Poet’s Corner

Here are just a few books that have been slightly overlooked this year. Some, like Rebecca Seiferle’s translation of Cesar Vallejo, insist on attention, and all deserve a closer look, having slipped a bit under the poetry-reviewing radar in 2003.

Fleet River

James Longenbach

University of Chicago Press:

72 pp., $14 paper

James LONGENBACH’S “Fleet River” is a brilliant book. The poet quotes Descartes in the epigraph (“Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite”), and the poems that follow are swept forward on a river of wonder. Longenbach has the kind of startlingly accurate yet self-effacing voice that risks disappearing into the flow of such poetry. “Because we can’t remember / what brought us here. / Because the consolation for having been / born is being forgotten.” If these astonishing lines do not leap out at us (even as the last lines of the book!), it may be perhaps because the poet offers so many similar observations on each page, and we remain in a state of regard close to dazzlement. The poems are a passage: analytic, expressive and mysterious, yet we accept the tactics of this passage as a species of reassurance:

I say seemed because I always knew

I’d exchanged one strategy

For another; it was only

Later, from a distance, that I saw

How revelation doesn’t wait

For us to choose a form.

A sensibility this cogent, subtle and austere is rare; even rarer is its proof that poetry still flows through all things and transforms all things in the process.

*

What Narcissism Means to Me

Tony Hoagland

Graywolf Press: 82 pp., $14 paper

A Late Night Show of poetry hosted by a high priest of irony (check out the title), that is Tony Hoagland’s new book. These poems are very funny, but they are also sad, sharp-edged and ambitious. They wish to be more than just amusing cautionary tales. They take on America itself, they take on self and self-storage and they are, occasionally, semi-lyrical:

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,

like a sudsy mug of beer,

like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds

It’s hard to tire of this voice -- it is confiding, consistently irreverent and, in a way, comforting. Even at his most impatient, he is comfortingly hilarious:

Maybe I overdid it

when I called my father an enemy of humanity.

That might have been a little strongly put ...

Still, after a while the reader wishes for a momentary respite from the (awful word) “zaniness” -- the kind of cleverness that J.D. Salinger described as ultimately crippling. In the poem just quoted, he manages to overcome this cleverness, to fully complete an emotional arc, “fading out on” his aging enemy-father:

while he holds the phone in his left hand

and stares blankly out the window

where just now the sun is going down

and the last fingertips of sunlight

are withdrawing from the hills

they once touched like a child.

*

The Black Heralds

Cesar Vallejo

Translated by Rebecca Seiferle

Copper Canyon Press:

250 pp., $16 paper

Cesar VALLEJO is a poet of excess, a kind of divine excess. And his poems, translated in the ‘70s by Robert Bly, James Wright and others, have occasionally been interpreted as a hipper-than-thou Spanish surrealism and thus, as Rebecca Seiferle puts it, “colonized.” In “The Black Heralds” (one of only two collections published in his lifetime, though he wrote five volumes, including the extraordinary “Poemas Humanas”), Seiferle labors in her introduction and translations at freeing Vallejo’s work from what she calls the poetry of colonialism and its “tourist-like tropes.”

There is no doubt that Vallejo miraculously combined radical Marxist politics with a Latin American consciousness that incorporated indigenous languages (like Quechua) into an astonishing natural lyricism and symbolism. Also miraculous is the poems’ resistance to reductionist impulses; the mode of expression remains deeply romantic in its surreality:

Tonight, my clock pants

next to my darkened temple, like

the apple of revolver that turns

the trigger without finding the bullet.

In English, the physical accuracy of “turning the trigger” (as opposed to turning, say, the bullet chamber) reflects the “slippage” or imprecision in some of these translations. The translations are, overall, vehemently gorgeous, ripe with feeling -- yet there are questions that remain about lines like “... My cigarette gleams / its melancholic sparks of alert” as fair renderings of the poet’s intent.) Translation of poems is always a challenge -- translating the wild anarchical Vallejo may be close to impossible. Still, this book is a long overdue re-envisioning of Vallejo. It will fall to his readers, in Spanish and English, to ultimately judge this latest attempt at embodying him on the page.

*

The Cure

Sarah Gorham

Four Ways Books: 60 pp., $14.95

Sarah GORHAM’S “The Cure” is intent on examining what needs curing in our lives. Her clear voice has an expressive power that, while not exactly that of a “healer,” is adept at intimating the shapes that health or healthy consciousness might assume -- without sounding didactic. Her style is engaging, sometimes hesitant but finally endearingly declarative, straight from the heart:

... what she wants

is a moment of unknowing;

she wants to be a rose pressed between the pages

of someone else’s story.

Though Gorham purports to long for unknowingness, her book is notable for its knowledge: its rigorous attention to how the world comes apart, followed by its rigorous attention to learning (a.k.a. putting the world back together again).

*

Skipstone

Ginny MacKenzie

Backwaters Press: 78 pp., $16 paper

Finally -- though many books have been left out of this quick “aerial view” -- here is a quick “fly-over” nod to “Skipstone” by Ginny MacKenzie. “Skipstone” is a smart and skillful first book, a fine and passionate calling-up of childhood and “dreamscape” memories, painterly memories, that draw the reader into a charmed space. She asks: “If our lives become suddenly beautiful, / is it because all we envy we imitate?”