THE FIFTY MINUTE MERMAID

Paul Muldoon's translation of Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's latest collection.


By Carmine Starnino
Poetry Media Service

The Fifty Minute Mermaid, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Tr. by Paul Muldoon. The Gallery Press.

Hands up, anyone who knew that the merfolk's language was "pelagic"? I certainly didn't. Much remains unknown about these mythic creatures, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's new book can help. A bluffer's guide to those from "Land-Under-Wave," The Fifty Minute Mermaid is based on close imaginative contact with its citizens, their history, and the trauma that "left them oddly out of the swim."

Merfolk are mermaids; or, more specifically, they are an Irish species called "merrow" who have the ability to assume human form. According to Ní Dhomhnaill, merfolk were driven to land two centuries ago, a race on the run. Why they fled "the warm bosom/of the ocean" has never been explained, and the mermaids themselves are mum on the subject. Were they victims of "some sort of ethnic cleansing"? Casualties of a Paradise Lost cataclysm that now leaves them struggling "to climb back again/to the place from which they first fell"? It's a mystery. But whatever happened, there's no going back: they've renounced water, their gills long defunct. Aquatic refugees in dry diaspora, the merfolk seem cursed. Worse, the general population they live among, while fascinated, can't muster much in the way of sympathy--as Ní Dhomhnaill says, "anyone with so much bad luck and misfortune following them/must have done something to deserve it."

The tragedy of the merfolk--namely, that they are a people cut off from their own legend--can also be said to define Ní Dhomhnaill's poetic project over the last twenty years. The Fifty Minute Mermaid, her fourth book in English, is translated by Paul Muldoon. This is because Ní Dhomhnaill writes exclusively in Irish, a once-suppressed language she loves for the way it effortlessly incorporates "quick and hilarious banter and a welter of references both historical and mythological." As it happens, the description captures the magic of her English voice, just as merfolk--who use words "still imbued/with the old order of things"--capture the proud exile of Ireland's Gaelic speakers.

The half-human "morph" of the merfolk as a metaphor for the act of translation is something else Ní Dhomhnaill is exploring in The Fifty Minute Mermaid. The book provides facing originals, but the accuracy of Muldoon's work will, for most North American readers, be hard to judge, even while his quirky embeddings are unmistakable ("I don't give a hoot," "to scare the living daylights," "discombobulated," "thingammies"). This, however, isn't our first look at Ní Dhomhnaill. She is already known--via earlier distillings by Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, and Medbh McGuckian--as a compulsive storyteller. And Muldoon's version jibes with her celebrated billing. In their English skin her poems are hugely playful, practicing a subversiveness just fractionally above unclassifiable. Ní Dhomhnaill is a nuts and bolts poet: she puts her ideas and subject-matter right up front, while somewhere in the background extraordinary meanings assemble:

Whatever you do don't ever mention the word "water"
or anything else that smacks of the sea--
"wave," "tide," "ocean," "the raging main," "the briny."
She'd as soon contemplate the arrival of frost in the middle of summer
than hear tell of fishing, boats, seine or trammel nets, lobster pots.
She knows such things exist, of course,
and that other people
have truck with them.

She thinks that if she covers her ears and turns away her head
she'll be free of them
and she'll never hear again the loud neighing of the kelpie or water horse
claiming its blood relation with her at the darkest hour of the night,
causing her to break out in goose pimples and having sweat lashing off her
while she's fast asleep.
--From "The Mermaid and Certain Words"

Ní Dhomhnaill's mode isn't exactly satiric or surrealistic, but derangedly reportorial. The poems are filled with fascinating crypto-anthropological details: the merfolk susceptibility to disease, their difficulty holding a tune, their antipathy toward breastfeeding. It's tongue-in-cheek scholarship that eventually runs to the horrific: a chilling mention, at the end, of merfolk returning to "Land-Under-Wave" to find Auschwitz-like "heaps of gold teeth" and "old garments in garment-piles." Ní Dhomhnaill always works this way--allegorically, she goes deep. There is rarely a point-for-point match, yet her major targets are impossible to miss: colonialism, female sexuality, the Catholic church. But The Fifty Minute Mermaid, constructed out of two parts, is significantly darker than her previous books. The first part is merfolk-free but discontent-rich. It closes with a seemingly autobiographical narrative where the poet, during a drive, replays a series of grim memories: a dying friend, news of Serbian atrocities, her husband's recent six-day coma. She is readying herself for the ultimate "task"--"to take it all in, to make room in your heart without having your heart burst."

Here, then, is the heart-bursting genius of this book. Ní Dhomhnaill's merfolkian epic--part two of the collection--is the alternate reality of a woman trying to "take it all in." The frantic fabulating, with its deadpan exaggerations, suggests a desperate wish-fulfillment. Like The Decameron, The Fifty Minute Mermaid explores the way our lives are constructed of fictions--fictions that both shelter us from painful facts and allow us to face up to them. It is a tale told in crisis, and a must-read.

Carmine Starnino's newest book of poems, This Way Out, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in spring 2009. This article first appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Carmine Starnino. All rights reserved.

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MEMORY HAS NO REAL ESTATE

German poet Durs Grünbein offers candid and chilling versions of history.


By Helen Vendler
Poetry Media Service

Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, by Durs Grünbein. Translated by Michael Hofmann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.00

Although some poems by Durs Grünbein had been published in journals here and in England, it was not until the appearance of this volume, crisply and colloquially translated by Michael Hofmann, that an English-speaking reader could approach Grünbein's coruscating writing. Grünbein was born in Dresden, in East Germany, in 1962, and moved to East Berlin as a young adult. "I was happy in a sandy no-man's land," the poet wrote in 1991, evoking his student life in the East by casting himself, in his devastatingly ironic sonnet sequence "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (Not Collie)," as a patrol dog "in the suicide strip, equidistant from East and West." With the fall of the Wall in 1989, with even the "two or three names for the place of separation" vanishing into oblivion, "nothing is left to recall the trick/By which a strip of land became a hole in time."

"Being a dog," says a defining poem early in "Portrait of the Artist," "is having to when you don't want to, wanting to/When you can't, and always somebody watching." The frustration of being restricted in will and placed under surveillance emerges in the iron grip of Grünbein's epigram. The young poet left the East as soon as possible, only to discover the vices and the disappointments of the West. Although he became permanently ill at ease with respect to place, he is supremely at home in language. There is hardly a page here that does not contain a real poem, out of Grünbein by Hofmann, a poem "real" enough--in emotion, in cadence, in imagination--to make a reader's hair stand on end.

The frequent criticism, by others, of Grünbein's bleakness is embedded in his "Memorandum":

Poets, so they tell us, are awkward customers
Not up to much. Even laughter has a keener, full-throated edge
When they're not around. They're not very amusing.

No, poets are not very amusing. The discontented demand by some readers that poetry should be "healing" or "uplifting" or "optimistic" or "humane" (or "accessible") re-affirms the truth of Eliot's observation that "human kind cannot bear very much reality." Yet it is, in fact, an optimistic act to write any poem at all: the act implies the trust that another mind will meet the poem half way, and an even deeper trust that language can become adequate to a human predicament.

There are even, for Grünbein, disheartening moments "when the books close ranks and it transpires they don't speak." Here the poet, speaking in the lyric first person, is the man of letters who looks for a sustaining word in the daily paper and finds none. The muse of history, Clio, will not reveal any significance in current events:

I have breakfasted on ashes, the black
Dust that comes off newspapers, from the freshly printed columns.
When a coup makes no stain, and a tornado sticks to half a page.
And it seemed to me as though the Fates licked their lips
When war broke out in the sports section, reflected in the falling Dow.
I have breakfasted on ashes. My daily bread.
And Clio, as ever, keeps mum.... There, just as I folded them up,
The rustling pages sent a shiver down my spine.

And yet Clio, for all her intermittent silence, is Grünbein's principal muse. He came to consciousness within the disastrous history of twentieth-century Germany and has had to re-imagine that history for himself, to meditate on the fire-bombed Dresden where he was born, and to judge the unified but invisibly divided Berlin where he now lives. It must give a shiver to citizens of Berlin to see their contemporary city-sites given sharp definition by Grünbein, with his perpetually simmering sense of an imperfectly buried past.

It is in the formidable 1994 eleven-poem Dresden sequence, "Europe after the Last Rains," that we see the most melancholy (and angry) Grünbein. He returns to the place of his youth, but it has disappeared. "Memory has no real estate no city / where you come home and you know where you are." Remembering the World War II firebombing of the city, Grünbein asks, "Is it the same city in the valley/as the pilot saw in its phosphorescent glory?"

Germany's earlier twentieth century, led by a Fuhrer and his followers, and populated by combatants, resisters, refugees, camp victims, children, "righteous Gentiles," and a host of subsidiary figures, has had its chronicles written and rewritten, just as the later twentieth century, with the Russian and American occupation, the Wall, the airlift, and the fall of East Germany, has had its own distinct forms of retrospection. One candid and chilling version of this history has been, and is being, told by Germany's poets. Durs Grü-nbein's account stands as an illumination and corrective to the more impersonal accounts of historians and scholars.

Helen Vendler is a contributing editor at The New Republic. This article first appeared in The New Republic. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Helen Vendler. All rights reserved.

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GIRLS INTERRUPTED

Two new memoirs by poets Lavinia Greenlaw and Sarah Manguso.


by Carla Blumenkranz
Poetry Media Service

The Importance of Music to Girls, by Lavinia Greenlaw. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23.00

The Two Kinds of Decay, by Sarah Manguso. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22.00

Few writers are memoirists by profession, and it's hard to imagine what the qualifications might be. A compelling and even awful life history helps (Mary Karr), but it's not really necessary or a guarantee. Exceptional success in some other field (Barack Obama) also creates basic narrative interest, but a talent for politics, for example, doesn't always translate into a talent for meaningful reflection.

What does seem to distinguish many great memoirists, though, is an almost supernatural intuition with language: the ability to take recollections that have personal resonance and make them echo for readers in written sentences (Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, and Elie Wiesel). In comparison with this gift, experience seems almost beside the point.

It's no surprise, then, that poets so often write memoirs, and that they take to the prose form so naturally. Karr is the blockbuster example of a contemporary poet-memoirist, but other young poets who have written in the form in recent years include Nick Flynn and Paisley Rekdal. Most recently, both Sarah Manguso and Lavinia Greenlaw have written memoirs that press on the boundary between poetry and prose and affectingly describe, in intentional fits and starts, the poets' tumultuous girlhoods.

Sarah Manguso was 20 when she was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), an obscure neurological disorder. Manguso describes what happened to her in about 80 discrete sections, each focused on one character or moment and none longer than two or three pages. The paragraphs, or perhaps stanzas, tend to be short and are separated by one-line breaks that function like intakes of breath. Manguso's writing is similar to poet Paisley Rekdal's in that, as one reviewer wrote of Rekdal's memoir The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, the writing is poetic "not in its dictions but in its elisions." Like Rekdal, Manguso tends to let the most significant moments in the text fall in the line breaks between thoughts.

At the same time, in what she chooses to describe, Manguso is strenuously precise. Most often, this is the facts of her illness and treatment, and how both physically felt. For example, when Manguso explains that she had a central line implanted into her chest, she writes that she would like the reader to know exactly how the cold blood infusions felt. She would like to invent a metaphor, she writes, but instead it seems most accurate to say that "it felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours."

Memoirs of sickness are common; what is remarkable about Manguso's is that it conveys more subtle developments. The years she describes as nothing were, as she slowly explains, not entirely empty. They were also the moment when an incessantly driven young adult had to pause, and so look around her, and start becoming a writer.

Lavinia Greenlaw was lucky enough not to suffer physical crises so early in life. Instead, her adolescence in Essex, England, in the late 1970s was characterized by intense but more benign influences. Her most formative experiences involved pop music, and she writes her memoir by describing her first encounters with it. Like Manguso's memoir, Greenlaw's The Importance of Music to Girls is written in short sections that often verge on poetry.

Greenlaw takes 56 of these sections to describe how she went from being a small girl who danced on top of her father's feet to the type of young mother who has an ex-boyfriend and a Public Image record with her on the day she takes her daughter home from the hospital. Greenlaw often casually plays with chronology, but at the same time she remains intensely aware of the contradictory and painful aspects of her adolescence. Greenlaw recalls being at a school dance where she "shrank and veered, and felt in any given situation that I was wrong--standing in the wrong place and making the wrong shapes, the wrong noise." The song for this is David Bowie's "Laughing Gnome," and it echoes how Greenlaw adapted to her new surroundings. "I looked around, took note, and changed. I was a small person in a small place. I developed a small voice and a small laugh ha ha ha, hee hee hee." Here and elsewhere, Greenlaw uses music not only to situate her young adulthood but also to convey exactly how it felt.

Greenlaw studied the charts, got a transistor radio, and acquired her first tastes from listening to John Peel. The sounds she heard acted upon her as though she were "a cloud struck by lightning," and these were not only music but also the church bells in the village, the singsong and interruptions of dinner conversations, siblings' arguments, and the murmur of her parents' medical language. It seems natural that Greenlaw's imagination also led her to poetry. The ping of the typewriter was everywhere, she writes, "the ratcheting revision of the carriage return."

In almost any memoir by a writer, there is a way that, by the end of the story, the author seems to have found his or her calling. The process of becoming a writer isn't treated directly in Greenlaw or Manguso's memoir, but it is constantly present in the example they set with their language and in their shared emphasis on growing powers of attention. Their young lives have so little in common except, it turns out, the powers they apply to them in retrospect.

Carla Blumenkranz has written for Bookforum, n+1, and The Village Voice. This article first appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Carla Blumenkranz. All rights reserved.

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DISMAL ROCK

A review of Davis McCombs's recent poetry collection.


By Jason Guriel
Poetry Media Service

Dismal Rock, by Davis McCombs. Tupelo Press. $16.95.

Younger poets still making a name for themselves, like Davis McCombs, know that they must be clear and compelling and not take up too much of our time--"for time," as August Kleinzahler smartly reminds us in a recent talk, "has vanished with inflated rents and the blitzkrieg of what's cheerfully called information, information to be attended to, and I'm talking right now." McCombs gets this and--in the first section of Dismal Rock, a sequence on tobacco farming--gets down to business, describing a world with the rigor of an anthropologist in the field:

The people are talking about budworms; they are talking
about aphids and thrips. Under the bluff at Dismal Rock,
there where the spillway foams and simmers,
they are fishing and talking about pounds and allotments;
they are saying white burley, lugs and cutters.
Old men are whittling sticks with their pocketknives
and they are saying Paris Green; they speak of topping
and side-dressing; they are whistling and talking
about setters, plant beds and stripping rooms.

In these lines, from "Lexicon," McCombs's speaker, a good listener, has catalogued his environment's recurring sounds--the "u" in "bluff ," "lugs," and "cutters"; the "w" in "white," "whittling," and "whistling"--and organized them into a brief, cohesive sound loop that captures the aural energy of a rural landscape. Dismal Rock reassures us that words, when used well, can work. They can record the world and, at their best, transform it, as McCombs's do when they describe a bat "crossing / the water on the boat of its reflection," or how "a bulb of gnats flickers on / above the damp leaves."

But while words can be made to work, they can also become workmanlike. And while much of the poetry in Dismal Rock is precise, much of it is also unmemorable nature poetry, opting for the obvious over the transformative:

each moment flaring up

like a match, consuming itself.

          --From "Gnomon"



                                   this is the river's

whorled thumbprint, the water's surface dark as ink.

          --From "The Tobacco Economy"



          the storm that, far beyond him, was purpling

like a bruise.

          --From "Hobart"



                                when the storm spread

like a bruise along the coast.

          --From "Bob Marley"

This is the sort of poetry in which things "unspool" (see "Salts Cave Revisited" and "Northtown Well"), in which stuff is compared to "ash" (see "The Tobacco Economy" and "Stripping Room")--poetry, in other words, that's teetering on the cliche of our era's cliches.

McCombs, a Yale Younger Poet, is capable of some fine moments--but then who isn't in an era that valorizes the bite-sized fragment over the fully realized narrative, the poetry over the poem? Instead of working through the implications of a neat idea--that bat "crossing / the water on the boat of its reflection," for example--McCombs merely moves onto the next idea--"it is squeaking / like a rusted hinge"--which is far less startling. The poems in Dismal Rock, then, are less poems than lists of description that never quite cohere into the self-contained pieces that need every one of their words. Like worms and double albums, they can be sectioned and still survive.

Jason Guriel lives in Toronto, and his next collection of poems is forthcoming from Vehicule Press in 2009. This article originally appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Jason Guriel. All rights reserved.

THE NURSE OF ENCHANTMENT

Even the avant-garde couldn't resist Helen Adam's ballads.


By Ange Mlinko
Poetry Media Service

A Helen Adam Reader, ed. by Kristen Prevallet. National Poetry Foundation. $29.95.

The publication of A Helen Adam Reader is of historical interest, feminist interest--and poetic interest. Born in Peeblesshire, Scotland, in 1909, Adam was a teenage poet whose Victorian fairy ballads captivated the British public and earned the praise of the Queen of England. Reviewers lauded her "perfect ear" and "delicate imagination." But this fame vanished into the past in 1939 when Adam, who lived with her mother and sister until their deaths, immigrated to the United States virtually by accident. The three women had traveled from London to Hartford, Connecticut, for a wedding; two months later World War II broke out, and relatives warned them against returning to a city of blackouts and rations.

The watershed moment of Adam's creative life came in the late 1940s, when her mother's health problems prompted a move west, first to Reno and then to San Francisco. In the Bay Area, Adam quickly found herself a member--some said godmother, witch or Nurse of Enchantment--of the interlocking Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer poetry circles, which, with the Beats, formed the avant-garde San Francisco Renaissance.

Adam wrote to raise gooseflesh. Her brand of ballad derived from the northern regions of Scotland, where minstrels evoked the grue (whence our "gruesome"). The grue manifests itself physiologically in the audience's shiver: the authenticity of a bodily response is the outward sign of the performer's otherworldly power. Helen Adam had, as they say, "it," as in these lines from "Kiltory":

"Come hither, my lady, lie doun wi' your dear.
A rival sae braw I ha' reason tae fear.
Come lie wi' your true love for ten starry nights.
I'll grudge ye nae hour o' your stolen delights."

Tae the dead man he flung her. He nailed up the door.
"Kiltory, I wish ye the joy o' your whore!"
Awa in the woodlands the wild throstles cried,
And the waters ran red on the brant mountain-side.

Adam combined the narrative economy of ballads--where each line is a discrete unit of information--with the lush sonic tapestry we associate with older Anglo-Saxon and Celtic strains of British verse. It's not just in the way she wields the Lallans dialect (those wi's and ha's, sae's and braw's), trimming consonants to highlight the more musical vowels. To see her sing her ballads--she chants "Kiltory" on the Reader's accompanying DVD--is to appreciate how the language, trilling and seething by turns, possessed its acolyte. Adam gets so lost in it, she dances a jig to her own bloodthirsty tale.

When Helen Adam landed in Robert Duncan's class at the Poetry Center in 1954, the effect was literally electrifying--classmates recalled a thunderstorm erupting at the moment Adam chanted William Blake's "Introduction to the Songs of Experience" from memory for him. Adam also cast a spell over austere, uncompromising Jack Spicer. This conjunction was even stranger, on the surface: Spicer worshiped virile boys, Billy the Kid, Federico Garcia Lorca. Spicer was struck by Adam's rejection of the folky and fey, her chthonic appeal to the grue. No hippie she, in these lines from "I Love My Love":

There was a man who married a maid. She laughed as he led her home.
The living fleece of her long bright hair she combed with a golden comb.
He led her home through his barley fields where the saffron poppies grew.
She combed, and whispered, "I love my love." Her voice like a plaintive coo.
Ha! Ha!
Her voice like a plaintive coo.

How different the ballad's "Ha! Ha!" from the Romantic odist's "O!" (Think of Shelley: "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being.") The note of mockery imbedded in the nuptial scene is but a foreshadowing of horror: in the climactic stanza "The hair rushed in.... It swarmed upon him, it swaddled him fast, it muffled his every groan":

Like a golden monster it seized his flesh, and then it sought the bone,
Ha! Ha!
And then it sought the bone.

What Duncan's and Spicer's enthusiasm had in common was the belief that Helen Adam was the real thing--a link to an authentic past and authentic power. In an interview, Adam admitted, "One critic called me a pre-Christian poet, which I think is nice...most of my poems are about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

The avant-garde needed Adam not only because she was Romantic, authentic and transgressive. They needed her example to unite their own fractured poetics, their own wounded demos. Despite herself, Helen Adam showed them how to be one again; she exerted authority, and they recognized it. From "Counting Out Rhyme":

Then cam' the unicorn, brichter than the mune,
Prancing frae the wave wi' his braw crystal croon.

Up the crisp and shelly strand he trotted unafraid.
Agin' the lanesome lassie's knee his comely head he laid.

Upon the youngest sister's lap he leaned his royal head.
She stabbed him tae the hert, and Oh! how eagerly he bled!

Now we can read Adam's poems for ourselves and judge whether Duncan was right that "what was important was not the accomplishment of the poem but the wonder of the world of the poem itself." She may not have invented a new form, but she did create a world.

Ange Mlinko's poems and articles have appeared in the Village Voice, The Nation and Poetry. Her latest book of poems is Starred Wire. This article first appeared in The Nation. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Ange Mlinko. All rights reserved.

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THE POEM AS TESTAMENT

Sarah Hannah's second, and final, poetry collection.


By Jason Guriel
Poetry Media Service

Inflorescence, by Sarah Hannah. Tupelo Press. $16.95.

The author of this next book, a one-time nominee for Yale Younger Poet, committed suicide last year. Its poems are about flowers and mental health; they have titles like "Dried Flowers" and "Night Nurse," and brandish sharp lines like

Don't talk to me of Paris;
I have duties.
Don't talk to me of loss;
I bury pills in applesauce.

Given those facts alone, it would be easy to write off Sarah Hannah through a single, obvious comparison. But the most amazing--and consequently tragic--fact about her second (and last) collection is that its poems (and they are poems, choppily well-separated and varnished with formal finish) are very, very good. Whatever the poet was going through, it didn't hinder the production of small, complete masterpieces like "The Riddle of the Sphinx Moth":

An enormous body kamikaze-dives
At me from behind the eaves of a summer
Shack: a sudden blow between the eyes,

A hybrid whirr--half bird, half bee--she hovers,
Helicopters to the grass, and sparks: Long-short-long,
Morse code in creature-speak for Get you gone.

I run inside. What was she? A pair of dragonflies
Combined to mate like biplanes in a blitz
Seem cordial in comparison to this--the eyes,

Two narrows, solid black, or should I say,
Twin Stygian pools of fixedness,
Her torso thick, a pattern throbbing in the fur,

And what was that prodding in front of her?
A stick, a thin proboscis, twice as long as she,
Insinuates itself in jimsonweed--

Sucks out all the juice. Twenty quiet minutes pass
Until I hear a rattle on the glass;
The window's shaken out of frame--she's in!

She fouls the bed--the whole room's a sty.
I should flee. I shudder in my chair instead.
She owns this house, not I.

A buzz and feint, and with a glare
She's out the door. She owns the house,
Not me. I've solved the riddle:

All skirmishes aren't fatal;
All metaphors don't fly.

Hannah has a knack for images, but she's careful not to overload the poem with too many, showcasing only the special ones. She's also careful--as Ariel-era Plath wasn't always--to unify them. The staggering description of a "pair of dragonflies / Combined to mate like biplanes in a blitz" is supported by references to kamikaze planes, helicopters, and Morse code, so that when the reader comes to "a pattern throbbing in the fur," the sphinx moth has already been transformed, in the reader's mind, into furry fuselage, capable of rattling windows. The deft use of rhyme and alliteration further unifies this subtle, anti-war psychodrama, lending an aura of inevitability to words like "throbbing," "prodding," "proboscis," "sucks," "pass," and "glass." The poem can't afford the loss of any of them.

But while Hannah expertly moves the reader, word by word, to the poem's finish, she's careful not to craft too tidy an ending. She solves her riddle with a bit of folk wisdom--"All metaphors don't fly"--but in doing so subverts the very art, metaphor-making, that she has mastered, suggesting the limits of poetry. She completes a final rhyme, but also drops a line from what would have been the final tercet, introducing a note of anxiety. Indeed, many of Hannah's poems set up consistent patterns of stanzas only to deviate from them at the last moment. Life, Hannah seems to have recognized, is closer to coherence than chaos, which makes it all the more troubling when it falls just short of gelling.

The pieces in Inflorescence add up to a memoir about Hannah's care for her terminal mother. But the best ones--"Greenbrier," "Common Creeping Thyme," "The Leaded Windows," "Night Nurse," and "Eternity, That Dumbwaiter"--are anthology-bound and easily transcend the collection's overall arc. Hannah has not left a body of work that, through sheer bulk, demands our grudging respect. She has left us poems, each its own testament.

Jason Guriel lives in Toronto, and his next collection of poems is forthcoming from Vehicule Press in 2009. This article originally appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Jason Guriel. All rights reserved.

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A CONVERSATION WITH KEATS

Poet Stanley Plumly's book on the legendary John Keats transcends biography.


By Eric Ormsby
Poetry Media Service

Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, by Stanley Plumly. Norton, $27.95.

Poets who die young often have surprisingly lively posthumous careers. John Keats (1795-1821) provides the most celebrated example: Almost immediately after his death in Rome, at the age of 25, he entered the realm of legend. Though his poetry wasn't much read at the time, he himself was quickly transformed into a figure of myth. For Shelley--who drowned with a copy of Keats's last book in his pocket--he was "like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished," as he put it in "Adonais," his elegy for the poet. At the opposite extreme, Shelley's good friend Lord Byron detested Keats and snubbed him, referring to him in one letter as "a dirty little blackguard." For the aristocratic Byron, Keats was a "Cockney" upstart--more a rank weed than a pale lily. But for Keats's admirers, his humble origins only enhanced the pathos of his fate. For William Butler Yeats, Keats was both the "coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper" and a woebegone schoolboy "with face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window," the very epitome of sensuousness unsatisfied.

In Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, the poet Stanley Plumly draws on these multiple, and often conflicting, images to create a subtle portrait of an elusive figure. Keats has been well-served by his biographers--most particularly, in the last century alone, by Walter Jackson Bate and Aileen Ward, both of whom wrote superb and compelling accounts of his short but rich life. Though Mr. Plumly uses these, and other sources, in his own account--and seems to have read virtually everything written about Keats from the early 19th century onward--his book is less a biography in the usual sense than an extended meditation.

Each of his chapters deals with a significant event in Keats's life, and yet the effect is anything but episodic. Whether he is describing Keats's grim medical training as a "dresser" (a surgical nurse who tended the survivors of operations) or exploring his passionate love affair with the enigmatic and flirtatious Fanny Brawne or recounting his terrible lingering final illness and death, Mr. Plumly knows how to piece the fragmentary evidence--from letters, memoirs, official documents, and, of course, the poetry itself--so seamlessly together as to bring each scene before the reader's eyes with great dramatic force. At the same time, by rejecting what he calls "linearity," he is able to proceed in a circular fashion, swerving and doubling back to give fresh emphasis or new nuance to a point made earlier. The effect is curiously musical, with each of his chosen themes followed by ever more intricate variations.

In this respect, Mr. Plumly's unusual method, which does take some getting used to, succeeds brilliantly. In part it works so well because it is perfectly suited to the "personal biography" of his subtitle. For while the book is a scrupulously factual account both of Keats's life and of his literary afterlife, it is also a sort of secret conversation carried on between two poets over a distance of almost 200 years. And this sense--not only of love for Keats's poetry, but of profound engagement with it--informs Mr. Plumly's discussion throughout. Unlike previous biographers, he has a subtle ear for the verbal harmonies which make the great odes in particular so memorable. When he quotes the opening lines of the ode "To Autumn," "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun," and compares them to these lines from the "Ode to a Nightingale," "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs," he notes that the interlacing patterns of sound in these two quite different poems both create "a hearing just beautifully ahead of knowing." This is part of what Mr. Plumly elsewhere describes, quite aptly, as Keats's "plush playfulness." The poems play upon our ears before they engage our minds; their sounds are the very music of the imagination.

In a way, Keats anticipated his own afterlife. His most fervent wish was one day to "be counted among the English poets." During his lifetime that wish seemed improbable.

Though he was admired early in America, it wasn't until the 1850s--some 30 years after his death--that English readers began to appreciate his distinctive genius. Byron scoffed at Keats's phrase "music unheard" but it was Byron, along with many of his contemporaries, who couldn't catch the tune. As Keats lay dying miserably of tuberculosis, tended only by his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, he asked his physician how much longer "this posthumous life of mine" would last. It has lasted now for almost two centuries, and it seems likely to continue forever.

Eric Ormsby's work regularly appears in The Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, The Paris Review, and other publications. This article first appeared in The New York Sun, where he writes the weekly "Readings" column. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about John Keats, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Eric Ormsby. All rights reserved.

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Reviewing Policies: Books and Other Media

Gilbert Wesley Purdy has been reviewing books and other items on the Internet and in paper venues for well over 10 years now. As regards books, he reviews both poetry and topical non-fiction prose. Should the texts be translations from a romance language, and the original texts be available to him, he may also choose to review the quality of the translation.

At present, he is the Review Section Editor for the online journal Eclectica. His reviews have also appeared at Jacket Magazine, The Georgia Review, Rattle, The Compulsive Reader, and his own Virtual Grub Street family of blogs. Links to his online reviews (and other work in poetry and prose) are posted at his Online Bibliography. The Bibliography is regularly updated.

He receives more titles than he can possibly review, generally direct from the publisher. The books (tapes, CDs, DVDs) are placed in a queue ordered more or less by the following criteria:

1. Books/items accepted on assignment;
2. Books/items that are in some way exceptional;
3. Books/items that will generally be positively reviewed;
4. Books/items from larger publishers;
5. Books/items from publishers with whom he has an ongoing reviewer relationship;
6. Books/items that touch on a theme or issue that seems especially worth comment even if that comment is mixed or negative in tone.

A book/item may remain in the queue for more than a year before it is reviewed or removed as "not accepted for review".

While he rarely pans a book/item, it is not altogether unheard of. The only representation he makes is that, if he should review a book/item, he will do so with the utmost honesty he can muster. Only rarely will there appear direct encouragement to buy a book/item. The reviews are intended to be descriptive and to leave the reader to decide, based upon the description, whether the book/item is for him or her.

Assignments are accepted on a case-by-case basis. Book solicitations are accepted with the understanding that they will be considered for inclusion in the book queue. Query to gwpurdy@yahoo.com for mailing address. Please begin the subject line with "###" so I can find your book amongst the deluge of other emails.

Contact information should be included with all materials. An e-mail contact address is greatly preferred. Related requests that require postage and/or handling (i.e. returns, correspondence other than tear-sheets) will generally not be fulfilled unless postage and materials are provided with the request and perhaps not even then.

WHERE THE SIDEWALK BEGINS

With his first book Don't Bump the Glump, Shel Silverstein made the leap from Playboy cartoonist to children's author.


by Jesse Nathan
Poetry Media Service

Don't Bump the Glump! And Other Fantasies, by Shel Silverstein. HarperCollins, $17.99.

In 1956, the young Sheldon Alan Silverstein dropped off a portfolio of about 15 drawings at the offices of an upstart publication called Playboy, then located at 11 East Superior in Chicago. Hugh Hefner said he hadn't gotten around to looking over the work when Silverstein returned for it two weeks later. Silverstein "demanded his cartoons back. He didn't think we were going to buy any of them," said Hefner. But the editor scrutinized and pondered and then, on the spot, purchased eight drawings for $500.

That was just the beginning: over the next 15 years Silverstein created a vast trove of drawings for Playboy, acting as a kind of cartoon correspondent, sending back illustrated dispatches from his travels in Japan, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, and San Francisco's exotic Haight-Ashbury. And among all that early material, Silverstein generated the poetry and illustrations that would in 1964 congeal into his first book of poems: Uncle Shelby's Zoo: Don't Bump the Glump! and Other Fantasies, reissued by HarperCollins as Don't Bump the Glump! and Other Fantasies.

Don't Bump the Glump!--a bestiary of strange critters brought to life in verse--is, decidedly, a "first book." Like the first collections of many poets, Silverstein's hints at what's to come and implies directions and forms. It's not a stand-alone gem, but it does shine from within the context of Silverstein's oeuvre. In this case that's the body of work generated in Silverstein's prolific career, which spanned from the late 1950s until his death in Florida in 1999: the poet was also a draftsman, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, guitarist, painter, playwright, and professional vagabond, best known for a kind of whimsical poetry officially for children and unofficially adored by gobs of adults.

Don't Bump the Glump! is clearly the youthful poetry of the artist who would give us much-celebrated works such as A Light in the Attic. It suggests the modes Silverstein would work in, showcasing rougher-edged samples of what was to come later. The poet loves dazzling us, for instance, by pushing meter and rhyme, even to the point of unwieldiness. In Don't Bump the Glump!, we read of "The Considerate Soft-Shelled Phizzint":

You'll never know an animal
                more considerate of human feelings
                than the Soft-Shelled Phizzint.

Someone has mistaken this one
                for a pincushion
                and he's too polite to say he isn't.

Silverstein would hone his use of rhythm in such creations as "The Razor-Tailed Wren," from 1974's Where the Sidewalk Ends:

The razor-tailed wren,
He'll pretend he's your friend
As he cuts all the grass on your lawn,
But do not leave anything
Sticking far out
Or swishity--it will be gone.

In Don't Bump the Glump! Silverstein reveals his affinity for refrains, a tool the poet came back to again and again in his writing. This, too, he improved upon. Consider the first stanza of "There's a Gritchen in My Kitchen" from Don't Bump the Glump!:

There's a Skaverbacked Gritchen
Who lives in my kitchen
And makes his home under the sink.
And he lives upon Gipes
that crawl out of the pipes
And he takes only Postum to drink.

By contrast, here's the first stanza of the slightly more elegant, less tongue-clunking "Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too," from Where the Sidewalk Ends:

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too
Went for a ride in a flying shoe.
"Hooray!"
"What fun!"
"It's time we flew!"
Said Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Throughout his career Silverstein was fascinated with creatures both wildly imagined and familiar, but this bestial obsession manifests itself most explicitly in the subject matter of Don't Bump the Glump!, in which the poet reels off one outlandish critter after another, from the Gorp-Eating Kallikozilliar to the Bald-Top Droan. One of the poems in Don't Bump the Glump!, "About the Bloath," turns up in Where the Sidewalk Ends 10 years later, essentially identical save a title change. By then it's just called "The Bloath":

In the undergrowth
There dwells the Bloath
Who feeds upon poets and tea.
Luckily I know this about him,
While he knows almost nothing of me.

The world quickly came to know of Shel Silverstein. And he went on to collaborate with loads of artists: He wrote "A Boy Named Sue" for Johnny Cash (and won a Grammy for it in 1970). He penned "Cover of the Rolling Stone" for Dr. Hook. "Queen of the Silver Dollar," which Emmylou Harris covered on her album Pieces of the Sky, was his handiwork too. As for his poetry, it improved as Silverstein learned to refine and harness his words. "Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility, and one that should be taken to heart," said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Perhaps, then, the zaniness of Don't Bump the Glump! carries it, but it's likely better viewed as a signifier of what was to follow from Silverstein. With Don't Bump the Glump!, acknowledged Mitch Myers, his nephew and the executor of his estate, "he was just starting to stretch his legs."

Jesse Nathan is an associate editor at McSweeney's publishing in San Francisco. His work appears widely, including in Tin House, The Believer, Sojourners, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. This article originally appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Read more about Shel Silverstein, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Jesse Nathan. All rights reserved.

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THE IMPETUOUS POET

Richard Kenney's first poetry collection in fifteen years is worth the wait.


by D. H. Tracy
Poetry Media Service

The One-Strand River, by Richard Kenney. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Fifteen years have passed since Kenney's last book, and The One-Strand River finds the author having deviated some from his last known trajectory. After The Invention of the Zero (1993), I would have guessed Kenney's poems would spiral farther out into the dismal reaches of the Thomas Pynchon / boy genius nebula of literature. Time had other plans, and although one must factor out certain quirks, losing every third poem or so to a gimmick of some kind ("This poem is no fun," etc.), Kenney has developed a capacity to be at least intermittently restrained, and the result is not only the entry of affection and wonder into his poetry but their coexistence with mordancy and mischief. Real feeling and satirical bite result.

The texture of the writing is defined by verbal impetuousness, a lunge for the aptest comparison at any cost in baroqueness--on the highway he watches "a lone deinonychid biker" whose shadow "writhes like a count's cape / Caught in a belt sander." The mood is defined, contrarily, by wariness and moderation amid midlife shoals where "Churlish / Thoughts bedevil me, often," although he has to admit "ambrosias / Yet decant." Kenney's fascination with data certainly still exists, and he cannot resist mentioning hurricanes on Jupiter and saying "the Middle Holocene" instead of "now." The data are not purely for show-off, but are pressed to serve as metaphors for experience and inner life, where they have the pitiably inadequate quality of a precocious child trying to insulate itself from uncertainty. They are no different ontologically from the stuff of religion or indeed fairy tales: "All linchpins shear." The problem is worse than that, since the things which affect him most--a glint in the eye of a laughing child, the scent of soap on a passing woman--are irreconcilable with a certain empirical idiom of public speech. With knowledge and meaning no longer overlapping, questions of right conduct become absurdly underdetermined ("the poled pirogue // Of Humanism slips the everglade / Of endocrine function, doing / Its very best"), and there are no grounds for deciding in what ratio one ought to be a creature of instinct and of reason:

Oh to live ignobly!
Not pig-
Like, quite, nor bleating,

Braying, mewling, really;
Neither, though, thoroughly
Morally:

Not for a life of pure sensation
Per se.
--From "To Circe"

The overall impression is of a slightly louche, roue, self-hating polymath, a role he plays much less consistently than Frederick Seidel but perhaps with more vulnerability. Kenney's touch is not always light enough for vers de societe or deft political incisions (it is in cases very crude) but when he can bring himself to leave something unsaid, the results are aqua vitae. This happens in "Critical," "Security Council," the academy sendup "Challenges & Opportunities" ("Sousa's // To be replaced, we learn, by !Kung plainsong") and in "Alaric Intelligence Memo #36," where the fiction is a sleeper terrorist filing a report to his superiors. Through this exercise Kenney is trying to decide what he has invested in his latter-day Rome: "Their warrior class, insufficiently manned, / Is mad, responsive, and under command":

Their poetry barks. Their faith, a ruins,
Ghost-infested, affords no womb
Of future. In sum: however skilled,
They are overripe. My Lord, strike soon.

Addendum: proud to have served your will,
I have lived too long among them. I am ill.
I am infected with dreams. At the first moon
Of conquest, I respectfully request to be killed.

That "Addendum" falls on a page break--until then, the poem seems truly out of control. But the ending exposes the internal struggle that has been taking place, charity fighting disgust to a draw. The poem is not about uncertainty or vacillation, but agonized and clear ambivalence, and in imparting such ambivalence to a public voice Kenney has made me rethink my suspicion that the art is ill-suited to the interestingness of the times. Not only is it not playing catch-up, it is, evidently, actively clarifying.

D.H. Tracy's poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois. This review originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Richard Kenney, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by D.H. Tracy. All rights reserved.

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THE PLAY OF OPPOSITES

A reissued translation of late T'ang dynasty poetry unites ancient form and raw emotion.


by Eric Ormsby
Poetry Media Service

Poems of the Late T'ang, edited and translated by A.C. Graham. NYRB Classics. $14.95

In the year 755 common era, when the T'ang dynasty was shaken by violent rebellion, many of its leading citizens--courtiers as well as poets--took to the roads. The dynasty was weakened but would endure for another century and a half, until it would be overthrown in 907. For the exiles, no return seemed possible.

One of these was the poet Tu Fu (or Du Fu, as his name is now romanized), generally considered the greatest of classical Chinese poets. In the poems he composed during his years of wandering, and especially in his last poems, written not long before his death in 770, at the age of 58, he mourned this loss. "I walk a road each day more desolate," he wrote. But what is most striking in these final poems is neither his nostalgia for the ancient capital of Chang'an, where, as he wrote, "the mansions of princes and nobles all have new lords," nor his sorrow at losing his position at court--and with it, his livelihood--nor even the pain of separation from family and friends. It is the sense of a hard-won serenity infusing every line which makes of his last poems both a surprise and a puzzle.

In "Poems of the Late T'ang," translated and with an introduction by the late A.C. Graham--and now reissued from the original Penguin edition of 1965--seven remarkable poets step from the shadows of a long-vanished dynasty. They range from Tu Fu to Meng Chiao (751-814), the "poet of cold," to the violent and extravagant Li Ho (791-817), one of the most original of all Chinese poets, and finally to Li Shang-yin (c. 812-858), an erotic poet of astonishing versatility.

Like Arthur Waley or David Hawkes, Graham is a both a lyrical and a scholarly translator; the individual accents of each poet ring out distinctively. This isn't as straightforward as it might appear. Classical Chinese poetry was governed by strict conventions. Poems not only rhymed but the syllables of each line were exactly calculated; to make matters trickier, there were tonal patterns as well, dictated by the pitch accents of the language. Add to this the time-honored conventions of topics and imagery--certain subjects, such as romantic love, were considered improper, and Li Shang-yin scandalized critics simply by writing about women. Graham neither rhymes nor counts his syllables, but he does manage to suggest the delicate tension which arose when poets of genius gave small but decisive spins to such conventions. For a T'ang dynasty poet, as Graham makes clear in his superb introduction and notes, poetic convention wasn't oppressive; rather, convention liberated originality.

Graham is as good on the lighthearted poet Tu Mu (803-52)--now better transliterated as Du Mu--as he is on the chilly Meng Chiao or the wild Li Ho. Tu Mu calls himself "a drifter in the blue houses," that is, a frequenter of brothels, while Meng Chiao complains that "the cold wind harshly combs my bones," noting, rather boastfully, that his bones have "hacking edges." Li Ho, strangest of Chinese poets, comes out with such baffling lines as "The blue raccoon weeps blood and the cold fox dies." And yet, the same Li Ho could write, "If heaven too had passions even heaven would grow old," a line in which all the pathos of human experience is obliquely conveyed.

Until his death in 1991, Graham taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and was steeped in Chinese philosophy as well as poetry. He was fascinated by the supple play of opposites in Chinese thought--his study "Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking" is now, sadly, out of print--and this awareness shaped his translations. When Tu Fu writes, "At home in its tree, notice the secret bird: / Safe beneath the waves, imagine the great fishes," he looses a ripple of antitheses. The contrast isn't only between the bird hidden in the leaves and the fish concealed beneath the waves. There is a tacit contrast, as secret as bird or fish, between those creatures and the homeless poet who envisions them. The images are at once objective and deeply personal. As Graham points out, Chinese poets rarely write, "I." No Chinese poet would exclaim with Shelley, "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" not only because it would seem blatantly distasteful, but because it would be less powerful. The Chinese poet would show us the thorn and the drop of blood. Our imaginations would draw the inference.

Graham's marvelous little anthology is governed too by the play of opposites. Each of his chosen poets stands in sharp contrast with the others. When Li Shang-yin in a moment of erotic disenchantment writes, "One inch of love is an inch of ashes," he seems utterly opposed to the fantastic Lu T'ung, who celebrates "a demon frog which comes to eat the moon." But both extremes tug against the conventions; they are dissonant and yet they cohere. Like figures from the terra-cotta army of the first Chinese emperor, buried a millennium before the T'ang dynasty not far from the same ancient capital of Chang'an, these seven poets puzzle and surprise: They are distant and familiar at once. Meng Chiao writes that in his verse, "the bones of poetry jut." Thanks to Graham's delicacy of touch, those bones live still.

Eric Ormsby's work regularly appears in The Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, The Paris Review, and other publications. This article first appeared in The New York Sun, where he writes the weekly "Readings" column. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Eric Ormsby. All rights reserved

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UNLOVABLE OBJECTS

Poet Cate Marvin relentlessly explores passion's pitfalls.


by D.H. Tracy
Poetry Media Service

Fragment of the Head of a Queen, by Cate Marvin. Sarabande Books. $13.95.

The world of Fragment is in part one of horses and town criers, a fairy tale setting without the fairy tales. The tales that do exist are fairytale grim, mostly about relationship dysfunction, recrimination, and gluttony for romantic punishment--you could say they investigate what happens when the irresistible urge to love meets, in a man, an unlovable object. The dirty laundry, within the pseudo-anonymity of Marvin's methods, is flown from a flagpole; Siegfried Sassoon is notably more gentle on the subject of trench warfare than Marvin is on the subject of love. Marvin understands from the outset that a life lived at a certain level of passion is bound to make no sense, and will have topsy-turvy notions of what is appealing and what isn't. "Marvel at the corrupt!" she writes, "Make disgust your / lust and cast your fresh pain to the trash!" And:

I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it's fallen
in love with the floor.
--From "Scenes from the Battle of Us"

Notwithstanding this directness, her style is comprised partly of ancillary, thrown-off gestures--the lines are bristly and seem to radiate from the armature of the poem rather than be it, like sparks flying tangentially off a grinding wheel. The poems have very little inertia; as they begin there is never that sense of a locomotive leaving the station. Marvin unmutteringly brings in disjointed fantasia, personification (especially of rooms and windows), and a hyperbolic projection of feelings in which "The world felt bad" and "Every leaf looked / like it needed a cigarette." This energy clears space, and has the unexpected effect of mitigating the self-absorption; the poems are not as solipsistic as their single seething emotional life would imply. "Dear less-than-a-man," she writes, "I think with my blood." Only she doesn't, quite, and the nature of Fragment's speech acts seems to me its big question. The book is part voodoo doll, to be sure--I suspect when it went to press some ex-boyfriends somewhere got spontaneous nosebleeds--and she does write best from the inside of experiences, whose passions correlate closely with the intensity of her language (though "A Brief Attachment," a wary, medium-heat poem about a same-sex crush, is an exception and one of her best). But she does not go over to pure curse, and she seems to want a connection to a frame of reference outside of her, even the exoneration of some independent tribunal--although she is not interested in the thorough post-mortems or courtroom reconstructions that would allow such a judgment to be seriously offered. At times propriety couldn't matter less; at others, it is the bottleneck:

Reader, do I border on the obscene? Have I forced
you to give up your sympathies in exchange for more

lurid curiosities?
--From "Muckraker"

If the answers were no, she would have no poem. I am of two minds about Marvin's unsettledness, which is sensate and alive but limits the quality of psychological insight she can sustain: for all the presence of the poems, one is left in mind of what they cannot talk about rather than what they can. I can infer only in general terms what she feels--frustration, rage, disappointment, righteousness--even though the book is principally about her feeling. In avoiding the pitfalls of self-interest by a kind of excess, Marvin resigns herself to a patchiness, even coarseness, in her understanding of experiences, especially the experience--love--that matters most to her. Perhaps this is to say that Fragment of the Head of a Queen is just that--but I remain curious what the whole head would have been like.

D.H. Tracy's poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois. This review originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Cate Marvin, and her poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by D.H. Tracy. All rights reserved.

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A SIGNAL THROUGH THE FLAMES

Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls on poets to save the world.


by Steve Heilig
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Poetry As Insurgent Art, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. New Directions. $12.95.

What is the "use" of poetry? Or, as more than one author has asked, Can Poetry Matter?

More than 50 years ago, renowned American poet William Carlos Williams wrote famously that "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there."

A practical man who was not only a poet but also a practicing physician, Williams's lines are usually read to imply that poetry--good poetry, at least--is essential to one's inner life and spirit. In the cultural doldrums of the early 1950s, that rang true for many people.

Around the same time Williams wrote those lines, Lawrence Ferlinghetti arrived in San Francisco, fresh from Paris with a doctorate from the Sorbonne and a love of the printed word. He soon co-founded the landmark and still-thriving City Lights bookstore and publisher--issuing not only his own work but also the first printing of Allen Ginsberg's iconic poem "Howl" and many other works by writers who became known as Beat. Ferlinghetti has been poet laureate of San Francisco, received numerous awards both literary and civic, had his paintings widely exhibited, and, nearing 90 years of age, is about as famous as a poet can be in these times.

In other words, Ferlinghetti should need no introduction. That he still might, to the vast majority of Americans who rarely, if ever, read poetry, is part of the lamentable background to his latest book. It has been argued that the current decade is the 1950s all over again, but worse. And for Ferlinghetti, poetry's "use" extends far beyond the personal into the political. "Poetry can save the world by transforming consciousness," he argues in Poetry as Insurgent Art, a slim hardback pocketbook manifesto of prose epigrams, addressed to poets.

"I am signaling you through the flames," he begins in the new section from which his book takes its title. "The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it." Poetry, in this vision, must be a political statement, arrows slung for freedom of expression, thought and resistance. "Write living newspapers," he counsels. "Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts"--in other words, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, to write mere "love poetry" in such times is "almost a crime." So "challenge capitalism masquerading as democracy"; "Liberate have-nots and enrage despots"; "Don't cater to the Middle Mind of America nor to consumer society." And so on, in variations of his admonition to "be committed to something outside yourself."

This is a tall order for poetry, to be sure. But the six or seven (mostly) one-liners on each of the 30 pages are testament to Ferlinghetti's enduring vision and commitment. Some of these lines read as if they could have been penned in the Beat heyday, decades ago: "Stand up for the stupid and crazy"; "Dig folksingers who are the true singing poets of yesterday and today." Political economy, down-home mysticisms, and occasional cringe-worthy silliness ("Make permanent waves, and not just on the heads of stylish women") all blend into his own version of Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." Thus, poets should "see eternity in the eyes of animals," but not "be too arcane for the man in the street." Ferlinghetti can be self-deprecating: "Don't lecture like this. Don't say don't." But he is also dead serious: "Don't let them tell you poetry is bull-" and, especially, "Don't ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times." Indeed, as Williams would probably agree, in dark times poetry becomes even more essential.

The second major section of the book, "What Is Poetry?," was started by Ferlinghetti in the late 1950s; here he provides backup for his argument for the importance of poetry, and that a "life lived with poetry in mind is itself an art." Here, the political returns--somewhat--to the personal, as "poetry is the shortest distance between two humans," is "the anarchy of the senses making sense"; and "it is a pulsing fragment of the inner life, an un-tethered music" which "restores wonder and innocence."

Again, a lofty charge, but many have believed it, and some, such as Ferlinghetti, have lived it--

We have seen the best minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

This impassioned, compact, and concise little book won't destroy any minds. But it may stoke some hearts, as Ferlinghetti intends. Long may he add to his poetic warning: "Wake up, the world's on fire!"

Steve Heilig is an editor, writer, award-winning poet, medical ethicist, environmental and public health advocate in San Francisco, as well as a frequent book critic for numerous publications and a music critic for the Beat magazine. This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Steve Heilig. All rights reserved.

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BEARING FALSE WITNESS

Were William Stafford's early poems better left unpublished?


By Eric Ormsby
Poetry Foundation Media Services

When William Stafford (1914-93) was given the National Book Award for poetry, for his 1962 collection Traveling Through the Dark, the judges said of his poems that "their music knows the value of silence." This seems a dubious tribute. Would a composer be acclaimed for his mastery of rests? In fact, though Stafford often wrote about silence -- and made grand claims for it -- he was an unusually chatty poet. Apart from a handful of surprising poems, in which he seemed overtaken by the listening stillness of the natural world, Stafford tended to colonize every pause. He summoned silence as a sort of proscenium, not only for the "cry of an owl" or "the yelps of geese," but for his own muted ruminations. He wanted to create, as he put it, "echoes realer / than originals." Unfortunately, echoes have a nasty way of fading.

Stafford had a small but genuine poetic gift and he worked hard to develop it. How hard can now be seen in Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (Graywolf Press, 128 pages, $26), edited and with an introduction by Fred Marchant. During that decade Stafford composed some 400 poems, 176 of which are included in Mr. Marchant's selection. Many of these were written when the poet, a conscientious objector, was interned for four years during World War II at a Civilian Public Service Camp in California. Mr. Marchant makes much of this fact in his introduction. Indeed, it is Stafford's opposition to war which appears to provide a justification for the volume. It is certainly not the poems.

Among many other misleading statements, Mr. Marchant invokes the grandiose notion of the "poetry of witness" to characterize Stafford's early scribbles. The only thing these wartime efforts bear witness to is how clumsy and naive the young poet was. Lines like "a wispy tapestry of wondering" alternate with self-righteous rants; during a pro-war sermon, Stafford describes himself as "holding my nose in the pews." As if the horrors of war weren't enough, Stafford thunders against lesser evils, such as the dread menace of cellophane; one shudders to think what fiery outrage plastic wrap might have inspired. Of course, this is a young man's verse, more concerned with posturing than poetry, and Stafford himself never saw fit to publish it. To publish it now, even at a time of widespread anti-war sentiment, does no service to his memory.

In his introduction Mr. Marchant uses Stafford's youthful doggerel as a platform for sophistries of every sort. Though the poet was set to work in the camp on various "forestry and soil-conservation projects," the "prison-like regimentation of life" there constituted "an assault on his integrity." Mr. Marchant refers to Stafford as an "internal exile," an allusion to the infamous camps of the Soviet Gulag. But the camp where he was interned was located in the mountains above Santa Barbara -- not exactly Siberia. And if Stafford was an "exile," it was by free choice and honorable conviction. In any case, forced dabbling in soil conservation, even under rough conditions, doesn't sound unduly oppressive, especially when compared with conditions at Iwo Jima or the beaches of Normandy.

Still worse is Mr. Marchant's dishonest tendency to equate Allied and Nazi intentions in the war. He goes so far as to state that the infamous Wannsee Conference, at which the "final solution" was hatched, was morally equivalent to the Allied decision to bomb Dresden and Tokyo, without noting that the former was an act of cold, calculated evil while the latter was a dreadful, but unavoidable, response to that evil. Nor does Mr. Marchant bother to point out that the American provision of conscientious objector status was a liberal and humane measure; it wasn't available to German soldiers in the Wehrmacht.

The same penchant for oversimplification mars much of Stafford's verse from beginning to end. In a 1962 poem he could write, with barely suppressed hysteria, "we live in an occupied country, misunderstood." But the misunderstanding -- like his wartime internment -- was mostly of his own making. As he wrote of a character in another poem from the '60s, "he uses / the haze as authentic." The same might be said of Stafford, too.

When the haze lifted he could write memorably. In "Traveling Through the Dark," the title poem of his best book, he showed what he could do when he set aside the specious generalization for the unique and unrepeatable instance. In this little poem, he describes finding a deer killed by the side of the road and discovering, when he drags her body to the shoulder, that

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.

The poem turns on the long hesitation which follows. The poet says, "I could hear the wilderness listen." How do you hear a wilderness -- or anything else -- "listen"? But we listen, too, at this moment, like that fawn waiting for the sound of its mother's heartbeat. Here Stafford let silence itself do the talking and this gives his last two lines their harsh but sorrowful force.

I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving -- ,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Eric Ormsby's work regularly appears in The Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, The Paris Review, and other publications. This article first appeared in The New York Sun, where he writes the weekly "Readings" column.

© 2008 by Eric Ormsby. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

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THE GREEN MAN IN CAMELOT

A review of Simon Armitage's new translation of the larger--and stranger--than-life Middle English poem, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."


By Edward Hirsh
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight A New Verse Translation. By Simon Armitage. $25.95, W. W. Norton & Company; 12.99, Faber & Faber.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is one of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry. The poem was created in the latter part of the 14th century by an unknown author who probably hailed from the West Midlands of England. He knew the spoken dialect of the rugged country between north Staffordshire and south Lancashire.

The geography of the poem puts it a world away from cosmopolitan London. The sole surviving copy of the manuscript, now kept securely in the British Library, was recorded by a scribe and bound up with three other poems probably by the same creator ("Pearl," "Patience" and "Cleanness"). Thus the author is generally known as the Gawain or Pearl poet. He was a contemporary of Chaucer and a master of our mongrel English tongue.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It's easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it. You can tear through it in a night or two--I couldn't put down Simon Armitage's compulsively readable new verse translation--and linger over it for years.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is one of the founding narratives of English literature. The storyteller nods to the "Aeneid," thus invoking his epic lineage, and then settles down to tell his tale, which begins in the court of King Arthur, "most regal of rulers in the royal line." It is Christmas-time at Camelot, and the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table are carrying on and carousing when suddenly an enormous stranger appears, a hulking interloper, "a most massive man, the mightiest of mortals." The astonishing stranger is green from head to foot, a kind of emanation from nature. Even his horse is "a steed of pure green stock." The Green Knight, "otherworldly, yet flesh/and bone," presents a startling challenge: he will endure one blow without offering resistance, but whoever deals it must promise to receive a reciprocal blow in a year and a day. Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, rises to the challenge and beheads the stranger in one stunning strike. Then the Knight stands, picks up his head, and reminds Gawain to meet him at the appointed time.

Thereafter Gawain, a bewildered southern innocent (he tells Arthur he is "weakest of your warriors and feeblest of wit"), honors his pledge to seek the Green Knight out and journeys into harsh northern terrain. A year of adventures ensues--an adulterous seduction, a series of graphically violent hunts, a meeting with the Green Knight in a green chapel--that constitutes the moral test and vision of the poem.

Alliteration, the audible repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or within words, is part of the sound stratum of poetry. Its heavy percussive use in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" brings the poem close to oral poetry.

Listen to the letter "v" in this line about the Green Knight - "And alle his vesture verayly was clene verdure" - which Armitage gleefully translates as "In all vestments he revealed himself veritably verdant!" Or consider the letter "g" in this comparable line - "Thou wyl grant me godly the gomen that I ask / bi ryght" - which Armitage renders as "you'll gracefully grant me this game which I ask for/by right." The repetitive consonants tie the stressed syllables together (grant, godly, gomen) and urge the interaction of the words upon us.

Armitage, an English poet from West Yorkshire, clearly feels a special kinship with the Gawain poet. He captures his dialect and his landscape and takes great pains to render the tale's alliterative texture and drive. Indeed, Armitage calls alliteration "the warp and weft of the poem." His vernacular translation isn't literal--sometimes he alliterates different letters, sometimes he foreshortens the number of alliterations in a line, sometimes he changes lines altogether and so forth--but his imitation is rich and various and recreates the gnarled verbal texture of the Middle English original, which is presented in a parallel text.

Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version. He reminds us that "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" still wields an uncanny power after 600 years. We're fortunate that "our coffers have been crammed/with stories such as these."

Edward Hirsch is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and his latest book is Special Orders.

© 2007 by Edward Hirsch. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

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NO DEAD-ENDS

Fanny Howe's poetry is consciousness without judgment; her objective is "not to conclude, but to discover."


By Joel Brouwer
Poetry Foundation Media Services

The Lyrics, by Fanny Howe. Graywolf Press. $14.00.

These six long poems were obviously written on the move; references to walking, traveling, searching, and fleeing appear again and again. The poems themselves roam, too, passing from one set of associations to another without troubling too much about transitions. Howe's poems have always claimed a right to include whatever passes through the poet's mind, and to hold up for reconsideration any and every assumption, whether spiritual, philosophical, political, personal, or aesthetic. In this, Howe seems to imply that the test for whether or not an utterance is poetic is simply to ask whether or not a poet uttered it.

Such an approach can be disastrous if the poet's consciousness is insufficiently remarkable, but this has never been a problem in Howe's case. These poems really should, by all rights, be impossible to follow; they're that heedless of rhetorical, narrative, or formal consistency. But each new line offers a fresh thrill of interest, and I read on like a hiker following blaze-marks through a forest, not sure where I'm going but confident I'm not lost:

Because my secret wedding
Was enduring and the rest
Was not--I think disclosure
Is dangerous.

What is heavier than lead?
The need for bread.

What is crueler than a boss?
The need for praise.

What is shorter than a step?
An indrawn breath.

My secret wedding was to whom?
A promise not a human.

* * *

Let the mill-clapper go on clacking,

Let mud and ink stiffen
On the same sheet.

Let the lamb shit on the cross
And the pen cut the butcher.

Let a fire blow and warm
The revolutionaries.

I am secular. I walk the streets.
I feel sorry for everyone.

When will the Messiah come?
The repetition of the same problem

Is getting exhausting.
"Roosters, blood, a silhouette.
Hanging over a gas lamp."

          --From Forty Days

One thread I hold on to through passages like these is Howe's companionable voice, which is earthy, funny, intolerant of euphemism, and delighted by beauty. Two others Howe seems to offer are political urgency and spiritual seeking; some lines sound like Bertolt Brecht and others like Teresa of Avila. But before we grab hold of those two, we should consider how they relate to one another.

Pace the inane book description on The Lyrics's back cover, Howe knows very well that there's a difference between good and evil, and her commitment to social justice is evident throughout her body of work. Howe has also long been fascinated by ideas of spirituality and transcendence. A reader given to dialectical thinking and impatient with religious sentiment in any form (mea culpa) might struggle to understand how a poet can on one page see language as a means of escape from the material world, "because the structures of language and sound offer one more way to get close to Atman-Brahman-Ma. // They reveal secrets by which you can reach enlightenment and live in the universe without fear," and on the very next use language to compose a prayer inspired not by any misty spirit but by straight-up historical materialism:

Ma is God but not quite the same.
So pray to the toilet, flush.
Pray to the floor, stay clean

* * *

To the cow and the hen, thank you
For all you have given
To us workers of the world.

          --From Far and Away

But this apparent conflict may not be one at all, if we think of Howe not as a lyric poet in the Romantic sense of someone engaged in subjective personal expression, but instead as a kind of lyricist improvising in her studio, patching together into her song the overheard and the imagined, the given and the made, ideas rejected and ideas dearly held, rumor and experience. "A day is a freely given poem; it can be short or long," writes Howe, and "Nowhere is better / Than a road without judgment."

In the end, it seems Howe's objective isn't to arrive but to travel, not to preserve experience but to let it pass through her, not to conclude but to discover. Asked why she left her "native country," Howe offers these lines of recognition and loss, which themselves seem to "sparkle as they vanish":

      To become a different kind of being:
      A realist
Who can recognize and classify the pieces of the lost.
      To be the only one!
It's true they sparkle as they vanish
And finding them lets you know you are credible,
      At home in the world.

Joel Brouwer is the author of three books: Exactly What Happened, Centuries, and And So. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

© 2008 by Joel Brouwer. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

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PUT ON THAT PARTY-CRASHING DRESS

Laura Kasischke's latest poetry collection, Lilies Without, offers unsettling charms.


By Joel Brouwer
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Lilies Without, by Laura Kasischke. Ausable Press. $14.00.

Not much light penetrates the gloom of Laura Kasischke's bewitching new collection, which conjures a mood of misty portent through the use of deep-image nouns (fire, sea, stone, bone, bird); mythological and fairy-tale tropes (Orpheus and Eurydice, the Styx, bats, cobwebs, ghosts, hags, wolves) and formulae ("Once, a woman lay her head on a pillow to sleep without noticing that ... "); addresses to and from god and other mysterious beings; enigmatic italicized passages perhaps spoken by those beings; convulsively varying line lengths; sudden strangulating enjambments; creepy storybook rhymes ("O, what would it be like, I wondered then, // to have that thing explode / each year for a week into blossom in your head // so long after you were dead?"); mesmerizing spates of anaphora; and occasional direct adjectival assertions of spookiness ("ominous summer," "haunted city," "ghostly babies," "monstrous cloud"). All these techniques appear in the opening poem, "New Dress":

Dress of dreams and portents, worn

in memory, despite
the posted warnings
sunk deeply into the damp
sand
all along the shore. (The green

tragedy of the sea
about to happen to me.) Even

in my subconscious, I ignored them.
(The green

eternity of the sea, just around the corner.) That

whole ominous summer, I wore it, just
an imitation
then, a bit
of threatening ephemera. Another
rumor. Another
vicious whisper. And then
they sang. (The giddy

green
girls
of the sea.)

The feminine
maelstrom
of it, I wore. (How

quiet, at the edge of it, the riot. How

tiny, the police.) The Sturm
und Drang of it. The crypt
and mystery. The knife
in fog of it. The haunted
city of my enemy.
(And always
the green, floating, open
book of the sea.) That

dress, like

an era of deafness and imminent error, ending
even as I wore it, even as I dragged the damp

hem of it
everywhere
I wore it.

Clearly, trouble is afoot. But as in a number of poems here, it's difficult to guess what that trouble might be. "New dress," "feminine maelstrom," "imminent error," and those eerie green girls together suggest a vague horror about female maturation, but that's about the best I can do. The poem seems to be made of clues to a mystery that might or might not exist.

In many poems here, though, Kasischke's atmospherics work as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. A suite of marvelous poems playing on the conventions of beauty pageants and pinups is no less mysterious than "New Dress," but because the poems' concerns--sexual, political, personal--are clearer, they both beguile and satisfy. The excellent "At Gettysburg" is successful for similar reasons. We know where we are and the significance of the place; we soon know the characters present and their relationships to each other. Given just those small bits of exposition to hold onto, we're
able to enjoy the ride when Kasischke releases her rush of strange and startling images:

The worms
beneath him make

the burden of the earth seem light enough to bear--and still

inside me I believe I carry
the pond where the injured
swans have come to flock.

This is a book of tremendous imaginative energy which is sometimes spent too wantonly but which often blossoms into truly engaging weirdness. An excellent choice for the Goth in your life, or in you.


Joel Brouwer is the author of three books: Exactly What Happened, Centuries, and And So. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

© 2008 by Joel Brouwer. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

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ARMED WITH VERSE

With recent collections of war poetry in his bag, an ex-soldier returns to Afghanistan.


by Nathaniel Fick
Poetry Foundation Media Services

The Baghdad Blues, Sinan Antoon. Harbor Mountain Press, $10.00.

The War Works Hard, Dunya Mikhail. trans. by Elizabeth Winslow. New Directions Publishing, $13.95.

Here, Bullet, Brian Turner. Alice James Books, $14.95.

I first flew into Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, near midnight, with a rifle by my side and no passport in my pocket. At 24 years old, I commanded a Marine Corps infantry platoon, spearheading the attack against the Taliban after September 11. My men and I had all joined a peacetime military, and that night we were self-consciously aware of heading into combat for the first time. Nearly six years later, on a sunny afternoon, I'm again soaring over the Hindu Kush range. This time, I'm on an Indian Airbus, sipping sparkling water and reading war poems.

After two combat tours (we did another in Iraq in 2003), I left the military to study for a master's degree in public policy and an M.B.A. Now I live with my fiance in Boston. We host dinner parties, grow herbs on the windowsill, and go walking in the park on Sundays. It's four years and 10 lifetimes since my last ambush patrol, and I've been invited back to the fray to teach at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy, a school set up to train Afghan and NATO troops on the finer points of fighting insurgents. For some reason, I've agreed to come.

U.S. Army Sergeant Brian Turner distilled his year in Iraq into a haunting book of poems titled Here, Bullet. Turner initially kept his work to himself because he didn't want his men to think he was writing about "flowers and stuff." One of my favorites is titled "Ashbah," Arabic for "ghosts."

The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,

unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice

sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,

how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,

leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

Having walked Iraq's streets by night and felt that dawn wind bending the palms, I get lost when I read Turner's verse. His words are worth a thousand pictures, and they take me right back. My memories are mostly sentence fragments now, rather than chapters, or even paragraphs. A boy with a bellyful of bullets. Birdsong in the palms. The taste of fear, like a penny on your tongue. Flames in the night sky. More than mere scene-setting, Turner captures the feel of the place, the sheer forlorn emptiness of it.

Sinan Antoon studied at Baghdad University before moving to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. We stood on opposite sides of a chasm: I was a combatant, and he was a civilian. But Antoon understands war's egalitarian nature: that it often doesn't matter which end of the gun we're on. Antoon touches another universal theme in "Sifting," a poem of but 12 words:

my eyes
are two sieves
sifting
in piles of others
for you

A husband scanning a crowd of refugees for his wife? Maybe a sister seeking her brother in a line of captured soldiers? Or how about a young Marine at a checkpoint?

Like Antoon, Dunya Mikhail fled Iraq in the 1990s. The title poem in her collection, The War Works Hard (winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award), turns President Bush's oft-repeated phrase on its head.

How magnificent the war is!
How eager and efficient!
. . .
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader's face.
The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.

As the plane drops toward the runway, into surface-to-air missile range, the poems have indeed prompted reflection. My heart's beating faster, and I'm thinking of Turner's wind, Antoon's sifting eyes, and Mikhail's working war.

They remind me where I've been, and make me wonder why the hell I've come back.

Nathaniel Fick served as a Marine Corps infantry officer in Afghanistan and Iraq. His combat memoir, One Bullet Away, was a New York Times bestseller, and was named one of the Best Books of 2005 by The Washington Post.

© 2007 by Nathaniel Fick. All rights reserved.

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