Poetry Chronicle
THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS
By W. S. Merwin.
Copper Canyon, $22.Nostalgia, grief, fear for our planet and a subdued resolve in the face of advancing years arrive together in the Hawaii-based Merwin’s 22nd collection of new poems, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. As in all of his verse since the late 1960s, Merwin does away with punctuation, letting line breaks and sense determine syntax and pace. The results suggest whispers, laments, accounts of long-ago memories, even voices from an underworld: “the dead are not separate from the living,” he says; “each has one foot in the unknown.” Looking back at old photographs and childhood houses, at horse pastures and “splintery unlit” schoolrooms, Merwin represents faint consolations, autumn and nightfall, and a parent’s dying words: “All day the stars watch from long ago / my mother said I am going now / when you are alone you will be all right.” Lines move forward almost ceremonially, confident in the simplicity of their diction, like “clear water revealing / no color but that of the gray / stone around it.” As he has before, Merwin writes gravely of species in peril, among them our own: endangered bats and departed songbirds “were singing of youth / not knowing that they were singing for us.” Yet most of the work in this capacious book considers not the earth’s mortality but Merwin’s own: poems shift from his first years to his most recent (he will turn 82 this September), from the helplessness of a young child to the profound resignations of old age.
ARCHICEMBALO
Poems.
By G. C. Waldrep.
Tupelo, paper, $16.95.Waldrep’s title denotes an antique keyboard instrument with 24, or many more, keys per octave. Notoriously hard to play, such instruments made subtle and challenging music, with notes a conventional score could not include. Waldrep’s sometimes bewildering, often exciting prose poems make their own unconventional music, replete with slippages, repetitions, suggestions: “Every sound is tropical, every sound is perishable,” he writes. “My aunt sends one wrapped in butcher paper & string.” Most poems take quizzical titles from musical terms (“What Is a Threnody,” “What Is a Motet”), and most take rhetorical gifts from Gertrude Stein; yet Waldrep’s poems, far more than Stein’s, revel in the variety of their subjects. Some include clear scenes and characters, as when the poet helps a boy cross a cold road: “we walked slowly, because he was not yet done with being five.” The poet also leavens his intricate compositions with self-consciously playful asides: “Nothing is what it appears to be, I say. To which you reply, yes it is.” Waldrep (who studied the labor movement for his Ph.D. in American history) attends to the meaning of work, to the hardships of lives unlike his own: “Who Was Scheherazade” begins “My job was to pick rocks.” Yet his great triumphs combine such outward sympathies with self-conscious attention to inward oddities, to fleeting thoughts, to the vectors of energy in abstract words: “If I subtract sacrifice from appetite from what fierce attention do I then compromise a strict union, have I faltered, have I made an argument for grace.”
TRYST
By Angie Estes.
Oberlin College, paper, $15.95.Gleeful and gorgeous, delighted by puns and other wordplay (including words from French, Latin and Italian), Estes’s fast-paced free verse, rich with internal rhyme, takes rightful pride in the beauties it flaunts and explains. Her fourth collection finds, for recurrent motifs, saints’ lives, medieval manuscripts, gold leaf and the alphabet: “hearts bloom / out of Ds like lamb chop sleeves / in the script of the fifteenth-century / scribe”; in a gilded Book of Hours, “the letters / have fallen out of the words and lie / scattered on the ground.” Each deft poem weaves together multiple topics — some art-historical, others autobiographical — through chains of homonyms and knotty analogies: “Take Cover” skates from the French “couvre feu, cover the fire” (the origin for our word “curfew”) to disheveled bedcovers and 1950s-style duck-and-cover drills. Though Estes revels in European reference (Dante, Trieste, Greta Garbo), her matchless hunger for experience makes her indelibly American: “how the tongue / keeps lapping the world’s / loot,” she exclaims, “even in the 499th lap / of the Indy 500.” The arts — from Cimabue’s painting to haute cuisine — are for Estes never mere luxuries; rather, the arts, and our pride in them, give us the only effective countermeasures to loneliness, helplessness and serious pain. And pain — remembered or feared — is always somewhere: “So Near Yet So Far” connects a lunar eclipse, a film starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, a concept from high-energy plasma physics and “the necklace / of pearls my father bought my mother / for their forty-fifth wedding / anniversary, which she made him / take back.”
SELECTED POEMS
By Eilean Ni Chuilleanain.
Edited by Peter Fallon.
Wake Forest University, paper, $12.95.Admired in Ireland since the 1970s, Ni Chuilleanain (pronounced knee QUILL-an-awn) deserves American attention too. Raised in the port city of Cork, drawn to visionary experience, yet alert to domestic and urban detail, she looks at once inward to things of the spirit and outward to coastlines, Continental Europe and an omnipresent sea. “Hurried exiles” disembark in Cork, “reach out for a door and find a banister, / Reach for a light and find their hands in water, / Their rooms all swamped by dreams”; the poet sees, in the grain of wooden furniture, “the long currents of a pale ocean / Softly turning itself inside out.” Poetry is for her an attitude, a kind of summoning, but also “another skill, as fine / As judging the set of milk for cheese, / A belief in the wisdom of a long view from one window.” Her visionary sentences favor soft consonants and muffled stops, without rhyme: their tones vary from celebratory to bitter, from the openly prayerful to the curtly appalled. Ni Chuilleanain’s Italy can get pious or touristy, but her Irish sites stay mysterious and credible. Poems on religious subjects pay homage to hermits, saints and nuns, sometimes with feminist undertones; poems of family life handle memories well. A mother’s sacred spot is “the place where the child / Felt sick in the car and they pulled over / And waited”; a young woman, coming home late on a bus, thinks “Nobody who knows me knows where I am now.”
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