Posts Tagged ‘Matt Soucy’

chap nook 6: Pritts, Dhompa, Herzer

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)

Nate Pritts’ chapbook Sentimental Spectacular contains five poems, a short collection, even for a chapbook. Though slight, Sentimental Spectacular mines the sentimental for careful, specific image and sound, crafting a work that’s, yes, deeply sentimental, but one willing both to celebrate its sentimentality and to search for a major key of resonance in its reader. “Darling, darling, darling,” reads the title poem, “there’s something sensational in the way / my heart takes on different forms.” (It is probably worth noting that the poet has also published a book called Sensational Spectacular.) We encounter the speaker’s heart—large, lush, loudly beating—in each of these image-rich poems.

Pritts engages with other poets in Sentimental Spectacular, including Frost in his poem “Frost at Midmorning”: “…me, a proud honorary / astronaut sent out as a lover of uncontained / & immortal beauty but, O, just a chump in love / with the ground…Frost in autumn, frost at midnight, / Frost on a hotel bed, telescoping from mountains to buzzsaws…” Here, we find a wisp of a reference to Frost’s “Out, Out–”, an arguably unsentimental tale of a young boy’s lost hand, as well as ever-sentimental Whitman, with his exultant and emotional O’s and preoccupations with lovelorn “chumps.”

In the final poem “Inarticulate Bird in Befuddled Blooming Bafflement,” Pritts upends his moment-driven sentimental explorations, challenging memory and nostalgia as stable vehicles of sentimentality. “You can’t bring [this poem],” states the speaker, “to the waterfall you made up, // you can’t show it to the rainbow you see when you / close your eyes.” Where imagination and desire intersect with memory, Pritts shows, sentiment becomes longing, and Sentimental Spectacular veers in an unexpected direction, as startling as it is beautiful. “Some handy flower to dip into,” the speaker calls this shadowy memory, this longing for a past self that did or didn’t exist, “a struggle to remember the sweetness.”

–Rachel Mennies

selvage: for country, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (Belladonna, 2011)

The title of this chapbook from the Belladonna Chaplet series sets a complex backdrop for the poems within. The word selvage refers to the edge of a woven fabric that keeps the fabric from unraveling. The word selvage also calls to mind the word salvage. A selvage salvages the unity or wholeness of the fabric; it preserves the individuality of something, keeps it from blending in with the rest of the world and becoming invisible in the chaos.

In these poems, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s speaker seems to be struggling to preserve identity, control and hope. For instance, in the first poem, the speaker proposes that “Perhaps it is no longer necessary to hope” and asks, “Does it matter how I feel?” The first poem establishes a general sense of giving oneself over to the powers that be. And all that is left is hope as can be seen at the end of the second poem: “And if I think with all my heart / and if I listen with rituals and codes in place, / maybe it will come to pass.” There exists, within these lines, the possibility for sarcasm, though. The phrase “with all my heart” is clichéd and obvious, suggesting a speaker that is, in fact, no longer hopeful. A sarcastic moment here would indicate that hope does not have the power to revise.

Hope plays a substantial part in these fifteen pages of poetry. A poem on page 13 ends, “everything balances on hope.” Although hope becomes central to these poems, there are multiple forces working against it. The concept of free will also shows up often in Dhompa’s collection, but almost always, it is rejected: “As though / the plants on my kitchen window have free will” and “No point bringing up free will.” Dhompa’s poems expound the internal human struggle to understand and control one’s life.

Some of the poems, however, become too abstracted and limit the reader’s ability to connect with the speaker. Take the following lines for example, “Not error but irony / of displacement gives tyranny / degrees of exception.” The piggybacked prepositional phrases and abstract nouns—“of displacement” and “of exception”—push the reader farther from the poem’s core. But nonetheless, readers are left with a beautifully confusing and hopeful moment: “I leave / today and will / see you yesterday.” Yes, see you then.

–Melinda Kaye Wilson

i wanted to be a pirate, Christine Herzer (H_NGM_N, 2010)

By design, Christine Herzer’s chapbook i wanted to be a pirate is an uneven and unpolished read. A visual artist, Herzer has scattered text, handwriting, scribbles, and blacked-out lines highlighting text in white. The poems are more successful in their telling rather showing, but Herzer mitigates that success by trying to maintain a distance from her poems and characters. She has several recurring characters, (‘surfer boy,’ Pan Tau, family members, and more), but none of them move beyond stereotype. There is very little personal connection here either between the reader and the poems or the speaker and the poems. Herzer writes, “I remember sister getting lost.” There is no article or possessive pronoun affixed to ‘sister,’ creating a colloquial, dramatic dissociation, which is soon contradicted. Other character-relation instances in the book feel similarly detached, emotional but partially insincere.

Though many whole poems don’t quite connect, there are many stand-out lines within them. The most simple and direct lines are the strongest: “the party, us arriving together / & leaving together, I liked it,” “where would i go if i had to be there / who would you call before the plane crashes.” Strong lines frame the poems but the attempted stories/emotions put to those lines are too expected. For example, the eponymous line, “we have so much love to do” is obscured in the poem, relying too heavily on butterfly sentiment (“it is a delicate process / branding wings, numbering wings”). While it’s unfair/unreasonable to expect narrative from poetry, “i wanted to be a pirate” is more notable for stand-out lines than its overall direction or impression.

–Matt Soucy

***

Tags: 5 stars, 6 stars, 7.5 stars, Belladonna, Christine Herzer, H_NGM_N, Matt Soucy, Melinda Wilson, Mondo Bummer, Nate Pritts, Rachel Mennies, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Posted in reviews

chap nook 4: Waite, Liening, Casey-Whiteman

Monday, June 6th, 2011

the lake has no saint, Stacey Waite (Tupelo Press, 2010)

Stacey Waite’s loose mosaic of (mostly) prose poems, the lake has no saint, chronicles its speaker’s gradual and variable understanding of self and gender. The title of every poem in the collection begins with the word “when” (i.e. “when praying for gender,” “when in spring the self pity”), so although the poems describe a personal history, they take on a quality of advice gleaned from a specific past but meant for a collective future.

The first half of the chapbook is colored by its hesitant memories of childhood. In “when the chalk of androgyny,” the speaker recounts, “there was always something about the public bathroom doors, always the chalk of androgyny sticking in my throat as i’d walk towards the women’s room with my mother.” The unpleasantness of this sensation—and the speaker’s subsequent inability to urinate—is assuaged by the speaker’s mother singing, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” It is a painful story, but it is touching. This formula is characteristic of the chapbook’s most important idea—that humiliation, confusion, and horror can be tempered by love.

The book’s latter half largely abandons childhood memories to gather around the speaker’s unnamed lover. Thematically, Waite still takes interest in the ways some relationships can alleviate the pain of others. Late in the book, the speaker addresses this passage to the lover:

then you say to me it is not your fault that your mother is lonely. it is moving into winter. long highway, your daughter asleep in the backseat. you are driving toward what’s left of ohio’s fields.

We can’t know whether they are driving toward or away from the speaker’s mother, but it’s clear the speaker’s “lover” has been absorbed by the same space in which a mother sang her diuretic rendition of a John Denver song. the lake has no saint pulls most of its strength from relationships, so when Waite’s language gets slippery, or wriggles out of perfect coherence, it is because relationships—even without the speaker’s autonomous piecing together of a gender identity—are slippery, wriggling, incoherent things.

–PJ Gallo

Oblivion, More, Brad Liening (H_NGM_N Bks, 2010)

Brad Liening’s oblivion, more opens with a seemingly casual disdain for poetic language (“I can already tell this won’t end well, / struggling in the belly of a whale.”) The words are aggressive, and sometimes too self-possessed, as he writes about robots, all-consuming fire, and the apocalypse. But the opening poems are there to set up the groundwork for a well-composed cycle of poetry. The reader is slowly exposed to the speaker’s doubt and vulnerability; in “Oblivion, More,” he thinks about bravery:

I don’t know
if this means
I don’t understand
what it means
to be brave or
if there’s bigger bravery
we have yet to tap into.

Even though this poem is highly personal, it introduces a broader hope for humanity that is all but crushed out in the opening poems. There are great lines that fit into his “sci-fi is reality” apocalyptic, but also prove an undercurrent of compassion (if you loved Wall-E, you might love the line “The robot turns its face to the sun”). As the poems progress, Liening also moves toward the abstract and creates a distinct sense of unwinding. The crushing images of apocalypse that open that book are too heavy to maintain, and there is a well-directed shift to impressions and a more personal imagery. Compared to the fire and robots that open the book, the poems at the end might even be said to be sweet:

You weren’t supposed to be there

but the moon was so big

and for a second

it was like all those fish

were just waiting there to say hey.

(Poem)

Because of the poet’s heavy hand and heavy brow, it may at first be easy to misjudge this intelligent and human set of poems.

–Matt Soucy

Lure, Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman (Poetry Society of America 2009)

The speakers of Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman’s Lure are intimately familiar with the body: how it performs and contorts, how it comes to stand for the self. Lure–Arthur Sze’s selection for the Poetry Society of America’s 2009 Chapbook series–begins as a performance: “The curtain lifts without a sound,” and the speaker asks, “Where should the eyes go first?” In “Strange Hope” and other poems, Lure’s speakers focus on the figures of typically female performers. She is often an artist—dancers Marie Taglioni, her protégée Emma Livry; painter Frida Kahlo—or, as with Patience Mouffett, the subject of art (“Little Miss Muffett”). But she is also another type of performer—a “Patient” whose behavior is detailed by a cold, objective observer, as in the three “Case Study” poems. (Perhaps the patient is actually Patience Mouffett, whose father tried to cure her ailments with various insects thought to have curing properties.)

Throughout Lure, human, insect and animal bodies curl up and arch over (“A mouse curled up inside of me;” “the man with the turtle/posture, each step a careful roll / of the foot”) as much as they fold sharply (“…I can fold myself / into clean origami shapes”; “she folded into herself like an envelope / when touched”). Through such careful attention to images of the body, Casey-Whiteman explores the complicated nature of appeal and attraction or the multiple facets of what it means to lure or be lured, to be a lure and to be alluring. While the poems that open and close the collection effectively entice and reward readers, those in the middle either lilt or teeter in line or language. When the leap is long or the figure ambitious, the presence of banal verbs (“to be” forms particularly) dulls its effect. Readers will prefer the start and end of Lure, where Casey-Whitman’s language is sharp, her poetic leaps as natural as the figures on which they focus.

–Roxanne Banks Malia

***

Tags: Brad Liening, H-ngm-n Books, Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman, Matt Soucy, Melinda Wilson, PJ Gallo, Poetry Society of America, Roxanne Malia Banks, Stacey Waite, Tupelo Press
Posted in reviews

Mister Skylight

Monday, March 7th, 2011

by Ed Skoog
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“You think time flies? It falls to earth.”

Ed Skoog’s Mister Skylight opens with “During the War,” which reads like a brief history of Skoog and America. It is a clear introduction to a collection of poems that is anything but. On the back cover, the point is made that Skoog worked for years in the basement of a museum. That is how most of his poems feel: image after image, one top of another, all with significance but not always with direct relation to one another. However, with close attention, there is something significant to be taken away from each poem, and the collection as a whole maintains a deep unity through consistency of voice.

There are places where Skoog’s imagery extends beyond rational comprehension, but where the tone remains consistent enough to keep us moving and experiencing. Lines emerge occasionally from the mass of images to deliver clear, unexpected messages. For example, in “Party at the Dump,” Skoog writes after almost 30 lines, “Life must be worth something / for the loss of it to hurt so much,” before diving back into another page and a half of conversational, erratic, and sometimes violent imagery:

Take the foreign policy of weather,
palmetto bugs caravanning up the lime tree.
Winds crater power lines, and from these,
an empty and alone beauty busters down,
bullies the shotgun house, keeps a body
up late. Dogs know, the wild ones…

It’s surprising how quickly the writing can come out of the disjointed onslaught of images to brief moments of clarity that extend even to the ‘meta-moment’ of writing a piece of poetry. Take these examples from “Memory Loss”:

When I write “I forgot my silencer”
I mean I have forgotten my silence,
and would like to be thought of
as a dangerous person,
as someone who is intriguing

…

My
fever should have been a prose poem, an entity separated out
and managed in its own tradition rather than asking to find a
place here. They almost reach me. I look up and see blue gels
from theater lights fluttering, caught in cottonwood branches.

The massed images surely have the “museum basement” effect, but each individual poem is also weighed with personal and public history. In “Ruler of My Heart,” the songs played on a jukebox are secret reminiscences of the long absent; the jukebox itself is fixed and unchanging with its limited playlist. “The Kansas River, Also Called Kaw” draws out the idea of childhood hopes and promises gone unfulfilled amid the violence of memory. Moreover, the amusements that occupied us as children would never suffice into adulthood.

The closing poems, “Mister Skylight,” and “Postscript: Autobiographical” are dynamic shows of the inevitability of progession. History is oppressive, weakness is awareness, power is close attention. Everything is fixed in a mire, overseen by Mr. Skylight (“You think time flies? It falls to earth”). This is an excellent collection of poems riding the line between personal expression and public, physical connection.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Ed Skoog, Matt Soucy
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Dead Ahead

Monday, November 1st, 2010

by Ben Doller
Fence Books 2010
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“Each thing charged / with ought bends –”

Ben Doller’s new book, Dead Ahead, is, dare I say,…fun. The dedication is “hey Sandra,” and the opening quotation is from a piece of colloquial writing by a seventeenth-century sea captain who explored the Pacific. The opening poem, “What Do You Do,” is a greeting between narrator and narrator. The writing is immediately fanciful and fast-paced:

What do you do.

Well. I tie population
knots in a length
of baling twine
laughing at mister
water & my, well –

(our elation
ship swell) –

Once you are started it is easy to be carried along from sound to sound and poem to poem. There is a vivid coherence of image and thought without the feeling of being brought into some writer’s overly-intense personal world. Doller uses a fair balance of sea-faring images, abstraction and personal interjection. His social commentary is quick and broad enough to apply to more than just current social woes.

What makes Dead Ahead strongest, though, is that concepts and sounds are well run-aground together. Piled internal rhymes and staccato beats keep the reader bouncing over the page:

A weight
A stick of space. A beam. Of zilch.
A swivelhead. Reverse trend
in cellular conglomeration. A cult.
An inner target. An origin disorder.
Send the word
send the word.
Telegram. Missile command.

(from “Pointing Habit”)

For all of feeling and sounding good (and good-sounding tongue-twisters that seem to move off of the page, e.g., “hotwater heater heating water hotter”), Doller also includes lines of a more personal nature that do not break up the central coherence of Dead Ahead:

were I were

steadfast as art

(from “On Vacation”)

but I have no city
an outline plus stains

a map of trade
routes winds & a market

community a target
humanity niche

I get so twitchy
when they call themselves me

(from “No City”)

Even when making serious points, as on the individual and community, Doller does not take himself too seriously. Even though much of the imagery used is reminiscent of pirates and exploration (ships, waves, squabs, holds, galleons, sails, citrus, etc.) his treatment of the images is light but not sarcastic. The strength of the book is in Doller’s obvious joy of words. The crafting is careful but not cumbersome.

The best example of this joy is the final poem, “Each Thing Changed,” where Doller jams sounds and words together to create two (or three) simultaneous poems. Here are the first few lines:

Each thing charged
with ought bends –

breaks light, which
is ought but

part star. Ought
is, I see

in the thick
book, a vulgar corruption.

Someone heard
someone say

an aught when
they said a

naught. Each thing,
charged with a

naught, bends,
breaks light bad.

The book ultimately moves through multiple formats and landscapes, moods and methods. What remains consistent is that Dead Ahead sounds good and feels good. Doller will delight you and remind you of poetry’s potential to create with language. Here, language pushes thought, not the other way around.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ben Doller, Fence Books, Matt Soucy
Posted in reviews

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

by Johannes Göransson
Apostrophe Books 2007
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“If you want to get rid of me / you’re out of luck”

There is a strong cycling of images in Johannes Göransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place. Sustained images set up a dense and tightly-wound set of poems, or, as it intended, a single poem broken up by titled sections. Nearly every poem ends in an incomplete phrase that is completed in the next poem and then turned in a new direction. The convention is not just clever exhibition; piling his poems on top of one another, Göransson provides a sense of anxiety and quarantine.

The voice in “The Seminal Union of Carvers” is striking and strong but also hints that its air of strength and control is at least partially ironic. True to the book’s title, Göransson opens with images of Vietnam, of Peace vs. War, of guards vs. inmates. The book continues in a balance between big picture commentary and personal feeling and experience.

“Shotgun Wedding in the Ribcage of the Bourgeoisie” has a gaudy moment of referring to how poetry teachers would critique the speaker’s work. He seems to be saying, “What are you going to do about it?” This second poem smacks of hubris, if not monomania, and even though the images are culturally broad, they are all blatantly reflected through Göransson. In the end, the provocative and brutal images are taken as personal affronts to be dealt with through violence, humor or poetry.

In “Obscenity Can Be a Form of Asceticism,” he writes, “I’m the son of a liar,” and the poem does actually feel like a lie, pushing the reader away. But there are welcome images which provide solidarity – for example, referring to the glitterati as animals. (The narrator abuses a captive Shirley Temple intermittently throughout the book.) Göransson’s use of animals is one of most interesting parts of the book. He does not stretch very far and pulls generic images (pig = excess, lamb = sacrifice, horse = fear and fragility, bird = beauty and metaphorical flight) but combines and recombines them throughout the book so they actually become more interesting – not an easy feat.

Throughout, humans are animals. That is one reason that genocide/quarantine has happened and will happen again. The poet seems to feel as if he’s living in a genocide. Instead of emulating the epic pieces of traditional literature that pull the greatness of humanity from those experiences, Göransson accepts a nihilism that surges not from humanity but from his own abused perspective. So, though the set-up for the book seems large-scale, the most compelling work comes from the poet’s experience, particularly with abortion.

The narrator in A New Quarantine refers to personal experience which has made him pro-life and seemingly misogynistic. In the aptly titled “We Will Use Clothes Hangers Next Time” and “This Silence Would Be More Pedagogical In A Meatpacking Plant,” Göransson fills the page with images of pigs (fetal and non-), sharks and lambs. “I’m talking you, about filthy girls have no right to call / yourself strippers”…“If you’re a cheerleader don’t / forget the vermin in your outfits…” In “Two Poems,” Goransson writes:

I only learned three things from those years:
If you want to get rid of a baby throw out the bath
        water.
If you want to get rid of a shivering lamb toss it into a
        room full
Of starving dogs. If you want to get rid of me, you’re
       out of luck
I’ve tried my whole life. We must be twins

Two criticisms are that the use and reuse of images can lead to sometimes tiresome redundancies and repetitions, and that the whole book as a continuous poem can lead to a page-turner effect a la The DaVinci Code where the reader is coerced, rather than compelled, to keep reading. Importantly, Johannes Göransson keeps you reading.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Apostrophe Books, Johannes Goransson, Matt Soucy
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If I Were Another

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

by Mahmoud Darwish (translation Fady Joudah)
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“I remember only the road.”

darwish cover

Mahmoud Darwish has been Palestine’s de facto poet laureate for decades. A new posthumous collection of poems, If I Were Another, selected and translated by Fady Joudah, provides readers with a carefully chosen intellectual continuum of Darwish’s thought through the last 18 years of his life. As is evident in every line of every poem, Darwish was a poet who never stopped evolving, and his two near-death experiences (1984, 1999) become points of reference and reflection for greater art and landmark poetic accomplishment.

Joudah is an accomplished poet in his own right, and has already received acclaim for his translation of Darwish’s Butterfly’s Burden. In presenting these later works, which investigate the pain, anxiety and complexity of exile, Joudah has clearly taken pains to carry through the density of Darwish’s rolling, ever-changing lines. The result is a highly readable book of poetry, even for someone like me, with only an American-level understanding of the Palestinians’ struggle for a peaceful homeland.

If peace is stillness, then the reader of If I Were Another is made to see how it is impossible in Darwish’s world. There is constant flux, so much so that a reader might occasionally feel disoriented and disembodied. Every time Darwish seems to stand on something solid, some truth or moment, it is immediately overwhelmed, overcome and discarded. Darwish’s notions of self, his images of gardens, grass, animals, skies and oceans come from a fundamentally unique perspective embodied in mystery, fundamental sympathy and constant contradiction. In the love poem “Rita’s Winter,” for example, romantic passion – the urge to blend with another person – is matched with the omnipresent fact of individualism:

Rita sleeps in her body’s garden
the berries on the fence of her nails light up the salt
in my blood. I love you. Two birds slept under my hands…
The noble wheat wave slept on her slow breathing
a red rose slept in the hallway
a night that isn’t long slept
and the sea in front of my window slept to Rita’s cadence
rising and falling in the rays of her naked chest
so sleep, Rita, in the middle of me and you and don’t cover
the deep golden darkness between us
sleep with one hand around echo and the other
scattering the solitude of the forests
sleep between the pistachio shirt and the lemon seat
like a mare upon the banners of her wedding night…
The neighing has quieted
the beehives in our blood have died down, but was Rita
here, and were we together?

Romantic passion is all the more urgent when one recognizes that two bodies can never truly merge. Independence is central in Darwish, much as it is in Whitman: it is an essential stopping point, the only conception that allows for understanding of, or relationships with, others and the world. There are undeniable echoes of Whitman in the book-length poem “Mural,” one of the only great poems published so far this century. Like Whitman, Darwish identifies that things are defined by their contradictions:

I come from there. My here leaps
from my steps to my imagination…
I am who I was and who I will be,
the endless vast space makes me
and destroys me

Here cannot exist without there, light cannot exist without dark, life and death are two words for the same phenomenon. What remains is self: the single poet attempts speaking for all, and finds that his own profound limitation – his intrinsic smallness – might be what allows him to do so:

And the poet says: Take my poem if you want,
there’s nothing in it for me besides you,
take your “I.” I will complete exile
with the messages your hands have left for the doves.
Which one of us is “I” that I may become its other?

And later,

I found myself as present as a filled absence.
Whenever I searched for myself I found
the others. Whenever I searched for the others I found
only my stranger self in them,
so am I the one, the multitude?

Contradictions form a metaphysical whole, and allow for transcendent oppenness – ”I” am profoundly isolated, individual as any human, including “you,” and on these terms, you and I are one. Like Whitman (“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then….I contradict myself; / I am large….I contain multitudes”), Darwish finds the impossible contradiction that the singular individual is component of a singular universe. The individual, through essential singularity, speaks to all-encompassing unity built upon the pairing of contradictions. Call the result yin yang, universe, self, even deity.

But Darwish expands upon the Whitman model with his unrelenting focus on the concept of exile both political and metaphysical. His obsession with contradiction presents exile in the metaphysical; life cannot exist without death, for example, so when one is alive, one is exiled from death – when one is dead, exiled from life. Darwish drives home with frightening diligence and accuracy how very little one knows about oneself or the directions one’s life will take. There is a constant movement in our lives; our level of control over it is minimal, and we are never capable of any sort of genuine “return.” This is undoubtedly an exile theme, raised to the level of the human condition:

There isn’t enough life to pull my end towards my beginning. The shepherds took my story and infiltrated the grass that grows over the beauty of ruins. They overcame forgetfulness with trumpets and radiant rhymed prose, then bequeathed me the hoarseness of memory on farewell’s stone and didn’t return…

(“Mural”)

But exile is meant literally as well. Darwish is very interested in the concept of naming, or labeling, a person or thing (“Mural” opens with a birth: “This is your name / a woman said / and disappeared in the spiraling corridor”). Yet to be named one thing is to be branded, and to not be named another thing; to be native of one country is to not be native to another – and to be exiled from a homeland can mean being stripped of whatever identity you thought that you had. Darwish obsessively navigates this balance: identities are in some sense accidental or arbitrary, but this does not make them meaningless. One name might be as good as another, and the same would be true of national identity, if not for the violent, corruptive forces that impose their will upon whole populations of individuals and make it harder and harder to try and live a life, let alone discover a self.

Where Whitman’s terrestrial expanse tended to account for the promise of the then-nubile United States, Darwish stretches around the globe. His references to the West are not antagonistic; he represents another culture, not an opposition culture. He is often political, but is not dependent on being pro-Palestinian or anti-Western. He comfortably references Sophocles, the Bible, the Koran, Saladin and more. He is not stuck in the modern conception of a juggernaut “West” with all other cultures in some degree of orbit:

And if this autumn is the final autumn, let us move away
from the sky of exile and from others’ trees. We grow a little older
and didn’t notice the wrinkles in the flute’s timbre…the road lengthened
and we didn’t admit we were on the marching path to Caesar. We
didn’t notice
the poem as it emptied its folk of their sentiments to widen its shores
and pitch our tent where the wars of Athens with Persia,
Iraq with Egypt, tossed us. We love the plow more than
we love the sword, we love the autumn air, we love the rain.

(“We Will Choose Sophocles”)

There may be some subtle suggestion in Darwish’s frequent referencing of Rome, but poems like “We Will Choose Sophocles” show cross-cultural interest. The poet’s access to all cultures and none adds to the feeling of permanent exile:

Where is the road to anything? I see the unseen clearer than
a street no longer mine. Who am I after the stranger’s night?
I used to walk to the self along with others, and here I am
losing the self and others. My horse on the Atlantic coast disappeared
and my horse on the Mediterranean thrusts the Crusader’s spear in me.
Who am I after the stranger’s night? I cannot return
to my brothers near the palm tree of my ancient house, and I cannot
come down
to the bottom of my pit. O the unseen! There is no heart for love…no
heart for love in which I can dwell after the stranger’s night…

(“Eleven Planets and the End of the Andalusian Scene, part vii: Who Am I After the Stranger’s Night?”)

This confusion of constant exile manifests itself in the construction of Darwish’s poems. Nearly all are at least several pages long (often much longer), cyclical and self-referencing. Each poem’s structure draws out of the reader what Darwish intends to communicate: confusion that is at turns blissful, and at turns devastating. In Part 1 of Exile, titled “Tuesday and the Weather is Clear,” he writes:

I walk lightly and grow older by ten minutes,
by twenty, sixty, I walk and life diminishes
in me gently as a slight cough does.
I think: what if I lingered, what
if I stopped? Would I stop time?
Would I bewilder death? I mock the notion
and ask myself: Where do you walk to
composed like an ostrich? I walk
as if life is about to amend its shortcomings.
And I don’t look behind, for I can’t return
to anything, and I can’t masquerade as another.

Repetition, refrain, rhetorical question and (in many other cases) sprawling lines sychronize with the notion that space and time are fused, immeasurable, mutating. One is always in a state of exile. At many points in If I Were Another, the setting becomes a nothingness which is only an extension of the speaker and his present company, who could be a friend, father, Death, or another self. “Dense Fog Over the Bridge” shows Darwish’s constant identity crisis in which he is all other people, not himself, himself again, no one, everyone, and on:

I said: Don’t bet on the realistic,
you won’t find the thing alive like its image
waiting for you. Time domesticates
even the mountains, which become higher, or lower
than what you knew them to be,
so where does the bridge take us?
He said: Have we been that long on this road?
I said: Is the fog that dense on the bridge: how
many years have you resembled me?
He said: How many years have you been me?
I said: I don’t remember.
He said: I remember only the road.

The flux of existence is ceaseless, personal, and universal. One thing remains fixed in Darwish’s centerless world and that is poetry. Darwish seems to say that, for right or wrong, poetry is the song we instill in life. Passively waiting for inspiration from the world is pointless. One must actively push to imbue life with value; if doing so is delusional, it presents our greatest delusion:

If the canary doesn’t sing,
my friend,
blame only yourself.
If the canary doesn’t sing
to you, my friend,
then sing to it…sing to it.

(“Tuesday and the Weather is Clear”)

Where other recent translations of “Mural” have comes across as strained, even claustrophobic, Joudah’s translation allows private access to the fluidity and expanse of one the great artistic minds of the modern era. Mahmoud Darwish’s late poetry, spilling over with hard beauty and visceral philosophy, is essential.

Tags: 10 stars, Fady Joudah, FSG, Mahmoud Darwish, Matt Soucy
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

Night-Sea

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

by Rachel Moritz
New Michigan Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“…there is not much of me.”

moritz cover Rachel Moritz’s brief Night-Sea is both a focused and enigmatic chapbook. Starting with a quote from Abraham Lincoln about a sketch of himself, “…there is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” the poems are loosely focused around the invention of history. While personal, these poems also delve indirectly into the creation of American myth.

According to Moritz, the past is cut out, rusted, pointed, “How much nostalgia lives / inside rusty bullets, amputation kits.” Here she recalls a personal memory from Boston in the 1970s, but every moment parallels and recalls the Civil War. Every poem is somewhat reminiscent of Lincoln’s face and Moritz borrows the description of Lincoln’s face as “half-alligator, half-horse.” Moritz’s craft is strong, clean, and purposeful. In “Past the World of Senses,” she writes:

Our flag wears thirty-two stars.

Then visit ‘The War is Over’
where soldiers loll

beneath the scaffold’s human
display.

For the woman, until the end –

a ladder leans, her footing
falters.

Ghost by the wall who is
my own throat.

People are already – always –
turning away.

This is a fairly literal example concerning the only woman hanged for conspiring to kill Lincoln. However, it shows Moritz’s conversion of history into the personal and, finally, the universal. She does this expertly throughout the book.

Varying between insinuation and more direct address, Moritz involves the reader in Lincoln’s most mythic moments, the log cabin, the whistle-stop tour, scenes of the Civil War, and the carriage ride to Ford’s Theatre. But this is not historic poetry; this is not going be read at any inaugurations. It is intricate and personal, vaguely critical without assuming too much—and always evocative.

Lincoln is used as a quintessential piece of history around which time moves. Time exists, as our experience tells us, as still moments. The movement of time appears as illusion:

Each winter day is dream-
Like in duration

More abstractly still, each
Is a brooding self, absolute

To the act of creation

from “Wonder Journey (Air-Wind)”

As with many poets, Moritz seeks something concrete in either time or space to hold onto and throughout these poems she offers some intelligent and heartfelt insights such as, “True being, meanwhile, is not in shapes / but in the dreamer.”

For such a short text, Night-Sea definitely merits multiple reads. The subtlety and depth grows as these well-constructed poems reveal themselves and lend power to one another.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Matt Soucy, New Michigan Press, Rachel Moritz
Posted in reviews

Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs

Monday, August 10th, 2009

by Ellen Kennedy
Muumuu House 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“Poetry is Terrible”

kennedy ellen cover I usually use quotes in my reviews but I won’t be doing so here because it would require opening the book again. To be gentle, Ellen Kennedy sounds too young for her own writing. To be direct, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs is awful, painful (not poetically, actually) and pointless.

For one, she attempts a taut narrative style, packed with name dropping repetition (Woody Allen, Ned Vizzini, Norm MacDonald). The tautness is meaningless, the repetition is frustratingly slow, and she doesn’t even achieve a rhythm by accident.

Another affectation is her vulgarity which, I suppose, is meant to shock the reader into being interested. It doesn’t. She discusses blowjobs, shits she’s taken recently and pissing standing up. She even gets her celebrities involved in the sexual action. It sounds exciting I know, but there is nothing behind the vulgarity (like the exuberant expanse one finds behind much of Ginsberg’s vulgarity) and by the end of the book you will be mentally chastising her like the parent you never wanted to become: “Are you really talking about this again? Haven’t you grown up yet?”

This book reads like the worst of blogs. I appreciate that there is an internet generation, but let’s not confuse poetry with, ‘this is what I’m thinking right now, if I put it on a page it will become profound.’ And it just isn’t enough to state that the poet might be ‘aware’ of the childishness she puts forward, and that all of this is done in the name of irony. If that’s the hope for this book, then it’s twice dead: bland, self-absorbed confession and “the idea” of bland, self-absorbed confession are equally mundane. People who ready Kennedy and like it might complain that “never getting anywhere, never doing anything” is the point. They also might like reading their friends’ diaries and talking about how life sucks, knowing in the process that doing so is lame, and assuming that this brand of self-awareness saves the day.

Which calls to mind a Roland Barthes essay, “Operation Margarine.” Barthes uses the example of a margarine commercial where someone states that a mousse made with margarine is “unthinkable.” But once the commercial has met the viewers’ stereotypes about margarine head on, “one’s eyes are opened, one’s conscience becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances.” The mousse isn’t so bad after all: “The moral at the end is well known: ‘Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!’”

As Barthes states, sometimes “a little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil”: “What does it matter, after all, if margarine is just fat, when it goes further than butter, and costs less?” But margarine that acknowledges its own weaknesses is still margarine. To be so plain about one’s weaknesses and label it irony is rarely more than an attempt to hide them. This is absolutely the case with Kennedy. There are a million pink diaries out there that would make a better read.

But I don’t want to be overly cruel. What is really interesting is that this book has been published. No one at any point in the reading to final publishing process thought to question these poems? The best I can come up with is that Muumuu House convinced itself this is something that it isn’t. The press delights in poets who stamp “look at me i’m self-conscious” on their foreheads. But the notion that responding to anxiety and self-consciousness by “telling it all” makes for depth needs to be destroyed. Especially when the subject refuses to invent, has nothing to say anyway.

Tags: 0.5 stars, Ellen Kennedy, Matt Soucy, Muumuu House
Posted in reviews

Bill

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

by Bill Rector
Proem Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

Bill Vol. 1

rector cover Bill Rector’s book, aptly named Bill, follows Bill through contemporary America, focusing on experiences in health care. Bill talks about Bill in the third person; he is alternately doctor and patient, insider and outsider, in a series of poems that speak like prose. Rector does an effective job of forming Bill into an idea that applies poignantly and broadly to the alienation of the American middle class.

Every poem runs into the next, building the character and world of Bill. Readers are first introduced to the emptiness of modern life and modern medicine; in “show room,” Rector makes a smart and direct analogy, using anti-depressants and America’s love of cars:

I guess what Bill is saying
is that there’s something empty

in the way we regulate our moods,
something clunky under the hoods
we drop when we go out.

Our health care system has become another thing to consume, to regulate our happiness as opposed to actually improving our quality of life. In this piece and others, Rector suggests that life has become intrinsically worthless in America because we put a dollar value on it.

Rector is not one-dimensional, though; he also shows moments when medicine fails due to the crushing inevitability of death. In “Her Husband is near…”, Doctor Bill becomes totally insubstantial while waiting with a family for the death of their father:

Her husband is near
death. Bill
changes shape constantly…

… – Bill’s
the snowflake that drifts
past the gray tower,
mind’s eye
he is
the stomach he doesn’t have
for the three sons who dropped everything to fly
in from the East

There are forces we control with economy but there are, and always will be, those forces of nature we cannot control. Poems like “The Anatomy Lesson” display the practice of medicine as little more than macabre theatre. Nearly all of Rector’s takes on health care in America are touched with cynicism, but he offers an intelligent and thoughtful variety of views.

As Bill progresses, the emptiness and insecurity of health care branch out into all corners of American life. Bill is left seeking the most basic communion within himself and between himself and others. There is the feeling that one must come before the other—but which remains a mystery. As Bill wanders without an identity (other than his plainsong moniker), he lacks morality, direction, purpose—maybe even existence. (It’s notable that the poet’s full name doesn’t appear on the book jacket or in the book, except on the copyright page.)

The whole text is straightforward, bordering on inartistic. However, there are moments presented that certainly transcend the everyday undercurrent of shallow, insecure American life. When Bill gets hit in the face with a line drive, Bill, covered in blood, refuses to show pain:

Boys don’t understand

how a man can stand
not to let pain
show. How

the mouth is a scar
that never cries
Never never

even when it can tell
what’s coming
until it’s too late.

Not even the heart bleeds like the face.

Rector references baseball, shooting, fishing, cars, politics, war, farming, and many of the images and ideas associated with the hardworking core of this country. He successfully avoids the pitfall of being blindly critical of such “American” traits. Bill is a curious and willing participant in these scenes.

This is a good book of poetry for non-poetry readers. Although Bill is too obviously Rector’s mouthpiece (Berryman’s Henry he ain’t by a long shot), it’s refreshing to read poetry from the point of view of a common man who deals with real-life value judgments daily. It’s more gestalt than deep delving, but the pace and consistent focus creates increasing intensity and suggestive meaning as the poems roll by.

Tags: 6 stars, Bill Rector, Matt Soucy, Proem Press
Posted in reviews