Tag: Steven Schroeder

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the poems of mao zedong

This new edition of Willis Barnstone’s translation of the poems of Mao Zedong (originally published by Harper & Row in 1972) includes thirty-five poems written between 1925 and 1963 (with Chinese and English on facing pages) along with an introduction and brief notes on translation and Chinese versification by Barnstone, a sample of Mao’s calligraphy, and (as an afterword) a snippet on Mao’s poetry from a 1983 interview with Richard Nixon conducted by Frank Gannon. The book is valuable for Barnstone’s comments on Chinese poetry – but it is also a fascinating historical document, with significant insights into two of the most powerful political figures of the twentieth century, Nixon and Mao, both of whom left decidedly mixed legacies.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Mao’s poetry is just how traditional it is, in both form and content. Barnstone’s introductory essay highlights this, also noting that Mao “modestly” dismissed his poems “as being of little value” (22) and did not recommend them to the young, “who must find their own way” (23). Barnstone’s observation that Mao, who wrote influential essays on art and literature, followed “little or none of his own counsel” (23) is telling. Separating the practice of those with political power from their art and from their philosophy is a tricky matter made trickier by proximity. Barnstone notes in his introductory essay that “the main published essays on Mao’s poems in Beijing and elsewhere are not much help in evaluating and understanding them; except in offering useful annotation on allusions, studies of the poems tend to be so full of admiration that there is much paean singing, little criticism” (22, 23). Almost forty years later, the uncritical admiration has faded enough to quiet the paean singing – and it has not been entirely replaced by uncritical condemnation, so there may be an opening now for a fresh reading.

Standing alone as poems, these are competent but not remarkable. They would likely not be read at all (and Richard Nixon certainly would not have discussed them with Zhou Enlai) if not for the continuing political significance of their author. What is remarkable, though, at least to an American audience, is the fact of a political leader in the midst of an intense struggle like the Long March turning to poetry that is competent if not brilliant – finding solace in the writing of it and turning to it naturally as a means of focused observation. And equally remarkable is the fact of two political leaders (Nixon and Zhou) turning in their last meeting to the poetry of a third. As a traditional poet, Mao reads the natural world through which he passes with eyes formed by centuries of mythology. And he turns those eyes and that reading to the politics in which he is engaged. A Marxist appreciation of the power of myth might at least remind us not to be surprised if it plays a role in tying revolution into time and history. That a revolutionary leader could be so unremittingly traditional is partly explained by the power of myth and tradition in shaping perception and action. Writing in 1972, Barnstone understands this as “Old and new China” coming together in Mao’s “fresh poems in the traditional style” (24). Old and new China are still coming together, of course, and “traditional style” remains an issue in every new China – as in every place where “newness” encounters tradition (and what place could there be where it does not?). Barnstone’s commentary is particularly helpful in making English readers aware that the interplay of poetry and politics is as conventional in Chinese society as the interplay of politics and religion is in the United States – so conventional that it mostly flies beneath the radar of public consciousness.

For the most part, the traditional style will not be at issue. Even a cursory reading of the poems confirms it, both in terms of form and content. The poems look like traditional Chinese poems, and the allusions that shape observation of contemporary affairs are classical. What will be at issue is the freshness. Take the second stanza of “In Praise of the Winter Plum Blossom” (105), written in December 1962, as an example: “The plum is not a delicious girl showing off / yet she heralds spring. / When mountain flowers are in wild bloom / she giggles in all the color.” This is written in the lyric style called ci, and it is a response to a Song dynasty poem by Lu You. But, as Barnstone notes, it reverses the ending of Lu’s poem “which speaks of peach blossoms that will signify fallen petals and dust, with only the fragrance left” (147). Does Mao’s vision of Spring in Winter constitute freshness, and does the plum blossom as giggling girl bear comparison to Sappho’s girl as an apple? There is a small window for freshness in poetry so clearly tied to traditional form and traditional images. Mao did not recommend it for the young, but the question is whether more experienced eyes can see something new in wild flowers heralding spring though they are not showing off. As a poet, Mao apparently thought he did. It is difficult for an audience to read that now without reading through the almost fifty years that have passed since; but, at the beginning of that half century, it is intriguing that the possibility of something new could be spoken by a revolutionary in the form of a traditional poem that responded to an older poem and to the world by only slightly turning it.

Politically, more Burke than Mao, perhaps. But interesting reading nonetheless. Read it, and let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

The Poems of Mao Zedong. Translations, Introduction, and Notes by Willis Barnstone. University of California Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-520-25665-1.

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cambridge companion to twentieth-century english poetry

In his introduction, Neil Corcoran draws the lines within which this Cambridge Companion explores English poetry with admirable clarity: “The poetry treated here is ‘English’ in the sense that it’s written in the English language, or versions of it, by poets who are, or were, of English, Scottish or Welsh origin, or have an origin or family attachment overseas but have been resident in Britain or taken British nationality” (1). That is at once a wide and an explicit net that raises issues of nation, language, politics, and identity – by what it includes and by what it excludes – from the outset. These issues were contested terrain in the twentieth century, and the terrain continues to be contested in the twenty-first. The work of poets in the period, whether explicitly engaged in contesting terrain or not, was (and is) affected by the way those issues were (and are) handled. And, as Corcoran suggests, leaving the Irish story untold in this volume (on mainly “practical” grounds, as he puts it) means that an Irish presence – particularly in the person of William Butler Yeats, haunts the collection from beginning to end. That alone makes for an interesting commentary on English poetry, particularly as the questions of language and national identity are complicated by nationalist struggles, devolution, and immigration in the course of the twentieth century. Add the fact that T. S. Eliot is not treated individually in this collection, and you have a century of English poetry haunted by two presences (and a multiplicity of “versions”) that have transformed the music of English as we hear it now.

The collection consists of seventeen essays in four sections: “contexts,” “moderns,” “modernists,” and “later modernities.”

The three essays in the “contexts” section address the transition from Victorian to modern (with particular attention to Gerard Manley Hopkins), the relationship between “modern” poetry (a matter of periodization) and “modernist” poetry (a matter of style and ideological orientation), and “postmodernism” as an “elastic” term (stylistic, ideological, and periodizing at the same time) particularly problematic for poets who – as Redell Olsen puts it – are “often relatively uninvested in the capital of a culture industry” (42) and critics (perhaps more invested) who investigate their work. The essays in this section do an excellent job of problematizing categories that might otherwise be so rigid as to obscure connections across boundaries historians have constructed for the sake of order or convenience. Hopkins is perhaps the most important instance of boundary crossing in this collection, which clearly outlines stylistic and historical reasons for making the line drawn at Victoria’s death in 1901 permeable while also noting quirks of publication that put the poems in this case in a different century than the poet.

The other three sections are generally chronological – moving from A.E. Housman, Charlotte Mew, Thomas Hardy, and Edward Thomas through D. H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, William Empson, and Dylan Thomas to Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. The last four essays continue the generally chronological plan under titles that also group poets along lines partly determined by historical developments and partly by the identity politics of the period: “Black British poetry and the translocal” (which focuses on Grace Nichols, Louise Bennett, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Bernardine Evaristo – but also reaches back through Afro-Caribbean music to Claude McKay), “Poetry and class,” “A Scottish Renaissance” (associated with Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Liz Lochhead, Robert Crawford, Don Paterson, and Kathleen Jamie), and “Lyric adaptations” (ending with Carol Ann Duffy, Martianism, and Simon Armitage).

There are problems, of course, of the sort that confront any survey: what is left out is as important in determining the shape of the object or period surveyed as what is included, and grouping poets – one chapter for the Scottish Renaissance, one chapter for women, one chapter for “Black British poetry” – may effectively marginalize them. But Stevie Smith’s comment (cited by Linda Anderson) turns this marginalization into an invitation to rethink the whole poetry of English. “But I’m alive today,” she said, “therefore I’m as much a part of our time as everybody else. The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won’t they, and for everybody else” (174). Everybody is not included in this survey, but (in the words of the publisher) “these specially commissioned essays by highly regarded poetry critics offer an up-to-date, stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century” – an overview that gives students a taste of the variety of English poetry rather than an illusion of its singularity. There are ghosts that dominate the story told here – but there is also Stevie Smith and the calypsonian Young Tiger singing “I was there” as he sings about the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (206).

When Corcoran writes “English language, or versions of it,” he invites a correction, not an alternative – joining John Agard in “inciting rhyme to riot,” opening up possibilities not only for “reverse colonization” but also for the new songs that accompany cities made new between Victoria and the turn of another millennium.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry. Edited by Neil Corcoran. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-69132-1.

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the art of the poetic line

James Longenbach’s assertion in The Art of the Poetic Line that “the line’s function is sonic” (xi) is a rhetorical flourish, an exercise in creative overstatement intended to open eyes to a truth about poetry as much as to say something simply true. Coupled with the opening line of the book – “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines” (xi) – it turns our eyes to sound and may put our bodies in the right place to see what our ears can do in the hands of a poem on the page.

One of the most delightful things about this book is that it refuses the separation of reading and writing from hearing and performing. The poem is a performance that plays with the matter of sound whether on the page or on the stage – and the line – visual, aural, tactile – traces the form of the play. “Poetry,” Longenbach writes, “does not need to be spoken to exist primarily as a sonic work of art” (14). But this follows the discussion of a passage from King Lear with which the book begins,  a discussion that moves from “Whatever else he is, Shakespeare is one of the great prose writers in the English language” (3) to a demonstration that great poems do not “simply describe a movement of thought” but rather embody and complicate the movement “through the relationship of syntax and line” (13). Poetry is a sonic work of art, but it works with the body, not the ears alone. And its work is a matter of relationship: it uses the eyes to grab us by the ears, and the means by which it grabs us – the line – exists “because it has a relationship to syntax” (18). Because line (unlike punctuation) “cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe” (xi), it resists abstraction. And this, perhaps, is what turns a writer like Longenbach to rhetoric and performance more than to grammar or logic. Not only does it resist abstraction, it defies rationalization. And so our “theory” of it is most likely to succeed where it takes the form of demonstration rather than argument: “look!” And when it does that, it may invite imitation – not in a derivative sense but in the sense that might introduce a partner to a dance: “walk this way.”

The line exists because it has a relationship to syntax, and “poems are poems because we want to listen to them” (120) – a marvelously relational pair of “definitions” that guides Longenbach through a fascinating discussion of the art of the line in Glück, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Dickinson, Stevens – all within the framework of a triumvirate that begins with Shakespeare, then continues through Joyce to Yeats.

Each of the three sections is a feast for the reader of poetry – whether a writer of poetry or not. This is not a “how to” book, but – by showing and showing and showing via a dizzying variety of poems and poets – it will sharpen the eyes to forms this sonic art has taken in some of the best of its practitioners and forms it may yet come to inhabit. Eliot, Longenbach reminds us, wrote that “poetry is a form of punctuation” (77) – and, like punctuation, it may inform our breathing. But, more, “to hear the work of line in a great contemporary poem is to listen again to the whole history of poetry in English” (77). Louise Glück writes in “Nostos” that “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” (42) – and Longenbach takes up this memory in relation to vision in a sense that might properly be called Eucharistic: do this in memory, and the whole history of poetry is present. This is a Eucharistic understanding of real presence grounded in ubiquity rather than transubstantiation: poetry permeates the world, so our whole being in the world is anamnesis. Longenbach quotes Mallarmé: “There is no such thing as prose… There is the alphabet, and then there are verses which are more or less closely knit, more or less diffuse. So long as there is a straining toward style, there is versification” (99, 100). And, as Longenbach understands this, “Truly to strain toward style, to write in one way rather than another way, is not to take a stand on prose or line or meter or rhyme: it is to discover what the language of a particular poem requires” (100).

This little book is an invitation to turn our bodies to the matter of what the particular poem – the poem we encounter here, now, with our eyes, our ears, our hands – requires. A welcome respite from the torturing of poems called “workshopping,” it is an exercise, a work in which the poem is subject rather than object, in which poet and poem work. Longenbach and the poets he enlists as partners – from Shakespeare to Yeats – make this work a pleasure for readers, including (but not limited to) the subset of readers who are also writers.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

James Longenbach. The Art of the Poetic Line. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-55597-488-6.

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wild flight

“Upon Being Asked What I Believe In,” near the end of Christine Rhein’s Walt McDonald Prize winning Wild Flight, is a key to the whole collection. She begins with language: “I say, for starters, the word in, / the way it dumps quicksand before / love and trouble, or after belief / and jump right!” (90) This delight in the smallest of words and what they do in relation to others serves Rhein well – and it is the relation, the dumping of quicksand, more than the sound or the shape, that first captures her attention. The list that follows in this poem is full of ordinary words naming ordinary objects full of life. The poet describes, but she also invites readers into a world of wooden spoons “meandering through thick lentil soup / with basil” (90) – a world rich with “music from unexpected sources” (90). This is a working world best known by working, not watching, just what one would expect from a poet-engineer – but also a wonderfully distilled instance of poetry’s experimental possibilities. In Rhein’s hands (and she is always anxious to get them on the working of the world), the experimental possibilities of poetry have less to do with the poem’s form than with its action. She speaks of “the temple / of science and poetry” (91); but the temple is also a laboratory and a workshop. Poetry – itself a making – is about knowing and doing as well as feeling, one of the things that made it a serious rival, not simply a frivolous alternative, to philosophy, if we are to believe Plato’s dialogues.

The book begins with a series of recollections of the poet’s father that inform the whole. There is an interesting parallel between the insistence on “German suffering” articulated by a Jewish woman speaking to the poet’s reflection “In the Women’s Room” and a pervasive suburban angst that resonates through poems like “How to Tell It,” in which a childhood friend who stayed in the city when the poet’s family fled looks the poet up in the suburbs. As the friend drives away, the poet, waving from the porch, knows she won’t phone “as promised, our friendship frozen / like a cartwheel mid-turn, my lawn too vast, / too green, no sidewalks heaved up by roots” (37). While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for this poetic persona with a vast green lawn and no sidewalks. it seems the collection is in part a struggle to thaw such frozen relationships in close encounter with objects that are full of life. And that is where music enters, making poetry of a collection that begins dangerously close to chopped prose. The beginning is poignant, no doubt; but breaking it into lines does not make it sing.

Rhein’s words do sing, though, beginning with “During Plans for War, Crows”: “This flock, explicit ink / in a landscape of snow, // as if there were no buried layers, / grass and root, rock and bone” (19) and “Story Problems”: “Edvard Munch painted different versions of The Scream. / Plot the size of the howls against / the intensity of the blood-red sky” (21). Plotting sound’s size against the intensity of sky’s space stops us long enough to catch the rhythm as well as the problem posed in those three lines. And each verse of this poem takes an equally illuminating turn, as in this little homily on a pericope of Stalin: “Stalin said, A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths / a statistic. Prove his theory using AIDS victims. / Solve for grief in Africa” (21). Is this nothing more than a trite criticism of Stalin’s atrocities? Does it raise the possibility that AIDS policies are equivalent to Stalin’s – thereby raising the question of who plays Stalin’s role? Does it simply cast Africa as victim and contain AIDS related suffering there? Does it call into question the act of “proving” a theory by using “victims” rather than encountering persons as persons? Perhaps all of the above. And, particularly, in the last possibility, we see some of the subtlety with which Rhein sets about thawing cartwheels in mid-turn.

Rhein uses words to experiment with ideas about objects in the world, but she also uses words as objects on which to experiment with vision – as in “Self-Portraits, Three-Way Mirror” (27). It is tempting to read this as two poems – one left-justified, one right – reflecting each other as they reflect two sides of the poet’s personality. The left is an engineer, the right a poet – dangerously close to a simple repetition of the stereotypical division of left and right brains in popular psychology. But the title directs us to self-portraits (plural) and a three-way mirror: the poetic persona is not simply reflected in a mirror, and the two sides do not simply reflect one another. If we encounter the persona at all, we do so in front of the mirror, reflected on three sides, turning the way a person standing before a mirror in a fitting room turns. Suddenly, the blank space spiraling down the center of the page appears. the closest thing we have to looking the poet in the eye.

And “In Code” (40, 41) is both visually arresting and conceptually explosive. It begins with an excerpt from The Detroit Free Press noting that “It was the complex software created at Michigan’s Gene Codes Corporation that made most of the 1,571 successful World Trade Center victim identifications possible” and that “the Gene Codes staff is working on Version 137 of the software called Mass-Fatality Identification System, M-FISys, pronounced emphasis.” One might just stop at M-FISys, staggered by the fact of 137 iterations of software designed for mass fatality identification – and counting. But Rhein writes a computer program down the left margin while she juxtaposes “tiny vials cradling / flecks of charred bone” with “parents, siblings, children / silently opening their mouths to offer / a swab of their cells, the tangible scrape / of something carried within” and “your four-year old son / building towers of LEGO, / knocking them over / with his Fisher-Price plane” (40). The program, running down the left margin, ends “Read Only / Object Stream / Description Hold // End If” – while the text running down the center (the way we might expect a poem to run) ends “hope packaged in manila envelopes, / in a lipstick or razor, toothbrush or / pillowcase a spouse folded / and smelled for the last time / or maybe the first” (41). The program on the left margin and the stanzas running down the center are staggered, so “Read Only” appears in the gap between the last two stanzas, while “End If” appears on the line after the last stanza ends. Reading left to right, line by line, there are no stanza breaks, though the gaps between the “program” and the “poem” make the two appear to be in separate columns. As if there were no buried layers.

“And the Beat Goes On” (67, 68) is a “found” pantoum that uses advertising slogans and phrases from popular songs (while evoking, at least for one generation of readers, visual and aural images of Sonny and Cher) to shed new light on “Another day in paradise.” It comes at the beginning of the fourth and final section of the collection, set in motion by a comment from Fran Lebowitz: “Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can’t close your ears…” (65) The poems in this section circulate around the world’s noise – but also its processes – our processes – of tuning, nightingales in London and Berlin that “now sing fourteen decibels louder / to be heard by mates, quintupling the pressure // in their lungs” and a poet in the suburbs musing on silence while trying not to hear the “boom! boom! boom! / from the shooting range” two miles away.

So many ways, contra Lebowitz, to close our ears…

And this is a wonderful first collection by a poet intent on using some of them to open our eyes to unexpected music from unexpected sources, prodding us (the way engineers often do) to get our hands on the working of the world if we expect to know it.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Christine Rhein. Wild Flight. Texas Tech University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-89672-621-5.

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famous last words

The title of Catherine Pierce’s 2007 Saturnalia Book Prize winning collection points to the final short section of the book – a series of seven poems, each of which begins with last words attributed to a famous person, from Billy the Kid to Pancho Villa. The final lines shed light on the whole: “How else / can we live forever? How else / can we write ourselves in?” (66) Pancho Villa’s associates – like the poet – “cannot help but imagine.”

The first section consists of eight “love poems” – to sinister moments, the word lonesome, a blank space, America, the phrase Let’s get coffee, DooWop, longing, and fear – that pretty thoroughly traverse the spiritual landscape of contemporary America (and do it in an oddly loving way). To America, the poet writes “teach me how to strut. // … You’re the one I want // to hate, with all your swagger and bravado, / and of course you take me home / every time. Who could resist?” (5) Oddly loving… “I love the asphalt taste of you, / your acid smell and your hunger and I love / how, afterward, you roll over and snore / like a locomotive before I even catch my breath.” There is a fire here that lights up landscapes of peculiarly self-destructive love: “In bed, / you fell me like a redwood. I am lost / in your factory body…” (5). Somehow it seems appropriate that this love poem to a peculiar country follows a love poem to a blank space and lies in the middle of a section that moves toward love poems to longing (“You’ve left me / wanting nothing”) and fear (“all bombast / and mystery. Everything / yours for the taking”) while it paves the way for the long road trip of section two.

The heart of the book is (adopting the title of one of the poems in the second section) a “cross-country song.” Pierce writes about places she has passed through as well as places she has lived with affection, but also with an eye that is not buying myths of innocence: “Oh country, you are an animal to yourself. / Let me roll in the dust alongside you.” (15) The object under observation is the observer as much as the observed: “Some days I watch myself / in the third person, speak to her / in the second. I say: I will / meet you in sleep. I will know you / by your stillness and your shaking.” (19) There are beautiful recollections of place here – “Fat Tuesday,” “Retrospect,” “Memphis” – but they are also recollections of time, as in “Adolescence”: “You dream yourself into every fairytale, the grisly / versions where the prince’s eyes / run blood and the girl disappears / into the wolf’s dark throat. / You understand the good // must be punished…” and so would be “the queen whose word // is wicked, who conjures smoke / and poison.” (26) Everywhere in these poems, there is energy just below the surface ready to explode. And the surface is explored the way it might be explored on a road trip – Graceland, Tupelo, Moab, Amarillo, Gallup – where everything you see in passing is new, and it makes the world strange in passing.

This is a beautiful collection, full of music and light on a landscape that could be abandoned as bleakly familiar. Pierce has written herself in with grace, humor, and insight that make the book a pleasure to read.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Catherine Pierce. Famous Last Words. Philadelphia: Saturnalia Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9754990-7-8.

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the way of the wind

Ken Hada is unequivocally a poet of place, and his poetry is at its best when it clears a space where readers can dwell for a time in “the gypsum hills of northwest Oklahoma and the Ozarks of north Arkansas.” There are moments in The Way of the Wind when this happens almost flawlessly — as in “The Windmill” (12), which “creaks and groans / the belt squeaking in prairie wind, / wrinkled blades twirling / in tired momentum / unbalanced.” We can see it, but we can hear it as well — especially in the direct discourse of the short first line — no simile, just the sound an old windmill makes in prairie wind, here and now. And in “A Cedar Grove” (15), “Musing in wild / transcendence, / buoyant bluebirds / sing me back.” The alternation between lines of four syllables and three throughout the poem evokes something of the rhythm of a bluebird’s song.

The book is divided into three sections, and the strongest poems (because they are most direct) come in part three, “Singing of Transience,” where moon is “Just a sliver / of light,” smoke is “incense returning / to vials / from the temple / of the gods /of Autumn” (21), and blood is “as familiar / as it is foreign, / ordinarily strange / like turning leaves.” Hada comes to blood by way of “Red-tipped fescue / red sumac, ivy, / cedar bark and berries –” in a place where “even the water is red” (62).

Writing of Hada’s collection, Texas poet laureate Larry Thomas says “if the timeless red dirt of Oklahoma could speak, this book would be its forceful utterance.” At its best, that’s exactly what it is — Oklahoma red dirt singing. Readers who know Oklahoma will recognize familiar tunes and sing along. Those who don’t know Oklahoma but listen will hear it here in the rhythm and words of Ken Hada’s poems.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Kenneth Hada. The Way of the Wind. Cheyenne, Oklahoma: Village Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9791510-7-1.

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broken and reset

The arrangement of Broken and Reset makes reading it something like visiting an archaeological excavation: while we don’t do the digging ourselves, we see evidence that it has been done. We stand on the rim of the dig and look down across forty years of poetry—and, as we read, we work our way to the bottom through four groups.

The first covers ten years and includes substantial selections from Myth Waking: Homeric Hymns, A Modern Sequel and Lost Gardens. The former is motivated by a sense of the “metaphoric usefulness” of things (Greek gods, in this case) thought dead. That is not a bad characterization of much of Price’s poetry, which often seems directed toward resurrections—of gods, of myths, of memories.

The second group, slightly smaller, covers a longer period, from 1994-1978. This section is dominated by a selection from Seven Deadly Sins, which Price describes (388) as “mock sermons . . . cast, irreverently, as artificial sonnets.” While the comment was originally part of the introduction, in this collection it falls at the end of the book as a note. The move is important because it is not clear from the poems themselves that they are mock sermons, and there is nothing inherently irreverent about the sonnet form in which they are presented. Though they don’t adhere to traditional meter or rhyme schemes, they are broken into fourteen lines. After the note, one is left wondering what might constitute a non-artificial sonnet.

And then comes an interesting outcropping low in the dig—a series of “Christmas” poems that covers almost the entire period of the book. These poems are dominated by the season—as much Winter as Christmas, including the association of Winter with death.

And finally, another group covering just over a decade, 1965-1977. Near the end of this final section (and thus in one of the earliest poems included in the collection, “Overworked”), Price writes that “Poems are, crudely, / fingerprints of the mind, left on a certain place / at a certain time. They are meant to remind, / not define…” (375).

The emphasis on mind perhaps explains the abstraction of many of these poems—a poetry of ideas more than a poetry of place, that often seems directed toward jogging the memory. Where that jogging paints people and places, it makes beautiful poems (as in “Laramie,” 7, which begins, “Beethoven grass / teasing and rolling /through the high alone, / surrounding us / with inner spaces /as far as we can breathe, intimate / as not being seen…”) that explode into provocative thoughts (as in the last four lines of  the same poem, “money is just / ticks and lice in the beautiful / fur of the music / bounding over the hills.”) Particularly in the newer poems, Price breaks lines and scatters them across the page to make poems of the eye that seem always out of breath. Such breaks sometimes overcome the sense that these poems are sermons incognito—and may be intended to express the “uneasiness” with piety and institutional religion that Price mentions in the introduction to Seven Deadly Sins, the last word in this collection. But the fingerprints of a lingering piety too often overwhelm certain places, certain times. I would be happy with a less visible mind, more Beethoven grass “intimate / as not being seen.”

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

V. B. Price. Broken and Reset: Selected Poems, 1966-2006. University of New Mexico Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8263-4157-0.

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all that road going

In All That Road Going, A. G. Mojtabai takes the well-worn tradition of the American road novel and makes it new. By choosing a title and an epigraph from Jack Kerouac, she makes the connection with the tradition explicit. But the epigraph from Alfred Corn’s April turns it: “…It’s over. The world wakes up.” And Kerouac’s phrase, “all that road going,” is spoken in Mojtabai’s novel by a downwardly mobile chemist who names it for its oppressive weight, not for the freedom it promises.

The novel is set on a long-haul bus ride in the middle of America – mostly between the Texas Panhandle and St. Louis, leaving passengers mostly in the dark and uncertain whether they are in Oklahoma or Missouri. We come to know that they are in the middle of the middle of a journey in which beginning and end are equally inaccessible: the road goes on forever. The road is what is now Interstate 40 and Interstate 44 – what used to be Route 66, and that locates the novel not on the “underside” of America but in its heart. That the vehicle is a Greyhound bus full of passengers more trapped than footloose turns the familiar image of the road as possibility inside out.

Mojtabai’s work is mostly character driven, and, since her first novel, Mundome, she has been fascinated with possibilities created by their chance collisions – in this case, in the form of a seemingly random collection of characters who have nothing in common but the fact of being trapped “on the road” for an extended bus journey. She moves through conversations that are most often parallel stories rather than real exchanges. (In an earlier work, she spoke of circles of pantomime with impermeable boundaries.) By forcing characters and their stories together in the close space of a bus, Mojtabai pushes boundaries toward a critical mass so every possible opening can be tested. It is this testing of boundaries that drives the action of the novel; and, as we might expect where a critical mass is building, there is an explosion.

We get to know several of the characters pretty well, mostly by eavesdropping on conversations intended to pass the time, but also by catching glimpses of the world through their eyes. Mojtabai gathers all of these characters together with us as a great “cloud of witnesses” to witness the heart of America.

Two phrases leap from the novel: “¿Dondé quieres ir?” and “You can’t get lost in America.” The first, a sign in the Greyhound station, calls to mind the Cheshire Cat’s response to Alice, lost, when she asks him which way she ought to go from here. He says it depends on where you want to get to; and when she says she doesn’t much care, he says it doesn’t much matter, because you’re bound to get somewhere if you just keep going long enough. The second, spoken by the bus driver when he is undeniably lost, calls to mind just how powerful the combination of fear and denial can be – especially in the dark on an unfamiliar road. “Anywhere but here” is the most common answer to the first question. And the driver, lost, simply plunges forward hoping for a sign. The novel ends with “a man weeping in darkness–”

Mojtabai writes compellingly, and she is a master at sketching characters. Drawing characters together in a great cloud of witnesses, she manages here to focus attention on some of the most important questions of our time and place – questions that retain their significance in any time and place where readers find themselves on the way, in the middle, in the dark.

Mojtabai directs her readers’ attention to the heart of America, not asking “what’s the matter with Kansas” (or Amarillo, or Missouri) but reminding us that “this raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge… all that road going…” is America.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

A. G. Mojtabai. All That Road Going. Northwestern University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8101-5200-2

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painting the borrowed house

In Painting the Borrowed House, Kate Rogers celebrates place without standing still. We move with her poems from becoming lao wei (foreigner) to being at home in “thinking about where / I’ve been and where I’m going next” (60) –even at those moments when we can’t wait to “be automatic.” One of the most striking aspects of the collection is the clarity with which it documents parallel processes of becoming lao wei and settling into a place where being automatic is a real possibility.

The book is divided into three sections, each associated with a particular place (though the third combines two) — “Becoming Lao Wei” (China), “Being Pale” (Hong Kong), and “Painting the Borrowed House” (Taiwan and Hong Kong). That three of the places are distinguished from China though all are China speaks volumes about the new China and about each of the places distinguished.

It is the mainland where the poet becomes a foreigner, an experience vividly captured in the first poem of the collection: “A child again, I am / alone with my myth of this country” (18). Like a child, the poet keeps pace with a Shanghai that is reinventing itself 24 hours a day. Like the child of “a lean mother, with no lap to sink into,” she learns practicality. Like a snake, she sheds her skin. All are images of beginning and beginning again, and those are as apt for China as for a stranger making the transition from passing through a place to living there. Images in the first section of the book are more vivid for being images of a child reinventing herself: “matching slippers slap / the pavement in a show of applause. And all these casual / loungers and strollers make nonsense of my old dream: kids / laughing at me because I’d worn a nightgown to school, / and passed no mirrors on the way” (21). This is a second naivete, making nonsense of one childhood while drawing on another to hear China as well as to taste it and see it.

The second section, too, makes space by drawing places together. While we learn Hong Kong with Rogers, she recalls Canada and dreams “of snow / muffling Hong Kong. Of flakes sifting down to glint in my hair, melt / their cold kisses on my cheeks. Of a darkening sky / shedding its stars, turning the universe inside out….” (29). This is more than nostalgia, more than an image of homesickness. It is an illustration of the way eyes formed in a place form other places, making old and new equally strange. The transition from “becoming” to “being” is not complete — and we have good reason to suspect it never will be. Recalling the image of being a child alone with the myth of a country, “Chung Yeung: Lamma Island 2006″ brilliantly evokes the settling into new myths that is part of making oneself at home, the other side of eyes formed forming: settling into new myths (new, at least, to the settler) transforms old eyes, here in the process of climbing a mountain: “we seek the highest point / to save ourselves and the family / friends have become, from historic danger” (34). Reenacting a myth is part of the ritual process by which friends become family and strangers become friends who are at home. The third verse of the poem transposes this to a cosmic level in the form of a question: “In twenty years, after the poles have melted, / the white bears of my northern / home become myth, / and the sea has reclaimed Hong Kong, / who will tell // the story of Chung Yeung? Who will offer / the children rainbows / as the flood waters rise?” (35) “A Book of Birds” (36-37), too, makes space between Canada and Hong Kong. The poet remembers her mother and writes “Gravity, momentum and other forces of nature brought me here. / Still, I often face north, feeling the pull of my country / and its raw bones full of iron. Think of my mother living / in opposite time, on the other side of the world” (36). That forces of nature brought her here (Hong Kong) as surely as they’d brought her as a child into Canada is another remarkable insight into the becoming that makes it possible to be at home.

The final section shares the title of the whole collection, and that title is a metaphor for the moment at which a borrowed house becomes home. Typically, one doesn’t begin painting until one is settled — though the house is still borrowed. That image is applied particularly to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and it highlights the extent to which Hong Kong has become the borrowed house in which Ryan is settled enough to paint. This in spite of the vivid evocation of earthquakes that “live on / in my body” (49) and (in the title poem) the observation that “a stairwell is simply a place to pause / before opening another door” (52). That pause flavors these poems: “These days my shadow is practicing / to be my ghost. It might prefer / to wander through cloisters with / submerged hands and invisible feet…. // …Become a tapestry / of myself in the Middle Ages. / But a stone cell loses / heat quickly as the light fades. / The single bed is too narrow / for my restless heart” (56, 57). The “Nunnery at Diamond Hill” gives the poet pause, but, being a traveler, she needs a different sort of hermitage.

In the second to last poem there is an image that casts considerable light on the whole” “I want to raise my camera, / capture the colours of their flight, / but will not startle with the flash. // Sitting on a low concrete wall, / I begin this poem” (58). One might think this is about birds, though it is about a group of “little nuns” receiving new robes. Rogers has published a collection of essays on birdwatching, conservation, and culture, so it is no surprise that her knowledge and experience in those areas would inform her poems. But it is particularly interesting that the poem takes the place of the camera here, precisely because the flash of the camera would spoil the scene — but the poem doesn’t. And that, I think, is startling enough to keep our eyes open even when we become sufficiently settled to become automatic in whatever strange places we inhabit.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Kate Rogers. Painting the Borrowed House. Hong Kong: Proverse, 2008. ISBN 978-988-99668-4-3

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not exactly job

Nathan Brown’s Not Exactly Job stands in a long tradition of Biblical commentary that is at once conversation and poetry — poetry in conversation with poetry.

Don’t be misled by my calling it “commentary.” It is not academic — and it is certainly not sectarian. In fact, it’s not exactly “religious” in the way people often mean. It’s more like a conversation with a friend — and that’s a preaching style Brown probably soaked up in years of being immersed (as the son of a preacher) in a Southern Baptist tradition that has produced its share of “conservative” resistance to dealing “head on” with “hard-hitting” questions — but also pastors “in the true sense of that word” who (as Brown says of his father) have fielded “blunt questions” and “profane poems” with “grace, openness and wisdom.”

That could describe Brown’s response to the “profane” poem that is Job. In “Missing God,” he writes “Theologians wax prophetic all over / the obvious reasons God must have / for occasionally going on a vacation / …when He’s gone… / He’s just gone, man. / Yet I am not silenced / by the darkness” (23). And in “Ways to Survive,” “But you were a poet too, Job. / That’s why I read your book” (40). Job, Brown writes, “grieves like a poet . . . like a groping/ philosopher. And, even though I may not / know what he means, I feel like I do. / And I feel like he feels it too, more / than he knows” (26).

Like all Brown’s poetry, this little collection is filled with humor and grace, in spite of “bursting,” as he puts it, “out of a very dark time” in his life. Like Job, he ends with an epilogue: “And Elihu? God never even bothers / to speak the punk’s name. // And Job gets all his stuff back, / twofold — like a blues song gone wrong. / All his flaky friends come back to roost” (42). Brown’s collection ends where Job ends: “like God and Satan / had overextended the budget / and decided to wrap things up / quickly: // And so he died” (43).

As an added bonus, some of Brown’s black and white photos of western Oklahoma are interspersed with the text and featured on the cover, a reminder that, even in conversation with an ancient poem that more than one religious canon has struggled to contain, Brown’s work is a poetry of place, rooted in his experience of Oklahoma and the southwestern United States.

He’s talking with Job, but he’s hoping (as his preface suggests) that others who’ve been subjected to “the modern, conservative Christianity that reigns here in the Southwest” that “seldom if ever deals head-on with the true discussion, the hard-hitting questions that live at the heart of this Old Testament book” — particularly those subjected to it when dealing with “very dark times” — are listening in.

Given the state of U.S. politics and its impact on the world, that includes an audience of potential eavesdroppers far beyond Brown’s Southwest.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Nathan Brown. Not Exactly Job. Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9801684-0-2.

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