Posts Tagged ‘Copper Canyon Press’

Flood Songs

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

by Sherwin Bitsui
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Vernon Lallman

“its owner — a leash without a hand — “

Sherwin Bitsui’s collection Flood Songs is the kind of book one carries in a picnic basket to Central Park on a tranquil summer afternoon before beginning to negotiate a seeming balance between the natural world and the human-constructed world. Bitsui is originally from a Navajo reservation in White Pine, Arizona, and his elegant poetry compares and contrasts his native Navajo myths, customs and traditions with urban American life. The poet creates a diverse and rich poetic landscape by interweaving open imagery, time and thought, as in these lines:

You trace deboned wings of ospreys with hawk talons
in the grocery line where the Navajo name for Pheiades
is pinched and shredded,
and we dart away thinking: This is escape, it’ll be over soon,
we have never bothered to grieve, over… soon…

(51)

The speaker alludes to the fact that a culture is losing its identity to modern American life. Now the tribe goes to the supermarket to buy “deboned wings of ospreys with hawk talons” instead of hunting for it themselves. Yet the grocery line isn’t entirely villainized; the individual is as culpable.

Flood Songs is a series of untitled poems. Each page contains an independent poem. The poems vary from just one to more than 20 lines per page. There are a few blank pages throughout; as Bitui writes: “I bite my eye shut between these songs” (4). Yet the book progresses with the inevitability of the wind and time it depicts. Its iconography ranges from alarm clocks, corn and bluebirds, to red-tail hawks paired with gasoline. In addition, the poet’s use of native language (in this passage, “Dinetah,” the native homeland) contributes to an open, chant-like rhythm:

Dinetah—scratched out
from the eye with juniper bark—
hunches with engine sweat
curling out of its collar,
its owner—a leash without a hand—
bleeds gasoline
when lathered with a blur of red bricks.

(59)

The narrator speaks with much sincerity about the implications of modern life on his culture; however, his imagery — skies, birds, development – is his hopeful origin. He suggets an abstract loyalty in his last line: “The [grocery] line was busy when I picked that ax and chose the first tree to chop down” (71). Generally, his metaphorical birds, open cliffs and broad vision of human destruction leave the reader in a state of serenity.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Sherwin Bitsui, Vernon Lallman
Posted in reviews

The Dance of No Hard Feelings

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

by Mark Bibbins
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Stephen Burt

“Truly, it never gets old.”

bibbins cover In the whirligig monologues and post-rock lyric throughout his first book, Sky Lounge (2003), Mark Bibbins sent kids with high hopes and low dreams into a glittering, punishing, shimmering dusk-to-dawn city. The kids in this second book are almost grown up, trying with very mixed success to make, and to understand, their remixed lives. The “I” and the “you” here sound almost self-assured, almost confident, but never quite: they face autonomy with all the demands of youth unmet, and since those demands are so great – sex, love, civic solidarity, promises kept – they may never be met, or not all at once. “Whatever you say sounds better with your thigh / against mine and caught in the camera-phones / of our undoing,” Bibbins writes in “There Is No You Are Everywhere,” which is either a poem of betrayal admitted, a breakup opus, or a regretful ode to averted risk: “you’re too burnt to burn,” he complains, to a lover more risk-averse than he, “or admit we wanted to try what feels almost new.”

Like Sky Lounge, The Dance is a book of subcultural scenes – “white kids giving / mad props to zombies, Jersey studs / with waxed eyebrows and brilliant / buffed nails” – but it’s also a book about feeling fake, urbane and inauthentic, too old for the makeup and too raw for anything else: “another false copy of me returns.” The real appears only through negatives, glimpses, outlines: “the best way to see a thing,” Bibbins says in a fine long poem called “The Devil You Don’t,” is to

   catch
   the edge of light
   that burns

around its opposite, that
   which it would otherwise
obscure.

The slipperiness, the unstable pronoun reference and the constantly changing scenes, that in another poet would point to a theory of language or comprise a postmodern Everyman in Bibbins are signs of a worried, anxious, too-cool-to-stay-cool personality: one who has learned to cherish, perhaps too much so, his power to offer scruples, to change his mind. “I’m not acting coy,” he protests; “I’m just terrified / of some rhetorical you.” But in Bibbins’s city every “you” is rhetorical, and rhetoric – verbal flourish, conscious construction – is not a block to strong emotion but a condition for its expression. Almost every scene and every figure seems both made-up and real, staged and genuine, disturbingly rickety and yet lovely enough that we wish it could stick around. (The devil “adores / the show, the high // tech of it, the low.”) When “an actual naked human stands / on a pedestal on the street” on West Broadway, Bibbins says, “you… don’t stop because you figure // it’s only art,” but Bibbins stopped; otherwise he could not have written the poem. He does not stop for long, though; his language keeps going, almost helplessly churning or burning through whatever phrases he finds: “I grew into a stuffed animal who wanted / only to insert itself into the fossil record…. When / it burns you move away // is good enough advice.”

For all its anxieties, The Dance is still (like Sky Lounge) an exhilarating New York book, even an I Love New York Book. It fizzes and sparkles against the sunlit buildings like O’Hara’s love poems to Vincent Warren:

They’ve hired skywriters
to compose clouds in a sky
off-color but clear; such
clever hats the chimneys

wear; so furiously they twirl.

If you hear something sour in that sparkle, something disappointed in that final iamb, so do I: the lover and his love don’t fit the poem, don’t fit the sky, can’t keep up the twirl. Rural areas give other poets ways to think about nonhuman nature, about what grows and thrives outside and beyond us, but they usually give Bibbins reasons to think about why “we” are artificial, unruly citizens, neither hardy nor solitary, and urban to the core: “a picnic in early autumn” becomes “a perfect time to resent / vegetarians, fuel-efficiency, / and ideas,” while geese overhead set “a kind of gray / fire down at our heads.” He tries, in other poems, to visit the ocean, the desert, even Germany, but he still feels like a poet of city life.

When Bibbins does not remind you of O’Hara, he might remind you of D. A. Powell: one poem is literally a collaboration with Powell (it begins “I used to have the shampoo / by the balls but the wind hurt my hair so”), and others could be. Like Powell, he makes the urbane and colloquial collide with the High Romantic; like Powell, he is inescapably sexy and unmistakably gay, and like Powell he is fond of square brackets and white space: “I want him to kiss me and another way of saying so // [he left a spark on my lip].” Sometimes Bibbins seems too fond of white space: the pages that look like erasures or ancient fragments, with two or three words to a line (“[crawl to // an end / an edge] // defer suffering // without proof”) may not play to his strengths. Even there, though, a racy, divine youth presides: “mercury / in a dirty hat // we see / ourself // but aren’t curious per se.”

Mercury presides over the whole book (as he presided over Sky Lounge): he is the god of quick changes, of youth, of speed, of thieves, of translation, of commerce and of the cities (built around marketplaces) where commerce accretes the connections it also destroys. Bibbins’s “devil” (who also rides a skateboard) is Mercury in Judeo-Christian drag; the beautiful youth who might know everything, the young man who is always running (but not always running away), makes a fit sponsor for Bibbins’s electric lines, and he sees himself, still, parties, in crowds:

Kids roll hash into
   their cigarettes and spotlights
turn the smoke pink
   in the trees. If he’d had

   a childhood, he’d have spent it

   running under sprinklers
to cool his smoldering skin.

“He” is the devil, the “abominable fancy” identified earlier in the same poem with Bush-era politicians (“the president who is not the president / trapped in a red room”). But “he” in the passage above is also the poet, always observing, and on fire, like it or not.

Those poems full of white space, their margins all over the place, look at first like failed attempts at philosophical, cod-Greek texts, but at their best they are worldlier, and more personal, and less idea-driven, than their format suggests. One of the best white-space sequences reinvigorates that hoary amateur genre, the breakup poem: “Forcefield [Ardor]” reads, in part,

take the couch

   the stove you’ve seen

and even touched me somewhere near

I want more city                                           to kiss you in
   [you say]….

you can leave your hand

   on the empty

   chair between us

Bibbins can sound almost helplessly hip, a poet who cannot help but represent his generation (which is no longer the youngest one to publish poems): a prose page entitled “Suicides of the 90s” alludes to Reagan and Bush in terms undergrads today won’t understand (“Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years”). Another poem asks, “Why shouldn’t he let someone / else fuck him to the mixtape / I made?” That such phrases will sound dated soon, that they will need footnotes in 30 years, makes no case against them, no more than against Lunch Poems, or against “The Rape of the Lock.” Bibbins does not write an entirely new kind of poetry (it is a very rare poet who does): he writes a kind perhaps 15 years old, old enough to have prompted reductions to absurdity (as in some of the poetry now called Flarf) and worthy counterrevolutions (as in some of the poets published by Flood). Yet it is a kind that still works, whenever (as here) it takes an interest not only in words on the loose, on bits of culture in the wind, but in people who mean those words or cherish those bits, who watch their city as they watch and love and often lose one another, caught up or caught out amid the mercurial fun.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Mark Bibbins, Stephen Burt
Posted in reviews

Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

by David Huerta, translation Mark Schafer
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

“– or of memories, such gasping for breath, no one arrives, I am alone…”

huerta cover

Before Saying Any of the Great Words marks the first comprehensive translation of Mexican poet David Huerta into English. Divided into three sections, it presents an overview of Huerta’s early work – El jardín de la luz, Cuaderno de Noviembre, and Versión, winner of the Xavier Villarrutia Prize – alongside selections from his 1986 book-length poem Incurable, the longest poem in Mexican history, and a generous amount of new work written in the time since. The result is a substantial look into the work of one of Mexico’s most renowned poets and his stylistic and thematic evolution from the time of his first publication at age 22 to today.

In his introduction to Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, Luis Cortés Bargalló cites Vicente Quirarte in defining Mexican poets born in the 40′s as a generation

“of solitudes…[an isolation that should] be emphasized in order to understand the intensity, the pursuit of a distinct voice and the authenticity of the generation’s best work. Without manifestos and group statements, these poets channel their respective individualities toward that space where solitary rebelliousness can be shared: the poem.”

This synopsis may be beneficial if approaching Huerta’s work with little knowledge of Mexico’s political and cultural history. Huerta’s poems consistently—throughout the decades of writing represented in this collection—approach the world of thought through a very solitary I, yet his world of thought is not at all solitary. It’s a world of intensely violent, baroque imagery blurring the lines between the real and unreal and the dream and the nightmare, in which the speaker engages himself in a high level of self-examination in an attempt understand himself, understand writing, and perhaps find the true meaning of words and the language they create.

In “Index,” Huerta states, “‘Writing’ is poking one’s nose now and then into the fragile image / of a place where living might be worthwhile.” In the “Simulacrum” selection of “Incurable,” he writes, “the storehouse of words is a strange, damp place, a discrete gallery, a hospital asleep.” While perhaps not their intention, these lines illuminate the exploratory nature of Huerta’s writing quite well. Much of the book is a constant exploration, a poking of one’s nose around a storehouse of words. In the “Someone May Arrive” selection from “Incurable,” Huerta writes:

A writing trickles from my body, everything is somewhat
            stained
with semen, the notebooks, the pages, the shirts, this
            maddened
mouth, the heavenly bodies above, this silence while
my hands rummage in my pocket, pull out, leave my body on
            these pages,
such violence slowly growing quiet, rocks crumbling, flowers
emitting their perverse perfume, gardens where jade, jasmine,
my own body yield, such madness. Now I can feel the breeze,
             its
deliberate habits, the caress it lavishes like a person.

It’s here, as throughout the book, that we see the journey of the mind and the blurring between what is a dream and what is real and how putting these thoughts together might work their way toward a meaning of language. Here, too, we witness Huerta’s distinct flair for musical progression. There’s a rhythm to all of the poems, aptly rendered in translation, that is unique to the poet – it’s one in which the beautiful, the ugly, the serene and the violent sing together.

In Huerta’s later poems, he experiments with divergent forms a bit more, and much of the feverish dreamlike qualities that highlight his earlier work are subdued. The imagery still explodes, but the voice is more tranquil. Still, the importance of words is ever-present; in “Words,” he writes that “one word lasts a century, another word vanishes/ In intercourse and its searing flame.”

In the “Lines” portion of “Incurable,” Huerta states:

The world is a radiant stain that I am swallowing.
Day is dawning, but I don’t believe it. I get up, doubt every-
thing
I offer myself to the light, get up again. The world
is a stain on the mirror. The light is giving me a name; I don’t
want it.
The world tells me what must be. There is a bright flame.
I must say what I must say – or be silent.

In short, this is an important translation by one of Mexico’s most important poets. It’s a collection spanning over thirty years of writing and the first of its kind in English. We’ll have to wait to see if Huerta one day actually says the great words, but until then what we have is a terrific representation of his work, one that I highly recommend, one representing man’s struggle with himself, his thoughts, his dreams and his realities.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, David Huerta, Jason Bredle
Posted in reviews

World’s End

Monday, August 24th, 2009

by Pablo Neruda
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“I am an obscure professor: / I teach classes of light to the earth.”

neruda worlds end cover Pablo Neruda’s World’s End has finally been translated into English 40 years after its initial publication in Spanish. Translator William O’Daly does a wonderful job of keeping the language palpable and rhythmic. Written five years before the end of Neruda’s life, this eerily relevant book is also a wonderful introduction to Neruda because of its balance of image and representative message.

If you look for Neruda in the bookstore, and you should every now and again, you will generally find multiple collections and repackagings of his romantic verses or odes. Neruda wrote some of the finest romantic poetry ever put on the page. However, remembering him as a romantic poet would be like remembering Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets who also did some stuff on the stage. Neruda is political, a fierce and essential critic of 20th century international affairs.

World’s End, the last installment in Copper Canyon’s long effort to publish all of Neruda’s final books (The Hands of Day is reviewed here), is very heavy on two of Neruda’s most valuable contributions to literature – political commentary and humanism. For Neruda, the two go hand-in-hand. There are no political associations or events without personal associations and events. Our amazing ability for denial that allows us to wear shoes made by starving children is cultivated by the little, personal denials we make in our everyday lives. But Neruda does not indict his readers; he empathizes:

Memories do not nourish me,
and I embark on the life before me
moving the plaster of the century
and the shoe of each day,
suffering without a cross the torment
of being the one most crucified,
torn to shreds under the wheels
of the false, victorious century.

(from “Time in the Life”)

We lied to our friends
In the sadness or the silence,
And the enemy lied to us
With a mouthful of hate.

It was the cold age of war.

It was the quiet age of hate.

From time to time a bomb
Burned the soul of Vietnam…

(from “Know It Know It Know It”)

He often refers to the close or end of the 20th century (still 1/3 of the century left to go) as being the end of a global shame fueled by blood, miscommunication, greed and convenient and destructive ideologies:

A century with shoe shops
filled the world with shoes
while feet were cut off
by snow or by fire,
by gas or by ax!

At times I remain bowed
by all that weighs on my back,
the repeated punishment:
it took a lot for me to learn to die
with each incomprehensible death
and to bear the remorse
of the wantonly criminal:
because after the cruelty
and even after the vengeance
Perhaps we were not so innocent
given that we went on with our lives
as they were killing the others.

Perhaps we rob our better brothers
of their lives.

(from “The Wars”)

Neruda repeatedly slams the war in Vietnam, even accusing Gen. Westmoreland by name (“Vietnam”). He views Cuba and Fidel Castro as shining stars held up to the world as an example of the true future. Neruda was heavily criticized for his support of Castro, but the beauty of World’s End is that, as you read some of the greatest literature of the 20th century, you also receive a lesson in what it means to experience and interpret history as it passes. Neruda’s words are always global in scope, and pointed towards certain ideals that Castro represented to many.

There are eleven sections to the book and it becomes more focused on individual experiences as it progresses. As always, Neruda is heavy on natural imagery. Fortunately, Neruda is the only person who can use “sea” 1,000 times in a single book (he doesn’t, but he could have if he had so chosen) and truly evoke the purest experience of that breathtaking phenomenon every time.

I learned the why of misfortune
in the school of water.
The sea is a wounded planet
and the breaking is its greatness:
this star feel into our hands:
from the tower of salt
scatters its heritage
of living shadow and furious light.

It has not married the earth.

We still do not understand it.

(from “Seas”)

He uses nature for imagery, but obviously derives significant meaning and purpose for a place through its landscapes. He viewed Chile as his motherland and that land had a character wholly independent from, but essentially influential to, the people:

There is a cemetery of bees
there in my land, in Patagonia,
and they return with honey on their backs
to die of so much sweetness.
it is a stormy region
curved like a crossbow,
with a permanent rainbow,
like the tail of a pheasant:
the falls of the river roar,
the foam leaps like a hare,
the wind cracks and expands
in the surrounding solitude:
the meadow is a circle,
its mouth full of snow
and its belly ruddy.

there they arrive on by one,
a million with another million,
all the bees arrive to die
until the earth is covered
in great yellow mountains.

I will never forget their fragrance.

(from “Bees (II))

The only form absent here is the ode. You won’t miss it. You love Neruda; you might not know it yet due to limited or biased exposure. World’s End is a perfect in-road to him, with a balance of politics, romance, genuine human experience and more mind-altering simplicities than most poets conceive in a lifetime.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Matt Soucy, Pablo Neruda
Posted in reviews

How Beautiful the Beloved

Friday, July 24th, 2009

by Gregory Orr
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

“Crammed with astute observations about anatomy in action!”

How Beautiful the Beloved by Gregory Orr Gregory Orr follows 2005’s Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved with this collection, How Beautiful the Beloved, a further examination of the beloved in the abstract. This expansive project reveals quite a lot of wisdom about the idea of the beloved – be it man, woman, pet, inanimate object, anything loved by someone – and its relationship to us as human beings. In that regard, it frequently hits the core of the human experience – and more specifically, the heart. When successful, the result can be transcendent – an idea seemingly too simple on the surface will reveal itself as intricately nuanced, and Orr’s ability to convey complexities with just a few words is not only evocative, for me, of some of the Asian poetry I’ve read, but also speaks to his greatest strength as a poet. The grandness of the product as a whole, however, is also its shortcoming – I left the book wondering how many poems about an abstract idea are too many and whether they begin to lose their lyrical power when the only tangible things are those happening around the subject rather than the subject itself. Of course, I feel the same way about church, so perhaps this is my own shortcoming as a human being.

Letting go, when all you want is to hold.
Turning away, when all you want is to stay.

Almost all that’s in the Book was written
On just such a day:

Someone remaining;
someone going away

Someone becoming silent;
someone who must say.

The above lines, perhaps some of the most persuasive in the book, act as a descriptor of what lies behind the poems in this collection. True, the subject of each poem is no doubt the oblique beloved, but the story between the speaker and the beloved, even humans and the beloved, is what make the poems superb. The joy of the beloved is what drives the speaker, but the heartbreak, confusion, sadness, and loss surrounding the beloved is the real story of the poems.

Human heart –
That tender engine.

Love revs it;
Loss stalls it.

What can make it
Go again?

The poem, the poem.

The book is always checked out of the library, the speaker proclaims, so better to create “Your own version:/ The poems and songs/ You love – the ones/ That saved you when/ You were young/ And suffered./ And also/ Those that consoled you/ When you were older.”

Really, I couldn’t praise the lyricism and wisdom of these poems enough. Orr has really mastered the lyric – I think the above examples are proof enough. However, the beloved is so present that the story around the beloved – joy, love, suffering, misery, salvation –also feels like a shortcoming to me, at times so hyperbolic that the words themselves seem meaningless:

How we embraced the beloved
So tightly that fate itself
Was changed into destiny

Then everything was different.

Exactly as before, but also
Different.
Death still there,
But different.
Loss still
Omnipresent, but not the same.

Held in our arms, holding us
Even as she vanished,
Even as he turned into song.

This poem feels like a lesson in the importance of the “show, don’t tell” rule. Just a few times I wished for something strikingly tangible to enter – a name, an object. What exactly does the first stanza mean? Should I debate with myself about whether it should appear on a greeting card? Have greeting cards, with their abstract, flowery language, ruined poetry? Should I have surrounded myself with dream catchers before reading it? Interestingly, I found the most tangible moments in Orr’s poems come when reflecting upon other poems:

Nazim Hikmet begins a poem
With the phrase, “Another thing
I didn’t know I loved.”
He writes in a tone of amazement.

He’s a Turkish poet in exile.
He’s on a train in winter,
Leaving Prague and headed
Toward an uncertain future.
The poem he’s writing is a list
Of things he suddenly knows
Are precious.
He doesn’t know
Where he’s going – old man
At the start of a long, cold ride.
The list he recites is also long.

As long as he keeps making that list,
He’s traveling toward the beloved.

This poem certainly stands out in the collection. It’s one of the few with specific names, places, and images. It makes me want to read Nazim Hikmet (though I read this particular poem and Orr’s poem is better). It makes me want to realize I love so many things I didn’t know I loved until this moment and it makes me want to list those things. The poem is a wonderful example of one of the most important messages of the book, yet also describes a poem in such a way that it seems the exact opposite of the poems in this book. Perhaps that’s the point, and perhaps this is why Orr is often compared to Whitman. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself” In that respect, even what I propose as a potential shortcoming could be a reflection of the complexity of human thought and the dichotomies in which we live every day. The things that move us do not do so with simplicity, but perhaps if we’re able to express those things with simplicity, we’ve started down the path of artistic mastery.

Sometimes the poem
Changes you slowly
As if eroding the old life.

You have to be patient
With the way it unfolds –
One line at a time.

So unlike the beloved:
All at once and forever.

Tags: 6 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Gregory Orr, Jason Bredle
Posted in reviews

The End of the West

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

by Michael Dickman
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by DJ Dolack

Out There

dickman michael cover Before you read through and come away confused as to what the overall opinion is here, I want to say this: Michael Dickman’s debut collection is solid. It’s straightforward and self-centered and immature, but it also cares about you. It puts a lot of weight on very small moments and it wants you to read it very, very slowly. It knows for sure that when you walk away from it, you will be leaving unnerved. For better and worse, the hype-machine that has surrounded its release has made it more subject to the overly-critical eye, but I suppose that’s a small price to pay for three poems and a New Yorker feature (an amazing feat for even the established poet with tenure and/or health insurance, let alone a writer who has only a few good publishing credits and no established record of relevance). But by blocking everything but the poetry itself out, we can see a collection that uses autobiography and (dare I say it?) confessionalism to put forward a declarative and make sense of this world the only way it knows how.

Many of the poems in The End of the West seem to come from the now infamous “Dickman background”; they are built around life experiences of growing up in a rough section of town, interaction with and absence of a truant father, a single mother, romantic lust, and a great metaphysical barbaric yelp. It’s very young work, but it forces you to pay attention to singular occasions of romanticism. In the opening poem, “Nervous System,” Dickman writes:

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on
a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside our
deaths

It’s a moment we are pressed into with or without him, and it’s sincere. In fact, sincerity runs rampant through the entire collection and sometimes gives us moments of information we’d be better off shielded from. In “Ode,” he fills us in a little too intimately:

Do you think there’s a difference
for the Lord
between

slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck, and later

my face
in your ass?

Yeah, I think there is. And I have no use to ponder it much more than you’ve given me already, but thanks for the image. It’s tough to transition from a stunning illustration like this to a more solemn and considerate follow-up:

I think His home is covered in dark leaves
cicada wings and
promises

a peaceful night
a perfect death

Ugly and frighteningly real as it is, it works. It is also one of the aspects of Dickman’s poetry that appeals to me so much. You don’t have to learn to read this book; you only have to be human. And I agree with Franz Wright’s blurbed assertion that Dickman drives against “the gratuitous non-sequiturs and obscurity for obscurity’s sake which have been fashionable in our poetry for the past couple of decades”—though I wouldn’t say Wright’s praise is surprising, as I think it’s fairly clear and just the way the guy writes. But this is just the beginning of my disagreement with some of the attributes Wright and others have themselves heralded upon the poetry of Michael Dickman. Although I see a lot to like here, and am thrilled to see what he will bring us in the future, I cannot go along with the super-sized praise that’s been bestowed upon this collection thus far, especially on the back cover.

Of course Franz Wright lauds the poems; they’re molded directly from his own early style, a style exhibited most devastatingly in 1993’s The Night World and the Word Night, a book that marked both the pinnacle of and turning point in Wright’s work. Within those pages we can find more of the stark imagery and darkness that his first collections introduced us to, and that came to define his writing until almost ten years later when it took on a subtle optimism as well as a fixed gaze on spiritual guidance. In no other collection though, has Wright’s poetry been more hauntingly effective than in The Night World…, nor has it stood together so well as an entire piece, complete with a beautifully delicate arc and pace.

As a disciple of that collection, I find Dickman’s poems fairly derivative and unable to truly reinvent themselves or seem fresh in the ways that count most. The quickly-jabbed images of light, stars, trees, leaves, needles, abandonment, and of course death, all show up within the first few poems with such a familiarity, it’s difficult to imagine that, in his enormously verbose blurb, Wright actually asserts that Dickman “has absorbed his influences and taught them to work hand in hand with his own
unique genius to produce a style like no one else’s…”. Come on, man. Can we be serious here for a second?¹

But it’s more than just these obvious images, words and subject matter that make the connection to Wright’s earlier work so distinct and insurmountable when discussing poetic style and originality, two of the things Dickman’s enthusiasts seem to applaud more than anything else. It’s the way in which Dickman goes about setting up his rhythm, his line breaks, his use of white space, as well as the tone built by these devices, that truly makes this collection seem like some kind of poetry cover album. To even the faintly read reader, it’s nothing terribly new. It does conjure the darkness we may like to associate with poetry, especially if we’re bred from such a background. It does not, however, solicit the level of praise or interest it has thus far received, especially when a number of younger poets are clearly writing and putting out collections that warrant deeper readings and attention, who have not had the opportunity or coincidence to meet, greet and drink with the Names this poet has. This understanding alone, that this simple reviewer, with no completed manuscript or published book in tow, can easily see the disconnect between what is new, original and challenging, and what this collection has to offer, is a forewarning of the comments on inadequacy and replication. Still, the connection to Wright’s style and lack of Dickman’s own uniqueness should play heavily into any unbiased appreciation and critique of the entire collection.

However, this is still not to say I didn’t like the collection as a whole, or appreciate the approach. The book is also, at many points, beautiful. It’s delicate and deliberate when it needs to be, honest when what we desperately need is honesty. Dickman manages to build small incomplete narratives in the poetry and deliver moments that are more touching than stark. In “My Autopsy” he lays out lists of declaratives that read like a last stand:

You eat the forks
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on despite
worms or fire

I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth

The poem is gorgeous, strange and slow; its lines inhale and exhale. But its best moments are gathered up front. The breaks between parts, something Dickman does throughout the collection, here seem to cut off the build in tension, but he always keeps us on track with the repetition of “There is a way / if we want…” beginning each part. The final part, though, is the weakest and runs a bit too far on its main image of “intestines” while ending the whole thing with a kind of dud stanza that doesn’t really tie anything in or up. We’re left with our eyes darting to the next page only to find a new title for the next poem. It’s disappointing, especially after such strong lines throughout, but we quickly understand that this is one of Dickman’s great weaknesses, and one of the few that ultimately hold the collection back: the guy can’t finish.

“Sticking the Landing” is probably one of the toughest things to pull of in the poem — a “know it if you got it” kind of thing — and Dickman surprises with the faint and unconvincing last lines he chooses. It seems in almost every poem, the lines that conclude each individual part are more effective and relevant than the lines that conclude the entire piece. He often tries to rely on singular images, delivered flatly, to bring on a reverberating crack of thunder, but they end up sounding more like cap gun snaps. Of course, this is something Franz Wright does hauntingly well, and we can see Dickman trying to emulate, but to little avail. I wouldn’t normally try to compare the skills of a young poet like Dickman to a master of the craft like Wright, but I think the palpable resemblance here warrants the evaluation.

Furthermore, there are so many potential moment-by-moment comparisons to Wright’s work, it’s probably best to just list the few I found most distracting. Although it’s difficult to really get at the resemblance through simple snapshots of the work, here are excerpts from various Dickman poems up against Wright; it isn’t out-and-out theft, but the severity of mood and image produce a kind of upside-down, rippling reflection, like a streetlamp in a puddle:

Wright (from “Midnight Postscript”):

It should always be
night, and the living with their TVs, vacuum cleaners
and giggling inanities
silenced.

With here and there a window lit a golden mysterious
light.
I love the night world,
the word night.

Dickman (from “Kings”):

Our crowns look nothing like his crown

needles and light and
needles of light
fingers
stamen

…

The kitchen window
the only light
for blocks

Now we’re going to know what it feels like

*

Wright (from “Train Notes”)

Green lightning past the last trees, they are pure
gaze.

Dickman (from “Good Friday”)

I think the light
appearing, then
disappearing

across the trunk of the live oak
is the boss of everything

*

Wright (from “Pawtucket Postcards”)

Lights of the abandoned
households reflected
in the little river through the leaves

Dickman (from “Late Meditation”)

What are you going to do?
describe the light
falling

through the pitch pines
again?

*

Wright (from “Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse”)

…horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white
bees.

Dickman (from “My Father Full of Light”)

like the residue of beets
on a cutting board

also
emitted light

A blizzard of wings

Wright (from “Provincetown Postcards”)

Wolf stars

Owl’s head moth

Icon-yellow twilight

Sound of leaves & sea the silent sun

Will all have had ample experience when the last loneliness
comes

Dickman (from “We Did Not Make Ourselves”)

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
It won’t last long
I promise

If you’re unconvinced, I highly recommend you check out any of Wright’s work previous to The Beforelife, both for the reference and some truly stirring poetry. I also recommend you take a good look at The End of the West for what it is, regardless of its origins or influences. It’s a book that asks for your time but not your patience, and it deserves both. In the brilliant title poem, which serves as the closing overture to the collection, Dickman writes:

They don’t say my name
but my name
is out there

I can’t help but use these lines as a way of thinking about the poetry of Michael Dickman: something that is out there, but still undefined unto itself.

¹Apparently not. That statement about style ends with: “…one as instantly recognizable as that of poetic masters such as Dickinson, Follain, and Simic.” I’m serious. These are the exact words. Now I know blurbs are supposed to talk up the work and stretch the truth a bit, but this is a great example of the blurb art form gone to shit. Who had the final say on this one, and where is the modesty and humility for a first-book poet? I imagine I’m not alone when I say that, as the author, I would have suggested a lighter phrase here, or at least an opportunity to edit. Flattery is nice, but isn’t it obvious that this kind of hyperbole just comes off as pretentious bullshit?

Tags: 7 stars, Copper Canyon Press, DJ Dolack, Michael Dickman
Posted in reviews

Human Dark With Sugar

Friday, March 6th, 2009

by Brenda Shaughnessy
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Cate Peebles

Fast Into You

In the poem “Replaceable Until You’re Not,” Brenda Shaughnessy writes, “You are not broken. You break again / and again because // that’s what breaking means / To be whole…I am yours. I am still I.” Throughout Human Dark With Sugar, her long-anticipated second collection of poems, we meet with an assertive but vulnerable speaker. This is a book of many sections, subsections, titles and subtitles, all held in place by a spine and a name. To be human is to be a whole mess all bound by flesh and etcetera into a freakish, thinking, feeling thing — one that relentlessly, joyfully, picks itself apart. Shaughnessy draws attention to the contradiction of being made up of so many parts while appearing to be one single body.

The book is divided into three sections: Anodyne, Ambrosia, and Astrolabe. And within these sections, the poems are further divided into parts—couplets, tercets, numerical sections, and named numerical sections. For example, “This Loved Body” is divided into 20 parts. But the writing in no way feels calculated or stilted by the breaks. The movement from part to part, poem to poem, is seamless. The poems explore these typographical divisions lyrically, with an intensely self-aware speaker; take these lines in “Why Is the Color of Snow?”:

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
to the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

…

What is constant is white…

Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self…

What is constant here is the insistence in the speaker’s voice. She consistently craves a closer look at the transient moment and the individual’s–her–passage through it.

The joy in these poems is found in their humor, and there is humor everywhere. Shaughnessy is clever without being obnoxious about it and her wit keeps the poems moving. In “Breasted Landscape” she describes Autumn as “scrambled math and nipples.” And in an anti-ode to the moon called “I’m Over the Moon,” she writes,

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone.

She doesn’t shy away from raunchy either, as in the next lines:

I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand…

I won’t give away any more, but it gets even dirtier. It’s this mix of humor and directness that keeps the writing from ever slipping into the ho-hum. Shaughnessy hits many notes, from angry to horny to wistful. Reading these poems you run an emotional gamut, but you do so with someone who doesn’t sink and drag.

I’ve heard many of these poems read aloud on several occasions, and I have now read the book about three times, and I still find it moving, erotic and intellectually engaging. If you get a chance to hear Brenda Shaughnessy read, you should go. Of course, if you are unable, the book itself stands up to multiple reads and does not fall flat. It’s the kind of book you might want to read when you’re in a sulky mood, because you can identify with the longing and pain and then laugh at yourself and long some more. The sugar and the darkness are inseparable.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Brenda Shaughnessy, Cate Peebles, Copper Canyon Press
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Shadow Architect

Monday, January 26th, 2009

by Emily Warn
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

No Code

This book is meant to be read slowly, and I think that Copper Canyon does it a disservice by not making it glossier and more visually pleasing. It’s divided into 22 sections, one for each letter of the alef-beit (the Hebrew Alphabet), and then there are three larger divisions. In the introduction, Warn describes the genesis (the Bereshit?) of the project as a collaboration with the visual artist Dennis Evans. His work for the letter Pei is on the cover, and it’s gorgeous. Think of a Cornell box with mezuzahs and circuits. I think that the book would make more sense—and be more sensual—were Evan’s visuals to work in conjunction with Warn’s text. Considering that each section has a full page introduction reproducing each Hebrew letter alongside its mystical significance (yud: The hand of god; Nun: the shadow architect), the book is already leaning in the direction of coffee-table-art-book.

Each of the 22 sections ends with three quotations. These act as brakes on the trajectory of the book. Warn is clear that her approach was deliberative: “I studied the letters in the same way I study Zen koans” (xiii). So it’s not surprising that each section ends with paradoxes for contemplation such as, “The glory of God is to conceal things” (83) or “The final end of knowledge is not to know” (117). If one has to thrice pause and consider after each section (3 quotes per section x 22 sections=66 contemplations in all), it would make sense to have something nice to look at during the pauses. The slowness and fragmentary nature of the book seems betrayed by it’s familiar form.

The poems themselves tend toward a celebration of the natural world with a mystic bent:

To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the language of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky’s pale page
(7)

The general theme of the book is that the incomprehension we face in nature (what’s that crow saying?) is the paradigm by which all human incomprehension can be understood. The poems repeatedly raise epistemological concerns, only to abandon them to the phenomenological experience of nature:

How you lived not knowing you lived.
How you postponed this reckoning

believing you lacked a desire to know.
Yet here you are listening to a leaf

scrape air, your hands smeared with mud.
(13)

Nature tends to stand in for the divine, though at times cloyingly so. In a poem called “The Sabbath Queen”:

Knit your soul to hers
as pine needles knit stars.
(42)

Do pine needles knit stars? Warn’s Surrealist bent is stronger and interests me more than her return to Deep Image. She clearly has a talent for juxtaposing images that sound compelling together. At the end of “The House of Fluency”:

You follow blind fish, find a violin with missing strings,
a glass float, a mouth harp.
(82)

I’m not a mystic, and for the most part, the Jewish liturgy bores me. My first objection is that it’s incredibly repetitive. I get it. You’re our king, we’re your subjects; you’re our shepherd, we’re your sheep, yadda yadda yadda. My second objection is that the insights feel so true as to be axiomatic (we all die), or entirely false (everything turns out OK in the end). Warn avoids most of those pitfalls. She uses only one extensive list, and though at times she tells an axiomatic truth, poets must be allowed axiomatic truths, as long as they are beautifully told. Warn makes it clear in the introduction that her major intellectual commitment is to postmodernism, not Judaism: “Whereas religious Jewish thinkers believe the Hebrew Alphabet is a code that reveals divine intention, I came to see it as a code that reveals the limits and generative power of language” (xiii). Unfortunately, I never saw those limits being explored—I kept hoping to find myself somewhere unfamiliar, but I kept coming back to well-worn territory.

Tags: 4 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Emily Warn, Jason Schneiderman
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The Shadow of Sirius

Monday, January 5th, 2009

by W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

Speak, Memory

W.S. Merwin has written, translated and studied a lot of poetry during his lifetime, and his newest collection, The Shadow of Sirius, undoubtedly demonstrates the payoff of that work. While deceptively simple, the poems effortlessly pursue themes lying at the core of human experience: childhood, impermanence, mortality and memory. They’re beyond poignant and possibly even beyond his best work. They’re essential.

Sirius is divided into three sections loosely separated but also linked thematically – the first a recollection of youth, the second a series of ruminations on death, and the third a less definable hodgepodge of observation. The focus of sections one and two allow them to resonate a little more powerfully than three as actual “sections,” but all remain effortlessly lyrical and all convey a general message that when one sits and reflects upon everything in old age, these are the most important things in a lifetime. Simultaneously, age seems to have transcended time for Merwin. In “Still Morning,” he writes:

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words

What proceeds in section one is quite a phenomenal display of memory and poetic expertise combining to result in simple, profound moments. In “The Pinnacle,” Merwin writes of a friendship he had with a teacher he once admired, and of the impermanence of that relationship:

she was beautiful
in her camel hair coat
that seemed like the autumn leaves
our walk was her idea
we liked listening to each other
her voice was soft and sure
and we went our favorite way
the first time just in case
it was the only time
even though it might be too far
we went all the way
up the Palisades to the place
we called the pinnacle
with its park at the cliff’s edge
overlooking the river
it was already a secret
the pinnacle
as we were walking back
when the time was later
than we had realized
and in fact no one
seemed to know where we had been
even when she told them
no one had heard of the pinnacle

and then where did she go

I could quote most of section one here and it would be equally as powerful, but I’ll refrain. The poet captures the general essence in “A Likeness,” in which he writes “I have only what I remember.” Moments from childhood, things we remember of people we’ve known, these are what ultimately resonate as important in our lives, and these things are typically remarkably simple, enhanced by a sight, smell or sound.

The book turns more specifically to ideas of impermanence and mortality in the more compact section two. “By Dark” works as a metaphor for the act of dying itself:

When it is time I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day

I can see nothing there but the black dog
the dog I know going ahead of me

In “Dream of Koa Returning,” a consideration of the loss of an animal results in the consideration of impermanence:

I looked out to the river
flowing beyond the big trees
and all at once you
were just behind me
lying watching me
as you did years ago
and not stirring at all
when I reached back slowly
hoping to touch
your long amber fur
and there we stayed without moving
listening to the river
and I wondered whether
it might be a dream
whether you might be a dream
whether we both were a dream
in which neither of us moved

I don’t really know what I can say about that passage other than the fact that it deserves ten billion enthusiastic thumbs up. It’s quite a revelatory moment in a brief period of text – the speaker sitting, thinking of his dead pet, then regarding both his own and his pet’s impermanence – and isn’t this what poetry is supposed to be about?

As I mentioned, section three seems more a mixture of daily meditations. It’s not quite as focused as the first two, but reverberates quite well. In one of the most powerful pieces in the section, “Shadow Hand,” the speaker thinks of a roof repairman he once knew:

yesterday after all these years
I learned he had suddenly
gone blind while still in his sixties
and died soon after that while I
was away and I never knew
and it seemed as though it had just
happened and it had not been long
since we stood in the road talking
about owls nesting in chimneys
in the dark in empty houses

Again, a revelation found in a brief moment, another revelation leading to a reflection on the impermanence of all things. Ultimately, “Worn Words” summarizes the essence of this book the best:

The late poems are the ones
I turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight

it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there

As such, The Shadow of Sirius acts in itself as a collection of late poems. They are made of words that have come the whole way, that have been there. In a world of so many poetry projects with so many complicated agendas, this collection both reemphasizes and illuminates the importance and relevance of good poetry.

Tags: 9 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Jason Bredle, W.S. Merwin
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The Dream We Carry

Monday, December 8th, 2008

by Olav H. Hauge
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Christie Ann Reynolds

Apple Apple

hauge cover

Orchards have always made a nice home for the shadows of horror films, and of course, Halloween hayrides where skeletons dangle from gnarled branches. Orchards are systematically planted in rows; we know what to expect when we round the last perfect line of trees. When an apple falls to the ground, its sound is unlike the thick stinking walnuts that dent my car in the driveway and unlike the soft padded thump of an orange just ripe enough to depart from a branch.

For Olav H. Hague, the peacefulness and reality of living and working on a farm and orchard fostered a fierce, often brutal, but natural love to unfold in poems of personal dialogue and documentation. The Dream we Carry, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, contains poems that are systematic and organized as an orchard, yet full of human complications and other surprises. We don’t know if a turn of the page will bring us to that next shining apple tree or the dark boles of its sturdy trunk. These poems, some previously uncollected, some collected from seven of Hague’s books, hold the truths of life as observed through the tender and vulnerable reflections of man and earth. When reading the poem “Across the Swamp,” we may first interpret it as a memory. After a second reading, we understand the poet’s contemplation of past, and in a third reading, our own mortality.

It is the roots from all the trees that have died
out here, that’s how you can walk
safely over the soft places.
Roots like these keep their firmness, it’s possible
they’ve lain here for centuries.
And there are still some dark remains
of them under the moss.
They are still in the world and hold
you up so you can make it over.
And when you push out into the mountain lake, high
up, you feel how the memory
of that cold person
who drowned himself here one day
Helps hold up your frail boat.
He, really crazy, trusted his life
to water and eternity.

There is an obvious affinity between poet and poem that is inescapable. Hauge’s connection to nature is extremely evocative, not unlike the simple life he lived on his tiny plot of land. He grew his own food, tended his own fields and even though he was the youngest son and given the least amount of land to live from, he harvested a plethora of poems alongside vegetables and a hobby of bird watching. Perhaps being the younger son with the least amount of land was a blessing for Hague who’s poem titled, “I Have Three Poems,” states, “A good poem/should smell of tea/ Or of raw earth and freshly cut wood.” His poems do not smell of commerce or money or television or greed. Hague’s poems are not reminiscent of contemporary celebrities or problems. They literally reek of tea and of that freshly cut wood he cut each morning with muscle and axe. Robert Bly said, “If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than apples. It’s good to settle down somewhere and to love poetry more than either of them.”

What Hague loved more than his apples and farm was Chinese poetry. In a poem titled “To Li Po,” Hague writes,

To be emperor of the Divine Kingdom
No doubt appealed to you, Li Po
But didn’t you have the whole world, the wind and clouds
and happiness when you were drunk?
Greater still, Li Po, is
to master your own heart

Generally, our poet seeks to master his own heart and whatever truth can be discovered in the creation of a piece of writing. In the Chinese poets, he found a devotion to writing about the human soul and its inevitable connection to nature. For Hague, nature is as much of a truth for the world as the human soul is for the human body. This narrator knows that he can not master the inevitable course of nature because it occurs with or without him. But by writing about everyday activities of birds and roots, he can admire them, belong to them and desire their silent but expressive habits. This is evident in the silent presence of Roc-bird in “Truth”:

Truth is a shy bird,
like the Roc-bird who
arrives when you don’t expect it,
sometimes before,
sometimes after.
Some say she
doesn’t exist;
those who have seen her
just keep quiet.

It is interesting to consider these poems as not only a dialogue between man and nature, but as a documentation of a lifetime spent only on poetry and hard work on the land. Like the ocean, Hague writes, “I, too, have stars/and blue depths.” Those blue depths may very well be connected to the years Hague spent in an asylum during his twenties. However, even at his depths, he was capable of finding a richness in human soul:

This Is Not the Kingdom of the Poor
In the Asylum

This is not the kingdom of the poor,
nor the house of sorrow.
But take your hat off
as you go in.
You have no way of knowing
where love blazes here
and whose spirit
watches.
No one reads here.
No one writes here.
But God
finds the sleeping
and the waking
heart.

The fifth line of the poem rings true for all of Hague’s poems: “We have no way of knowing where love blazes here and whose spirit watches.” I think this book proves that an ostensibly simple life can lead to complex poems where the new moon is also, “a hard fingernail scratching the sky,” and where in “From the War,” of a bullet Hague writes, “I had no doubt it could kill.” The designation of bullet to death is obvious, but every time I read that line out loud, I can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson and the strangeness of, “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” The afterthought of the fly and the bullet, for me, persistently haunt.

The two poets rarely left their homes or personal space. Upon Dickinson’s death, the innumerable poems she left behind were evidence of a far more provocative mind than anyone suspected. Hague too, writing from his orchard and reading in his library reminds me of a Norwegian Dickinson. I imagine both of them out there—Hague walking through his fields and plants just as Dickinson was once pacing the small upstairs room of her Amherst home, their minds ticking and creating poems that thud into our heads like…apples.

Tags: 7 stars, Christie Ann Reynolds, Copper Canyon Press, Olav H. Hauge
Posted in reviews