Poetry Microreviews
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il cuore: the heart: Selected Poems 1970-1995
Kathleen Fraser
Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, $35, $16.95
(paper)
Fraser's mature work comprises, mostly, prose-poem series and ambitious sequences
with typographical or visual-text elements, like those of Susan Howe or Charles
Olson (whose admirers may cherish this book whole); several sequences concern
Italy, its art, towns, ruins, and customs. Fraser's shifting sentences and
page-arrangements try, sometimes self-consciously, sometimes winningly, to
represent fluidity, openness, reflexive uncertainty: "to map how it is for
us, as it changes," recording "currents we cannot wholly predict." At her
best--mostly, in prose poems--her West Coast-style, ambiguous sentences keep
her thoughts and impressions vivid; lyrical moments interrupt, even redeem,
her metapoetical delvings with lines of elegance and warmth, as in this address
to her friend or stand-in "Anna": "In the corners, never in sneakers, you
prowl the page of a large heavy man and wish to be a signature he could touch
and remember later and pay for."
--Stephen Burt
At the Site of Inside Out
Anna Rabinowitz
University of Massachusetts Press, $20, $10.95 (paper)
In her first collection, Rabinowitz proves herself an intelligent witness
to grief, both her own and this century's. She is drawn to forbidden spaces
in living experience, language, and visual art, and devises novel means to
enter them. For example, fascinated with the power of art to make "boundaries
disappear," Sappho lauds the achievement of Georgia O'Keeffe "making art with
her body, / trapped in her body." In "Anthem," the reader is invited to "praise
. . . the remains, the residues." The speaker's most haunting visits are to
Eastern Europe, where instead of finding an ancestral home, she experiences
the historical past as a collage of atrocities: mouths of broken teeth, children
skittering like mice. These "Dislocations" abandon punctuation to emphasize
visceral imagery. Rabinowitz is just as unflinching in "Anatomy Lab" and "Fragile
Dialectics," where the body itself becomes opened to the merciless, clarifying
light of her attention.
--Michael Tyrell
Candy Necklace
Calvin Bedient
Wesleyan University Press, $25, $11.95 (paper)
In a style well-infused with our meatiest twentieth-century masters (Celan
and Graham most apparently), the influential poetry critic Calvin Bedient
takes a turn at das Ding an sich, and the results are impressive. "I
want my share of the masterpiece," he writes, and here you have it. Occasionally
Bedient's obvious breadth of reading gets in the way of his own voice, and
some allusions (particularly one or two to death camps) seem less felt than
willed by the drive to write "important" poetry. But more often, his voice
rings strong, original, uncanny, and startling: "Tender voiceless no pain
moon, / before you my heart flaps like the mouth of a tent." Bedient is most
honestly, most fundamentally, a poet of heart, of individual desire, longing,
and fear. He's a poet ready both to judge and Whitmanically embrace "a known
killer . . . shaking with his shaking as any son of a bitch should." It's
then that you hear "whatever has sung at the exact moment of its need." And
sing these poems do.
--Tom Thompson
Letter to an Imaginary Friend
Thomas McGrath
Copper Canyon Press, $35, $20 (paper)
Written in exile--after the late McGrath was blacklisted from teaching by
Joseph McCarthy--this book-length poem is a train ride through half our states
during an era when political divisions were deep and stained with blood. Finding
the vast landscapes of North Dakota and Alaska forbidding and instructive,
Letter is a Western poem, and Beat in its celebration of hobos, drifters,
and holy fools. It might have been written by Carl Sandburg, had Sandburg
been a hard-boiled socialist instead of a corny populist, and with its angry
demands for justice, it might have been written by Pound, had Pound only stayed
in Idaho. Recalling the hard life that made the poet radical, Letter
shares with all modern long poems a conflict between ideological perspective
and imagistic, anecdotal lyric means: "That's how it was. Geeks, Cons and
Lemon Men, / Guys with their intellects all ganted up out of the barbarian
North / Tea sluggers and cathounds / The girl who, when I said that God had
created / Male and female the Spanish Moss, wanted to see them in action.
. . ." It lulls, but also startles us awake.
--Will Broaddus
The Poems of J. V. Cunningham
Edited with an introduction by Timothy Steele
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, $28.95, $16.95 (paper)
Cunningham's (1911-1985) precisely bitter epigrams deserve more admirers.
This gathering of all his verse returns to print such barbed, impregnable
accomplishments as this poem (quoted whole): "Time heals not: it extends a
sorrow's scope / As goldsmiths gold, which we may wear like hope." Like Ben
Jonson's, Cunningham's best lines often state his moral or stylistic goals:
"The classic indignation, / The sullen clarity / Of passions in their station,
/ Moved by propriety." Other favorite topics are regret, epistemology, bad
books, theology, alcohol, and sex. (The lesser poems simply condemn, or resent,
or become dirty jokes.) Epigrams state rules, clarify, generalize and show
impersonal authority; Cunningham's parched, self-suspicious intelligence fit
such ends, and formed his "plain style"-- "Savage, direct and bitten, / Not
pitying and unclean." Like the diamonds used as drill bits, Cunningham's rigorously
specialized verses are harder and clearer than what they attack, pointed,
unornate, small-scale, useful, and valuable.
--Stephen Burt
How Late Desire Looks
Katrina Roberts
Gibbs Smith, $9.95
Opening with the title poem, when the speaker's encounter with a married
neighbor lasts "one minute / longer than intended," this scrupulously crafted
debut shows us, to quote Jorie Graham, "that perfection can't be kept, / only
its perfect instances." In dense lyrics, prose poems, and even double sestinas,
consummated desire shatters into restraint, refusal, reciprocity, and finally,
despair. Although Roberts plainly acknowledges that the self must "open into"
the "harm's way" of experience, a quandary of detail hinders longer poems
such as "Fugue," which packs so much operatic theme and minutiae that it collapses
into itself, like a black hole. More often, "entire worlds of possibility"
are uncovered in neglected recollections and everyday phenomena. Thus a pill
becomes a country; an inability to breathe provokes a moving meditation concluding
that death often "last[s] only a day," but the passions that make us human,
such as fear and memory, "last longer."
--Michael Tyrell
Diaries of a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler
W. W. Norton, $27.50
When he was 23, Rilke set off to Florence upon the suggestion of Lou Andreas-Salom,
his 36-year-old mentor and lover, to begin the first of these three diaries.
The writings are structured as imaginary dialogues with her: "My joy will
seem far-off and unfestive as long as You . . . do not share in it," he announces
in his first entry. Recording, among other things, a detailed perspective
of the gorgeous art and landscape around him, Diaries--translated for
the first time into English--gives intimate insight into a crucial and formative
period of Rilke's life. Characteristic moments of self-loathing, intense longing,
and melancholy are chronicled here, as well as the kind of ecstasy and clarity
achieved only through the act of writing: "everything becomes trusting and
forgets all manner of disguise . . . in these moments I look deep into the
earth. And see the causes of all things. And they drink from one source."
These diaries and poems (written from 1898 to 1900 in Schmergendorf and Worpswede
as well as Florence) mark the young poet's extraordinary journey from apprentice
to artist: a lyrical, joyous, essential read.
--Carmela Ciuraru
Uncollected Poems
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Edward Snow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13
These uncollected poems complicate our image of an incantatory Rilke. The
shorter poems feel fragmented--less-crafted utterances instead of arguments--and
exaltation of the divine is tempered by exultation in the things of this world:
"We're drawn away from gods toward rotting refuse, / for gods do not entice.
They possess being / and only being, great stores of being, but not scent,
not gesture." Indeed, Rilke inhabits the senses so deeply that, in one poem,
sight and touch become intertwined: "Are there no places on your dear body
/ that keep remembering like eyes?" In another (the poet's epitaph), the subject
of the human gaze cannot or will not look back: "Rose, / O pure contradiction,
delight / in being no one's sleep under so many / lids." A winner of the Academy
of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for his translation
of the two volumes of Rilke's New Poems, Snow is meticulously attentive
to Rilke's diction and phrasing. He is less likely to poeticize plainer passages
than other translators, and deftly reproduces lyricism where it exists in
the original.
--Matthea Harvey
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