by Diana Der-Hovanessian
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by Steven Karl
No Stick
The Second Question is preoccupied with identity, specifically Armenian identity. Here is the title poem:
Where are you,
where were your people from?
was the first question
our grandmothers asked
each other when they met.
The second question
was always How?
How did you escape
death? Now
their children ask
only the first,
where in Turkish Armenia
were your people from?
The poem is an excellent representation of Diana Der-Hovanessian’s poetics—short and tightly wound, rather easy to access. “How did you escape / death?” begs the question of survival from genocide and how that survival has shaped and transformed a culture and its people.
But this narrative, recurrent throughout the book, isn’t explored as fully as it could be. Instead the poet spends her time on moves like capitalizing the “H” in “How?” Instead of trusting her readers, the poet instructs them on how to read the poem and what to take away from it, somehow avoiding the fact that the reader might be asking for something else entirely.
X.J. Kennedy’s blurb reads, “If you think you don’t like poetry, The Second Question will quickly change your mind…” Perhaps. Diana Der-Hovanessian is an accomplished poet, instructor, and translator and I can’t help but wonder if this book was put together with the intent to appeal to—even teach—mainstream readers. I put this question out there because for the most part, the book is, dare I say, too easy, and many of the poems too “clever.” Their cavalier accessibility detracts from a potentially engrossing personal study of identity, particularly the sense of identity one feels as the descendent of a nearly-obliterated culture.
The book is also distracted by a peripheral focus on feminine identity which brings no new arguments. Here’s “Earmark”: “ In spite of dangles / hoops and spheres / men seldom notice / girls have ears.” Strange, but in all my years, I never met a man who fancies a woman earless. The Second Question contains more than a few poems that follow this formula: men are insensitive and aloof while women remain survivors of subjection; but we are told this and never tempted to explore the deeper machinations implicit to that subjection.
“Cold Fire” offers a convenient example of clichéd femininity: “A fire once it’s dead stays dead / in women. But in most men / cold fires can revive and spread.” (“What kind of fire are you?” the teacher seems to be asking). The fourth stanza continues, “A woman wants fire. That’s bred / into her bones, but when / the fire is dead it’s really dead…” I suppose the last thing I want in a collection of poetry is to be given a bland generalization. And there is little room for penetrating or interpreting “a woman wants fire”; Plath stole away with that concept 40 years ago.
Alas, in the end, do the poems’ simplicities make it hard for the poet’s issues to stick? At first I thought the simplicity was indeed the culprit, a device that made the poems falter or fail to shine. But I’ve carried both Neruda’s Odes and Basho’s haikus with me for years; the real problem with D-Hova’s poems is that they are mostly surface.
Which brings me back to the question of audience: was this collection put together to serve as an introduction to poetry for those less aware? In the issue of identity Suji-Kwok Kim’s A Divided Country, Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in the Imperial City, or Carly Sach’s the steam sequence all delve successfully into the complexity of straddling identity and/or maintaining an identity in the face of shifting politics or the erasure that progress/history creates. Der-Hovanessian’s knowledge, experience, and poetic expertise should make this collection one of significant weight and contemplation; unfortunately too many of the poems warrant little more than a passing glance, and the potentially invigorating study of her Armenian identity takes a disappointing back seat.
*
