Poetry Microreviews
Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers
Lidija Dimkovska, translated
by Ljubica Arsovka and Peggy Reid Ugly
Duckling Presse, $12 (paper)
With the direst laugh-out-loud sense of humor around, Dimkovska’s swaggering and prosey poems take on the sorrows of love (“tell me why you left me and married my sister”), God (“who does not exist . . . I’m afraid of his great eyes”), and anxiety (“I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf, / I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her?”)—and that’s in just one poem. This first English translation of the 35-year-old Dimkovska’s work culls from four books previously published in her home country of Macedonia, and her translators, Arsovka and Reid, have rendered the poet’s irony and insistence with a smirk discernable from a mile away. Nothing is too insignificant or unpoetic to inspire her associative thunder: nail clippers (“what are long nails compared with my thirst for the truth”), a bouillon cube (“Man, oh man, it will suck you up at lunch / when you think that you are eating it, / . . . and will wait for the death in you to pop up”), and aloe vera (“We spread a moisturizing mask for dry skin / on the dead man’s face / and his niece knelt in front of the coffin / praying thus: Come on, Aloe Vera, / make my uncle’s cheeks rosy”) are all unassuming starting points for narratives that pass through irony, anger, profundity, and humor to end up somewhere weighty and totally unexpected: “Was it a funeral or a wedding, Aloe Vera? / Who married whom? Who buried whom?” Elsewhere Dimkovska treats feminism, suicidal thoughts, the Russian Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky, and sex (“Oh, the monster knows that my sex is my cellar”) with the same stunning capacity to transform the ridiculous into something poignant and utterly precise, breaking down “the membrane between me and the events in the world” in order to “make a porridge out of eternal meanings.” The results are transcendent, dizzying, and not to be missed.
—Craig Morgan Teicher
Parallel Play
Stephen Burt
Graywolf
Press, $14 (paper)
In “After Callimachus,”
one of four lyrics with that title in his new collection, Parallel
Play, Stephen Burt writes, “Bunting I like, but not
Olson, nor Bernstein, nor Pound; / I’m tired of flashy long
poems / that mean whatever anyone wants them to mean.” Burt’s
aversion to long indeterminate poetry suggests the character of
his own work—short, resonant lyrics that are well-suited
to close reading and that speak their meanings eloquently and
directly. The book’s title refers to a transitional phase
of development during which children begin to enjoy playing alongside
one another before they learn to communicate and cooperate, and
many of Burt’s subjects feel an isolation suggestive of
this period: “How alone / it is, therefore, to be with someone
else.” Often Burt’s speakers find themselves intellectually
mature yet emotionally and socially childlike, haunted by feelings
of helplessness and vulnerability. In “Like a Wreck,”
the adult speaker, yearning for real communication, returns to
early-childhood failures such as “flaunting [his] useless
knowledge” and wetting his pants at school: “New shoes
won’t help. / Neither will asking the right questions .
. . / To stay in your present tense, and keep your promise, /
We’ll have to clear these girders off you first.”
Later in the collection Burt turns his attention from personal
tribulations to the larger failures of government and society.
In “Canal Park Drive,” Tenth Avenue,” On the
‘A,’ and “The Road Builders,” Burt criticizes
America’s unique vision of progress, in which buildings
exist to be torn down and built again and our hopes for change
are eternally misguided. In “Our History,” he fulminates
against the American government for its hypocrisy in claiming
to fight terrorists abroad while oppressing its citizens at home:
“we’re all too busy fighting evildoers / to notice
the stale crusts of bread at the core of our being.” With
his clear and accessible voice and his willingness to go to the
heart of universal issues, Burt has created a collection of startling
immediacy and purpose.
—Robert Schnall
My Brother Is Getting Arrested
Again
Daisy Fried
University
of Pittsburgh Press, $14
As its title suggests, Fried’s second collection (after 2000’s She Didn’t Mean to Do It) confronts the world with humor and more than a little chagrin. Hers is an urban, street-level vision, an indie-film aesthetic (think Hal Hartley or Nicole Holofcener), comfortably contemporary with none of the post-Beat hipster affectation one might associate with that description. Like Frank O’Hara and Harvey Pekar, Fried records the feints and fillips embedded in mundane activities—eating lunch, sulking, watching the news, complaining about spouses or lovers, working at ossifying jobs—that occur while we wait for more exciting things to happen. Her vivid characters could be émigrés from novels or short stories; they become present to us through physical gestures (“The daughter belly down, stomach / muscles tight, head hanging / off the bed-edge, arms straight out / before her.”) as much as through speech. But Fried makes room for the extraordinary, too, such as the casual surrealism of a butcher’s shop window, in which homemade Renoir copies hang among deer carcasses, or the memory of fifth graders catching oak leaves as they fall, “laying them to ground gentle, same as / they would have been without us.” A poetry that looks outward, as Fried’s does, can’t ignore politics, and here the current political climate of distrust and division is just that, ever present as weather, a condition to which we have become inured but that surfaces in offhand associations (a show pig with “Dick Cheney skin,” a half-heard “rat-terrier commentator” on the radio). When, as in the sober ending of “American Brass,” a reference to the bombing of Afghanistan becomes explicit, the effect almost seems melodramatic, an oddly self-conscious note in an otherwise confident collection by a poet who crystallizes our American moment with candor and precision.
—Fred Muratori
Revelated
Matt Hart
Hollyridge Press,
$10 (paper)
Who’s Who Vivid
Matt Hart
Slope Editions, $14.95 (paper)
Matt Hart’s first full-length poetry collection, Who’s Who Vivid, follows by just a few months the publication of his chapbook Revelated. What is most striking about both collections is the poet’s quirky, edgy, original, and endlessly energetic voice, as revealed in the opening lines of “All the Best Reasons I’m Nowhere” (from Who’s Who Vivid): “I don’t know whether I’m talking / or if I’m nineteen. I do know I need a haircut. / And the world opens its lips and spits plastic / army men straight-up like scotch in the movies / or a fountain of youthful exuberance, angels / and gargoyles pissing together.” Here, as in many of Hart’s poems, language and thoughts are disjunctive: he uses traditional diction and conjunctions such as “or,” but he turns them upside down, as if it made perfect sense that the speaker could be either talking or 19. Poems like “The Weight of My Next Best Thing” could make a logician’s head spin: “I may be thirty-ish and still / interested in seashells, but not enough // to get sucked down the drain looking / for a rowboat with my head in the sand. // Nevertheless, if you get tired of your couch, you can always come over and crash mine.” The speakers in Hart’s poems see connections between typically unconnected images and objects, and for this reason their utterances seem like little bullet points, one after another, disorderly, but orderly as far as these speakers are concerned. They want to be angry, ironic, disconnected, and meaningless, but they simply can’t be. They also want to be “beautiful” and to relinquish everything that is “fake,” as in “Beautiful Burns”: “What’s beautiful burns a hole in my pocket,” and “Nowadays / in everything the emphasis is on hipsterish // tragedy, but it’s all so fake my head hurts.” But Hart is also a hipster, if a newer, sincerer breed, and his frenetic hipster voice, which often is his greatest strength, at times becomes a crutch. Hart’s poems feature a powerful, ubiquitous first-person speaker, an I that overflows with an original electric earnestness that can be edgy, sincere, or edgy and sincere, but is always present. This voice varies little within or across these collections; lines from Revelated seem as if they could be from Who’s Who Vivid and vice versa. In Revelated, a poem titled “Whatever You May Have Said Before” is already familiar in its disjunction: “Say whatever you want, / but always say it with conviction / and connected in waves to the musculature of swans. . . . ” Ultimately, this lack of real stylistic variation deadens a voice that wants desperately to be heard. As the speaker states in the title poem of Who’s Who Vivid, “Who’s Who Vivid in the Moonlight in Pain”: “How // uncomfortable to be comfortable, to be churning / with poems, to be messed up and messy, / exuberant-green . . . Anymore what I mean / is like new, wet cement, / I speak and I’m stuck in it forever.” But while Hart’s speakers sometimes seem stuck in a rut, Hart nevertheless hooks us in and takes us for a happily messy joy ride: “My style is no style. My form is a pigsty. / Just look how far I haven’t come in the dark.”
—Victoria Chang
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