

The first section, “Mystery,” sets up Gioia’s lucid yet complex perspective. In the wistful poem “Insomnia,” the speaker contemplates mysteries such as “the murmur of property, of things in disrepair” and “the faces you could not bring yourself to love,” arriving at no epiphany but “The terrible clarity this moment brings, / the useless insight, the unbroken dark.” In “The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves,” the speaker considers that, alas, there are no guiding stars to rely on at the moment, and urges us to “look for smaller signs.” Have we abandoned our natural, inborn sense of wonder, as the Christian theologian Paul Tillich admonished us not to? Taken as a whole, the poems in this section suggest that we perhaps shouldn’t even look for too much meaning, but that we shouldn’t overlook the realm of the compromised and seemingly insignificant either, as this sphere is a haven of sorts, where the last sense of mystery lies. But is there no higher, transcendent realm? In “All Souls’” the speaker asks us to imagine (as did Marx and John Lennon) that “there is no heaven and no hell,” while adding that even the spirit trapped in this unholy world is “disabled.” The poem “Maze without a Minotaur” describes a maze in which there are “no monsters but ourselves.” Indeed, the only monster in the poem “Monster” is described as “the thing I have created.” It appears that we are responsible for our own problems, values, actions, judgment, and vision.

Similar principles apply in the next section, “Place,” though the poet’s evocations of place involve polemical, social, and political commentary. “A California Requiem,” one of many poems about Gioia’s home state, concludes: “We could not…/ see the trees cut down for our view. / What we possessed, we always chose to kill.” Equally admonitory is “Most Journeys Come to This,” a poem about Italy, one of Gioia’s ancestral homelands. In this piece, which updates the wisdom of the classical Latin eclogue, we are advised not to buy into the commercial tourist itinerary or agenda:

Leave the museums. Find dark churches

in back towns that history has forgotten,

the unimportant places the powerful ignore

where commerce knows no profit will be made.

This emphasis on the road less traveled is of course fitting for the itinerary of a poet (in fact, Gioia’s “The Road” clearly references the Frost poem). Here the speaker is also commenting on the road of cultural materialism. He urges us to seek out alleys and listen through windows for the sounds of native Italian speech, then to enter a dark obscure chapel. But there we will not necessarily see the light. Instead, “if the vision fails,” there is perhaps nothing left to contemplate but:

the grim and superannuated gods

who rule this shadow-land of marble tombs,

bathed in its green suboceanic light.

Not a vision to pursue, and yet

these insufficiencies make up the world.

This landscape is beautifully rendered in all its familiarity and unfamiliarity. But is this new kind of postcard enough to coax a broad audience off the tourist route? What’s more, if what “most journeys come to” is at best a vision of “the insufficiencies of the world,” just the shadow-realm of “the grim and superannuated gods,” is there any place left for the monotheistic God, or for any enduring higher power or purpose?

What we can clearly see is that the templates and sources Gioia relies on are rather insistently (and often ironically) Christian, and that those religious echoes account for much of their appeal. In the poem “Shopping,” the speaker takes on the role of a latter-day Jesus sardonically parodying the Beatitudes to critique American materialism: “Blessed are the acquisitive, / For theirs is the kingdom of commerce.” These godless values are inadequate. But unlike in “Most Journeys,” here even the resident deities are reduced to puns: “Redeem me…/ Mercury, protector of cell phones and fax machines.” Indeed, “Spending all my time, discounting all I see,” this speaker makes short work of even Wordsworth’s plaintive invocation to the spirits of pantheism, countering that “There is nothing but the getting and spending….” In fact, in “Prophecy,” Gioia invokes the Lord’s prayer as if to include the oracular mode itself in his list of misguided pretentions: “O Lord of indirection and ellipses, / ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction…// bless us with ennui and quietude…”

Gioia can sound like Auden, relying on irony, formal discipline, and tonal restraint to preclude the kind of language that could be construed as self-involved, overblown, or in any way demagogic. The section on “Place” even includes a poem set in the Never-Never land of the airport. It concludes, “But nothing ever happens here.” It is hard not to hear an echo of Auden’s elegy to his own less skeptical predecessor, W.B. Yeats, in which Auden’s speaker insists that “poetry makes nothing happen,” a subject Gioia addressed in his 1991 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” There, and in the eponymous book that followed, he critiqued what he saw as an academic predilection for exclusivist and obscurantist approaches to writing and writing about poetry. But he by no means denied that more lucid poetry can have something to teach us. Our modern preoccupation with external “progress,” after all, can entail overlooking deeper, quieter truths. At the close of this section, the speaker of one of Gioia’s newer poems concludes (perhaps echoing Eliot) that even a writer may get much further by staying where he is: “What a blessing just to sit still…,” he observes. “Let the dust settle on my desk. / No one needs to hear from me today” (“Progress Report”). And yes, writing about having gotten nothing done amounts to getting something done. But it takes the proper preparation.

Is the path of quiet contemplation necessarily that of imagination? Though he preaches perceptivity and reflectiveness, Gioia often seems to question Romantic and Transcendentalist notions of the artist’s power. The poems in the section entitled “Imagination” are often about the lack thereof. They are also often archly meta-poetic. “My Confessional Sestina” is a hilariously clever putdown of writing workshop hackwork. And that word “Confessional” in the title is aptly mock-Catholic. It prepares us for the next poem, in which the title merges with the first line: “The Silence of the Poets / is something to be grateful for.” The playful poem that follows is about how money is not simply or unironically, as Stevens mused, “a kind of poetry” (“Money”). And the next poem, entitled “The Next Poem,” is in part about the disappointment a poet faces: “How much better it seems now / than when it is finally written.” What’s more, this section of the book is not without sociopolitical statements about how imagination can get us into trouble. Consider the end of “A Short History of Tobacco”:

The elders smoked and chanted in a trance.

The Mayans blew the smoke to the four corners

of the world. It was a gift from God—

profitable, poisonous, and purely American.

More intimate, personal explorations come to the fore in the section on “Remembrance,” where we find “Finding a Box of Family Letters,” about Gioia’s memories of his father. Even more challenging to easy faith are the poems inspired by the death of his infant son (including the moving “Planting a Sequoia,” and “Special Treatments Ward”). In “Majority,” which was written twenty years later, the speaker both imagines the maturation of that son and offers his farewell, without clarifying whether the “afterlife” he refers to is just a trope or something more.

Gioia is a master, rare in this day and age, of the narrative poem, as the “Stories” section bears out. “Haunted,” which is in free verse, though with the discipline of blank verse punctuated with internal slant-rhymes, seems to be about the memories of a loved one. The speaker has an encounter with a middle-aged ghost who undresses like a lover, her chemise billowing “as if alive.” But the speaker is a monk. Then again, this monk is telling his story in a bar as he pursues nothing more than an earthly life. Does a “higher” realm exist in Gioia’s universe, or in ours?

The poet plays masterfully with many such story genres, unspooling his lines with Audenesque clarity and wit. But ironically, the stories are often about something missing. Perhaps all of our plots amount to a pile of clichés, as in this excerpt from “Film Noir,” a poem in the “Songs” section:

She’s married but lonely. She wishes she could.

Watch your hands! Oh, that feels good.

She whispers how much she needs a man.

If only he’d help her. She has a plan.

Their eyes meet, and he can tell

It’s gonna be fun, but it won’t end well.

He hears her plot with growing unease.

She strokes his cheek, and he agrees.

For all its clever irony, and for all its bemoaning of the vacuity of wide-spread approaches to everyday life and art in the modern world, Gioia’s work does at times strike transcendent chords. “Prayer” adopts the rhythms of the Christian prayer so effectively that, in the end, despite the provisos it encompasses, it seems to express a kind of faith. And, with its thematic paradoxes and strains of Anglo-Saxon sound structure, there is something thrilling and otherworldly about “Vultures Mating.” Here the poet taps into a primal sense of religiosity, as in something out of D.H. Lawrence or Stanley Kunitz: “the buzzard or the princess, the scorpion, the rose— / each damp and fecund bud yearning to burst, / to burn, to blossom, to begin.”

“Love,” the last section of the book, closes with “Marriage of Many Years,” a subtler paean to what “happens beyond words.” Though (as the speaker of an earlier poem, “On Approaching Forty,” affirmed), everything passes away, love itself involves a language spiritual enough to express acceptance, thereby arriving at what is ultimately “learned by heart.” Here Gioia’s speaker eloquently celebrates this quiet mystery:

Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep

our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy.

What must be lost was never lost on us.

Throughout the volume, in its ongoing push-and-pull between affirmation and doubt, Gioia’s work demonstrates mastery of many genres and forms, showing us how poetry can disabuse us of easy clichés while helping us to make deeper sense of the world and our lives. By subjecting our faith and our understanding to the standards and challenges of both tradition and innovation, Dana Gioia could be said to lend compelling and enduring shape to the human struggle for meaning.

De Palchi, Alfredo, Paradigm: New and Selected Poems 1947-2009, ed. John Taylor, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013.

ISBN 978-0-9884787-1-8

Review by Stephen Massimilla

Paradigm: New and Selected Poems is the most comprehensive single collection to date of the original, provocative, and uncompromising poetic oeuvre of Alfredo de Palchi. As one of the trustees of the Sonia Raiziss-Giop foundation, De Palchi has done a great deal to support and promote poetry in translation in the United States. He founded the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award at the Academy of American Poets; and he provided funding for the Bordighera Poetry Prize, for bilingual book publication, at CUNY. De Palchi was also the long-time Editor-in-Chief of Chelsea magazine; and, with Sonia Raiziss, he has been an accomplished pioneer translator of such Italian poets as Eugenio Montale. Paradigm comprises selections from all of the author’s major volumes, as well as new poems, in the original Italian complete with en face translations by six accomplished poet-translators. The book also includes an extensive bibliography of critical works on the poet.

This volume showcases the poet’s various styles, ranging from the dark and curt to the somewhat more prosy or plain-spoken. The work is generally—for all its frequently frank, hard-edged anti-lyricism—also mysterious, rhythmical, and emotionally rich. Although De Palchi is not a narrative poet, his poems often fit together in long sequences that recount stories.

Whole cycles are at times delineated in a few turns of phrase. (I will quote from the English translations, though it is important to look at the Italian, which is generally more lyrical than the translations, to get a better sense of the original music.) In a world “boiling with seed” (71), birth itself is represented from the start as an affliction that engenders the trials of life—possibilities, sufferings, the struggle for self-preservation: “The first cause / engrafts the nebulous aorta / and quickens consciousness / with the abject drop that splits / the egg / starting the womb / fit for affliction” (5). And the related “black / sunflower seed” evoked on the next page simultaneously signifies the urgency involved in writing, in reading back into the embryonic past “behind / the unconscious,” only to face the advancing “nebulae” of uncertainty and inquietude (7).

This early sequence was written while the poet was incarcerated; and the darkness surrounding the “nebulae” reflects the historical context in which de Palchi came of age. His work is not only haunted by wartime atrocities—he refers a bit later to “El Duce’s camps” (75) and “Gesthemanes where an entire people are ground to ash” (79)— but also to his own experience as a political prisoner in Italy. The poet was himself tortured in his youth by the Fascists and later by the Communists—background information that sheds a poignant light on his cryptically spartan realism.

Among the selections from Sessions with My Analyst, the poet speaks of scratching on stone, digging inward to extract inspiration despite and through his unjust confinement: “I don’t know how, where in my geologic age, / to begin, to extract the magma: / impossible to communicate / the twisted inconclusive gibberish, / a thicket alive with snakes” (83). In this sequence, the often-repeated word “difficult” describes communication as much as survival. The Modernist theme of “non-communication” (115) as inseparable from the truth is central to all these “sessions.” Even beyond any literal prison, reality and human relations themselves involve entrapment. It is in this light that, in the title poem of the preceding collection, De Palchi’s speaker freed the trapped moth beating against the window pane, only to insist, “I persist in doing the scorpion’s / dark dance” (The Scorpion’s Dark Dance, 11). That “dance” is the dark art of the poet in search of the truth. And as De Palchi much more recently emphasized in an interview, “I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but there is not one false word in my poems” (Panella, Giuseppe, The Poetry of Alfredo de Palchi: An Interview and Three Essays, trans. Jeremy Allen, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013. p 53).

That assertion of honesty can recall a political context—“because I told the truth I was beaten, / forced to silence by fascists / then tortured by partisans” (99)—but it also underscores De Palchi’s commitment to speaking, spitting out what is most essential. This fierce aesthetic serves as a bitter tonic to the inauthentic soppiness of many a pointlessly popular poem. Thirty pages later, we are told with regard to communicating “openness / to the love of mankind” that “I shun every request, any effusiveness” (131). Instead, the poet generally favors a poetics of reticence and interruption involving a network of hyphens, caesuras, commas, periods, spaces, and elisions: an intense hermeticism that is at times—as in the sections of the poem “Hamletic Fungus”—almost haiku-like (256). And like Emily Dickinson, De Palchi never includes titles with his poems.

It is fitting that so many of these laconic but ironic and sardonically outspoken pieces should be populated by snakes, spiders, worms, maggots, microbes, bacteria, moths, rats, and scorpions. Even in the earliest work, we inhabit a world “of trees swallowed whole by / the concrete spider / and the festering blister of night” (37). Elsewhere, as in Addictive Aversions, we encounter creaturely evocations of frank eroticism: “my sex lurks, / an obsessed rat” (193). And even very recent poems addressed to those who may lie in “a worm-thick mucilage” include allusions to the Christian mythos that nevertheless defy the sanctimonies of religion: “the visions of too many a mother of Christ / in your cell/ can’t save you….” (517). Spurning platitudinous notions of beauty, De Palchi insists on unsentimental expressions of anguish, sexuality, and anger, as well as on rapt, unadorned observation.

Indeed, he is a devotee of indifferent natural and scientific processes, even  “plankton that entangles me in the abyss” (83). It is in this light that the poetry of Anonymous Constellation describes a harsh, humbling “begetting devouring” universe of dust to dust: “Everywhere dust on all things on all of us dust” (157). In Sessions with My Analyst, we are told that  “I love technical knowledge that is / speechless” (141). This realm could be said to include everything from “the anthill that forms a solemn cathedral” (67) to the “voracious insects” of De Palchi’s most recent collection (429). As in the eyes of the astronomer, the geologist, and the biologist, impersonal nature will of course win out in the end—as in the beginning. In one poem, the speaker even asserts, “I spit on my own origin where the cormorants sweep by me on the primeval banks” (101).

In the later erotic sequence entitled Carnal Essence, a different speaker returns to the “originary water” (321) of creation, descending into the chaos of the germinative unconscious, with the “serpent” as a figure of rebirth. In fact, the poet has sowed “fecund…ground” for this realm of “carnal religion” (327) by much earlier establishing that “any snake egg” contains the embryonic proto-form of a person, and that the storm in the serpent’s eye holds “the paradigm” of the human capacity for creation and regeneration (275). It is in light of this at once scientific and outrageously pagan, almost Pharaonic metaphor for the imaginative process that we can view the persona that one poem presents as “the diabolical priest who irks / and burns old age” (283) in a context that points all the way back to the “primeval banks” and the “black seed” of origin with which this review began. Indeed, in a related recent poem, the thorn-throated, mock-Christ figure that “withdraws into the ditch” is restored as “the purely green fossil / that I am at the dawn /of the other light” (347).

Productively yoking many contrastive tendencies, this entire volume, which samples the poet’s vast and varied production, amply demonstrates a lifelong dedication to gritty lyricism, forthright reticence, scientific inspiration, visceral imaginativeness, and ultimate originality—a vividly unsentimental paradigm of beauty and truth.

In my post of Jan 20, 2015, I mentioned that I’d spent the late spring, entire summer, and fall of 2014 translating a lot of Neruda. My translations of cantos from the Canto General–including the entire Heights of Machu Picchu–were contributed as input for a project in which I believed they would (and still believe they should) play a key role.

In response to this installment, the leading editor at a press commented, “You’re a gifted, lyrical translator with a keen sensitivity to Neruda’s inner workings. I’m very, very glad that you’re taking this project so much to heart.” Though these are not at all my most recent revisions (they date back to 2014), I am happy to share just a couple of selected samples of that work here:

CANTO GENERAL, first two cantos (Massimilla, summer 2014)

CANTO I:  A LAMP OF EARTH

I:

Amor America

Before the wig and the waistcoat,

there were rivers, arterial rivers:

there were cordilleras in whose wrinkled wave

the condor and the snow appeared immobile:

there was the dampness and thickness, the thunder

as yet unnamed, the planetary pampas.

Man was earth, vessel, eyelid

of tremulous mud, a shape in clay,

he was a Carib vase, Chibcha stone,

imperial cup or aruacanian quartz.

He was tender and bloody, but on the moist grip

of his obsidian blade, the initials of the earth were

written.

No one could

later recall them: the wind

forgot them, the language of water

was buried, the code words were lost

or drowned in silence or blood.

Life itself was not lost, my pastoral brothers.

But like a savage rose

a crimson drop fell into the thicket

and extinguished a lamp of earth.

I am here to relate the history.

From the peace of the bisons

to the flailed sands

at the earth’s southern edge, in the spume

of the accumulated Antarctic light,

through the furrows in the precipice

of shadowy Venezuelan serenity

I looked for you, my father,

young warrior of brass and darkness,

or for you, nuptial verdure, unruly mane,

maternal alligator, metallic dove.

I, Incan of the loamy soil,

touched the rock and said:

Who expects me? I clasped

a fistful of empty silicate dust.

But I wandered among Zapotec flowers

and the light stepping gently as a doe,

and the green shade fell, sensitive as an eyelid.

My land without a name, without America.

Equinoctial stamen, purple spear,

your scent rose up through me, from earthen roots

to the cup from which I drank, to the slenderest

word as yet unborn on my lips.

Vegetation

To unnumbered nameless lands

wind dived down from other dominions,

trailing celestial threads of rain;

and the god of the impregnated altars

restored the lives and the flowers.

In the fecundity, time grew vast.

The jacaranda uplifted its spume

of transmarine splendors.

The araucaria with its bristling lances

was pure magnitude against the snow,

the primordial mahogany tree

distilled blood from its crowning cup,

and to the south of the larch pines,

the thunder tree, the red tree,

the spiny tree, the mother tree,

the vermillion celba, the gum tree,

were earthly volume and sound,

were terrestrial entities.

A new aroma was propagated,

passing through the earth’s

interstices, converting its breath

to smoke and fragrance:

wild tobacco lifted

its rosebush of imaginary air.

Like a spear tipped

with fire, corn appeared, and its stature

was threshed and grew anew,

disseminating its flour; the dead

were held beneath its roots,

and then, from its cradle, it witnessed

the emergence of the vegetal gods.

Wrinkle and extension, the seed

of the wind was dispersed

over the feathers of the cordillera,

dense radiance of germinal stalks,

sightless dawn suckled

by the earthly unguents

of relentless rain-drenched latitudes,

of enshrouded fountainous nights,

of whispering cisterns of morning.

And even so, over the llano plains,

like planetary plates,

beneath a fresh pueblo of stars,

the ombu tree, lord of the grasslands, detained

the susurrous flight of the open air

and mounted the pampa, subduing it

with its bridle of reins and roots.

Arboreal America,

savage bush between the oceans,

from pole to pole you balanced

your verdant treasure, your lushness.

Night germinated

in cities of sacred seedpods,

in sonorous timbers,

extensive leafage that covered

the germinal stone, the early births.

Green uterus, seminal American

savannah, overladen bodega,

a branch was born, like an island,

a leaf took the shape of the sword,

a flower was lightning storm and tentacled medusa,

a cluster rounded off its outline,

a root dropped into the tenebrous depth.

II:

Some Beasts

It was the twilight of the iguana.

From its iridescent crest

its tongue like a dart

plunged into the vegetation;

the monastic anteater treaded

through the jungle on melodious feet.

The guanaco, thin as oxygen

in the wide brown heights,

went walking in his golden boots,

while the llama widened its innocent

eyes on the delicacy

of the dew-pebbled world.

The monkeys were braiding

an unendingly erotic thread

along the high banks of the dawn,

pulling down walls of pollen

and startling the violet flight

of the butterflies of Muzo.

It was the night of the alligators,

the pure and swarming night

of snouts jutting out of the slime,

and from the somnolent swamps,

an opaque clamor of scale armor

returning to its terrestrial origin.

The jaguar touches the leaves

with its phosphorescent absence;

the puma running in the branches

like a predatory fire, while burning

in him are the alcoholic

eyes of the jungle.

Badgers scratch the feet

of the river, sniff out the nest

whose palpitating delight

they’ll attack with scarlet teeth.

And in the depths of the great water,

like the encircling ring of the earth,

lies the gigantic anaconda

covered with ceremonial clay-paint,

devouring and religious.

III:

The Birds Arrive

Throughout our land, all was flight.

Like drops of blood and feathers,

the cardinals incarnadined

the Anahuacan aurora.

The toucan was an adorable

box of multicolored fruit,

the hummingbird conserved

the original sparks of thunderbolts,

and in the immobile air,

its miniscule bonfires burned.

The illustrious parrots filled

the profundity of the foliage

like ingots of green gold

freshly extracted from the muck

of submerged marshlands,

and from the orbits of their eyes

yellow ringlets looked out,

ancient as minerals.

All the eagles of the atmosphere

nurtured their bloodthirsty infants

in the uninhabited azure,

and soaring over the world

on carnivorous plumes,

the condor—royal assassin,

solitary friar of the sky,

black talisman of the snow,

hunting hurricane of falconry.

Out of the fragrant clay,

the ingenious teacher-bird

built small sonorous theaters

where it burst out singing.

The nightjars kept

lavishing their watery cries

on the banks of the cenotes.

The aruacan doves built

rustic nests of brambles

where they left their regal gifts

of iridescent eggs.

The southern starling, redolent,

gentle autumn carpenter,

displayed its breast spangled

with a scarlet constellation,

and the Antarctic sparrow lifted

the flute it had just fetched

from the aqueous eternity.

What’s more, wet as a water lily,

the flamingo opened the roseate doors

of its stained-glass cathedral

and floated off like the dawn

far from the stifling rainforest

where the quetzal dangles its precious

gems and, the moment

it awakes, stirs, slides, flashes

and lets its virgin embers fly.

A maritime mountain moves

toward the islands, a moon

of birds flocking south

over the seething islets

of Peru.

It’s a living river of shadows,

a comet of innumerable

little hearts

which eclipse the solar world

like a star with its thick tail

glittering toward the archipelago.

And at the far edge of the irate

ocean, in the marine rain,

wings of the albatross surge up

like two pillars of salt

establishing the silence

between the torrential waterspouts

with their spacious hierarchy—

the Order of the Solitaires [solitaries].

IV:

The Rivers Approach

Lover of the rivers, lover attacked

by turquoise water and transparent drops—

it’s like a tree of veins, your specter

of a somber goddess who bites apples,

only then to wake up naked;

you were tattooed by the rivers,

and in the soaked heights your head

filled the world with fresh drops of dew.

You shook the water in your belt.

You were shaped of springs

and lakes glittered in your brow.

From your maternal thickness you gathered

the liquid like vital tears,

and you scratched the riverbeds of sand

all across the planetary night,

traversing rough and dilated rocks

on the path, breaking apart

the entire geology of salt,

cutting down forests of compact walls,

parting the muscles of quartz.

Orinoco

Orinoco, let me be on your shores

that hourless hour

let me go naked, as then,

and enter your baptismal darkness.

Orinoco of scarlet water,

let me plunge my hands so they may return

to your maternity, to your course,

river of races, homeland of roots,

your broad burbling sound, your savage lamina

comes from where I come, from the poor

and haughty solitude, from a secret

like a stream of blood, from a silent

mother of clay.

Amazon

Amazon,

capital of aquatic syllables,

patriarchal progenitor, you’re

the secret eternity

of fecundation;

like birds, rivers rush to you, covered

by conflagration-colored pistils,

the great felled trunks fill you with pueblos of perfume,

the moon can neither watch nor measure you.

You’re charged with green sperm

like a nuptial tree, you’re silvered

in savage springtime;

you’re reddened by timbers,

blue between the moons of the stones,

wrapped in ferruginous vapor,

slow as the passage of a planet.

Tequendama

Tequendama, do you remember

your lone passage, unwitnessed

along the heights, your thread

of solitudes, slender willfulness,

celestial line, arrow of platinum;

do you remember, step by step,

opening walls of gold

to the point of tumbling from the sky into

the terrifying theater of empty stone?

CANTO II: THE HEIGHTS OF MACHU PICCHU

I

From air into air, like an open net,

I breezed between the streets and the atmosphere, appearing and waving good-bye,

in the arrival of autumn, with its coinage flickering

through the leaves, and between the spring and the tasseled grain—

that which the greatest love, as within a falling glove,

hands on to us like a large moon.

(Days of living radiance in bodies exposed

to the elements: steel converted

to the silence of acid:

nights unraveled to the final thread of flour:

yarns of pollen reaped from the nuptial native land.)

Someone waiting for me among the violins

discovered a world like a buried tower

sinking its spiral deeper than all

the rough sulfur-colored leaves:

still deeper, into the gold geology,

like a sword enveloped in meteors,

I plunged my tender and turbulent hand

down to the most genital terrestrial territory.

Head first, I entered the deepest waves

plummeted like a droplet through the sulfuric peace,

and, like a blind man, returned to the jasmine

of the spent human spring.

II

From flower to flower, the high seed is passed on,

and the rock retains its own flower scattered

in its crushed frock of sand and diamond dust;

but man crumples the petal of light that he gathers

from relentless deep-sea springs

and drills the pulsing metal in his hands.

And soon, over the sunken card table, between

the clothes and smoke, like a shuffled number, the soul is left:

quartz and wakefulness, tears in the ocean

like pools of cold: but still

he tortures and kills it on paper, with hate,

sweeps it under the habitual rug, shreds it

in the hostile garments of wire.

No: through the corridors, air, sea, or out on the roads,

who stands guard over his blood, knifeless

(like incarnadine poppies)? Anger has exhausted

the dreary trade of the dealer in souls,

while, high in the plum tree, the dew

has for a thousand years been leaving its translucent message

on the same branch that waits for it, oh heart,

oh crushed brow among the cavities of autumn!

How many times, in the wintry streets of a city or on

a crepuscular bus or boat, or in the denser solitude

of a night of festivities beneath the sound

of shadows and bells, in the very den of human pleasure

I wanted to stop and search for the eternal unfathomable vein

that I’d once touched in the stone or the lightning unleashed by a kiss.

(Something in the grain like a yellow history

of little swelling chests repeating an account

of unending tenderness in the germinal layers,

and that, always the same way, is shucked to ivory,

a diaphanous ghost of home in the water, ringing

from the lone snowcaps down to the blood-shaded waves.

I could grasp nothing but a bunch of faces or masks

tossed down like rings of hollow gold,

like scattered clothing, daughters of a furious fall

that shook the wretched tree of intimidated races.

I had nowhere to rest my hand,

no place that (running like the fluid of an impounded fountain,

or sharp as a nugget of anthracite or glass)

would have restored the heat or cold of my outstretched palm.

What was man? In what part of his conversation started

among shops and whistles—in which of his metallic vibrations

lived the indestructible, the imperishable life?

III

Like corn, the mortal being was husked in the bottomless

granary of forgotten deeds, miserable events,

from one o’clock to seven, to eight,

and not one but many deaths came to each:

every day a small death—dust, worm, lamp

snuffed in the outskirts of mud—a small thick-winged death

entered into each man like a short lance,

and man was driven by bread and by the knife,

the cattle driver: son of the seaports, or dark captain of the plow,

or rodent of overrun streets:

all weakened waiting for their death, their brief daily death:

and the fateful affliction of each day was

like a black cup from which, trembling, they drank.

IV

Mighty death beckoned me many times:

it was like invisible brine in the waves,

and what its invisible savor disseminated

was like half-sinking, half-rising heights

or vast constructions of snowdrift and wind.

I came to the iron edge, to the narrows

of air, to the burial shroud of farmland and stone,

to the star-scattered void of the final steps—

and the wild vertigo of the spiral highway:

but, oh death, vast sea, you don’t come wave after wave

but like a gallop of nocturnal clarity

or like the final tally of night.

You never came to rummage in your pocket; it wasn’t

possible for you to visit without your red robe,

without your dawning carpet of clinging silence:

without your lofty, buried heritage of tears.

Not in every soul could I love a tree

with its own little autumn on its shoulders (a death of a thousand leaves),

all the fraudulent deaths and the resurrections

out of nowhere—not the earth, not the abyss.

I tried to swim out into the widest lives,

the most wide-open river-mouths,

and when man went denying me bit by bit,

blocking the pass and the door so I’d never touch

its wounded nonbeing with my gushing hands,

then I went by street after street, river after river,

city after city, and bed after bed,

and pressed ahead through the desert in my salt mask,

and there, in the last humiliated hovels—lampless, fireless,

with no bread, no stone, no silence, alone—

I rolled on, dying the death that was my own.

V

It wasn’t you, grave death, bird of ferrous feathers

that the impoverished heir of these hovels

was carrying between urgent meals, under his loose skin:

it was rather a poor petal with its severed stem:

a scintilla of the chest that never entered into battle

or the sour dewdrop that never trickled down the brow.

It was what could not resurrect itself, a morsel

of the small death with neither respite nor territory,

a bone, a bell perishing from within.

I raised bandages soaked in iodine, plunged my hands

into the poor pool of sorrows that were bringing death to an end,

and I found nothing in the wound but a cold blast

that penetrated the vague interstices of the spirit.

VI

Then, on the ladder of the earth, I clambered

through the atrocious thicket of forsaken forests

up to you, Machu Picchu.

Lofty city of stone stairways,

finally a dwelling where the terrestrial

did not hide in her night clothes.

In you, as in two parallel lineages,

the cradle of lightning and that of man

rocked together in the bristling wind.

Mother of stone, spindrift of the condors.

High reef of the human aurora.

Trowel abandoned in primordial sand.

This was the dwelling, this is the place:

Here the large grains of maize swelled

and fell again like roseate hail.

Here the golden thread spun off the vicuna

to clothe the loved ones, the barrows, the mothers,

the king, the prayers, the warriors.

Here the feet of man found rest by night

beside the feet of the eagle, in the high

meat-strewn aeries, and at dawn

they trod thunder-footed through the rarefied fog,

and touched the soils and the stones

until they recognized them in the night or in death.

I gaze at the rags and the hands,

the trickle of water in the sonorous hollow

the wall softened by the touch of a face

that with my eyes gazed at the earthly lanterns

planks: because everything—clothing, skin, pots,

words, wine, loaves—

was gone, fallen to earth.

And the air entered with its orange-blossom fingers

over all the sleeping dead:

a thousand years of air—months, weeks of air,

of azure wind, of iron cordillera,

that were like soft hurricanes of footfalls

polishing this solitary precinct of the rock.

VII

Oh you dead of the lone abysm, shadows of one chasm,

of such depth, as if rising to the measure

of your magnitude—

the true, the most consuming

death; and from the quarried rocks,

from the scarlet turrets,

from the staggered stairways of the aqueducts,

you tumbled down as in the autumn

of a single death.

Today the hollow air no longer cries,

no longer acquainted with your feet of clay;

the pitchers that filtered the firmament

when the blades of a sunburst spilled forth

are already forgotten;

and the mighty tree was swallowed

by fog, struck down by gusts.

Suddenly, from the highest summits, the hand

that it held up toppled

to the end of time.

You are gone now, spidery fingers, delicate

filaments, interwoven mesh:

All that you were has dropped away: customs, unraveled

syllables, masks of resplendent light.

But there was a permanence of stone and word:

The city like a cup was uplifted in the hands

of all—the quick, the dead, the silenced—sustained

by so much death, a wall; out of so much life, a hard blow

of stone petals: the sempiternal rose, the traveler’s abode,

this Andean breakwater of glacial colonies.

When the clay-colored hand

turned to clay, when the diminutive eyelids closed,

crammed with coarse walls, crowded with castles,

and when the whole of man lay ensnared in his small hole,

exactitude remained there, waving like a flag:

the high site of the human dawn:

the loftiest vessel ever to contain the silence:

a life of stone after so many lives.

VIII

Climb up with me, American love.

Kiss the secret stones with me.

The torrential silver of Urubamba

sends pollen flying to its yellow cup.

Emptiness flies from the creeping vine,

the petrified plant, the hardened garland

over the silence of the mountain coffin.

Come, miniscule life, between the wings

of the earth, while—cold and crystalline in the pounded air,

extracting battered emeralds—

oh wild water, you gush down from the snow.

Love, love, until the sudden night,

from the reverberant Andean flint

down to the red knees of the dawn,

contemplates the blind child of the snow.

Oh, Wilkamayu of resonant threads,

when you whip your linear thunder

into white foam, like wounded snow,

when your precipitous storm-winds

sing and flagellate, waking up the sky,

what language do you bring to the ear

hardly uprooted from your Andean froth?

Who seized the lightning from the cold

and left it chained in the heights

divided into glacial tears,

shaken into choppy rapids

striking its embattled stamens,

carried on its warrior bed,

bounded to its rock-tumbled finality?

What do your injured flashes say?

Your secret rebel lightning:

did it once travel thronged with words?

Who keeps smashing gelid syllables,

black languages, gold banners,

fathomless mouths, muffled cries,

in your tenuous arterial waters?

Who goes reaping floral eyelids

that arise from the earth to gaze?

Who hurls down the dead clusters

that dropped into your cascading hands

to thresh their threshed night

into geologic coal?

Who flings down the linking branch?

Who again entombs the last goodbyes?

Love, love: don’t touch the border,

don’t worship the sunken head:

let time fulfill its high stature

in its salon of broken fountains,

and, between quick water and the great walls,

gather the air from the narrow pass,

the parallel plates of the wind,

the blind channel of the cordilleras,

the crude greeting of the dew,

and climb, flower after flower, through the thicket,

treading on the serpent hurled from the cliff.

In this precipitous region of crag and forest,

green stardust, clear jungle,

the Mantur valley explodes like a living lake

or like a fresh level of silence.

Come to my very own being, to my dawn,

up to the crowning solitudes.

The dead dominion still lives.

And across the Sundial, like a black ship,

the predatory shadow of the condor crosses.

IX

Astral eagle, vineyard in the mist.

Forsaken bastion, sightless scimitar.

Star-strung cincture, ceremonial bread.

Torrential stairway, immeasurable eyelid.

Triangular tunic, pollen of stone.

Granite lamp, bread of stone.

Mineral serpent, rose of stone.

Sepulchered ship, ocean-source of stone.

Lunar horse, light of stone.

Equinoctial quadrant, vapor of stone.

Ultimate geometry, book of stone,

Iceberg carved by the squalls,

Coral of sunken time.

Rampart smoothed by fingers.

Ceiling struck by feathers.

Mirrory branches, thunderous foundations.

Thrones overturned by creepers.

Dominion of the ravenous claw.

Hurricane held high on the slopes.

Immobile waterfall of turquoise.

Patriarchic campanile of the slumbering

Hitching-ring of the horse-broken snows.

Iron rust draped on statues.

Inaccessible sealed-off storm.

Cougar paws, blood-splattered rock.

Tower of shadow, quarreling snowflakes.

Night held up on roots and knuckles.

Window in the fog, indurate pigeon.

Nocturnal plant, thunderclap statue.

Essential cordillera, roof of the sea.

Architecture of lost sky-scavengers.

Heaven-cord, celestial bee.

Sanguinary stratum, constructed comet.

Mineral bubble, moon of bulging quartz.

Andean serpent, amaranthine forehead.

Cupola of quietude, purest homeland.

Sea-bride, tree of cathedrals.

Branch of salt, black-winged cherry tree.

Snow-capped teeth, thunder-crack of cold.

Crater-scored orb, menace of rock.

Crest of frigidity, activity of the air.

Volcano of hands, smoke-black cataract.

Wave of silver, needle-pointer of the hour.

X

Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?

Air upon air, and man, where was he?

Time after time, and man, where was he?

Were you also the little broken fragment

of unfinished man, of the empty eagle

that above the streets of today, over the old tracks,

through the leaves of the moribund autumn,

goes on crushing the soul until it reaches the tomb?

Poor hand, poor foot, poor life…

In you, did the days of unthreaded light

like the rain

on fiesta banners,

drop their dark food petal by petal

into an empty mouth?

Hunger, coral of man,

hunger, hidden plant, root of the woodcutters,

hunger, did the edge of your reef climb

up to these high plundered towers?

I interrogate you, salt of the pathways:

show me the spade; allow me, architecture,

to poke the stone stamens with a little stick,

climbing all the airborne stairways up to the void,

scraping away at the heart until I touch man.

Macchu Picchu, did you set

stone upon stone on a base of rags?

Coal upon coal, and at the bottom, a tear?

Fire in the gold, and in that gold, the trembling red

gout of blood?

Give me back the slave that you buried!

Shake the stale bread of the wretched poor

from the earth; show me the clothes

of the servant, and his window.

Tell me how he slept when he was alive.

Tell me if his dream was hoarse-sounding,

half-open, like a black cavity

dug out of fatigue into the wall.

The wall, the wall! If each floor of stone

bore down on his sleep, and if he fell

beneath them, as if under a moon, with his dream!

Ancient America, drowned newlywed,

your fingers also,

upon leaving the jungle for the high void of the gods,

under the nuptial banners of light and decorum,

mixing with the thunder of drums and lances,

also, also your fingers,

those of the abstract rose and the rimrock of cold, those

that the blooded chest of the new grain transferred

to the fabric of radiant matter, up to the hard hollows,

also, also, buried America, you held in that bottomless depth,

in your bitter gut, like hunger itself, an eagle?

XI

Through the delirious splendor,

through the night of stone, let me sink my hand

and within me let the ancient heart of the forgotten one

beat like a bird that has been imprisoned for a thousand years!

Today let me forget this joy, which is wider than the ocean,

because man is wider than the ocean, than its islands,

and you have to fall into him as into a well to rise from the bottom

holding a branch of secret water and submerged truths.

Let me forget, wide rock, powerful proportion,

transcendent measure, the cornerstones of the hive,

and from the square, today let me slide

my hand along the hypotenuse of rough blood and sackcloth.

When, like a red-tinged horseshoe, the fury-driven condor

batters my temples in the region of his flight,

and the hurricane of carnivorous plumage sweeps the shady dust

from the little slanting stairways, I don’t see the soaring beast,

don’t see the blind scythe of his claws,

I see the ancient being, the servant, the sleeper

of the fields; I see a body, a thousand bodies, a man, a thousand women,

under the black storm-bird, blackened by rain and night,

and the heavy stone of the statue:

Juan Stonecutter, son of Wiracocha,

Juan Coldeater, son of the green star,

Juan Barefoot, grandson of the turquoise,

rising to be born with me, my brother.

XII

Rise up to be born with me, my brother.

Give me your hand out of the most profound

reaches of your wide-sown sorrow.

You will not return from the rocky bottom.

You will not return from subterranean time,

You will not return with your hardened voice.

You will not return with your deep-drilled eyes.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,

farm laborer, weaver, silent shepherd:

keeper of the tutelary guanacos:

mason of the faithless scaffold:

water-carrier of Andean tears:

lapidary of crushed [well-worn] fingers:

farmer trembling over the seed:

potter fallen into your own clay:

bring your ancient buried sorrows

to the cup of this new life.

Show me your blood and your furrow;

tell me: here I was whipped

because the gem didn’t sparkle or the earth

didn’t yield the stone or the grain on time:

point out to me the rock on which you fell

and the wood on which they crucified you;

spark up the old flints for me,

the old lamps, the whip-lashes stuck

to your wounds across the centuries

and the axes with their glitter of brilliant blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouth.

Across the earth [all through the earth], unite

all the silent dispelled [wasted] lips

and from the depths, speak to me this whole night long

as if I were anchored here with you.

Tell me everything, chain by chain,

link by link, and step by step;

sharpen the knives you kept below;

thrust them in my chest and in my hand,

like a river of flashing yellow rapids,

like a river of buried tigers [jaguars? panthers?],

and let me weep: hours, days, years,

blind ages, stellar centuries.

Grant me silence, water, hope.

Grant me struggle, iron, volcanoes.

Cling to me, bodies, like magnets.

Hasten to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my words and my blood.

Stephen Sandy, Overlook (LSU Press). Review by Stephen Massimilla

Stephen Sandy’s Overlook is about looking over an extensive terrain without overlooking its subtlest riches. It is the work of a master craftsman assembling and reassembling puzzles—from the rhythmic workings of the New England landscape to the intriguing perplexities of daily life to challenges that crop up at locations throughout the globe. Poems about artists from John Constable to Francis Bacon provide an additional thematic strand, a set of windows through which we can look both inward and out on the world.

The journey is also temporal, as the opening poem “Waxwings” immediately reveals. Yoking contemporary distraction to regional tradition entails artful enjambment when “a dropped cell phone” falls between stanzas to show up “still ringing in a bed of reeds.” Looking up, the poet-naturalist has fallen to the ice, where he observes fallen, wizened winter fruit but still anticipates spring. The narrator concludes: “What can he do back from the stream’s loud bank / but keep his eye on the clouds, carry on.” Both sensitive and tough-minded, the author himself does carry on, eventually concluding this first section of fifteen poems with equally loud calls in “Discovered Country,” where geese converge on Flint’s Pond, gliding “into loud formation, mournful cries.” Yet the speaker tells us that Landsman equates the beauty of such scenes with the silence of God.

Here, as elsewhere, the poet juxtaposes opposites: silence with cries, appreciation with unsettlement, beginnings with endings. The second section of the book opens with “The Inn of the Beginning Bar and Grill,” followed by the poem “Nailed,” which begins with the words “There would be an end to it” and concludes, “well / isn’t any death wrongful in this world of buds”? This at once poignant and clever merging of the poetic and the legalistic is also characteristic of the work.

Confronting mortality and catastrophe, this collection also defines the confluence of the journalistic and the elegiac. Sandy bears witness to sociohistorical suffering in far-flung regions: mudslides, war-torn Ethiopia, trouble in Eastern Europe. Throughout Overlook, he simultaneously confronts the personal wheel of aging. The poem “Wheel” is about recovering one’s footing in on the slow treadmill of time, of doing double time to cover the same ground, yet covering it. As in the conclusion to the first poem in the collection, the dictum remains “carry on.”

The poet’s elegiac strains never overpower his sense of thoughtful commitment to the task at hand. Sandy—who is also a scholar of Romantic poetry—is a master of modern nature poetry, which is also to say, poetry about language. In “The Naming of Birds,” for instance, the speaker wittily explores the extent and limits of a birdwatcher-poet’s powers by contemplating the role of naming in altering—and failing to alter—the natural world.

The New England landscape is clearly home base, but as in Sandy’s Octet and other relatively recent collections, the lookout is vast. We not only travel from Vermont to Minnesota to Montana: We also follow numerous incarnations of the culture hero and the historical figure—from Dante to Coleridge to Lincoln to Henry Adams—to different corners of the globe. What’s more, the journey has a mythic quality.

I was especially taken by such tours-de-force as “As Smoke Robes Fire,” an airy, mysterious lyric series. Here another alienated speaker seeks an elusive homecoming by referencing everything from Aeneas leaving Carthage to a visit to Disneyland in spare, clipped visions and paired-down language that is at times reminiscent of William Carlos Williams. This poem of passage is haunted by the sense of a burdened subaqueous consciousness breaking the linguistic and emotional surface like the “crusted back” of a great female whale. “She feels/ it has not been well for so long,” we are told of this huge ancient mammal seen from the boat, “yet there it goes rising there / in sun, doing his life.” As the book draws to a close, the poems continue to thin down and spread out, revealing the potentialities of, as one title identifies it, “White Space.” Sandy’s both detailed and spacious vista is packed with riches that deepen meaningfully beneath the reader’s gaze. Though the poetry in Overlook is difficult, it is worth looking over, and over again.

Michael Blumenthal’s No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012. Wilkes-Barre: Etruscan Press. 2012. Review by Stephen Massimilla

In No Hurry, Michael Blumenthal reaffirms that powerful poetry can be accessible and complex at once. The poet is in the autumn of life, in “no hurry”: careful not overlook everyday pleasures or even to skirt painful realities. As a wisdom poet, he rejects quick fixes. Though he pays homage to such heroes as Tennyson, Yeats, James, Bishop, and Larkin, Blumenthal also eschews bookish allusions and tonal affectation. As in the past, Blumenthal addresses us as “friends,” as if we were being given access to the poet’s complex conversations with himself.

Blumenthal continually reminds us that honesty is a complicated challenge. The speaker of the first poem in the collection takes an unflinching look into a dominatrix’s chamber in the Atelier Rhinegold, a room from which a client can exit into  “a world / made whole again for a fee, / a kindly universe where there’s a cure / for every unlived fantasy a life provides.” Only a skeptical and courageous writer could even begin to treat—or at least diagnose—the conditions of life in our frustrating, ailing world, given that even a temporary “cure” provided “for a fee” is a masochistic fantasy. By opening his book with such an unexpected “exit,” Blumenthal signals that he will not favor factitious comedic endings. In “The Rabbi Prepares a Wedding Poem,” Blumenthal identifies the rabbi as “duty bound to all that can be recited / from a podium,” which precludes even mentioning the “dangerous” facts. In another poem, the poet suggests that it is better to admit that even the nightingale must at times sing “alone” and  “in praise of deceitfulness” and “impossible love” (“Because Marriage Is Not for Romantics”). The tone here is both down-to-earth and wistful, both biting and tinged with unfulfilled longing.

Indeed, much of what Blumenthal reveals can be communicated only through his complex tone. Notice how the speaker of “Background Music” undercuts what the opening line—“If you are lucky in love”—would lead us to expect: “If you are lucky in love / someone will become the background music / to your own life // listened to but not actually heard….” What an effectively indirect way of suggesting that the speaker is culpable of having overlooked his loved one’s needs, “as if the music were playing in another room.” An alternative to oblique self-indictment could have involved ignoring or denying his own self-absorption, or perhaps confessing his perceived failings outright; but, as we are warned in the villanelle “Le Choix,” the choice between dying and lying “is always painful, and unclear.” When it comes to questions of frankness and deception, sexual desire and love, one’s own needs and another’s, there is no easy shortcut to bearable honesty.

Besides the earned honesty and tonal mastery of his poetry itself, what in this troubled world does the poet give us to celebrate? I’m tempted to say that Blumenthal would not entirely disagree with Rilke about the poet’s duty to praise and bless whatever he can—provided, Blumenthal might add, that this praise is often drowned in bitterness.  “I know that wherever we find beauty needs to be praised,” the poet asserts early on, only then to tell us that one “beauty” in question was a young Jewish woman being admired by the Nazi soldier who was pushing her into the gas chamber (“A Photo of Terezin”). If “Grace may not be merited, / friends, but nonetheless deserves to be praised,” how confidently are we to sing the world’s praises in the midst of injustice? (“Blessed”). And in a book that refers to the global economic downturn and all kinds of personal losses, only Blumenthal could coin phrases like “the blessed burdens of our disenfranchisements” and “the sense of our own sinfulness.” (“Not the Soul”).  In “The Human Condition,” the poet’s “bethren of the mid-range,” those likewise facing aging and death, are, Blumenthal suggests, still free to celebrate “birdsong and the wild graffiti / of the everyday,” along with the blessings of the “next” life. That next life (like this life), after all, is “there for the asking like the garbage, / just waiting to be taken away.” For a seasoned Jewish writer with a distrust of claims to the romantic and the transcendent, what could be more “everyday” than this birdsong graffiti and that afterlife garbage?

Given the complex uniqueness of his oeuvre and voice, Blumenthal not only helps us to face bitter realities: he also practices kindness and compassion, and he can be hysterically funny. Imparted with music as buoyant and lovely as it is turbulent, what comes through, in spite of everything, is the poet’s bigheartedness and unabashed willingness to investigate. In a moving tribute, Blumenthal expresses gratitude for all he has learned from his various relatives in and through their struggles, strategies, and sufferings (“Genetics”); and he is both touching and wittily satiric in his honorary dirge to a pigeon that perished because it was perhaps “as bored of false praise as I was” (“The Pigeon”). Most appositely, Blumenthal adopts a tone at once quirky, enchantingly lyrical, and profound in his praise of “moles,” those scribblers persistently digging, mining the subconscious dark of the writer’s mind (“Moles”). The unhurried product of that pursuit is a productively troubling book, a multifaceted statement of courage, of moral and aesthetic purpose. It is in this spirit that, at the end of “Self-Help,” the poet urges us to speak out so that:

the books that once gave us so much bad feeling

toward our happier selves can go on doing their work

in the deeply literate darkness underground.

As I read yesterday about his funeral with its big, all-star cast of mourners, it occurred to me that Seamus Heaney made a point of criticizing “something too male and assertive” in the complex but largely transcendent “Under Ben Bulben,” Yeats’s funeral poem to himself, which concludes with the lines on Yeats’s own headstone. What would Heaney have thought of 80,000 football spectators applauding Heaney as “the world’s most renowned composer of verse”? In point of fact, it is said to have been an excellent funeral full of humor, tears, and grace notes; but only one poem was read. It occurred to me that, if such things were possible at this late date, Heaney would be the best person to write a poem about his own funeral and burial. A poem like that wouldn’t have the feel of a traditional elegy or eulogy but something more befitting such a humble, passionate, and earth-loving soul. Such a poem would be distinct from the high strains about a man’s surpassing destiny that tend to resound over the airwaves. Like his best verse, it would accessibly epitomize his knack for tactile evocation, sinuous rhythms, and recognizing the manifold aches and terrible contradictions of this life. It would include moving memories that only Heaney could evoke, as he did when he recalled his own secret communion with his mother at her funeral in “Clearances,” or when he recalled his father in “Digging,” equating the poet’s work with “the squat pen” with his father’s work doggedly exhuming potatoes with a spade. Reflecting the harsh realities of a pastoral existence, such a poem would be rich in slimy, rifted, dirt-stained observations on the precariousness of life in the midst of its continuance.

On the day of Heaney’s burial, I was reminded that—as Derek Walcott emphasized in his conversation with his Irish friend and fellow Poet Laureate just last spring at AWP—Heaney generally did not imitate Yeats, the master with whom he is most often compared. Though he was at heart a private poet who remained in touch with his origins as a farmer’s son, Heaney felt an obligation to respond to global events. Still, at no point in his career did Heaney climb up into a Yeatsean heaven or golden Byzantine dome of high art, nor did he pursue the sweep of the Whitmanean sublime. Instead, he painstakingly delved toward a vertical earthbound frontier, where–as when he excavates a multiplex ancient homeland in poems inspired by P.V. Globb’s The Bog People–“The wet centre is bottomless” (“Bogland”). He relishes the way each layer of his history “has been camped on before,” and he accepts that the center cannot hold. He admits that, in returning to a land “Of country people / Not knowing their tongue,” he “will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home” (“The Tollund Man”). In these works, there are no pretentions to a mythos of reassurance or to a mighty principle of political order underlying everything.

This is not to say that Heaney should not be grouped among the political, postcolonial poets—such as Neruda and Milosz—who have produced some of the most interesting work of our age by redefining the sociopolitical center in terms of the “periphery” of America and Europe. But Heaney remained resistant to slogans, partisanship and propaganda. Only he could address the sanguinary strife of late twentieth century Irish history—not to mention ongoing sexism in the West—by anatomizing bodies extracted from the alluvial mud of ancient peat bogs. It is well known that Heaney grew up Irish Catholic in Northern Ireland under British rule. In the poem “Punishment,” he contemplates the naked, peat-tarred body of an Iron Age girl submitted to ritual sacrifice for committing adultery:

I almost love you

but would have cast, I know,

the stones of silence.

I am the artful voyeur…

Heaney has the courage to admit to his own voyeurism and sinfulness, even as he lays claim to deep empathy. At this moment, the poet is simultaneously referring to Catholic women in modern Ireland who have been shaven, stripped, tarred, and chained to railings by the IRA for keeping company with British soldiers. Surprisingly, the speaker does not claim to have sided fully with humane, civilized people who express public outrage at such unspeakable atrocities. He has to admit, after all, that he did nothing to prevent such crimes and is guilty of a subtle kind of treachery with which we are all familiar:

I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters,

cauled in tar,

wept by the railings,

who would connive

in civilized outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

He admits even to having committed pagan, tribal vengeance in his heart. Groups can be more immoral than individuals, but the poet can still speak the truth about political violence by examining how even he has never relinquished his ambivalence. (In “Terminus,” he asks, “Is it any wonder when I thought / I would have second thoughts?”; “I grew up in between.”)

As he suggests in his essays and his often-anthologized lecture “Feeling into Words,” Heaney was not unaware that he was influenced as much by Hardy’s grim, unsentimental “regionalism” and even Wordsworth’s intricately nostalgic journeys through his own rural west country as by Yeats’s mid-career interest in the World Soul of Irish art. But, as was the case for Joyce, bringing the present into a significant relation to the past still was always Heaney’s agenda. Heaney himself called this jolt of reapprehension “a returning of the world itself.” It is just that he focused on his relation to local traditions and to the world of his own memories and inner conflicts. In “Station Island”—where he ambitiously merges present and past in the midst of his reworking of canonical myth—he even has the ghost of Joyce challenge him, a version of Dante’s Pilgrim, to “keep at a tangent” when the circle widens and “swim out on [his] own” to find his own “echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, // elver-gleams in the dark….”

With these thoughts in mind, I’ll conclude by presenting a Heaney poem entitled “Personal Helicon” that I used to hand out to students in my poetry writing classes. I offered it as a “Helicon” for them, asking them to follow this example, to write poems about their own “mirrors” and personal source materials. I love the various ways in which this piece presents personal reflection as a source of inspiration:

Personal Helicon

-for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one

Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

(Online source and audio recording: Internet Poetry Archive Link)

Everything described here—however strewn with heteroclite growths and implements–is also part of a self-portrait. The poem contains echoes of Wordsworth’s boy of Winander, who would call out to owls in the listening dark…that they might answer him. As in the language of Jutland, where the bog people were exhumed, Heaney’s lexicon includes a good number of hardy Anglo-Saxon terms such as “fungus” and “brickyard.” Very few of the rhymes are predictable—and Heaney would of course conclude by rhyming “rhyme” with “slime” and “into some spring” with “echoing.” Anyway, this is the only “Helicon” I know of where a rat can slap across the poet’s reflection and the Olympian “spring” in question is allegedly “beneath all adult dignity”—which of course it is not, because Heaney is simultaneously referring to what draws the gaze of his mind’s eye as he writes, including the “trapped sky” and “darkness” from which the poem emerges, stanza by stanza. This descent, this “dark drop” into the wet earth, is more a resurrection than a burial.

I look forward to picking up copies of many new books and journals this week at the AWP conference in Boston. Since anticipation is a product of memory, and since both of the authors celebrated below are coming out with new books, I’ve also decided to review their last books. These are two of the many collections I picked up last year at AWP in Chicago:

ANNUS MIRABILIS, Sally Ball, New York: Barrow Street Press, 2005

What is the nature—including the congruencies and limits—of knowing, identity, love, and hope? In Annus Mirabilis, Sally Ball explores such central questions with continual reference to the lives and modi operandi of Leibnitz and Newton. A poet who loves great eighteen-century thinkers is one who takes interest both in the search for universal principles and in the observations that lead us there, but there is a twist. Ball, as a modern poet, also focuses on the act of comprehension itself, on observing carefully observed, as when we see the six-year old Leibnitz sorting through leaves in the poem “1652.” Here “Curiosity / and certainty collide,” right down to what we make of the look of “the love itself.” The poet is often absorbed in “the measure of wanting to see” (“Toward the Opticks”). Indeed, the speaker of “Given” wants “to see the lens itself, / the one Newton made.” In the course of this quest (and meta-quest), the poet also contemplates mythic mainstays such as the moon and cosmogony, but from multiple angles, and with a sense of irresolvable anguish that grows as the book proceeds.

Perhaps you knew that Newton engaged in certain reclusive practices, such as celibacy and alchemy. But did you know that he never saw the sea? I used to teach a little Leibnitz, but largely to dispel clichés about knee-jerk optimism unfairly attributed to him by Voltaire in the form of his parodic Pangloss. Newton and Leibnitz were not only precocious, industrious and eccentric: they were both polymaths of the highest order. Ball is a (sometimes literal) follower of Leibnitz and Newton, of the very walkways they trod, of the tropes their lives and works provide the poet, and of the ironies that, in turn, necessarily follow. In “In Hannover: Clairvoyance,” the poet appears at Leibnitz’s house with her sick child and her other ongoing concerns. She contemplates Leibnitz’s portrait and (thinking of Newton “as master of the English mint”) throws a coin (presumably stamped with a portrait) into the reflecting pool. Her pilgrimage and her wish for a magical diagnosis and solution nevertheless defy the limits that Newton would impose on “the regulated dream.” In this poem, we recall that Leibnitz was highly accomplished not only as a mathematician and a philosopher of harmony among the monads, but also as a diplomat. Could there ever be just one portrait of such a man? Indeed, didn’t and doesn’t his rivalry with Newton in itself become part of his portrait? In this book, it certainly does. We later visit Newton’s portrait as well, or at least a photograph of an imprint of it, in a poem called “Newton’s Death Mask.” As she reflects on her portraits of them and their ghosts, Ball’s fascination with these figures and their rivalry becomes ours.

In the title poem “Annus Mirabilis,” the plot thickens (and the work breaks into sections, sometimes clustering in stanzas of longish lines, sometimes falling into single-line or even single-word stanzas). We learn here and elsewhere that Newton and Leibnitz both happened to have complementary ideas about miracles, that each (though the matter was and is still debated) independently invented the differential calculus…and the list goes on. Important differences are also noted—not in a systematic way, but in one imbued with self-reflexive curiosity. The vanishing point of resemblance (its risks and redemptions) is a critical theme throughout this book—not only where Newton and Leibnitz do and do not align, but also, for instance, where work and conviction meet paralysis—“weakness? sickness? / Where’s the line?” The poem I just quoted, entitled “Function of  X,” harks back stylistically to the earlier “Proofs,” but it takes on a greater problem. It is the problem at the heart of the book—that of human relations, the relation of Y to X, her to him, the solver to the irresolvable. We are made to see, in passing through a twisted logical vortex, how much more complex than logic human life and human relations are. To quote, for just one out of many examples, the poem “Candle under Glass”: “What can it possibly mean / that I am happy / when the person I love / has no capacity for happiness?”

As the collection progresses, the poet looks more and more deeply “inside the hospital”—at a father’s uncertain operation, a loved one’s persistent depression—while keeping Leibnitz and Newton and their solutions (and “Dissolution”) in the equation. Much seems to come together in the late poem “Entreaty to the Air”: the abstract mock-math meets the physical specificity of “The slightly flexing muscle”; the language of science meets that of domestic life and want. Indeed, “Any point can be one of intersection.” This poet has a very gifted and unusual mind.

OF GODS AND STRANGERS, Tina Chang, New York: Four Way Books, 2011

Tina Chang’s Of Gods and Strangers is full of sensual, heartfelt, excitingly nervy incantation: the warmth and magic of a dazzling artist. In enacting a spaciotemporal journey within and beyond the borders of America and the West, Chang also explores a long history of aspiration, adventure, and damage. The poet combines her perspectives on contemporary life with imagined visions of the Empress Dowager, Tzu Hsi, the last emperor of China, who ruled from 1861 until her death in 1908. This figure is, at different times, playful, torchlit, rebellious, lipsticked, bejeweled, distraught, perfumed, electric, magnetic. In “Empress Dowager Boogies”—the oxymoronic title is representative of the tensions in this volume—she is eager to “let” her “majesty and birthright go.” Soon, however, she displays “A face powdered so rouge it becomes an empire” (“Dowager in Matrimony”). Her feet are wrapped, and her mouth is stuffed with fog as she prepares to meet her groom. There is truth and compassion in this portrait, but this character has many other facets. Later in the volume, a century after she has ordered the deaths of the artists who failed to envision her most perfect sky, the cause of her own death is identified as suffocation by riches: “nostrils and mouth stuffed with diamonds” (“Reign”). The poet-as-dowager (one poem is explicitly entitled “The Poet as Empress Dowager”) can accordingly identify with an exotic caged creature (“The Empress Dowager Has One Bird”). It also makes sense that images of reaching for an elusive, heavenly freedom abound. The poet’s other alter egos include the more modern image of herself in youth as a furious DJ, a vixen who slowly takes off her coat “like a religion.”

These tensions—between tradition and contemporaneity, between entrapment and freedom—point toward a deep exploration of the divided self. One often senses that a speaker is grappling with a fractured identity, that she is caught between polarities, backgrounds, or modes of being. At one point, we are told that she and her lover were born between “twin lightning storms / on opposite sides of the earth. / White birds colliding into black birds that high” (“Sex Gospels”). And the very openness of the sky or road can itself define a kind of trap. The central consciousness of this book is often set adrift: “What is this force / that makes me continually lost? What is it that I want / in all these disappearing cities?” (“Baguio”). Indeed, in “Cutting It Down,” another speaker’s self-portrait can mirror that of Frida Kahlo in all her broken glory:

she held her own twin’s hand, one who was

laden down by tradition, another freed from it,

the forced embrace and cleaved tongue flicking

like a serpent’s. When God multiplied the soul,

it fractured, splintered beast wandering in the mirror,

strangeness of pleasure in tandem. What does that say

about the spirit, one’s own disaster split in two,

to halve the pain or double it?

But does such torment arise primarily from within or without? To follow these various personae is to feel threatened, at times, by “invisible bandits” (“Sex Gospels”) and shady men in the Tunisian black market (“The Evolution of Danger”), threats on the outside that mirror threats on the inside. To luxuriate in these poems is to be haunted by desert nights and moon-fear, by the split head of Trotsky, by a dying horse, a hacked-open goat, an unstable bridge over rushing water, even the blackened body of God. Are such evocations primarily personal, or are they political? Are they historical or psycho-spiritual? Are they erotic or military? Are they about love or death? Such questions are reductive in a world where a poem entitled “Patriotism” can begin with “shrapnel” and a “guilty mouth,” describe the act of digging down “below kneeling, below bowing” to the place where “you can mount the cry,” and end with “my tongue waving like a flag.”

In the third section of the volume, entitled “Territory,” what might have been an intimate journey clearly opens out onto wider territory. Here we bear witness to explicit atrocities and natural disasters in Ethiopia, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, wars between gods and devils, “history” that “you can never fix” (“A Full Life”). But even in poems such as these, we inhabit a surreal atmosphere where (for instance) a simile can almost liberate itself from its usual descriptive function, making a play for its own deadly freedom: “It is as simple as a lone man wrapping / himself like a gift with a bomb at the center” (“Substantial”).

For all its elaborate gesturing toward the definitions of fracture and trouble, Of Gods and Strangers is full of “So Much Light” and “Possibility.” The book opens with “Unfinished Book of Mortals” a long, fascinating poem which defies all spaciotemporal bounds; Chang concludes, wittily and refreshingly, with the dreamlike “Author’s Notes on Imaginary Poems.” Some pieces, such as “Wild Invention,” are so full of wild game (in multiple senses of the term) that they cast fairy tale spells. Several provide an antidote to death by riches: Chang’s linguistic and visual lushness is often balanced by restraint (as in “Lord,” “The Idea of Revelation,” and “Epilogue”). I’m a sucker for all the startling, leaping imagery and all the unexpected turns in this book. More importantly, Chang always has her finger on the pulse of the human condition. She glimpses burning buildings, suffering cities, and figures swept out to sea. It is as if she could survey the whole canvas of the human struggle on earth, while recognizing that it is the personal that provides a window onto the universal. With “birds rummaging in [her] breastbone, ” the speaker of a concluding poem has the courage to declare, “Strange God, I understand the human void.” Of Gods and Strangers is a gorgeous, unnerving, revelatory read.

It is a basic tenet of literary modernism that the acts of articulation and explanation can displace the matter being related. We can take as an example Conrad’s and Ford’s best work, where the drama of the narration supplants—becomes—the subject matter itself. The same holds true for Eliot’s landmark modernist poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” where the anguished voice of the dramatic monologue demands a stronger hold on our attention than the more elusive subject matter. Criticism that articulates the effect and meaning of this displacement ordinarily takes us out of that drama, insofar as criticism is not literature.

Of course, literature itself can act like criticism. Poems about poetry or the writing of poetry —including Artes Poeticae—are termed “meta-poetry.” We can call poems that comment on commenting on poetry meta-critical. Consider this poem by J.V. Cunningham, entitled “To the Reader”:

Time will assuage.

Time’s verses bury

Margin and page

In commentary.

For gloss demands

A gloss annexed

Till busy hands

Blot out the text,

And all’s coherent.

Search in this gloss

No text inherent:

The text was loss.

The gain is gloss.

With that final pun, Cunningham equates all “commentary”—including that of which this poem consists—with “gloss” in the sense of sheen, transparent polish, nothingness. Given its wit and compression, the work nevertheless seems to profit from the irony that, as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, “There is no there there.” Still, irony alone does not a poem make. Is there enough here in the way of emotional disclosure? The key lies in the assertion of the first line (which ends with a period instead of a comma, suggesting that it should not be read only in apposition to the phrases that follow): “Time will assuage.” Assuage what? The answer seems to come in the penultimate line, where we expect to hear “The text was lost,” but instead are told that “The text was loss,” which is something different. Cunningham does not appear to be speaking of a particular loss but of the experience or process of loss in general, which we might expect we could come to terms with through the distancing lens of interpretation and reflection. But we cannot: the gain—including the displacing commentary in the poem, and even this blog—is only gloss.

Has the teacher bird always known in singing not to sing of what to make of a diminished thing? We take it as a given that, even when it retains some of the old formal virtues, as the poetry of Cunningham and Frost does, modern and postmodern literature often “goes meta” in a particular way that earlier poetry did not. Eliot’s narrator Prufrock thinks in a poignantly self-defeating way, one that affirms Wittgenstein’s claim that the greatest burden of ineptitude is self-awareness. When self-reflection becomes the object of contemplation, attempting to achieve wholeness by seeing the object in terms of the subject, the external in terms of the internal, only opens up the possibility of further fragmentation, yet another consciousness of consciousness. It is with painful self-consciousness that Elizabeth Bishop concludes her famous villanelle “One Art” with the lines “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” The poet knows that mastering her form demands that she conclude with the word “disaster.” The art of writing (along with, for Bishop, the arts of living, traveling, and loving) is part-and-parcel of “the art of losing.” Her parenthetic, italicized command to herself—“Write it!”—is a master stroke because she also wants us to hear the homophone “Right it.” She knows that proceeding to “write it” cannot “right” the wrong, given that, as Cunningham puts it, “the text was loss.” Bishop can only, in passing, frustratedly pretend to pretend otherwise, and with considerable self-conscious irony. In comparison, Pope’s much earlier, more sustained meta-poetic reflection entitled An Essay on Criticism—even given its self-reflexive wit and sundry famous lines—is too dazzlingly self-assured, too full of technical bravado, too inclined to delight and instruct in the old Horatian sense to move many a non-academic modern reader. Pope’s immensely skillful, socioculturally informative meta-poetry has experienced a revival among scholars in the era of new historicism, but for many others, as Terence Des Pres has put it, “Further adventures of the self-delighted self are not what’s wanted.” In short, there are clear differences between modern and older meta-poetry—and between modern and older meta-critical poetry. Unlike Pope’s work, modern meta-critical poetry like Cunningham’s, in reflecting on how we read it, may propose to burn away whatever lies under its lens, including the critical process.

Still, well before Cunningham, the roots of trenchantly disconcerting meta-critical poetry were visible. Consider “A Poet’s Fate” by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), whose work has inspired many spin-offs (Pinsky’s poem “The Shirt,” for instance, seems to derive much of its content from Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt”). Notice how modern Hood’s Poem is for a nineteenth-century piece. And notice that it begins with a question that turns out not to be one:

What is a modern Poet’s fate.

To write his thought upon a slate;

The Critic spits on what is done,

Gives it a wipe—and all is gone.