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Here are six notable books of poetry publishing this month.
Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey by Craig Morgan Teicher
Teicher perfectly captures the teetering feel of middle-age: a lament clothed in appreciation (our gifts, collected and overflowing in our arms, can weigh us down). His first narrator remembers what it was like when his generation was “about to // inherit the world.” Now, “look // what we did, and we didn’t. / And now look at us, and it.” Now, “we look up again, decades groggy, // decades late.” What do we have to show for it? A lot, Teicher reminds us: “for joy is always / our secret, the secret of this hurried, harried life / without horses.” Let it never be trite to say that poets reveal the poetry of our lives: a tied garbage bag (“I find myself admiring the swift / dexterity with which I fashion, almost effortlessly, / the weird knot to seal off the bag from the world”), love (“We try to talk during crowded weekend days”), birthday parties (“I owe her happiness / if only because it was I, not she, / who asked for all of this: / marriage, house, for her to be.”). Teicher’s poems often rewind to the past—perhaps age 10, in Lake George, thinking: “He has this one chance / at childhood.” Years later, stretching that child toward man: “All my choices have led me right here, / to this chair, to typing who cares.” A genuine, searching, and honest book of considerable skill. Postscript: the late-collection poem “New Jersey” is magnificent.
Connoisseurs of Worms by Deborah Warren
A treat to read these mealy, mucky poems. Warren imbues a dewy, syrup drip to varied subjects, including, somehow, a ventriloquist’s mannequin: “Pumped too full of windy vocables, / he unsags—swells up—he’s about to go / some kind of crazy.” Imagine him, animated by language, softening from plastic to skin, as he “rolls the smile back in to a small pink circle / and spits a blast of shrapnel—plosives, glossals / fricatives.” An epigraph from Job (“I am…a companion to owls”) spurs an appreciation: “Owl, in spite of your reputation / as an icon of sagacity, / Job, comparing himself to you, referred / not to wisdom but to desolation.” Job was wrong: “mistaken.” Warren goes anywhere, inhabits anything: it is fun to see a poet so willing to embrace metamorphosis. Strung by playful song, she can also (pleasantly, but pointedly) shock you: “Being thin, I feel mortality / more than most,” a “frame under the flesh.” “I’m a living ossuary,” she writes. A great book.
If God Is a Virus by Seema Yasmin
Yasmin, a medical doctor who investigated outbreaks for the Epidemic Intelligence Service from the CDC and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings considerable experience and a poet’s vision and sense to her depiction of Ebola’s spread through Liberia. To read this work during the coronavirus pandemic is to recognize Yasmin’s prescience, and her ability to unpack how disease intersects with prejudice, race, myth, and poverty. “Dark deaths matter more if they speak / English,” she begins one poem, lamenting how awards are won “for photos of brown faces / eating expired medicines smeared in peanut / butter aid.” Yasmin is deft at inhabiting the voices of those she encountered, including a fortune teller who says that terror “descends here every fourteen years or / fourteen hours depending on your lineage or // ancestor’s prayers.” The woman tells a child: “ask not why war // comes, ask: Why does peace keep leaving?” Yasmin quotes Marwa Helal’s line “poems do work journalism cant,” while demonstrating that the synthesis of those modes can create revelations.
The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz (translated from Spanish by María Baranda and Paul Hoover)
“Tonight I shall sing matins in Heaven” said San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross) on his deathbed—after asking the friars around him to “read aloud some verses from Song of Songs.” The enigmatic text greatly influenced him, although he was certainly aware of its sensuality (spiritually and theologically, of course, those elements were essential to the power of his own poetry). As the translators of this collection note, San Juan produced hundreds of pages of exegesis to “clarify his message,” so to speak. With the Spanish on the left in red and the English on the right in black, this is a gorgeously presented book with equally stunning verse. “This life that I live,” San Juan writes, “is the absence of living; / and so is endless dying / until I live with you; / listen, my God, to my words, / that I don’t desire this life; / I die because I don’t die.” Other poems like “Romances” teem with the type of deep paradoxes that sustain faith: “In the beginning resided / the Verb, and it lived in God, / in whom it possessed / its infinite happiness.” The rare poet whose pondering theology exists of songs of love—to God, creation, and our attempts to transcend.
In a Sentimental Mood by Ivana Bodrožić (translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Damir Šodan)
The title piece is such a wonderful love poem in spite of itself, in spite of war and pain (we feel Bodrožić tiptoe toward sentiment, even acknowledging that “Jazz is so fragile” in the first line, like she is gently placing the poem in fear it might crack). “We packed up,” she writes, and “selected music for the car, / spread out the map over our knees, / then the earth split open, the road ahead unfurled, / the rivers spilled out of their riverbeds.” The lovers are “searching” for something, and soon find themselves in a hotel room, where they “shudder underneath a single sheet / so thin” while hearing “aggressive men howl, / herding their beasts of steel.” Is language enough? “Give up on words,” she writes elsewhere: “Everything ends, anyway, in silence.” A book of bodily pain and soulful despair.
32 Poems by Hyam Plutzik
A Pulitzer Prize finalist, World War II veteran, and professor whose work arose from and was influenced by his Russian-Jewish heritage, Plutzik receives much-needed consideration here. As editor George B. Henson notes, Plutzik’s death from cancer in 1962—while in his early 50s—left his work an unfinished project. “At the first smell of fall the locusts sing / Louder by far than on the midsummer nights, / Storing song for the later silences,” he writes in “Frederick’s Wood,” his stanzas can exist as their own poems. In “Connecticut Autumn,” he writes: “I have seen the pageantry of the leaves falling— / Their sere, brown frames descending brakingly, / Like old men lying down to rest.” He often returns to a pastoral melancholy, a recognition of death as an inevitable process: “Now the swift rot of the flesh is over. / Now only the slow rot of the bones in the Northern damp.” Poets will find so much that is wonderfully true here: “The poetic process is lonely but theatrical, / Improvisation before an empty house / With the dread that prompter and stagehands will stay away.” Perhaps even more so is his coda, which ends with an affirmation: “We must stay alive, must write then, write as excellently as we can. And if out of our labors and agonies there appears, along with our more moderate triumphs, even one speck of the final distillate, the eternal stuff pure and radiant as a drop of uranium, we are justified.” This bilingual (English/Spanish edition) helps introduce Plutzik to a wider audience.