I feel confident that I’ve missed some, what with too much time passing, my hard drive seizing up and my spread sheet having to be retrieved from an older back up however as books resurface I can add them.
- Eight Million Gods by Wen Spencer (Baen, 2013)
I like every Wen Spencer novel and I think I only missed one. Hooked forward with a pantheon of gods and semi-earthly creatures, there’s a plot of young women with hyperglossia which her grandmother was institutionalized for. A need to write so strong that if there’s a bottling up with no outlet, she’ll write with her own blood. In all the chaos each female character has her own personality, personal history and in-road to solving the puzzle of wth is going on. - puck bruise bloom black by Brea Burton (Jack Pine, 2014)
A thick chapbook with vivid language. At first it seemed any given line was staccato but put all together it builds a picture in language of rough and tumble in action movement that fits the body check scene on the rink. Form a bit of one,Smitty says never apologize,
never say sorry when you hit somone
hard ice this dance
romance of fists & love taps
let’s hug it out bitch
the steps—
push me & I push
backQuick tussles of sound, non-serif font, hockey taped cover edges, rhythm and vocabulary, it all coheres perfectly to take you to place of being in hockey. Many sports books read as if for fans of remember when this occurred and most of it doesn’t make it to the page for a non-fan. This by picking language and the sounds in it, sentence structures, it all skates together.
- Yusef and the Lotus Flower by Doyali Farah Islam (Buschek, 2011)
A lot of attention to beauty such as p. 64, “flute-hole that no longer knows its note to sing,/held by melodic bars within” or p 52, “longing constricts the vessel of self/until self becomes a seed”. Gentle care-built poems travelling the ZamZam well to Vishnu to yoga meditations.
- An Unexpurgated Translation of Book of Songs: translated, versified and annotated by Xu Yuanzhong (Panda Books, 1994)
It must have been a lot of work. So many poems, all kept to some rhyme form. It reads like 1800s despite being contemporary because of word choice such as a poem in which torches are lit around the palace walls to call the princes and top men to crack of dawn council on the war, but what is lit in the clarification footnote to torch, are faggots. Some word order is convoluted for rhyme as if that era.
The footnotes are wonderfully rich in detail but the tone control means that I have to check the notes to see if it was satire, or straight-up or a song of mourning or a drinking song, which is unfortunately. Still some things come through and you get a taste for the various eras represented. I can see the logic of various translators doing the poems so different voices and tones come across. After reading 6 or 8 pages I can see past the rhyme to the content each time. Although as rhyme goes, it doesn’t feel like predictable bad verse but reasonably good. Surprising number of poems of hunting and feasting. Also striking were the number of poems of waves of famine and waves of war. The first book was my favourite of songs of peasant life, navigating the seasons. This is from a later book,
- The Zurich Axions: The Rules of Risk and Reward used by generations of swiss bankers by Max Gunther (Harriman House, 2004)
This was a fascinating read of principles that apply as well to life as to finances. The goal is to invest better, to take off the nonsense that putting money in a bank isn’t a gamble as any use of money. You have to know when to quit, have that point pre-decided. A strategy, say the investment went down 15%, you pull out. If you are putting money in, you will go to a pre-chosen limit, even if profit if still rising. You can reward yourself with something symbolic for feeling badly about pulling out too early. Yes, it might still double but it might crash any time and better to get out early. When the ship goes down, praying won’t help. Getting off will. - For the Living and the Dead, by Tomas Transtromer trans by Don Coles (Buschek, 1996)
It’s been a while since I re-read this one. They are dense poems, some dark. It is a pleasure to see the poems against the facing page of the original language even if I can’t pronounce it well let alone translate myself. Here’s a poem of his from there that I opened with at VERSeFest, thanks to Arc recording it. - dog sleeps: irritated texts by Monty Reid, (NeWest, 1993)
Although a while back it still sways like a Reid book, unexpected turns in a clear scene. On speaking of caves with ancient native paintings, observes that there’s “no habitable space in the rock, only outside it”. Even when you’re in the cave, you’re outside its skin even if inward skin of stone. Not pure surface anecdote, but some note of transcendent, and something pondering significance. Of a woman on the bus offering or requesting something unspoken on the bus, what to make of yourself or the other. “how would one represent an idea of oneself, a card with HANDICAPPED on it? […] distance destroys plot”
Three whole sections I had to read aloud to the hubby. One on a blizzard is scattered over the page like large flakes. Some are tight prose. Some are humourous such as memories of a dog as panty-eater. - dark archive by Laura Mullen (University of California Press, 2011)
I got Dark Archive when it came out and it got lost in the shelves from time to time. I made a burst at finishing it last fall, and it fell by the wayside again but the second half revs at a higher speed than the first. It meditates around agency. “lonely as a cloud” presents itself as lone poet in the world, made famous by a male poet but it was coined by his sister, who was there too, as they did a whole family walk through the scene but how did currency go to the brother in the end? she remixes the poem and its ideas, sifting it with their lives, her life, clouds, weather, the life of her aunt, grief and other less linear bits of the mind. It is diaphanous except in cloud breaks where we’re asked what we own of what becomes a public tragedy of a person murdered. In Message, p. 98 some interesting accumulation in language and ideas,
- Paper Radio by Damian Rogers (ecw, 2009)
There’s a new book out that I’ve yet to get but this was a good read. Maybe I went too gulpetty fast. But it was a pleasure and the poems themselves move quickly. Some lovely pieces in there including Prayer Lesson that have a startling clarity “Open me like a hatchback./Empty me of all these rain-beaten scissors./Fill me with the light of your basement.”
An antidote to all the poems written again as blandly as previous iterations, this fresh set of images, intercut and dissonant yet fitting. Here’s a favourite from it, p 98, In the Back of a Cab, a lovely moment of between that you want never to end.
- Uncle Tom’ Cabin by Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (1852)
You can get the translation in various places and forms but what a ride of a story. Or rather stories since it follows a few individuals. Quoting from news of the day, songs, Bible, sourcing stories, the people are vivid. It is a treatise on human rights and human potential for good and clearly wrong. Not content with thumbnails of outcome, there’s the motivation out personal histories of people. One with a virtuous mom picked up the kindness, not the religion. Another with a similar mom was driven to superstition, violence, weak-minded paranoia. The characters are complex. Even the Quakers are not depicted as one spirit, but a man who married in has some of the speech and cultural habits but moves differently and shoves a man off a cliff, then, in human kindness brings the broken body of the slave hunter to be mended, and at the end of the convalescence of week, turns to hunting for fur not people. There’s no typical hero’s journey as some die before success. Some get to Liberia. One thing pointed out in the text is marking out the bodies of the free vs. owned people, how some slaves were fair and some slave drivers had dark eyes and hair. The very arbitrariness was called out. The back story of one woman. An owner married a young woman in the north for love and had children then died and had never written out the freedom papers so upper class raised kids, now adults, fluent in piano and a few languages were on the block in New Orleans with anyone of any birth. “Sold down river” has had a peculiar journey to one criminal selling out another out for getting leniency of cooperation in court when it used to be from the slave trade. - 300 Selected Poems of the Tang Dynasty by Chiang Yee/Jiang Yi
Vivid tight translations of poems. They seem contemporary from poems of monks wandering to people in battle to social criticism of the concubine of the the leader to poems of longing and separation of couples, a fascinating read. The choice each translator makes for a set is remarkably different. Common are mulberry bushes, travelling o horses and pain of duty to state vs duty to home vs duty to family, but there’s a keen detail or a flattening out in some translations, perhaps some attending to songs of praise and court drinking songs that are more public, thus more general and exaggerated. Quiet private poems are more picked out in the this set. For example from Zhang HuIf one in the forbidden city
When the moonlight, reaching a tree by the gate
Shows her a quiet bird on its nest,
She removes her jade hairpins and sits in the shadow
And put out a flame where a moth was flying.Two more. One from Li Pin
Crossing the Han River
Away from home, I was longing for news
Winter after winter, spring after spring.
Now, nearing my village, meeting people,
I dare not ask a single question.
Compare this translation with the one in Poems of the Late T’ang trans by AC Graham, (Penguin Classics, 1965):
- abecedarium by Dennis Cooley (University of Alberta press, 2014)
Just a romp. A delight of disintegration. Taking w or
ds apart, lines, split
tingtingtingling. Such utter fun to read. Aloud is a whole other business. Surprised he found ones that could follow a stream aloud to read at VERSeFest. Sometimes words make sense and sometimes they make sound. The typographer/typesetter either loved putting this together or must have pulled out hair over spacing and font changing. Like John Barlow’s poetry, why, just why should we use one font? A word might look better and more itself in OKAY CORRAL. And why apostrophes? We can read id as well as I’d in context. There are point-note essays of history of type scattered through and why not. If poetry is about ideas, let ideas take a logical form. a log i calcu late later marks itself as whose timbermill.
A Slip of the Pen flickflacks back at the unchallenged assumption of poetry as solemn-only zone.
Through the poems he looks like he’s having an awful good time. If words or cliché phrases stick, let them loop until they fly off like muck in the tread of a spun tire making a glorious spatter. p. 28.
- Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle (WavePoetry, 2012)
This was a daybook of quotes in part. Some earnest, some self-effacing, some comic. A lot of heavy marginalia dotting of this, that, that. I was glad to see her outrage against Billy Collins creepy book title of undressing Emily Dickinson. And pointing out that he is not even up to his virgin-ruining aspirations since he doesn’t know clothes button front not back.
I liked 2nd half better. It’s quite a crash course in literature with heavy use quotes which don’t necessarily hold together towards a point, such as Borges picking up some sand in the Sahara and dropping it further along “modifying the Sahara”, or Milosz saying “the purpose of poetry is to remind us/how difficult it is to remain one person.”
They are essays in the sense of journeys and trying on ideas. To stimulate more ideas. p 260Short Lecture on the Nature of Thing
(Turn vase into a hat and wear it)
You think the vase has become a hat; it has not.
My body has become an upside-down flower.Glad I bought it. People who called it game changer, mind-blowing may state things in higher wattage terms than me but a worthwhile read and one I expect I’ll dip back to.