because God had translated them: A Review of Dimitris Lyacos’ With the people from the bridge

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dimitris lyacos, greek poetry, poena damni, poetry in translations, shoestring press, shorsh sullivan, translated poetry

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan

Both postmodern and high modernist poetry have a context of traumatized grand narratives, reflections of human consciousness (both writer and reader) damaged by and aware of their own damages, whatever the source. In the highest sense, both approaches to writing use language to pull everyone involved up short to a face-to-face blinking contest with reality. For the real owns rider and horse, and language obscures this fact by its severing nature—and this explains why postmodern literature is such a difficult medium in most hands. Only a writer who has studied and read the deepest narratives will succeed, reaching for and pulling up out of the muck brief remnants that add much-needed weight to the radical fragmentation that is contemporary life’s relationship to personal and cultural histories, not to mention death and reality. This is the gift of high modern and postmodern art. In his trilogy Poena Damni Dimitris Lyacos proves it’s a gift we’re still (for now) willing to accept:

As long as a match stays alight. As much as you have time
to see in the room that flares and fizzles out. The images holding, briefly, then
fall. Some lines you manage, they are
gone, another match, again. Pieces missing, empty pages, match, again. Comes
across an unknown work and sticks
in your mind. And where are the dwelling places of
the wicked. Ask those who pass beside you. Match, some smudges parts again
like those of the Testament,
then some of his pieces, then mine. The light so brief
that you don’t have time to write, in the dark you can’t
see if the page is blank. You write, a match, words fall-
ing on top of each other, another page, write, again a
match…. (Z213:EXIT)

Delicious, isn’t it?

Lyacos’ Poena Damni is powerful because the work is stitched in all its seams with a very deeply grounded lyrical and inward-looking precision. Most attempts at post (and post-post) modernism end up weak, scattered and afraid of scaffolding for fear of ridicule. In other words, something you only want to read once, with, at the end, a sense of relief that you are still someone special. Relief is overrated.

Begin getting to know Poena Damni as you read by searching references and collective human history and memory. You’ll get triggered for touchstones and allusions and be on your way to complete presence with the text. Soon, instead of knowing until you’re nauseous exactly where you stand (and do not stand) in today’s global economy, for example, you’re good and lost (in the best literary way) on the confusing road to a questionable salvation with each refugee, seeker and lost soul among the torturers, prisoners, survivors, lovers, friends and worshipers who haunt the trains, bridges, villages and churches that inhabit Lyacos’ (and our) world. It’s a real masterwork in that it accomplishes the avant-garde task of throwing the reader in all directions simultaneously. It’s a hearty meal, a marvelous, lively response to madness, to death and to reality, all of which we contain and run from constantly. In a sense, that would be the trilogy in a nutshell if the nut itself were not so remarkably complex.

With the people from the bridge is the second book in the Poena Damni trilogy, and in many ways the most initially difficult of the three books. It’s staged as a drama. NCTV is play’s title. There are four characters: the Narrator (who turns a cassette-player on and off and holds a Bible); a Chorus of women; LG, a man, and a woman named NCTV, presumably the subject of the drama’s title, who sits in the burnt-out shell of a car and also appears on television. The stage is set under the arch of a bridge. The floor is dirt, there are people and dogs sitting around, and the lighting consists of five or six lights, white, blue and green. There’s a fire in an oil drum. One of the men, half-naked to the waist, makes a cross out of two pieces of wood and sticks it into the mud. Thus, Lyacos builds a makeshift setting of a church for the reader.

The Narrator begins the scene by tearing out pages from the Bible and papering a nearby wall. Then he begins reading from Mark 5 (New International Version), a passage of the Bible in which Jesus restores a demon-possessed man. The man, too strong to be kept in chains, is free, possessed and wildly alone:

And always, night
and day in the tombs
and in the mountains he was crying
and cutting himself with stones.
But when he saw Jesus afar
off he ran
and worshipped him,
and cried with a loud voice,
and said ”what have I to do with you, Jesus,
son of the most high God?
I adjure thee by God,
that thou torment me not.
For he said unto him; come out thou
unclean spirit from the
man, and he asked him;
what is thy name? and he answered
saying; my name is legion
for we are many.

And so Lyacos begins the dramatic monologue of LG, a man possessed by demons, and not yet healed, waiting. And what does he hear? Her. And as the books nears its conclusion and LG draws near to being healed:

Narrator with the Bible.

for he saith; in a time accepted
I have heard thee and in the day
of salvation have I succored thee;
behold now is the accepted time
behold now is the day of salvation

Chorus. Burning newspapers. Narrator goes and turns on
the TV.

The TV. And NCTV is on the TV. It’s devastating, really, how accurately Lyacos explains our self-distances. And how beautifully, when it happens, we might be healed:

They were not to be found
because God had translated them

Has anyone else written a long dramatic poem about what goes on between the time a man and his insane legion encounter Jesus and the time they reach Him? Here we appreciate Lyacos’ gifted imagination.

Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni (the loss of the damned) is perplexing, confusing, disturbing and gorgeous. It’s timeless work. There isn’t a screwdriver or latte or economic travesty in sight. It’s so refreshing to read work that dives down into the deep inner life of human consciousness, and at the same time in allegorical slant, maps the outward, subjective mess of ordinary life.

As for the last sentence in With the people from the bridge, we are brought into our current condition in which a man, for reasons we can only guess at, has tried his best to become a God. Which of course, makes him possessed by a demon. ~

Dimitris Lyacos | Translated by Shorsha Sullivan | Available from Shoestring Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Myhr

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A Review of Matt W. Miller’s Club Icarus

by Michael Luke Benedetto

In Matt W. Miller’s Club Icarus, his second collection and winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, the opening pages offer two epigraphs:  the first, a quote from Virgil’s The Aeneid, and the second, lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.”  Miller’s readers can expect to navigate the spectrum between these two poles as they are confronted by densely constructed and intricately woven poems, as well as simpler, more lucid pieces, all the while unraveling the familial narrative of a man struggling with loss and becoming a father.

Death and loss are ubiquitous in the four sections of Club Icarus. Even though contemplative ruminations and narrative vignettes are interspersed throughout, the slow, debilitating decline of Miller’s father is always lurking nearby, in a photograph, under a bridge, in distant childhood memories, or an open letter to a famous NFL player.  Many of the characters that materialize out of the collection’s linguistic snapshots are intriguing within the few stanzas they occupy, but it is clear that the true power behind Miller’s narratives derives from the metamorphosis of a family across generations.

It is difficult not to be simultaneously enticed and alarmed by the language in these poems, often luring the reader in with smoothly compacted alliterative verse, which may, at any moment, leap from the page with macabre, guttural images.  From “Aruba, One Happy Island,” which opens, “Too much salt for our skin but the sun / is the sun again and the sand a warm / whiteness against the stitched lip of winter,” to the speaker in “Exempli Gratia” who wants “forearms scabbed / and scarred from fisting death’s teeth,” readers are treated to the full range of Miller’s poetic talents.

Often in tercets or couplets, these poems are crafted with succinct lines that expand into elaborate and forceful images.  Though the majority of poems are written in complete sentences, utilizing standard prosaic punctuation, Club Icarus is not without pieces that eschew this convention in order to reinforce the sense of immediacy that springs from the subject.  This is best evidenced in the poem “Partus,” which details the birth of, presumably, Miller’s daughter:

“Riflebutt the curve of her wool
socked foot into the shoulder shove

her knee down now toward her ear fingers
wrapping hamstrings stretched”

Again, Miller’s tightly packed language tumbles forth creating an air of urgency that propels the reader from these opening lines to the culmination of the narrative:  the successful delivery of a baby girl.

Though loss hangs heavily throughout this collection, and the Icarian theme is present in many of the poems, a sense of hope occasionally rises to the surface and solidifies around a familial relationship.  There is no better example than in the title poem, “Club Icarus,” which closes part two.  In it, we are ejected, along with the speaker and his daughter, from a plane that has struck Icarus on his flight.  Before meeting his fate at ground level, the speaker sees his daughter one last time as “wings like blades butterfly / from her back and lift her / laughing back into the blue.”

In Matt W. Miller’s prize-winning collection, windows are opened into the lives of tragic figures—a dying father, an ailing football coach, a down-on-her-luck ex-bodybuilder—and since these tragedies are played out in verse as striking as it is pleasing to the ear, the reader cannot help but be drawn into each brief glimpse before the window closes.  Whatever his subject, Miller masterfully paints an evocative scene with language both accessible and stunning.

A Review of Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia

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Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia, Poetry

by Kaitlin Dyer

In her second book of poetry, Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay continues her exploration into deep emotional issues. While her first collection of poetry, Teeth, also used a slightly fragmented style to delve into such topics as love, death, and family discord, Kingdom Animalia seems to master this technique and exploit it for all its potential.

Kingdom Animalia is a book that unravels on itself like a Russian nesting doll. The structure of the book is broken into several “books” such as “a book of dirt” or “a book of beautiful monsters.” By doing this, Girmay refocuses the reader on viewing the world, and its inhabitants, in a new perspective. Uniquely, she seems to make even the mundane parts of humanity or life appear strange by shifting the reader’s perspective. One example of this can be found in the poem “St. Elizabeth” when Girmay discribes meeting a group of goats along a road:  “I fall in love. How they wear / their strange and double-eyes.” Naturally, it is not unusual that goats or any other creature would have two eyes, but Girmay is able to construct a perspective in which this occurrence feels strange. This only seems to add to the poem’s integrity, because the poem wants us to feel the appreciation and wonder of this specific road and experience. It is through the subversion of perspective that we, as readers, are able to relate to Girmay’s individual experience.

In Kingdom Animalia the technique of fragmentation is also evident in the transformations that occur throughout the book. The speakers in Girmay’s poetry hardly ever remain simply one entity. They are often objectified or transformed into other beings or objects. For instance, in the section, “a book of graves & birds,” she includes a series of self-portraits as other beings: “Self-Portrait as the Snail,” Self-Portrait as the Snake,” “Self-Portrait as the Airplane,” “Self-Portrait as the Pirate’s Gold,” and “Self-Portrait as the Snake’s Skin.” These poems do not simply present the self as these creature, but also work to expand and transform the creatures presented into still other creatures. In “Self-Portrait as the Snail,” Girmay begins by exclaiming “I am the snail / trailing my thought behind me,” but continues to characterize herself as “Resourceful Gretel who, in eating all the bread home, / lets her blood down to mark the way back home!” She is able to fold complicated metaphors for the self over and over again. Not only are her thoughts like a slow-moving snail, but she has become resourceful enough to find her way.

A similar strategy is taken when she objectifies body parts throughout Kingdom Animalia. In the title poem, “Kingdom Animalia,” Girmay speaks directly to the body:

“Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you 
& touch you with
 its mouth.”

Girmay is able to objectify her entire body in these lines and also fragment the body from the self. She fragments the body further later in the collection. In “Portrait of the Woman as a Skein,” the body becomes an expression of parts: “Tell me what, on earth, / would make you leave your hands / or want to, at the wash-sink?” The hands no longer have a literal connection to the rest of the body, but can be separated at will. In this way the body is continually fragmented from the whole, which transforms the objectified body parts.

In this way, the book becomes a book of transformations as Girmay is able to continually reinvent her objects through the use of perspective and fragmentation. This is a book that requires time and attention. We must give Girmay’s poems time to digest and unravel in our own minds—to reread and make connections.  Girmay’s work is careful and deliberate and should be read carefully, again and again.