OUT HERE by Joseph Keller McNeilly, alicejamesbooks, Farmington, ME, $17.00, 192 pp.
Review by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Spring 2002
When the talk turns to family
you dart your eyes, turn
skittish, and bolt into the cracks
of our conversation
like a lizard flushed from his sunning spot
on the garden wall, your tail twitching
as you slither into the pauses, the dark
and the cool and the safe
between stone words.
Molt, p.127
The man has a way with words. However much he may paint himself as a grizzled, leathery desperado, his poems are honest, four-square structures each as perfect in every detail as any model sailing ship, terrarium or HO train setup sporting a 1st Prize ribbon at the county fair. From the evocative illustration on the cover to the last poem on page 176, you get your money’s worth and then some from this beautifully constructed book. I finished it with both my brain and scrotum engorged, each with its own ambrosia. The fine workmanship of the poems holds, preserves and decants its emotional freight like vintage wine. It’s comforting to run across a mature, seasoned poetic talent whose pages don’t cause us to wince at awkward phrases, solecisms and poor scansion. These poems have been polished and honed to a fine edge, yet they retain the sturdy, oaken honesty of houses that will stand the storms of time. They have earned the right to speak, even to sing about things witnessed and dreamt.
] Writing in a serious, masculine voice, McNeilly talks of everyday occurrences in rural towns, surrounding fields and shores. His verse has the rhetorical tone of a litany, seldom lifting to the lyrical but never relaxing into plain prose except where appropriate. Dressed in worn denims and scuffed shoes, the verse often has the cadence of a farmhand teaching the new guy to string fences or run the harvester. But it’s poetry all right. While there’s no shortage of brilliant imagery and metaphor, the domination of ideas is what leads us hurrying along an ascending path in each poem, making us impatient to attain the full complement of meaning it bears. This is what makes it so difficult to quote individual lines; every atom of every poem is an inextricable element of the totality. Its power comes from the totality and can seem like a chloroformed butterfly if set apart.
These are story-poems that reflect lives mostly blasted by time and circumstance, but still harboring some obscure plenitude of grace. Examples could include the eleven, shabby parishioners in Sunday filing out of a moribund country church at daybreak; the migrant worker pedaling his decrepit bicycle in His Pedal Go Click, Click, Click; the mother relentlessly watering her zinnias in The Semiotics of Flowers, or the diner waitress whose “elbow reached for heaven” as she poured coffee in Common Ground.
McNeilly often writes of the infirmities of age; the betrayal of once smoothly-running muscle, of brittle joints and clenching prostate. Perhaps he plays the old age card a bit too hard at a youthfully rugged fifty-one (if the photo at the back is anything to judge by) especially considering all those seething erotic poems set in the present tense. But this is merely the quibble of a sixty-seven year old reviewer who would love to regain his 51-year self. Of course, any poem certainly has the right to don whatever persona it chooses.
McNeilly’s knack of creating synergy by tying disparate things together is apparent in a piece like, Of the Princess, the Automobile and Bad Art, where he uses the death of Princess Diana as a springboard for an analysis of the automobile as an example of artistic abortion: “this grotesque boxy thing on wheels” in which we move “in a slow sea of such boxes/ to our work”. It’s a fine poem, but dragging Michael Jackson in as an example of such ugliness is hard to forgive. I hope he’ll edit this out in future editions.
The book is filled with people: ordinary, everyday, tragic specimens drawn from any small town or city you care to name. In the poem, A Dirty Little Secret, McNeilly revels in the obscene fleshiness and vulgar handicrafts of a country fair. Other poems depict the torments and ecstasies of childhood: Saving Acts of the Imagination stands out particularly in this respect. Many poems dwell on women the writer has known or lusted after: most notably, in so many passionate poems, his wife. There are wonderful poems about the subtlety of memory such as Macondo, which speaks of “clicking blue grass/ in a hot brown field/ stored for fifty years/ in a neuron”. Many allude to the difficulty of contacting other human beings and the empty exercises we indulge in to escape the pain of isolation; one such, he is honest enough to acknowledge, is writing poetry. McNeilly never elides the ugly aspects of life: gross eating habits, unpleasant body parts and bodily functions, freaks, monsters and grotesques swarm through the book. But he softens the attack somewhat by being hardest on himself as in Class Comes Calling, where he enumerates more petty, felonious and vile things about himself than I need to know about anybody. He teaches us about what life should be in pace and posture through poems like Looking Down; Man,Walking; and In the Manner of Lions.
I hope this rather superficial smattering of images will lead some readers to go deeper into the dense fabric of Out Here. It leads us out into the blinding light of the real world as few books can. It deserves our attention and richly rewards the effort.
Review by Martin Abramson
Saturday, April 17, 2010
BOOK REVIEW: Temporary Apprehensions: Poems by Patric Pepper
Temporary Apprehensions: Poems by Patric Pepper. Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Washington, DC, 2005, 61pp. $12
Review by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Spring 2006
The glossy reproduction of Rousseau’s Rendezvous in the Forest that adorns the cover of this collection is probably worth the price of admission alone. There’s even a poetic tribute to the artist inside. It’s a good poem and there are many others in this (dare I say) slender volume. For example, Ground Zero p.33, is a nearly perfect sonnet in which the author describes himself as ‘second rate’ and goes on to prove the opposite. Mr. Pepper is one of the few formalist poets who uses form out of mastery rather than curiosity. His use of form is prefigured by the material, not the reverse, and varied when appropriate. One of the strongest poems: Words for Weldon p.17, uses rhyme and meter flexibly but with stunning effect. He describes some crows, identifying their ‘tattered song’ with what I take to be the rough and impoverished life of his friend Weldon Kees; and clinching the merged metaphor with consummate skill:
And lacking your finesse,
they nonetheless will sing their big crude truth—
though not today, as the day you didn’t sing,
but flew from the Golden Gate,
no word or wing.
But formalism doesn’t always work in Mr. Pepper’s favor. He is sometimes harmed by random reinforcement. Knowing that he frequently uses rhyme and meter in conventional ways sets us up to anticipate their appearance throughout, but we are often jarringly disappointed. A good example is Sunday p.59. Stanza 1 sets up a pattern of 4-foot lines. Stanza 2 shifts suddenly to pentameter in the first 3 lines and then to unaccented prose in lines 4 and 5. Stanza 3 wanders all over the place. Mr. Pepper also sprinkles internal rhymes passim: room/groom; money/honey; tune/soon; bread/weds; which, again, create anticipatory disappointment when we find no end-rhymes.
The poems in this collection, while well worth reading, are too often marred by faults of form and/or diction. In Yearbook p.54, Peppers lulls us pleasingly with perfect rhymes in the sestet, then in the octave hits us with the jarring: chagrin/children; kiss/axis. Accentual mayhem. Otherwise pleasing poems are brought down by single bad lines: e.g. In The Mist p.51, the last line is not merely innocuous, but also unrelated to the preceding description. And I’m tempted to bring up the same ‘last-line’ problem with Channing Street p.39, an otherwise moving poem, but ...“oh same, oh same, oh joy tonight.” The irony is the author’s not the reader’s who is still resonating to killer lines like, “Some teenage boys in baggy pants,/slow as turtles, quick as ants”.
10:00 P.M. p.42, is a lovely double study of evening, with a fine ending couplet:
Our open doors will close by twelve o’clock;
we’ll fill with dreams as silence fills the block.
But the unjustified violence of the second line had prejudiced me against the rest. “...blasting bolts of laughter down the lawn.”
For those whose lovers have been gone for months or years, the author’s soulful whining about his wife’s one-night absence in While You Were Away at the Cape.58, seems a poor excuse for another average villanelle. But in the same (open) vein, Breakup p.56, shows authentic feeling in fine lines that build to a powerful, cumulative impact. The tragedy of impending estrangement is symbolized by the German shepherd –a cohesive force in the relationship—to whom the author addresses his displaced plea:
She woke amid their things, and the dog stretched.
The family portrait, which he had overdrawn,
beamed back the morning sun as any day:
her golden bangs, his brown cowled eyes, detatched;
their shepherd’s mouth agape and panting, Stay!
And still on this topic, The Truck Driver’s Husband; A Letter p.47, is a poignant update of The River Merchant’s Wife that never hits a false note.
Some poems should have been dropped altogether: I could list Interview with a Lump of Coal and Life’s a Picnic as obvious choices. But having inoculated you, dear reader, for the worst, I take pleasure in pointing out the best.
Chagall’s The Rooster p.60, is a perfect achievement that enhances the art-work, sexual love and the sonnet form. The colors of the poem, like those of Chagall, are intoxicating.
The Dancing Hat p.5, is a chilling foreshadowing of doom. In a dream of death, a dancing Tai Chi instructor gives a friend a hat: “a manless, gamboling hat, and only answer/ for David’s strangely real, impromptu cancer.”
The Judas Tree p.12, is a distinguished work as noted by R. Espillat on the back cover. Ground Zero p.33, is a powerful poem that merges the author’s first experience reading his poetry at a Tribeca gathering with the close-by horror of 9/11. When a fellow poet says, “You guys were great”, Pepper writes
But I don’t feel that great, too old to fight,
too mad to love my enemies as Jesus
preached, too wise to hate, too scared to focus
on stuff, except for this: the poetry of night,
and us, benumbed that day at the abyss,
which didn’t Stevens call the nothing that is?
Wallace Stevens seems to be an important influence on Pepper’s work. In Marcus Aurelius at Carnumtum p.27, he does his predecessor proud in a deceptively simple, philosophical analysis of death. “All things,” he begins, “are less/ complicated than they seem./...Death does not caress,/nor inflict. You cross the stream...” (Unfortunately, Pepper’s stabs at philosophy are not all as successful. Reading Kant Again p.24, doesn’t do much for modern life or Kant.)
I found the return of adults to a childhood home in A Pittsburgh Ballade p.53, quite moving:
After the church, with trembly gown-up will,
you took me home to 93 North Euclid,
the “3” crooked, the steps crumbling. Ill-
ness wracked the shingles, gutters, porch and yard.
Maintenance Mechanic p.38, is a flawless miniature oil-painting of a back-country working man. In D.C. p.36, the author has compressed a full-length autobiography into 19 lines. He chooses to live in the nation’s capitol not in spite of tawdriness and terror ...“but because of it.” Very strong.
The Brilliant Ticks p10, reveals a ready sense of humor abetted by a deft hand at rhyming quatrains. And in Paving Parking Lots p.8, evidently dedicated to Whitman, the poet takes so much pleasure in “tattooed arms rippling from/ their sleeves”, “glistening black/necks” and “godly muscles,/ gorgeous shoulders”, one wonders if the thrill is all Walt’s.
At any rate, I’ve enjoyed my exposure to this collection and look forward to subsequent publications by this talented poet, with the single reservation that he wield the editorial pencil a bit more stringently next time.
marty684@bellsouth.net
Review by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Spring 2006
The glossy reproduction of Rousseau’s Rendezvous in the Forest that adorns the cover of this collection is probably worth the price of admission alone. There’s even a poetic tribute to the artist inside. It’s a good poem and there are many others in this (dare I say) slender volume. For example, Ground Zero p.33, is a nearly perfect sonnet in which the author describes himself as ‘second rate’ and goes on to prove the opposite. Mr. Pepper is one of the few formalist poets who uses form out of mastery rather than curiosity. His use of form is prefigured by the material, not the reverse, and varied when appropriate. One of the strongest poems: Words for Weldon p.17, uses rhyme and meter flexibly but with stunning effect. He describes some crows, identifying their ‘tattered song’ with what I take to be the rough and impoverished life of his friend Weldon Kees; and clinching the merged metaphor with consummate skill:
And lacking your finesse,
they nonetheless will sing their big crude truth—
though not today, as the day you didn’t sing,
but flew from the Golden Gate,
no word or wing.
But formalism doesn’t always work in Mr. Pepper’s favor. He is sometimes harmed by random reinforcement. Knowing that he frequently uses rhyme and meter in conventional ways sets us up to anticipate their appearance throughout, but we are often jarringly disappointed. A good example is Sunday p.59. Stanza 1 sets up a pattern of 4-foot lines. Stanza 2 shifts suddenly to pentameter in the first 3 lines and then to unaccented prose in lines 4 and 5. Stanza 3 wanders all over the place. Mr. Pepper also sprinkles internal rhymes passim: room/groom; money/honey; tune/soon; bread/weds; which, again, create anticipatory disappointment when we find no end-rhymes.
The poems in this collection, while well worth reading, are too often marred by faults of form and/or diction. In Yearbook p.54, Peppers lulls us pleasingly with perfect rhymes in the sestet, then in the octave hits us with the jarring: chagrin/children; kiss/axis. Accentual mayhem. Otherwise pleasing poems are brought down by single bad lines: e.g. In The Mist p.51, the last line is not merely innocuous, but also unrelated to the preceding description. And I’m tempted to bring up the same ‘last-line’ problem with Channing Street p.39, an otherwise moving poem, but ...“oh same, oh same, oh joy tonight.” The irony is the author’s not the reader’s who is still resonating to killer lines like, “Some teenage boys in baggy pants,/slow as turtles, quick as ants”.
10:00 P.M. p.42, is a lovely double study of evening, with a fine ending couplet:
Our open doors will close by twelve o’clock;
we’ll fill with dreams as silence fills the block.
But the unjustified violence of the second line had prejudiced me against the rest. “...blasting bolts of laughter down the lawn.”
For those whose lovers have been gone for months or years, the author’s soulful whining about his wife’s one-night absence in While You Were Away at the Cape.58, seems a poor excuse for another average villanelle. But in the same (open) vein, Breakup p.56, shows authentic feeling in fine lines that build to a powerful, cumulative impact. The tragedy of impending estrangement is symbolized by the German shepherd –a cohesive force in the relationship—to whom the author addresses his displaced plea:
She woke amid their things, and the dog stretched.
The family portrait, which he had overdrawn,
beamed back the morning sun as any day:
her golden bangs, his brown cowled eyes, detatched;
their shepherd’s mouth agape and panting, Stay!
And still on this topic, The Truck Driver’s Husband; A Letter p.47, is a poignant update of The River Merchant’s Wife that never hits a false note.
Some poems should have been dropped altogether: I could list Interview with a Lump of Coal and Life’s a Picnic as obvious choices. But having inoculated you, dear reader, for the worst, I take pleasure in pointing out the best.
Chagall’s The Rooster p.60, is a perfect achievement that enhances the art-work, sexual love and the sonnet form. The colors of the poem, like those of Chagall, are intoxicating.
The Dancing Hat p.5, is a chilling foreshadowing of doom. In a dream of death, a dancing Tai Chi instructor gives a friend a hat: “a manless, gamboling hat, and only answer/ for David’s strangely real, impromptu cancer.”
The Judas Tree p.12, is a distinguished work as noted by R. Espillat on the back cover. Ground Zero p.33, is a powerful poem that merges the author’s first experience reading his poetry at a Tribeca gathering with the close-by horror of 9/11. When a fellow poet says, “You guys were great”, Pepper writes
But I don’t feel that great, too old to fight,
too mad to love my enemies as Jesus
preached, too wise to hate, too scared to focus
on stuff, except for this: the poetry of night,
and us, benumbed that day at the abyss,
which didn’t Stevens call the nothing that is?
Wallace Stevens seems to be an important influence on Pepper’s work. In Marcus Aurelius at Carnumtum p.27, he does his predecessor proud in a deceptively simple, philosophical analysis of death. “All things,” he begins, “are less/ complicated than they seem./...Death does not caress,/nor inflict. You cross the stream...” (Unfortunately, Pepper’s stabs at philosophy are not all as successful. Reading Kant Again p.24, doesn’t do much for modern life or Kant.)
I found the return of adults to a childhood home in A Pittsburgh Ballade p.53, quite moving:
After the church, with trembly gown-up will,
you took me home to 93 North Euclid,
the “3” crooked, the steps crumbling. Ill-
ness wracked the shingles, gutters, porch and yard.
Maintenance Mechanic p.38, is a flawless miniature oil-painting of a back-country working man. In D.C. p.36, the author has compressed a full-length autobiography into 19 lines. He chooses to live in the nation’s capitol not in spite of tawdriness and terror ...“but because of it.” Very strong.
The Brilliant Ticks p10, reveals a ready sense of humor abetted by a deft hand at rhyming quatrains. And in Paving Parking Lots p.8, evidently dedicated to Whitman, the poet takes so much pleasure in “tattooed arms rippling from/ their sleeves”, “glistening black/necks” and “godly muscles,/ gorgeous shoulders”, one wonders if the thrill is all Walt’s.
At any rate, I’ve enjoyed my exposure to this collection and look forward to subsequent publications by this talented poet, with the single reservation that he wield the editorial pencil a bit more stringently next time.
marty684@bellsouth.net
BOOK REVIEW: The Gifts and Thefts by David Staudt
REVIEW By Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Fall-Winter 2003-04
David Staudt’s The Gifts and Thefts, 2001 The Backwaters Press, 3502 N 52nd St., Omaha, NE 68104-3506, Tel. 402-451-4052. www.thebackwaterspress.homestead.com. 102pp.
David Staudt’s prize-winning collection is divided into five sections each marked by a large asterisk styled as a compass-rose. The first section describes the early years and his entangled memories of them. He recalls visiting his mother in a hospital:
A woman that light and that long in bed
becomes less body than relief:
a woman of wood in raised relief
He daydreams of adventure watching bed sheets “blow and lift on their lines”. They become “Wet white sails of the Niña, the Pinta”. Mom pulls the “clothespins apart/ with her teeth, a sailor on a rolling deck,/ rigging her family’s bedclothes”. In Souls, the old nun teaching the lives of saints is more afraid of binomials than of the school hoods. During the first snow, she takes the kindergarten class out to a “fenced-in/ playground no bigger than a carport” telling them to “Pretend you are the top of a mountain”. As they stare upward, they feel
“dizziness when snowflakes stop mid-air,
and the body starts falling into sky.
Then she tells the children how their souls
will feel, returning to heaven.
Other poems in this section speak of the poet’s father, neighbors, local dogs, his asthma: “…sliding into bed he’d start to drown,/ rousing to the weary little music/ raled through the pipes of his bronchi”. He describes his work on area farms and orchards and his fascination with the factories whose fiery lights and controlled chaos he tried to photograph. He revels in the local color of ethnic superstitions and ever-present ancestral ghosts: “Those whitetail doe in the street/tonight, who’s to say it isn’t/Emmy and Jenny, pausing then/wheeling in our parking light’s glow…”
The next section deals with nature and here we find some of the most ethereal and even metaphysical works in this volume. This is from Red Sumac:
I find a Shiloh in oak woods
a peace place razed by riversilt…
the pale trees halftwist northward,
tuned to the light from Polaris
But the natural context is set within and captured by the markers of civilization which counterpoise it. Here’s Staudt’s “jar in Tennessee”.
…as if all geography turned
around a hillside south of Vestal,
where the feedcorn sags through a post
rail fence, the rails have not moved
for fifty years, and a puzzled
hawk drifts to a stop in the sky
without a draft to tend her either way.
These images strike like lightning flashes. “A celery salt of rust and powdered moth/parts glitters in the cattails…” And they just keep coming: “…the lights snap on,/triggered by the smallest shift to red/in amber weeds along a drainage ditch.”
…mugwort and chicory crack
our roads, creeks dry up in garlic
and even cornstalk’s rebel cobs
sprout purple kernels.
These poems have the uncanny power to make me long for a lost farm-country world I have never experienced. “On Fall Creek herons/ lift their oars and pull hard overhead/ for deeper water.” Bear in mind, I’m just skimming the foam at the crests of these waves. For an example of a natural portrait whose precision and clarity approaches perfection, I would point to Little Brown Bat. A modest subject but then, so
was To a Mouse. The poem’s unity and coherence are so remarkable I refuse to diminish it by tearing out some lines. It’s a work of genius. Let it stand.
The next section gives us some fine portraits of women, never abstractly romantic, but real, solid women in their actual surroundings. In Trick we have:
The winter’s last thunderstorm
pummels south Los Angeles.
All the car alarms trip off:
a passing front, a crime burst.
…Your moist, salt weight
pins me with regret.
There’s strong sexuality in this group. As from Cold:
Touching her, he wonders how she
can bear the heat of her own breasts.
…Even her dress, hung over the chair,
could keep his bedroom warm for days.
On an amusement park ride with a teenage girl he realizes that shared thrills can lead to uninvited passion: the girl’s mother, anxiously watching, “knows the hardest most fugitive loves/ are born in a moment of amusement.”
From White Acre: “In Pusan I’ll pay a Korean girl/ what she asks for her hips, her limp back,/ the couple of filthy words she thinks/ all servicemen adore.”
In the section simply entitled: Two, there are poems reflecting the author’s experiences during his eight-year stint in the Navy as sailor and submariner. In Deep Depths, the poet conflates an accident at sea with the feared image of his father seen in childhood. From Running Ultra Quiet, we have:
I sat outboard the turbines on midwatch,
The whole crew asleep,
The boat like a man dreaming,
Under black tons.
In the last two sections, Staudt returns to familiar themes
introduced earlier: rural and farmland life; tin-shack townships in America’s back-mountain country; snowy winters; couples fighting in shiny Chryslers; hopeless wives; the boredom of dogs; the agony of hooked fish; family tragedy; tragic people; old time religion; spiritual isolation. All of it ending with the mother’s death.
…we’ve fed the wild geese at home
from our hands, those durable engines
of continental flight…
Late tonight, your heart will batter itself
to pieces trying to fly out with them.
For twenty
more nights we would watch the procession
of sine waves roll across her monitor,
those ardent crests…
crumbling and deforming in the darkness,
as an ocean of silent disappointments
threw its lasts waves down in protest.
These are passionate and powerful poems that drag the bloody organs out of life’s body displaying the love, the cruelty and everything in-between. These are profound works but don’t search them for blue heavens. They stand in the midst of those somber witnesses that see the world as it is and tell it so:
Mounting our empty beds at night we heard
the dirt already raining on the rooftop.
David Staudt’s The Gifts and Thefts, 2001 The Backwaters Press, 3502 N 52nd St., Omaha, NE 68104-3506, Tel. 402-451-4052. www.thebackwaterspress.homestead.com. 102pp.
David Staudt’s prize-winning collection is divided into five sections each marked by a large asterisk styled as a compass-rose. The first section describes the early years and his entangled memories of them. He recalls visiting his mother in a hospital:
A woman that light and that long in bed
becomes less body than relief:
a woman of wood in raised relief
He daydreams of adventure watching bed sheets “blow and lift on their lines”. They become “Wet white sails of the Niña, the Pinta”. Mom pulls the “clothespins apart/ with her teeth, a sailor on a rolling deck,/ rigging her family’s bedclothes”. In Souls, the old nun teaching the lives of saints is more afraid of binomials than of the school hoods. During the first snow, she takes the kindergarten class out to a “fenced-in/ playground no bigger than a carport” telling them to “Pretend you are the top of a mountain”. As they stare upward, they feel
“dizziness when snowflakes stop mid-air,
and the body starts falling into sky.
Then she tells the children how their souls
will feel, returning to heaven.
Other poems in this section speak of the poet’s father, neighbors, local dogs, his asthma: “…sliding into bed he’d start to drown,/ rousing to the weary little music/ raled through the pipes of his bronchi”. He describes his work on area farms and orchards and his fascination with the factories whose fiery lights and controlled chaos he tried to photograph. He revels in the local color of ethnic superstitions and ever-present ancestral ghosts: “Those whitetail doe in the street/tonight, who’s to say it isn’t/Emmy and Jenny, pausing then/wheeling in our parking light’s glow…”
The next section deals with nature and here we find some of the most ethereal and even metaphysical works in this volume. This is from Red Sumac:
I find a Shiloh in oak woods
a peace place razed by riversilt…
the pale trees halftwist northward,
tuned to the light from Polaris
But the natural context is set within and captured by the markers of civilization which counterpoise it. Here’s Staudt’s “jar in Tennessee”.
…as if all geography turned
around a hillside south of Vestal,
where the feedcorn sags through a post
rail fence, the rails have not moved
for fifty years, and a puzzled
hawk drifts to a stop in the sky
without a draft to tend her either way.
These images strike like lightning flashes. “A celery salt of rust and powdered moth/parts glitters in the cattails…” And they just keep coming: “…the lights snap on,/triggered by the smallest shift to red/in amber weeds along a drainage ditch.”
…mugwort and chicory crack
our roads, creeks dry up in garlic
and even cornstalk’s rebel cobs
sprout purple kernels.
These poems have the uncanny power to make me long for a lost farm-country world I have never experienced. “On Fall Creek herons/ lift their oars and pull hard overhead/ for deeper water.” Bear in mind, I’m just skimming the foam at the crests of these waves. For an example of a natural portrait whose precision and clarity approaches perfection, I would point to Little Brown Bat. A modest subject but then, so
was To a Mouse. The poem’s unity and coherence are so remarkable I refuse to diminish it by tearing out some lines. It’s a work of genius. Let it stand.
The next section gives us some fine portraits of women, never abstractly romantic, but real, solid women in their actual surroundings. In Trick we have:
The winter’s last thunderstorm
pummels south Los Angeles.
All the car alarms trip off:
a passing front, a crime burst.
…Your moist, salt weight
pins me with regret.
There’s strong sexuality in this group. As from Cold:
Touching her, he wonders how she
can bear the heat of her own breasts.
…Even her dress, hung over the chair,
could keep his bedroom warm for days.
On an amusement park ride with a teenage girl he realizes that shared thrills can lead to uninvited passion: the girl’s mother, anxiously watching, “knows the hardest most fugitive loves/ are born in a moment of amusement.”
From White Acre: “In Pusan I’ll pay a Korean girl/ what she asks for her hips, her limp back,/ the couple of filthy words she thinks/ all servicemen adore.”
In the section simply entitled: Two, there are poems reflecting the author’s experiences during his eight-year stint in the Navy as sailor and submariner. In Deep Depths, the poet conflates an accident at sea with the feared image of his father seen in childhood. From Running Ultra Quiet, we have:
I sat outboard the turbines on midwatch,
The whole crew asleep,
The boat like a man dreaming,
Under black tons.
In the last two sections, Staudt returns to familiar themes
introduced earlier: rural and farmland life; tin-shack townships in America’s back-mountain country; snowy winters; couples fighting in shiny Chryslers; hopeless wives; the boredom of dogs; the agony of hooked fish; family tragedy; tragic people; old time religion; spiritual isolation. All of it ending with the mother’s death.
…we’ve fed the wild geese at home
from our hands, those durable engines
of continental flight…
Late tonight, your heart will batter itself
to pieces trying to fly out with them.
For twenty
more nights we would watch the procession
of sine waves roll across her monitor,
those ardent crests…
crumbling and deforming in the darkness,
as an ocean of silent disappointments
threw its lasts waves down in protest.
These are passionate and powerful poems that drag the bloody organs out of life’s body displaying the love, the cruelty and everything in-between. These are profound works but don’t search them for blue heavens. They stand in the midst of those somber witnesses that see the world as it is and tell it so:
Mounting our empty beds at night we heard
the dirt already raining on the rooftop.
BOOK REVIEW: Part Mirth, Part Murder, by Dan Giancola
Review by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Summer 2007
PART MIRTH, PART MURDER
by Dan Giancola.
Street Press, New York, 2006
$12.00, 56 pp, Paper
Dan Giancola, who has worked summers as a laborer, carpenter, clerk, and caretaker among a multitude of manual jobs; and spent the school years as instructor and now professor at colleges in Eastern Long Island, thoroughly refutes the old canard about those who teach. The poetic mastery Mr. Giancola demonstrated in his previous collection, Songs from the Army of the Working Stiffs, are, like fine wine, aged and matured in the present volume.
As the title suggests, the poems are grouped in two sections labeled respectively Mirth and Murder. They are separated by an intermezzo called Bedtime Suite in which the author expresses the tenderness and profundity of fatherhood. However, as I have a limited space to review this book, I propose to begin with the last and to my mind, the most moving section, Murder.
The philosopher Giles Deleuze writes of “philosophy at the edge of chaos” and later extends the concept to writing at the edge of chaos. He is not so much interested in formal systems of language, as in the areas where it deterritorializes, frays and breaks apart; seeing this as a productive, affirmative process that makes new thinking possible, rather than a destructive mechanism. He values the edges where language stutters and begins to fragment because in so doing, it opens into the universe of dark energy (my interpretation) which flows into the writing, illuminating and energizing it. These are processes which Mr. Giancola understands very well and uses to signal advantage in his best poems.
Elegy for Dan Murray, set during a memorial reading in a noisy bar, illustrates this:
our voices wander
like lost explorers
through your poems
and die in the din
…………………….
the amp croaks a final syllable
In Labor Day, the lawn of a beach house slopes down…
below a flag yanking
its lanyard like a guard dog
……………………………….
on the deck a telescope
poses like a heron.
……………………………….
Overhead a cormorant
a dark thought passing…
In What Do You Know About Corpses and Gold?:
Day lilies send forth flames
on slender green wicks
that gutter at dusk
January is the poem and the month…
when lovers
tally their hurt
on spreadsheets of fog
Meditation on a Moon Jelly is a minor miracle that begs comparison with Moore’s Octopus and Bishop‘s The Fish. The poetic camera, with all its intricate lenses perfectly aligned, focuses on this nearly transparent organism and finds in its crystal vacancy and exfoliate “cellophane” pulsations, a mandala for the silence of a preconscious world.
They gather light
like ice & disappear, itinerant
oracles portending clarity’s emptiness,
zen ciphers even gulls eschew.
And Mr. Giancola effortlessly repeats this feat with poems like Slugs, Ecology and Vivarium: studies that peer deeply into the universe of living things and ferret out the secret filaments of experience. Ecology is a perfect example. In complexity, Giancola finds Mozartian simplicity: “A vine’s aim? Climb.” And so they do with the sole purpose of strangling a tree. And after they are hewn down and strewn around…
on the yard’s green page
they scribble winter…
in loopy script
that’s all too human
In The Gate, the sleeping poet, tracking through wilderness runs across a rustic gate that in dream’s frustration evades his every effort to pass. Reminiscent of the Kafka story of a man who waits his entire life for a door to open, it symbolizes a crime that needs atonement: to whit, the youthful killing of a deer with bow and arrow. It is only by entering in imagination, the actual bleeding wound he had inflicted, that the author is able to pass through the gate, learn “what man I was” and find “a world to live in.”
In Eels, we witness a boy’s earliest memories of a mother-goddess
barefoot with bucket & spear
on barnacle rocks, singing
of her life as a bird, as a fish
in that world out of which
we are born
The Oak “grows in the wind,/taking the shape/of its trouble”. Indeed, the profusion and precision of natural imagery throughout this collection would be stunning even without the insights and revelations to which they point.
In the first section, Mirth, Mr. Giancola indulges his interests and ordinary experiences. There are some pieces that focus on athletics such as Little League and The Beehive which describes the dangerous exhilaration of mountain climbing. Others are clearly physical: Sciatica, which elevates the clinical to the mystical; Sunbather and The Fat War, both ironic studies of physical vanity, in the former, leading to cancerous horror. Crowns, examines an unpleasant visit to the dentist again inspiring a confession of vanity and fear of aging. In Haircut, the poet’s youthful visage with abundant hair and ponytail, mocks his tonsure which he orders cut to the bone thus hiding his receding hairline, only to reveal “my father’s face”. We share the commuter’s experience on that Machiavellian form of transportation portrayed in: Riding the Long Island Railroad.
There are some scathing sketches of people as in Neighbor, wherein a lonely woman is epitomized by the riding mower that constitutes her raison d‘etre; or Terrible Swift Sword which dramatizes the plight of a district piano teacher whose long-rehearsed fourth-grade chorus barely mumbles the chosen ode before an audience of snickering parents. In Passion Party at the Broken Down Valise, a harrowing slide show of drunken people are seen trying to have fun and hook-up at a bar “to end a month of loneliness”. There follows a grostesque display of sex-dolls, dildoes and erotica. It’s Long Island’s corner of The Waste Land.
It goes without saying, that an English professor who teaches creative writing will employ all the poetic techniques with old-hand mastery. They are woven into the warp and woof of these poems and I leave it to the reader to tease them out. Ditto the diction. The true joy of these poems lies elsewhere…in the ironic but accurate depiction of gullible people trying to adjust to modern modalities, in the author’s personal confessions with which the reader cannot help but empathize…but pre-eminently in the brilliant fusion of image and idea which generates the explosive power we like to call inspiration.
PART MIRTH, PART MURDER
by Dan Giancola.
Street Press, New York, 2006
$12.00, 56 pp, Paper
Dan Giancola, who has worked summers as a laborer, carpenter, clerk, and caretaker among a multitude of manual jobs; and spent the school years as instructor and now professor at colleges in Eastern Long Island, thoroughly refutes the old canard about those who teach. The poetic mastery Mr. Giancola demonstrated in his previous collection, Songs from the Army of the Working Stiffs, are, like fine wine, aged and matured in the present volume.
As the title suggests, the poems are grouped in two sections labeled respectively Mirth and Murder. They are separated by an intermezzo called Bedtime Suite in which the author expresses the tenderness and profundity of fatherhood. However, as I have a limited space to review this book, I propose to begin with the last and to my mind, the most moving section, Murder.
The philosopher Giles Deleuze writes of “philosophy at the edge of chaos” and later extends the concept to writing at the edge of chaos. He is not so much interested in formal systems of language, as in the areas where it deterritorializes, frays and breaks apart; seeing this as a productive, affirmative process that makes new thinking possible, rather than a destructive mechanism. He values the edges where language stutters and begins to fragment because in so doing, it opens into the universe of dark energy (my interpretation) which flows into the writing, illuminating and energizing it. These are processes which Mr. Giancola understands very well and uses to signal advantage in his best poems.
Elegy for Dan Murray, set during a memorial reading in a noisy bar, illustrates this:
our voices wander
like lost explorers
through your poems
and die in the din
…………………….
the amp croaks a final syllable
In Labor Day, the lawn of a beach house slopes down…
below a flag yanking
its lanyard like a guard dog
……………………………….
on the deck a telescope
poses like a heron.
……………………………….
Overhead a cormorant
a dark thought passing…
In What Do You Know About Corpses and Gold?:
Day lilies send forth flames
on slender green wicks
that gutter at dusk
January is the poem and the month…
when lovers
tally their hurt
on spreadsheets of fog
Meditation on a Moon Jelly is a minor miracle that begs comparison with Moore’s Octopus and Bishop‘s The Fish. The poetic camera, with all its intricate lenses perfectly aligned, focuses on this nearly transparent organism and finds in its crystal vacancy and exfoliate “cellophane” pulsations, a mandala for the silence of a preconscious world.
They gather light
like ice & disappear, itinerant
oracles portending clarity’s emptiness,
zen ciphers even gulls eschew.
And Mr. Giancola effortlessly repeats this feat with poems like Slugs, Ecology and Vivarium: studies that peer deeply into the universe of living things and ferret out the secret filaments of experience. Ecology is a perfect example. In complexity, Giancola finds Mozartian simplicity: “A vine’s aim? Climb.” And so they do with the sole purpose of strangling a tree. And after they are hewn down and strewn around…
on the yard’s green page
they scribble winter…
in loopy script
that’s all too human
In The Gate, the sleeping poet, tracking through wilderness runs across a rustic gate that in dream’s frustration evades his every effort to pass. Reminiscent of the Kafka story of a man who waits his entire life for a door to open, it symbolizes a crime that needs atonement: to whit, the youthful killing of a deer with bow and arrow. It is only by entering in imagination, the actual bleeding wound he had inflicted, that the author is able to pass through the gate, learn “what man I was” and find “a world to live in.”
In Eels, we witness a boy’s earliest memories of a mother-goddess
barefoot with bucket & spear
on barnacle rocks, singing
of her life as a bird, as a fish
in that world out of which
we are born
The Oak “grows in the wind,/taking the shape/of its trouble”. Indeed, the profusion and precision of natural imagery throughout this collection would be stunning even without the insights and revelations to which they point.
In the first section, Mirth, Mr. Giancola indulges his interests and ordinary experiences. There are some pieces that focus on athletics such as Little League and The Beehive which describes the dangerous exhilaration of mountain climbing. Others are clearly physical: Sciatica, which elevates the clinical to the mystical; Sunbather and The Fat War, both ironic studies of physical vanity, in the former, leading to cancerous horror. Crowns, examines an unpleasant visit to the dentist again inspiring a confession of vanity and fear of aging. In Haircut, the poet’s youthful visage with abundant hair and ponytail, mocks his tonsure which he orders cut to the bone thus hiding his receding hairline, only to reveal “my father’s face”. We share the commuter’s experience on that Machiavellian form of transportation portrayed in: Riding the Long Island Railroad.
There are some scathing sketches of people as in Neighbor, wherein a lonely woman is epitomized by the riding mower that constitutes her raison d‘etre; or Terrible Swift Sword which dramatizes the plight of a district piano teacher whose long-rehearsed fourth-grade chorus barely mumbles the chosen ode before an audience of snickering parents. In Passion Party at the Broken Down Valise, a harrowing slide show of drunken people are seen trying to have fun and hook-up at a bar “to end a month of loneliness”. There follows a grostesque display of sex-dolls, dildoes and erotica. It’s Long Island’s corner of The Waste Land.
It goes without saying, that an English professor who teaches creative writing will employ all the poetic techniques with old-hand mastery. They are woven into the warp and woof of these poems and I leave it to the reader to tease them out. Ditto the diction. The true joy of these poems lies elsewhere…in the ironic but accurate depiction of gullible people trying to adjust to modern modalities, in the author’s personal confessions with which the reader cannot help but empathize…but pre-eminently in the brilliant fusion of image and idea which generates the explosive power we like to call inspiration.
BOOK REVIEW: Cat City by B.J. Cassidy
Cat City by B.J. Cassidy, Northport, NY 2002, 43 pages. (Self-published chap-book: available from author at 631-261-6505: $5 ea.) Review first published in Book/Mark, Spring-Summer 2002-03
Reviewed by Martin Abramson
Bonnie Cassidy has given us one of the most delightful collections of cat poems since Old Possum. From her cat-patrolled ramparts overlooking Long Island Sound, she has stirred up a magical, mewling brew made up of two parts love and one part exasperation. And to spice up the mix, she has sprinkled in vignettes and encounters from her life.
Like Eliot’s cats, Ms.Cassidy’s have individual personalities e.g. Pooka, a mischief maker probably related to Eliot’s McCavity. Or Calphurnia, so obsessed with flowers that she’ll habitually knock vases off shelves just to smell the lilacs and azaleas. Then there’s the savage Miss Kitty and the elusive Ghost Cat with his “blue glass eyes”. But B.J. goes Eliot one better in the very personal relationships she maintains with her feline family:
she blends
into my flesh
she is
not a lover
but somehow loves me
when others do not
Or:
…my cat
in my bed
even as I write this
she is climbing on my chest
rubbing her face against mine
and purring
Or:
only the cat understands me
as she tries to enter
my mouth
purring
this is a divine mystery
Over and over, Ms. Cassidy catches the mystical feline essence of her subject.
Silent tiger
stalking toward nirvana
your footsteps silent
your breath silent
an aura about you
silent and silence
Or:
…the storm wind
moans in ecstasy
yes yes
swirling and gusting
and the feral cat cries
at the front door
“let me in”
Or:
Miss Kitty is coming
to hunt and to feast
and no one is safe
from the claws and the teeth
But the true wonder of this book lies, as in all fine poetry, in the loveliness of the line and the luster of the image. The grey cat is “…invisible at night/mistaken for shadows/in the sun”. And: “…like a white whale/a big tom cat/appears in the side yard”. Or: “the crows are entering the trees/they talk to each other/about the cats”. Or:
who could replicate the
sleeping cat
from a blueprint
while scientists follow
the dots
a red cardinal flashes
against the pale leaves
Or:
we used to have a ghost cat
in the hall way
small and black
he would lie
curled up
till you reached out
to pet him
then he’d fade
now my son says he’s back
Ms.Cassidy is particularly skillful in suggesting the interaction of men with cats. In “News Flash” a businessman steals millions, escapes to Florida with two cats and dies of drink. At Key West, Hemingway’s cats accompany “the black man/with the drum” by “caterwauling”. And in the title poem, her cats sense that “the man smells/of smoke/fire saltwater/fish/when he comes/to my bed”. (Hmmm, that sounds like a certain, celebrated, maritime poet who lives in these parts, but I do not hypothesize.)
The truth is that no collocation of brief excerpts can really connote the atmospheric mystery, idiosyncratic humor and elemental strength of these poems. They need to be read in their entirety, each a complete and moving moment, each amplified by the preceding and following poems as well as by the continuity of the entire collection. The poet is like the cat in that:
I sing because I must
there is no contemplation
no musing in my songs
they spring
from endless wells
of bottomless
unfulfilled yearnings…
in deep woods at sunrise
under the boardwalk
I sing
Reviewed by Martin Abramson
Bonnie Cassidy has given us one of the most delightful collections of cat poems since Old Possum. From her cat-patrolled ramparts overlooking Long Island Sound, she has stirred up a magical, mewling brew made up of two parts love and one part exasperation. And to spice up the mix, she has sprinkled in vignettes and encounters from her life.
Like Eliot’s cats, Ms.Cassidy’s have individual personalities e.g. Pooka, a mischief maker probably related to Eliot’s McCavity. Or Calphurnia, so obsessed with flowers that she’ll habitually knock vases off shelves just to smell the lilacs and azaleas. Then there’s the savage Miss Kitty and the elusive Ghost Cat with his “blue glass eyes”. But B.J. goes Eliot one better in the very personal relationships she maintains with her feline family:
she blends
into my flesh
she is
not a lover
but somehow loves me
when others do not
Or:
…my cat
in my bed
even as I write this
she is climbing on my chest
rubbing her face against mine
and purring
Or:
only the cat understands me
as she tries to enter
my mouth
purring
this is a divine mystery
Over and over, Ms. Cassidy catches the mystical feline essence of her subject.
Silent tiger
stalking toward nirvana
your footsteps silent
your breath silent
an aura about you
silent and silence
Or:
…the storm wind
moans in ecstasy
yes yes
swirling and gusting
and the feral cat cries
at the front door
“let me in”
Or:
Miss Kitty is coming
to hunt and to feast
and no one is safe
from the claws and the teeth
But the true wonder of this book lies, as in all fine poetry, in the loveliness of the line and the luster of the image. The grey cat is “…invisible at night/mistaken for shadows/in the sun”. And: “…like a white whale/a big tom cat/appears in the side yard”. Or: “the crows are entering the trees/they talk to each other/about the cats”. Or:
who could replicate the
sleeping cat
from a blueprint
while scientists follow
the dots
a red cardinal flashes
against the pale leaves
Or:
we used to have a ghost cat
in the hall way
small and black
he would lie
curled up
till you reached out
to pet him
then he’d fade
now my son says he’s back
Ms.Cassidy is particularly skillful in suggesting the interaction of men with cats. In “News Flash” a businessman steals millions, escapes to Florida with two cats and dies of drink. At Key West, Hemingway’s cats accompany “the black man/with the drum” by “caterwauling”. And in the title poem, her cats sense that “the man smells/of smoke/fire saltwater/fish/when he comes/to my bed”. (Hmmm, that sounds like a certain, celebrated, maritime poet who lives in these parts, but I do not hypothesize.)
The truth is that no collocation of brief excerpts can really connote the atmospheric mystery, idiosyncratic humor and elemental strength of these poems. They need to be read in their entirety, each a complete and moving moment, each amplified by the preceding and following poems as well as by the continuity of the entire collection. The poet is like the cat in that:
I sing because I must
there is no contemplation
no musing in my songs
they spring
from endless wells
of bottomless
unfulfilled yearnings…
in deep woods at sunrise
under the boardwalk
I sing
BOOK REVIEW: Condo; A poem, by James Boring
REVIEW by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark,Fall-Winter 2006-07
Condo: a Poem, by James Boring. 2006, Lit Pot Press,Oceanside, CA Inc. 59pp. $10.00
In this modern art gallery of portraits eviscerating the residents of a senior citizen community, Jim Boring calls them as he sees them; and brother, can he see them! The shocking cover photo of a naked, middle aged woman with an unreconstructed mastectomy should tell us that there is to be no merciful soft-focus or blurring of the age-lines in this collection. Each poem begins with the number of an apartment and in a few incredibly deft strokes, lays bare the story behind each door.
111
She walks ahead of him
Carrying the bag of beans
Deference to his solitary nature
He looks up from time to time
Her broad bottom rolling before him
Reminds him of the way.
Sometimes the author alludes to a Florida setting: “Look at these birds/ White as there is no other word for it snow/ With their long curved beaks and their legs/ With the kneecaps on backwards” (Ibises). “In the Parking Lot” notes the EMS truck that responds to a late night emergency: “The heavy throbbing of the engine/ Mocks the poor heart it rescues”. They’re all here: the old man with his voices, the vet who broods on the absurdity of his wartime experience, the Holocaust survivor, the aimless widow, the faithful caretaker, the neighborhood watcher, the grandma primping for a date, the couples living in mutual misery. All done in a conversational, street-wise argot that cradles tender personal emotions in thick, but strangely gentle workman’s gloves.
Some poems look back on lifetimes, others snapshot momentary tableaux. Some wonder about lost feelings, some marvel at feelings that remain. From the Rabbi trying to say something meaningful about a deceased person he never knew, to the old heads nodding in dark corners, death pervades this book; sometimes as the enemy, often as an expected friend. These poems are about the wreckage left by death as well as the dread of its approach.
He slumps small in the wheelchair
A boneless bag his head
Limp on his shoulder
Hands between his legs
But there is such astonishing tenderness as well:
Once in a while he asks for my breast
He doesn’t just take it he asks for it
I lean down to him lying in my lap
Over an old child softly sucking.
The power of simplicity never had a more able advocate:
Unit 201
The Widowed Second Wife
I know he loved me best
He told me so
She was so cold
He loved the things I did
He told me so
I did them for him
My mouth meant more to him
He told me so
My breasts my heart
He did not think of her
He told me so
I think of her.
If that poem took you to as deep a level as it did me, you will find much beauty and wonderment in Condo.
Condo: a Poem, by James Boring. 2006, Lit Pot Press,Oceanside, CA Inc. 59pp. $10.00
In this modern art gallery of portraits eviscerating the residents of a senior citizen community, Jim Boring calls them as he sees them; and brother, can he see them! The shocking cover photo of a naked, middle aged woman with an unreconstructed mastectomy should tell us that there is to be no merciful soft-focus or blurring of the age-lines in this collection. Each poem begins with the number of an apartment and in a few incredibly deft strokes, lays bare the story behind each door.
111
She walks ahead of him
Carrying the bag of beans
Deference to his solitary nature
He looks up from time to time
Her broad bottom rolling before him
Reminds him of the way.
Sometimes the author alludes to a Florida setting: “Look at these birds/ White as there is no other word for it snow/ With their long curved beaks and their legs/ With the kneecaps on backwards” (Ibises). “In the Parking Lot” notes the EMS truck that responds to a late night emergency: “The heavy throbbing of the engine/ Mocks the poor heart it rescues”. They’re all here: the old man with his voices, the vet who broods on the absurdity of his wartime experience, the Holocaust survivor, the aimless widow, the faithful caretaker, the neighborhood watcher, the grandma primping for a date, the couples living in mutual misery. All done in a conversational, street-wise argot that cradles tender personal emotions in thick, but strangely gentle workman’s gloves.
Some poems look back on lifetimes, others snapshot momentary tableaux. Some wonder about lost feelings, some marvel at feelings that remain. From the Rabbi trying to say something meaningful about a deceased person he never knew, to the old heads nodding in dark corners, death pervades this book; sometimes as the enemy, often as an expected friend. These poems are about the wreckage left by death as well as the dread of its approach.
He slumps small in the wheelchair
A boneless bag his head
Limp on his shoulder
Hands between his legs
But there is such astonishing tenderness as well:
Once in a while he asks for my breast
He doesn’t just take it he asks for it
I lean down to him lying in my lap
Over an old child softly sucking.
The power of simplicity never had a more able advocate:
Unit 201
The Widowed Second Wife
I know he loved me best
He told me so
She was so cold
He loved the things I did
He told me so
I did them for him
My mouth meant more to him
He told me so
My breasts my heart
He did not think of her
He told me so
I think of her.
If that poem took you to as deep a level as it did me, you will find much beauty and wonderment in Condo.
TRANSLATIONS: Some notes on translation (by m.a..)
Translations, Translations.
Paul Valéry is pretty much out of reach for those not fluent in French language and culture, but William H.Gass gives us deep insights in The World Within the Word.
For example: the chambermaid whose presence the poet barely registers as she quietly tends to his rooms, moves “as glass passes through sunlight/ without trembling the balance of my thought”
Comme passé le verre au travers du soliel
Et de la raison pure épargne l’appareil.
Gass tells us that in “The Rower,” Valéry imagines, in the water, “objects and their reflections…to be like the images of burning which smoked the walls of Plato’s cave…The boat’s prow is urged to divide the world which seems painted in the water, shattering its calm so that of such a massive stillness no memory will remain.”
And, in the same poem (in David Paul’s version) the poet describes floating into the sunlight from beneath the darkness of a bridge:
the mind
Lowers its sensitive suns, its ready eyelids,
Until with a leap that clothes me with jewels
I plunge into the disdain of all that idle azure.
And (switching lingos) when Catullus says: “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and value at one penny the murmurs of disapproving old men.” Tom Stoppard recasts the last clause:
“and not give tuppence for the mutterence of old men’s tut-tutterence.” (‘The Invention of Love’)
Now that’s translatin!
Paul Valéry is pretty much out of reach for those not fluent in French language and culture, but William H.Gass gives us deep insights in The World Within the Word.
For example: the chambermaid whose presence the poet barely registers as she quietly tends to his rooms, moves “as glass passes through sunlight/ without trembling the balance of my thought”
Comme passé le verre au travers du soliel
Et de la raison pure épargne l’appareil.
Gass tells us that in “The Rower,” Valéry imagines, in the water, “objects and their reflections…to be like the images of burning which smoked the walls of Plato’s cave…The boat’s prow is urged to divide the world which seems painted in the water, shattering its calm so that of such a massive stillness no memory will remain.”
And, in the same poem (in David Paul’s version) the poet describes floating into the sunlight from beneath the darkness of a bridge:
the mind
Lowers its sensitive suns, its ready eyelids,
Until with a leap that clothes me with jewels
I plunge into the disdain of all that idle azure.
And (switching lingos) when Catullus says: “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and value at one penny the murmurs of disapproving old men.” Tom Stoppard recasts the last clause:
“and not give tuppence for the mutterence of old men’s tut-tutterence.” (‘The Invention of Love’)
Now that’s translatin!
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