Shearsman 61: Short Reviews (3)

Shearsman 61

Tony Frazer

Short Reviews (3)

Andy Brown (ed): Binary Myths 1 & 2 (Stride, Exeter, 2004. 176pp, paperback, £10. ISBN 1-900152-96-7). This volume brings together two separate volumes which are now out of print, all in Stride's handsome new house-style. It's good that they are back because there are a number of enlightening interviews here — and sometimes enlightening for the wrong reasons. There's more than one smug interviewee here who needs a good kicking behind the editorial office, but perhaps it's better to let them shoot themselves in the foot as they do here. Which is not to say that there aren't interviews here that shine a light into welcome corners: there are indeed — David Kennedy, John Burnside, Sarah Maguire, the late Michael Donaghy, Tim Allen, Peter Finch and Rupert Loydell all come up with stimulating material. There are others still who are intermittently interesting and, ahem, a couple — who shall remain nameless — who proved they were full of nothing but hot air or more solid substances. A revealing book.

Catherine Wagner: Macular Hole (Fence Books, New York, 2004. 64pp, paperback, $12. ISBN 0-9740909-1-3); Imitating (Leafe Press, Nottingham, 2004. 28pp, chapbook, £3.50 / $8. ISBN 0-9535401-1-1)

Catherine Wagner is a relatively new voice on the US poetry scene, based in Boise, Idaho, but originally from the east coast. Her poetry is startlingly different from other things out there: there is a powerful voice here demanding to be heard and saying quite extraordinary things. There's a real world in these poems, but the poet's perceptions reveal it to be full of surprises, contradictions, and surreality.

I'm not stupidly assailed by the moonlight
I'm an example, an experimental

Attempt to assess how a kid of my talents
Responds when she's given the life that I was

(from 'I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake' in Macular Hole)

His father fed him from a bottle and I fed him from a fat skin flask.
My blood made blood and his blood made blood to fill him.
He was bigger and his bag packed peach. I he looked around.
He sucked, which looks like chewing on my breast.
More me was available. He loved it. More him too, he looked upon his head of glass.
Then the water was too flashy with reflection. Saltwater from his eyes of glass.
Scull on the river upside down and right side up.

(from 'For you everywhere Phoebus the fields of song are laid out' in Macular Hole)

I should explain that the latter quote is the ending of the poem and that the scull in the final line refers back to 'rowers' at the beginning of the poem. There are a number of poems here that concern pregnancy, childbirth and the aftermath, which is fair enough since the poet was delivered of a child about a year ago or so. What's different is the way this experience has metamorphosed into poetry — the imagery is really quite startling. It's not too often that one come across an original voice like this, and it's really a rather exciting, and liberating experience. Ms Wagner is a name to watch.

Elsa Cross: El vino de las cosas (Conaculta, Mexico City, 2004. 87pp, pb, MXP 80).

Elsa Cross is one of the most exciting contemporary Mexican poets and is also a Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Religion in Mexico City. Her most recent book, El vino de las cosas, is a collection of dithyrambs in honour of Dionysos, the third part of a trilogy composed as a lyric vision of antiquity (the first two parts being Los sueños and Ultramar). This book further demonstrates the power of her work and is essential for any collection of contemporary Latin American poetry, let alone Mexican. Here's a snippet from part 2 of 'Las hijas del viento' (Daughters of the Wind):

Serpentean en la hierba
devanan suaves
sus marañas
sisean
entre las siemprevivas

It's a splendid collection and, like the rfest of her work, should be part of any library of contemporary Latin American — or, for that matter Hispanophone — writing.

Friederike Mayröcker: Gesammelte Gedichte (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 2004. ISBN 3-518-41631-6. Hardcover, 856pp, €28.90).

To coincide with the author's 80th birthday, Suhrkamp have just recently issued this huge Collected, which is just what we needed. It brings all the long-lost volumes back into print in a smart hardback edition at a very reasonable price, and tosses in over a hundred uncollected poems as well. This is a little like the Carcanet collected Raworth in the UK: a wonderful surprise, and a long-awaited event. I can't pretend to have done more than dip into the book yet (it only appeared in mid-December 2004), but it's a treasure-trove. I guess the question would have to be "why did it take so long?", but I don't want to be too churlish — this is the most important collection of German poetry to have appeared in years. Bar none. An essential book.

Evelyn Schlag: Selected Poems (translated by Karen Leeder, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2004. 210x135mm, paperback, 168pp, £9.95. ISBN 1-85754-652-0)
Carcanet has an enterprising translation list, and this volume was a welcome surprise, given that hardly any living German-language poets get published in the UK, barring the inevitable Grass and Enzensberger. Evelyn Schlag is Austrian, in her early 50s, also a novelist, and has a solid reputation in what might be called the Austrian mainstream. (Though at times it seems that the Austrian experimentalists are the mainstream... given the startling number of fine innovative poets at work in Vienna alone.) Looking in from the outside, as it were, I find Ms Schlag's introduction fascinating: she name-checks a number of poets who have been central for my engagement with German poetry (Celan, Eich, Aichinger) along with a couple I can't get along with (Rilke, Enzensberger), but at the same time lists British and American names that don't seem to sit well with any of these: Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop. I admire Bishop's work but have had problems with the other two. Perhaps these figures offered something that's not present in contemporary German verse and that's what attracted her.

The book begins with her most recent work, the 27-poem sequence 'Summer Elegies', which at times sounds like the work of a British poet, but then doesn't — there's something about the tone here, a rather affecting and, yes, elegiac tone that British poets find hard to bring off these days:

For hours before the moon came up I stood
Alone scanning the garden to see you appear
Leaning against a tree or moving aside
A bramble with two fingers holding the leaf

I listened for your voice but the air
Was empty letting everything else crowd in
I had music in me sorrow sleep
Longed for the return of an apparition

(From Summer Elegies XVII)

The poems that I find most successful in this book are those which are least like current British mainstream verse, which is obviously my problem, rather than the author's. Over the past several years I have seen so many mild-mannered anecdotal poems, dominated by the authorial first person, that I now find this kind of thing hard to read in any language. Indeed my instant preference is for a poem with the I fully absent, or at least elided. The I is nearly always present in Evelyn Schlag's poetry; there is no doubt that we are sharing her perceptions, that we are being allowed a glimpse through her eyes, and there are many places here where that makes me uncomfortable. I tend to prefer a more assertive kind of poem, or, alternatively (and oddly) a more effaced authorial presence where the language becomes a protagonist rather than an actor. Fortunately, Ms Schlag avoids too much repetition of style, and I find the longer poems here distinctly impressive. 'The Married Couple's Sarcophagus in the Museo Etrusco, Villa Giulia, Rome' starts off as one of those descriptive pieces about art, which all too often fail, but that is mere sleight-of-hand in this case, as the poem moves into speculation and reverie, into meditation, and comes off spectacularly well in Karen Leeder's version. In fact the key to the book's overall success is the sheer consistency, accuracy and good judgement shown by the translator throughout the book. The poems read like English poems and there has been no disruption of the originals in order to achieve that. Despite some minor caveats, which are rather personal issues of my own, this is a fine book and serves to introduce an interesting poet to a new public. Well done, Carcanet, and Ms Leeder.

Lutz Seiler: Sonntags dachte ich an Gott (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 2004. ISBN 3-518-12314-9. Paperback, 150pp, €9).
I think very highly of Seiler's poetry and his two Suhrkamp collections have pride of place on my shelves. He's less interesting as a prose-writer, but these essays have the great virtue of filling in some of the background to his poetic endeavours and, as such, are invaluable.
Anja Utler: münden - entzüngeln (Edition Korrespondenzen, Vienna, 2004. ISBN 3-902113-33-2. Hardcover, 190x140mm, 91pp, €17.40).
A beautifully-produced slim volume of extraordinary verse from a very talented young writer. Anja Utler won the Leonce-und-Lena Prize in 2003, awarded to the best young poet under the age of 35. It's astounding, from a British perspective, that such experimental, hard-edged work should even be in the running, let alone be able to win the prize. This volume is her first full-scale collection, and is full of her trademark explorations of language. Although German, she actually lives in Vienna, spiritual home of the German (-language) poetic avant-garde, and one could make all kinds of assumptions about influences in that quarter as well as, perhaps, from Thomas Kling, doyen of the new-wave experimentalists in Germany itself. I first came across her work last year when asked to translate a poem-cycle called 'marsyas' (included here) for a bilingual Australian anthology. I don't think I've ever had a harder time translating a poem, but the process was most enlightening and quite fun. It's good to learn like this. While some aspects of the poem defied translation (puns on the names for parts of a plant and parts of the human body: identical—or nearly so—in German but utterly different in English), others were achievable — assonance and alliteration, for instance, where German and English can approach one another far better than, say, English and a Romance language. Some of the author's fascination with the nuts and bolts of language obviously have their history in her studies — she has a doctorate in Russian 20th century women's poetry and a background in linguistics — but she's turned this into much more than an intellectual game. It's unusual to see a German poet abandon syntax in favour of fragmentation, but Anja Utler's poetry is boiled down to the most vital of nuts and bolts, all excess verbiage expunged:

wie entledigt sein

steht – stehn – durchronnen nicht, nicht
mal durchschwammt das: geschützte gewebe
gelehnt gegen kalkfels geländer gestemmt
richtung: einfassung – wissen das: stürzt
nicht das: fällt ihm nicht zu – diesem becken
wos: staut sich – gesperrt – schlackt, es weiß
auch die kiefern nicht die: sich entlegen, im
wasserstress – krümmen, entlassen sich
samen: ins eigene, schwappende bild
zielen weit: an den augen vorbei

[ part IV of 'die eins zu sein scheinen: stückweite auslösung (zweite begegnung)' ]
It's an astonishing work for a young poet, startlingly assured in the way that it bores down into the language and allows the language itself to become an actor in the unfolding of the poem's 'story', rather than simply an accomplice.
Zwischen den Zeilen 23, October 2004 issue, edited by Urs Engeler, 329pp, paperback, €17. ISSN 1022-002X; SBN 3-905591-74-X. Dorfstrasse 33, CH-4057 Basel, Switzerland. Website here.
ZdZ is one of the German-language journals that one just has to take very seriously. Like the Engeler press which publishes it, the journal is full of stimulating work, often operating at the boundaries of current poetics. This issue concerns itself with translation and things Italian and French: Leopardi, Stampa, Mallarmé, Ronsard for instance, My favourite piece in the whole book is Oskar Pastior's engagement with Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, the troubadour, which is a kind of Zukofskyan translation — that is to say, a sound-transposition rather than a lexical reading. This is exactly the kind of thing that Pastior does so well. I wish we had such a journal here in Britain, but we don't, alas.