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Finally a review by Judith of three American poetry books from Faber
Child In Gaza
after Wm Blake
I was a little child
born in Gaza ruins.
My name was Palestinian
and my heart was strong.
On the Israeli green
the little children played,
I asked to share the play
but they sent back fire.
Why did they send white fire
which melted away my flesh?
They said it was the gift
my jealousy deserved.
Why did they burn me so?
In white bandages I die
in a hospital like a ruin.
Tell me, you who know.
1.31.09
To Church
You wear a foxglove so lightlysince you only have
to open your thighs
A bell so pink, and pinker
and floppy as the feather
on your Sunday hat.
To church all foxglove and fine feather
tugging the purple bell,
the bee on its knees.
From ‘Just After Midnught’ Judith Kazantzis 2004
His photo and two fish
FL. 3.8.01He takes the birthday
without sentimentality,
the flashed wit a bit frail,
fluttering his logic - not mumbling,
dancing the phrases - rather as
he dance-shuffled the street,
refusing a white stick:
that way he felt ground and took
help just for crossing. We say,
as we always did,
how does he do it?
Because he’s in his hideout,
the ledge, the cliff shadow, where he,
and she too, lie anchored,
two silvery black-eyed fish
waving transparent bodies
against the tugs and tweaks of
the roving current, all that
such suspended beings
now and forever need.
The Long Man of Wilmington
Did you hearof the dancing Christ?
how he was washed clean
out of the roots of the hair
of Windover Hill,
by a typical vigorous vicar,
who loved antiquity
and to restore.
What a service he gave
in spades
on the home mount.
Sleezed in sheep droppings,
sunk under bumpy turf,
marker flints gone to Christian byres;
still there used to proceed
beneath the grass
the Long Man, the Giant,
huge as a cloud’s cousin -
on line for Wilmington Church.
Did the vicar stumble
when he felt a heaviness come on him,
his chalice gathered earwigs and spiders:
tithes not paid,
the village, the church, at loggerheads,
pews empty, muddy cottage doors closed
when he calls, black hat in hand,
scapegoat, Jonah,
seems to the poor man,
murrain, hail out of season,
yes, in Victorian England.
One night sozzled in bed
his appropriate angel speaks:
sh..uggest, m’boy, not you, not me,
‘s him up there, and I don’t mean...
lesh reroute, good and all.
He took his spade, his surveyor’s string and pegs,
workmen echoed the hillside with curses,
god’s work be done,
he shortened and rejointed the long half-traced legs
into a crab’s stride
across the towering shell of the hill.
(Laming that great glint
of a jump
from top to bottom,
arms balancing
twenty cubits across the rabbit terraces,
hands extending two staffs -
at dawn a gateway,
night unlocks,
the god waltzes downward
to his altar
under the young green yew-tree).
How do we know
this dancer didn’t eat human hearts,
captives, pitiful boys and girls,
the Sussex minotaur -
Who knew? Who dreaded?
Old Bishop Who and When?
Then ever so much later,
still a fear at night of the clouds wheeling,
ah vicar.
Just the yew-tree stands
as big as a mammoth’s cave
behind the church
built square by Augustine
to cut off the jumpline
- after the god was hung out dry,
flattened in Palestine,
spread-eagled by Empire and Pope.
What jollities lost heart,
or cruelties, in the grass trace,
what grace came out of the hill,
what lanky
descent of the chalk aisles,
clerestory of sunlight,
pillars of rain showers.
Stand under the strange tree
crutched
with a hundred dicta,
a mighty cuphoard of doctrines,
bats’ droppings,
branch groaning on branch,
library of howling rain, wind,
scritch owl, dark watchout robin.
Praise the shoulders, the lissom hills,
our steep climbs, our trudge,
the sky, the clouds,
the hair whirling in our mouth,,
the wind, the rainbow,
blackberries in the rainbow’s cup -
Into the gateway,
remember the clambered year,
a fruit,
a man in the grass.
Seeing What You Made
To Mimi
From Birthday Volume for Mimi Khalvati, ed: E A Markham (in loving memory)
Without thinking, a moonlit flood,
white as a cherry-tree in jubilance.
Your mirror-tree refracted somehow
to a moon in full flood: this mirror-moon,
my quite misremembered dazzle,
stood in a garden, in a Highgate road.
But you, for whom your mirror-tree
flickered dark and light, and the room
kept a diary of that self,
you’re there and gone, to your other rooms.
Also come gold, snow, lavender, amber…
Before, your grandmother, sugar-breaker,
morning maker of the sugar-bowl.
"‘Salaam, my daughter-lovely-as-the-moon,’"
A childhood, a revolving house…
Your lines are your own silk routes,
tough, tramping your northern city;
myrrh; and kids’ laughter, in cold air.
Now the room notes the ‘acorn sea’.
And sun rises, and enters. Love writes
each room, each ‘pool of light’, from secrecy
to opened secrecy, dazzling, yours the gift.
Mistakes and all, I took it to my heart:
the snow-light on the bare ceiling,
its ruby heart, face of winter, face of summer,
watching how, not moon but love’s sun shivers
to the peacock’s spreading fan of poems
just as your tree, or mosaic in the street,
stood mirror, all that you saw and sang:
What is broken, what is made of it and sung,
the sweat of your bashful peacock of light,
the falling drop, your ‘pool of light’.
Review:
Frightening Toys by Charles Simic - Faber
Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow by August Kleinzahler - Faber
The Given And The Made, Recent American Poets by Helen Vendler - Faber
Three American poetry books from Faber, all interesting and the best first: a second selected poems from the New Yorker Charles Simic.
Avoiding a too cute replay of his brilliant folklore heritage (his family emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1948 when he was eleven.) was always something of a problem for Simic, and still can be. However, despite some failures, some poems too chic, some too demure, on the whole they develope movingly from his first selected, published here in the mid eighties. Say 'surreal' to poets and many reply Simic. This is to diminish his gift of quietly walking the reader up an existential gangplank. In "Frightening Toys" there is no comparable crisis to that faced so harshly and movingly in "Charon's Cosmology" and beyond, but once again the migrant's angst is given Simic's specialty treatment. Irremediable doubt pushes its barb through gentle narrative or pounces with a backhander (folksongs are the "Sausage‑makers of History/The bloody kind"). Identity trembles during the amble into a dark shop, down a street, a cup of coffee, a child sobbing. Here's "Stub of a Red Pencil"
You were sharpened to a fine point
With a rusty razor blade.
Then the unknown hand swept the shavings
Into its moist palm
And disappeared from view....
On the other hand, New York itself has become one of his main characters, a vivid, unfair, expressionistic "City" occupied like Metropolis only by the frivolous or the starving. The prose poem pieces that hop around history and literature seem pretentious; his writing is more vital when, especially in the later books, he touches base with the old neighbourhood of the imagination, bustling, haunted, Europe its past, America its past and present. Youthful alienation has become something slightly else. Separateness, and the struggle to love in the face of it, are his enduring themes. At his best there is often the necessary undertone of some violence: the image of a severed dolls head haunts him: it first appeared in a poem of the late seventies linked closely with a punishing view of his mother. But here, in the nineties, he chronicles his parents' pathetic old age with great compassion. The journey he has taken towards expressing feeling without loss of ambivalence pays off wonderfully in a poem like "True History". Or here in "The prodigal son" is his mother
How slow she shuffles now
In my father's Sunday shoes.
The dog by her side
Trembling with each step
As he tries to keep up.
When obliquely, as in "Lost Glove", or, outright rhetorically, in "The City", Simic thrusts into the wider picture all his considerable powers, anger in restraint, tenderness, humour, fantasy, something else is gained, a voice of stature bearing witness to a general suffering.
August Kleinzahler has no argument with separateness; he bubbles like a verbal melting‑pot. He nips from Jimmy the Lush shouting drunk in the park over to foreign lit. quotes, from Gulf War military jargon to funny man macho: "If it's a dream /Give the projector a flip, willya/ Please /Get under the covers..." He knocks off tales of "Gladys, the killer and me" in Reno and of Madame Cornichon sighing for Ravel in Paris. But under the story‑telling (and speediness can't prevent some of it being flat), under the sightbites of San Franciso, New York and Paris, there's a self that's more sensuous and self‑reflective, unified by erotic love, leaves, flowers and the weather of the seasons. I thought never would come the day when I would hail a cat poem but his "Cat in Late Autumn" takes us movingly into the animal's light and darkness. Not forgetting his short wild bits of verbal brio like "Song" "Dream Juice" or "Jump Tune", for me the most interesting longer poems arrive at the end, when Kleinzahler's social and intimate selves get on surer terms. The meditation on a bitter Canadian spring turns notably: first a tough lady in a bar, then an equally tough but silent picture of winter breaking up, into which suddenly, at last the personal "I" breaks, hesitantly. The title poem is so powerful because its dichotomies stir Kleinzahler at real depth: big city and huge weather, domestic interior and the wild external. But perhaps more characteristic of his skimming the cream style is this from "Pieces of Summer"
On the subway escalator,
eyes averted,
pants snug as the skin of half‑ripe pears
In pastel rooms all through this melting world,
love‑thoughts, like cuttings,
have begun to take
Emotional thinness over longer or narrative poems has much to do with Helen Vendler's inquiry in her expanded T S Eliot lectures: a look at the modern American lyric. She takes four poets, described oddly both as "representative" and "arbitrary": two postwar poets, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and two wellknown contemporary women poets, Rita Dove and Jorie Graham, whom I assume she would like to see better known here. But I don't think the uniting theme, "The Given and the Made" is best suited to do this for Dove and Graham. Vendler strains awkwardly for her common title: arguing as follows, that each of the four has made their poetry out of some given, "some personal donnee which the poet could not avoid treating" and which it becomes their poetic task to find symbolic equivalents for, in short a major driving‑force of the work.
Lowell"s donnee is "history", that is to say the task of dealing with his own highly political and establishment family history. We get a politically interesting, if dogged, survey of Lowell's lifelong attempt to write a total lyric history, one that could include both the public and the personal, history in both capital and lower case. Hence the turning point of 'Life Studies', hence the turn again into what Vendler wearily calls the "inflexible iambic Procrustean bed" of the later sonnets. There is an almost Zen irony, one might conclude, in the fact that it was Life Studies, with its feeling turn towards "the insignicant" (Lowell's word), that made the real history, since it gave poets a more democratic language to write in.
Berryman, child like the the Lowell of Life Studies of Freud has as his donnee his own unassuageable id, who he made into the Henry of the Dream Songs, irresistible, irrepressible and tragic. Vendler's theory of the post war American Freudian lyric provides the background to an excellent excursion around Henry of the Dream Songs, though the Dream Songs are more fun to read about than perhaps to read, nowadays. They date; for one thing the blackface. Vendler indeed makes an ingenious general point about that. However she seems to count the Dream Songs as a successful modern lyric epic. Henry's wise " Friend", she suggests, is not Henry's Superego but an allegorical Conscience figure and in this confluence of Freud and Christianity lies the poem's originality, expressed in a "comic equilibrium", a balance between "the ecstatic and the parodic." But the only real order imposed on Henry's (epic) linguistic mess is, she concludes, the form itself; nevertheless in this, the eighteen line songs with their retaining walls set on the linguistic floods, lies the poem's formal achievement. As a result Berryman was able to bring off a coup of language which gave American poetry "one of those rare jolts onwards that compell lasting attention".
Less satisfactory is the "donnee” given to the African American poet Rita Dove: that of her blackness. Not her only concern, it is admitted; three others are (briefly) mentioned. Nevertheless Vendler's compartmentalised look at how the issue of blackness is treated in Dove's book length sequence "Thomas and Bewlah" seems a wooden way to appreciate either the poem or Dove as a whole poet. She does set out well some introductory questions about traps and strategies open to black and minority poets. But the sensation of Vendler as (somewhat dated) white interpreter of black poets to international white student audiences is depressing. Is she the Ivy league's high tide of political correctness? Who is concluding what here? "More than any other contemporary black poet, Dove has taken on the daunting aesthetic question of how to be faithful to, and yet unconstrained by, the presence ‑ always already given in a black American ‑ of blackness."
Incidentally, where does Walcott's presence in America fit in? The concept of "blackness" as one of her donnee remains with all Vendler's good intentions obstinately white‑centred: if only that these christening gifts of hers seem to be bad ones, not good ones. She is surer when she attends simply to Dove's powerful way of building images.
Rather differently, the donnee given to Jorie Graham, her trilinguism as a child in Italy, is a slender reed on which to hang an ideas essay which seems almost perversely to focus on poems which Vendler admits are not Graham's best, and at times feels quite stuffed with cleverness. I have only, but with enthusiasm, read Graham's beautiful and ambitious poetry in anthologies: this essay may not I think bring her new readers, though it will interest students. However the last few pages provide a steadier celebration of what appears as a supple philosophical lyricism; Vendler, always excited by the movement of a poet's ideas, is too plunged in Graham's. But here she writes with heart. Forget trilinguilism.
2007 CHOLMONDELEY AWARD
FOR POETIC ACHIEVEMENT
What's New
And Other Fairy Tales -
Open House in Lewes Artwave with Judith Kazantzis and Carolyn Trant.
Paintings, drawings, prints & special display of Carolyn's Artbooks. August & September, see events for further details.
Just After Midnight is named for the hour when my mother died. My latest poetry book, its last section remembers her and my extraordinary father. But first I range from the USA, both lyric and satire, to poems of Sussex, Italy, Palestine, love, satire and memory that grew through many a night into wave paths of image.