A Note on Suzanne Cleary Langley’s Beauty Mark

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Ilya Kaminsky, suzanne cleary-langley, the beauty mark

by Ilya Kaminsky

 

“The imperfect is our paradise,” Wallace Stevens reminds us, but how lucky we are to have in these poems of Suzanne Cleary-Langley another reminder—that “we seldom forget our dead when we laugh,” and that “dancing the polka is like walking / on a ship’s deck / during a storm…each time the ship / tilts, you take two hop-like /steps.”

 

Beauty bedevils, she tells us, but the beauty-mark bedevils beauty. And this is exactly what her lyric voice is doing in this book of poems that bewitch and stun, knowing that in the end, although we are not the ones who said “our little life is rounded with a sleep,” we too, have taken “the very earth / into our mouth…mortal, mortal, mortal.”

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A Note on In the Absence of Clocks by Jacobo Shores-Arguello

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crab orchard series open competition winners, jacob shores-arguello, ukranian poetry

by Ilya Kaminsky

                 

Beginning with “the ox-hauled moon” this book opens to pages where thin boys and bakers sit on their stoops, pouring “flour from one hand to the other” and the tower’s clockwork is arrested, and the village “is late for bread.” Where are we? In what geography? We are in a peninsula that looks like “cold wolf hangs from the teat of upper atmosphere” and those who rejoice here, make toasts “To childhood. To death.” And, what year is it? “A year is a modest thing, naked to its ankles.” Again, where are we? In Paradise:

 

How do you know that Adam and Eve were communists,

he asks. His laughter foams like the sea, cannot

hide from itself. Because they had no clothes to wear,

no sausage to eat, and still they thought it was paradise.

 

This is the Ukraine of Arguello’s imagination, a place where “a thin boy is a spy, disguised by a magnolia.” When you open this book, “do not ask what the crows have done” because “the beer still tastes like beer. / The girls who serve it / still trust their hips.” This is the sort of a book that investigates deeper into the lives of others, to find poetry there, to find meaning, to find strangeness that is all our own. So, what do we find here? I found how “betrayed by quiet, we do not pray to darkness. We demand.”

A Note on Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de La Tour du Pin, translated by Jennifer Grotz

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french poetry, jennifer grotz, patrice de la tour du pin, poetry translation

by Ilya Kaminsky

 

“I am a child of September”

 

“Was he bowing to himself when he died?” So begins one of the most daring, unusual, and memorable collections of poetry in translation that I have read in years. This book of ‘remade psalms’ written by ‘a child of September’ and carried into English by one of our best lyric voices, gives us that rare thing: devotional poetry that is as skeptical, self-doubting and struggling as it is glorious in its high-style and aspiration.

 

“Yes, I loved greatness too much…I savored the vulgar tongue,” writes the poet who admits, “then I came to dream of writing / the great prayer of our time” only to step back “I could never have the right to such a voice” and yet, affirm: “I assemble an interior liturgy in this way.” One thinks here of Celan’s “o one, or none, o no one, o you” when one is faced with the poetics of such immediate negation and affirmation, of seeking.

 

And, so we recognize it as truth when the author of dozens of pages of psalms admits ‘it is quite dangerous to speak so much about God,” and yet exclaims ‘You allotted me too much happiness, my God!’ And we of course think of G.M. Hopkins exclaiming “(my God!) my God” and remember Kafka’s “all language is but a poor translation.” But the poet struggles on, as “the one who wanted to understand too much, say: here is a man.”

 

Argument with another, Yeats taught us, is rhetoric, while argument with one’s self is poetry. And we see this clearly when the author of this book, after much struggle, exclaims: “Like a sailor who cries out: Land! / There’s land! I shout: / Man! finally I’ve reached mankind!” And then, with even more clarity, we see how out of private struggle the lyric arrives: “Two of us: the throat and the voice to say so.” And we realize then that we are in the presence of a true spirit, as his talented translator Jennifer Grotz reminds us, with J. S. Mill, that “eloquence is heard. Poetry is what’s overheard.”

        Devotional poetry is the hardest to translate and Grotz’s brilliant and very honest introduction offers a rare glimpse into the struggles, the doubts and joys of this process, in a way that is both frank and refreshing—and raises the bar for anyone who attempts to translate, from any language.

A Note on Todd Swift’s When All My Disappointments Came at Once

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british poetry, todd swift, when all my disapointments came at once

by Ilya Kaminsky

 

“The highest criticism is the record of one’s own soul,” writes Oscar Wilde, and here in this book Todd Swift finds a way to give us a record which is both unpredictable and deeply comforting. How? Swift has found a tone that is smart and honest without being patronizing, he gives us an imaginative clarity that is both evocative and sustaining, in which we sense “the vibrancy of loss is violins.”

 

This is a book of portraits and voyages. You will find moving elegiac invocations of figures ranging from Delmore Schwartz to Snow Child.  Swift will take you on many trips to real world places such as St. John’s Wood hospital, St. Ives, Hammersmith Grove, as well as to various imaginary realms that are fascinating–“The land I’d wish to describe” Swift tells us, “contains beasts more delightful than art itself…how fortunate we are to live elsewhere.” And on another voyage we venture into “the past-clever home / for poets, when, inkhorn / Dry, their plain pure language / Has run out.” Then we find ourselves in a “New Country” watching  “ministries / swelling to a nation in some streets” and realizing that “light is always violent expansion.”

 

Swift’s tone possesses a certain knowledge, a certain vision. Of what sort? Of seeing a body that is “like a dancer, a mind like a jackal.” His acute awareness of his own mortality brings wisdom, yes. It also brings clarity to how, in our time, to use F.T. Prince’s phrase, “to love is terrible we prefer/the freedom of our crimes.” This too, is a record of one’s soul.

 

It is rare to find, in a chorus of contemporaries, a voice that speaks unsentimentally, but passionately–and of what matters. Todd Swift does this. I particularly loved here such pieces as “Michael Kohlahaas,” “Azoospermia,” “St. Peter and St. Paul,” “Love or Poetry,” “Pont D’Avignon,” “August 1982, Lac Bridgen.” If you have only a few minutes, read the piece called  “God has left us like a girl in a bookstore” and you will want to buy this book.

A Note on Sylva Fischerova

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czech poetry, eastern european poetry, sylva fisherova

by Ilya Kaminsky

Sylva Fischerova is a poet like no other. What does that mean? It means that here we have a poet who “lives with the dead,” who “finishes their gestures” and raves and dances and loves in a large way, with both arms open. But she also whispers, conjures, casts a spell.

 

She speaks of fate, but not “as in Greek tragedy / where you carry it inside / where it’s written in your eyes.” Her fate is “like rain: a branch fallen, / right in front of you, / pointing to the graveyard.” This is a voice that speaks without patronizing, that knows of mystery but admits that “in the last room, / the soul tied up in a password,/ which I’m not gonna tell you –”. This refusal to say, with all its warmth, love, verbal skill, aplomb, and fireworks of the highest order, is wisdom.

 

She is not just one of the most important European poets alive, she is also one of the few European poets who is great fun to read, without compromising the truth, without selling out the magic. She entertains in the old way, still teaching the lesson. Her phrases are both utterly playful and utterly instructive: “what the Greeks / died in admiration of, /all these are statues./ They can’t eat spinach. Can’t see/ how you, before the mirror, / try to find yourself, / the inside of your statue.”

 

Fisherova teaches me something new each time I open her books. This is a poet to live with.