Return to Archive Index

Number 287 April May 2001 New & Noted RICHARD SILBERG Copyright © 2001 Poetry Flash Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan translated by John Felstiner W.W. Norton, New York, 2000 The Ghost Openings by Sheryl Noethe Grace Court Press, New York, 2000 r s 1 Isolato by Larissa Szporluk University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2000 Nightworks, Poems 1962--2000 by Marvin Bell Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 2000 Blessing the Boats, New and Selected Poems 1988--2000 by Lucille Clifton BOA Editions, Ltd., Rochester, New York, 2000 r s 1 Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner, W.W. Norton, New York, 2000, 426 pages, $29.95 cloth. DIE POSAUNENSTELLE tief im glühenden Leertext, in Fackelhöhe, im Zeitloch: hör dich ein mit dem Mund. THE SHOFAR PLACE deep in the glowing text-void, at torch height, in the timehole: hear deep in with your mouth. (pages 360--361) Paul Celan was born in 1920 to German-speaking Jews in the Romanian province of Bukovina; he committed suicide in Paris in 1970 by jumping into the Seine. In an overnight raid in 1942 the Nazis picked his parents up and took them east to camps where they were shot; Celan spent nineteen months of forced labor in Romania. He went on to become the greatest poet of the Holocaust, his poem "Todesfuge" or "Deathfugue" the most often quoted lamentation of that midnight time. While Todesfuge could be described as a lyric, musical as its title implies, a slant, elliptical narration, his poetry turned increasingly spare, transpersonal, soundings among the stones of language. Celan touches on this himself in his speech on receiving the literature prize from the city of Bremen, included in a brief selection of prose at the end of the book: "Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, 'enriched' by all this." (page 395) Ironies, frequently touched on, hang over this writing: Adorno's famous pronouncement that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, which we might say Celan's life's work disproved, but barely, and then the irony of that language itself. Celan, who had mastered six, wrote in his 'mother tongue', German, which was also the "deathbringing" language, the speech of his parents' murderers. John Felstiner, the translator, has steeped himself in, been obsessed with, Celan, and in this book he's brought off a superb double impossibility, that of translation in general, the very art of loss, and then this particular translation, his deeply nerved rendering of an impossible poetry. The two poems quoted are late works, published posthumously in Zeitgehöft or Homestead of Time, 1976. REBLEUTE graben die dunkelstündige Uhr um, Tiefe um Tiefe, du liest, es fordert der Unsichtbare den Wind in die Schranken, du liest, die Offenen tragen den Stein hinterm Aug, der erkennt dich, am Sabbath. VINEGROWERS dig up the dark-houred clock, deep upon deep, you read, the Invisible summons the wind into bounds, you read, the Open ones carry the stone behind their eye, it knows you, come the Sabbath. (pages 376--377) Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

The Ghost Openings, by Sheryl Noethe, Grace Court Press, New York, 2000, 93 pages, $12.95 paper. I'm impressed by the voluptuous imagination, the energy and passion of this book: "This is the loneliness of my brother. / Today I saw a woman sitting alone laughing at what she held in her / glass. / My brother laughs behind a closed door alone in a room. / This is the loneliness of my brother. I dreamt we quarreled. / I picked him up and beat him against a brick wall until all that was left / was a pair of pants. / This, too, is the loneliness of my brother. I dreamt he was a boy, drunk, / laughing and stumbling against me. I held him in my hands. He became / a rabbit made of ice." ("The Loneliness of My Brother") The Ghost Openings is a sack jammed full, writhing, with life stories: She borrowed a cop's car and threw it from forward to reverse, smashing cars in front of and behind her. She turned on the siren and red light. We stood on our front lawns and watched her, the antics of her boyfriend the policeman as he ran alongside his car. She was a ball. We were all of us afraid of her. In treatment, she was smarter than the doctors. Funnier, too, she could wrap her gaze around a man and make him blind. She liked danger, men who could spin basketballs on their fingers. Then she married the banker. Once in a while she ran away. She and her daughter dated together. Her daughter's boyfriend went to jail. The banker bought her more dogs, then birds; huge cages of intelligent blue parrots with eighty-year lifespans. The big dogs moved outside. The daughter's lover got out of prison and she moved back in with him. The grandson tore all the heads off of his toys. ("An Attempt to Describe Beatrice," pages 43-44) The nerve and impulsiveness of that story poem, only a sliver of which vibrates in the section I've quoted, runs not only in the character of Beatrice, but through Noethe's writing as well. Here's the ending of the poem "Fjords," with the anaphora phrase, "my people…" and the theme of depression, alcohol, hypersensitivity: "My people keep secrets at the cost of coherence. / Tell them something personal, or embarrassing, / they look away, nod, say, Uh Huh. // That's all. Came home one winter night to grandpa / in the kitchen standing at a slant. He named each object / with his finger: peaches, potato, hot water and bread. // A can of beer fell from his pants and pulsed onto the floor. / My people sleep too deeply to awaken. Lie on the couch / drinking whiskey from a Pepsi can, escaping religion and poverty. // I am a realist. I believe in destiny. The world is feudal. / Futile. Foetal. Fatal. Brutal. Total. Half finished." Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Isolato, by Larissa Szporluk, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2000, 58 pages, $10.95 paper. Co-winner of the 1999 Iowa Poetry Prize. It is dark inside the body, and wet, and double-hearted. There are so many ways to go, and not see, and lose the feeling of the thread, which was alleged to be invisible, and lose the man, the fast Athenian, to someone with less rootage, and never reach the fabled center, afraid that if you did, you would find the hybrid, not the hero, beautiful. (from "One Thousand Bullfrogs Rejoice") That's the way Isolato begins, mysterious, yet (literally) visceral, immediate. In contrast to Noethe, the writing is neither personal nor narrative; it's powered by language, language in itself and as enactment of spontaneous myth: "The moon makes my son go silent. / It sucks the fight from his mind, / leaving him hollow in my arms, / like a final piece of tunnel / diminished between lights. // I lose him to the brighter world; / the dark one vibrates with alarm, / as if the storm about to come / had sprung upon its axis. // Trees turn blue from drag; / leaves, like minnows, in reverse, / breaking for the shallows. / In human terms, in human terms, / their flesh is being stolen. / Long bone shadows slam into the ground." ("Mare Incognito") The reader has to give up logic, any firm footing in 'reality', and switch into dream gear, the beauty of moebius dream: "But there was nothing lucky / lurking in the wet interior, sucking up / the surface plenty, a dragon infant / cutting through the skin, the soft and fragrant fats, / to reach the sweet-and-sour source / of mother, her faintly yellow labor, / quashing her, like buttercups, this thing we know / as sinister, what had to be / a terminator, a counteractive force, / to keep momenta bound to what was tangible, / to hold them down, to stop / the temperatures from rising in the bloodstream / of a pair, a true desire / that would graduate to happiness / and absolutely sail." ("Mare Fecunditatis")   Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Nightworks, Poems 1962--2000, by Marvin Bell, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 2000, 284 pages, $28.00 cloth. Nightworks is a retrospective of Marvin Bell's work, a new and selected, to be fully accurate, of a poet well known in American poetry circles, but probably not well known enough. Bell is innovative, but not splashy, not with the formal tail fins and chrome that would announce his membership in one avant-garde movement or another. In fact, his poetry is subtle, muted, non-splashy, in what would seem a principled way. Here's the opening of a short poem from his 1990 book The Iris of Creation; the poem's title, "He Had a Good Year," functions also as a first line: "while he was going blind. Autumnal light / gave to ordinary things the turning / beauty of leaves, rich with their losing. / A shade of yellow, that once stood opaque / in the rainbow of each glitzy morning, / now became translucent, as if the sun / broke against his own window. As for white, / it was now too much of everything, / as the flat deprivations of the color black / moved farther away: echoes of a surface / unseen and misremembered.…" Obvious beauty there, the tone quiet with a touch of the vernacular in that "glitzy," even in the title. The subject is clear, the "autumnal" riches of loss. But is this a 'realistic' poem? How, for instance, could a surface be both "unseen and misremembered"? Is it a self-reflexive poem, then, about its own writing processes? But isn't there a sad, gorgeous truth in the lines, a human rightness we judge and accede to? Bell provides his own 'answer' to this conundrum I'm spinning in the second part of a new poem, "Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man's Footsteps (#16)": I want to understand. It was a town where watermarks meant the moon. An island where the tides took men's lives. A quarry was our Grand Canyon. We lived for the end of the line, the tip of the peninsula, the deserted beach. And a girlfriend, we lived for someone to live for. So a book here and a book there, and then you're talking to yourself. I walked in the gas of the dead fish and the algae. I failed neatness and penmanship. I learned that language can think for itself. I needed to stop myself from thinking everything at once. I think Bell is writing for the halftones, the ambiguous area where language both grasps the world and slips off it. He has a mind both large and precise enough to doubledwell, to catch the flash in that slippage, each truth in each poem. Here's one more poem, atypical for its shortness, so I can quote it whole, another opportunity to see that mind and heart in action: To Dorothy You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly. You let a weed grow by the mulberry and a mulberry grow by the house. So close, in the personal quiet of a windy night, it brushes the wall and sweeps away the day till we sleep. A child said it, and it seemed true: "Things that are lost are all equal." But it isn't true. If I lost you, the air wouldn't move, nor the tree grow. Someone would pull the weed, my flower. The quiet wouldn't be yours. If I lost you, I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep. Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Blessing the Boats, New and Selected Poems 1988--2000, by Lucille Clifton, BOA Editions, Ltd., Rochester, New York, 2000, 132 pages, $25.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Winner of the National Book Award. poem to my uterus you uterus you have been patient as a sock while i have slippered into you my dead and living children now they want to cut you out stocking i will not need where i am going where am i going old girl without you uterus my bloody print my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire where can i go barefoot without you where can you go without me Blessing the Boats is another new and selected, but not a selection from her whole career; this is definitely a book of her aging, with a number of sickness and hospital poems. But though her body is aging, her spirit seems well, one of the biggest and most generous in American poetry. There are marvels and mysteries in Lucille Clifton's work, but very little ambiguity: Iorena it lay in my palm soft and trembled as a new bird and i thought about authority and how it always insisted on itself, how it was master of the man, how it measured him, never was ignored or denied and how it promised there would be sweetness if it was obeyed just like the saints do, like the angels, and i opened the window and held out my uncupped hand. i swear to god, i thought it could fly Now that poem is mysterious, at least to me---perhaps the reader knows what's in her hand. But there's no doubt about the poem's mode or meaning, its gestural center. Something's been broken; she wants to lift it up, give it flight. Clifton's is a poetry of solidity and amplitude. It doesn't offer much in the way of talking points. I could ask, for instance, why that amplitude is housed in such short lines and poems. But I already sense the answer, something about going to the core of things. And the answer doesn't really matter to me. I'm just glad for the power of her work. Glad that she's a big passionate boat that's still sailing: blessing the boats (at St. Mary's) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that Richard Silberg is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. His new book of poetry, Doubleness, is a part of the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press. Return to Top of Page • Archive Index