Poetry Microreviews
Drunk from the Bitter Truth:
The Poems of Anna Margolin
translated by Shirley Kumove
State University of
New York Press, $30
Drunk from the Bitter Truth
is the first English translation of the Yiddish poet Anna Margolin’s
single volume, Lider (Poems), published in 1929.
Margolin was mysterious in her own time: early on, many in the
literary intelligentsia thought a man was hiding behind her name.
Although she lived and worked in New York in the midst of a Yiddish
cultural explosion—by 1915, there were five Yiddish daily
newspapers, with a combined circulation of half a million—she
chose to remain an outsider. Most Yiddish-language poets were
then writing in traditional forms, but Margolin declared that
she was “insulted by the mechanical precision of the conventional
rhyme.” Thus her poems are sensual, jarring, plainspoken,
and hard, the record of a soul in direct contact with the streets
of 1920s New York, where days are “holy and yellowed, /
like the verses in an old prayer book,” and the sun “spreads
on high / bridges of roses, bridges of smoke.” But while
the poet is immersed in the material world, she longs for something
beyond it, telling us, “My days take root in stones. . .
. But the blueness above them / is altogether more ethereal, purer.”
Indeed, the gulf that separates the material world from a spirit,
or transcendent, level dominates many of these poems, as we see
in “Discontented”: “Swung back and forth today
on the El strap / to the rhythm of worn-out Jews. . . . Perhaps
I would not be so disheartened / if I didn’t dream of poems.”
And in the haunting “Years,” Margolin describes a
reckoning between daily life and ultimate mystery: “Like
women well loved yet still not sated, / going through life with
laughter and rage . . . that’s how the years were. . . .
See how submissive they are now, my God, / struck dumb as a shattered
piano, / taking each blow and taunt like a caress, / seeking You,
yet not believing in You.” It is the reader’s good
fortune that Margolin didn’t merely dream of poems. In this
powerful collection, we are afforded a glimpse into a recklessly
original mind, knee-deep in muck but scouting for divinity.
—J.D. Nordell
Shake
Joshua Beckman
Wave Books, $12 (paper)
“The glass box in which the lettuce grew / was broken by nasty racoons / and we turned the other cheek,” reports Joshua Beckman. “No incredible silence, no / intangible calorie, just / bad racoon in a good world.” The notion of the world as good finds itself under investigation in Shake, Beckman’s fourth solo collection, as the poet tracks discernable signs that “people, all at once, can be kind and thoughtful.” In the title sequence that opens the book, human gesture occasionally transcends mere decency in order to become tender, even beautiful: “Countries fill their countrysides / with sheep so that their countrysides / can be nibbled upon—everyone’s trying.” In “Let the People Die,” the skillful sonnet sequence at the center of Shake, syntax is indeed “shaken,” rearranged, reworked. If syntax is an act of faith, then “Let the People Die” doesn’t so much arrive at belief as circumnavigate it, doesn’t so much testify as hoard: “The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. / I’m sad, I make horrible sentences. / A woman alone in the park waves. The water. / The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett.” Shake’s third and final section, the meditative sequence “New Haven,” shows Beckman as a Whitmanesque cataloguer of experience, charting both the psychic and the physical space we move through at the end of empire, “The flat world of borrowed things / and the banging of everything that is heavy / into everything else.” Beckman confesses that “To collect of things is all I ever know,” but this isn’t a declaration of acquisitiveness so much as a statement of poetic vocation, suggesting something akin to Rilke’s proposition that “Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window.”
“Somewhere a willow sways above a pool,” Shake concludes. “Here is the pool. / Here is where the willow will go.” The world as Beckman sees it is as good as we make it—the tending is the point—and we are lucky to have him in our garden.
—Kerri Webster
On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay
Robert Creeley
University
of California Press, $20 (cloth)
When he died on March 30, 2005, at the age of 78, Robert Creeley left a group of poems in a black folder on top of his desk. Collected now in On Earth, this work reveals a journeyman poet writing with unparalleled clarity as he approached that most private of possible thresholds—the end of a sorely loved life. As the culmination of Creeley’s lifelong practice—exacting a syntax responsible to the cadences of natural speech and true to the movements of thought—On Earth looks back through the prism of specific memories and upon the mystery of memory itself. The prevalence of rhyme and the traces of meter in his late style signal a return to the pleasures of childhood song, though Creeley’s is surely not a gratuitous music: the sweetness and light of these last poems was earned in the darkness of the proverbial cave, where one removes oneself from the glare of experience (a long poem explores the caves of Dordogne) in order to come to appropriate terms: “Sun on the edges of leaves / patterns of absent pleasure.” What one realizes in reading On Earth is how personal the writing is and has always been. The essay “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” included at the end of the book, is a deeply moving portrait, not just of an elderly Walt Whitman but also of its author: “In age one is oneself reflective, both of what it has been to live and of what that act has become as a resonance.” Tendering many such insightful moments, On Earth comes to us as the final say of a poet who always spoke with heart-rending accuracy at the edges of the sayable—a writer whose most telling word would appear to be “here.”
—Zack Finch
The Incentive of the Maggot
Ron Slate
Mariner
Books, $12 (paper)
After a poetic dormancy of more than 20 years, Ron Slate has gifted us with the product of his creative suspension, a slim first volume of poetry. In one of his more self-referential poems, Slate remarks, “Once I fumed at my own silence, / incapable of employing it. / Now I produce the unexpected sound / of something tangled in your hedge / after a wild tide.” In contrast to the roar of oceans and economies, the technologies and information transfers that form the background of much of his work, Slate’s own voice is understated and, as he tells us, “in no hurry.” A poet-turned-businessman-turned-poet, he chooses words less for their surprise than for their precision. And yet Slate is in command of a varied tonal repertoire. He is at times caustic, as in “The Plan for Cyprus,” which imagines an orchestra assembled to play in the island’s neutral zone to move an audience of international luminaries “beyond the political”: “The logo of our sponsor will snap / in the wind above the stage. / To marvel at our mission / is to salute the courage of commerce.” Or he can be thoughtful, as in “Turbulent Ferry, Evening,” a meditation on labor and leisure: “To ease into the slip / so many times in a lifetime / that the act becomes imponderable. / So ingrained in its restraint / like a future saint moving into marble.” Slate carries off both effects equally well, with a studied distance and an elegance of idiom reminiscent of Mark Strand. In the book’s title poem, a young nurse examines gangrene: “She may feel contempt for a journalist’s catalogue / of atrocities, genitals beaten with a ruler. / Not because they are not actual, / but because someone looked and discovered nothing.” This ethic is Slate’s own, refusing “to use grief for the purpose of edification” or even for art, and these poems are the better for it.
—Susan Barba
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems
Noelle Kocot
Wave
Books, $12 (paper)
In her third book of poems, Noelle Kocot writes that “irony is the most wounded bird of all” and almost entirely declines its sour consolations, suggesting that ironic detachment, contemporary poetry’s usual hedge against emotional vulnerability, may have nothing to say about great loss. The losses in Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems are both personal—the long title poem is dedicated to the poet’s late husband—and collective, global, and historical. Although pain is often their point of departure, these poems don’t wallow; instead, they gamble on the hope that “our collective sadness is buzzing with opportunity.” In the title poem, which occupies the second half of the book, Kocot invokes the romantic exuberance of Crane and Whitman by celebrating Brooklyn, her birthplace and—per tradition—a figure for America as a whole. The poem connects country, borough, and marriage not through direct analogy but through a continuous verbal and emotional intensity. As the poem refuses the crutch of detachment, it also wards off a conversational tone by repeating a kind of ostinato—the phrase “my neighborhood” at the ends of successive lines, where it places emphasis on significant moments: “I am speaking this poem as I’m writing it my neighborhood / People are walking by wondering what I’m doing my neighborhood / When they ask I ask them to bless me my neighborhood.” The neighborhood suggests a site for the meeting of the individual and the collective, the stable and the mutable; it pulses under and unites the poem’s many tonal and allusive registers. Kocot’s poems are songs rather than stories. Both “Poem for the End of Time” and the wrenching and imagistic short lyrics of the book’s first half risk everything on the hope that a reader will accept their invitation to a heightened emotional state, an invitation that this book’s wit and beauty reward.
—Sarah Cohen
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