A review of Charles Simic's Come Closer and Listen

 

Koon Woon

Professor Gery

Book Review

 

“Unending Unevenness”: Charles Simic’s Come Closer and Listen.

Review by Koon Woon

 

Charles Simic. Come Closer and Listen. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2019, 75 pages, $24.99.

     Come Closer and Listen is Charles Simic’s 25^th collection of poetry. The poet has won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur Foundation ”genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the appointment as US poet laureate (Poetry Foundation website). I purchased his ninth collection of poems, Unending Blues  in 1986 because I like blues music and there was that in the poems, except not of the American flavor but of a Serbian background that the poet grew up in WWII.

He was born in 1938. I knew then in 1986 that he was an unusual poet, as he wrote elsewhere that his mother shielded his eyes when they walked down the streets where men were hung on telephone poles.

And one memorable line I read of his is “Fear travels from tree to tree, leaf to leaf” in a poem called “Fear.”

     Come Closer and Listen has four sections, with each sections organized around a theme. The first section is metaphysical musings; the second section talks about the evil “out there.” The third section perhaps can be called love poems.  And finally the fourth section may be about mortality. No matter, in each section, regardless of theme, there is a sense of the surreal coupled with metaphysical musings in workman’s language rather than those of an academic philosopher from a prestigious institution.

     The book is introduced by an epigram from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “As if one needed eyes to see.” This is to alert the reader that if one is just looking, he may not see, because it is not the eyes but the mind that can make sense of Simic’s words. The first poem of the collection: “Some Birds Chirp,” and I quote:

                        Some Birds Chirp  

                       

                        Others have nothing to say.

                        You see them pace back and forth,

                        Nodding their heads as they do.

 

                        It must be something huge

                        That’s driving them nuts –

                        Life in general, being a bird.

 

                        Too much for one little brain

                        To figure out on its own.

                        Still, no harm trying, I guess.

 

                        Even with all the racket

                        Made by its neighbors,

                        Darting and bickering nonstop.

 

     This poem pretty much sets the tone of the all the poems in this collection. It involves thinking and it is self-referential in that he is referring to himself as a bird that does not chirp, that is, to made useless racket, but “trying to figure it all out,” even though is too much for one brain. Simic is at his best when using visceral language to discuss metaphysical musings. The title poem of the book is also in the first section, “Come Closer and Listen.” 

     “I was born – don’t know the hour -- / Slapped on the ass / And handed over crying / To someone many years dead / In a country no longer on a map…” He states further that he doesn’t know if he is cursed or blessed, and he no longer frets about it, because he heard about “A blind lady called Justice,” and she listens to everyone’s troubles, but people still have good days and bad, and he doesn’t blame her because she is blind and does the best she can. One begins to notice that Simic puts himself squarely in the middle of humanity as he caricaturizes thinkers in a skid road mission as “metaphysic anonymous,” where they are “estranged from family and friends” pondering “knowledge beyond appearance.” All the trappings of a Schopenhauer are here.

     Just about all the poems in this collection are one page in length or shorter, and so we do not get a symphonic build up of sonics and message, but pithy insights and wisdom. Because the poet is now 81, many of these poems have a sense of fate as in the poem “Blind Fate,” in which a mad woman grabs a man’s arm, which causes him to yank free of her, but only to knock the coins out of a beggars cup, which causes the beggar to swear at him. And this and similar fateful things are beyond our control.

     At his best in this collection, Simic is able to summarize great philosophical and political issues such as separation of Church and State in the poem, “Arson,” where a church is set on fire. The third and final quatrain of this poem reads:

                        As for the firebug, we were of two minds:

                        Some kid trying out a new drug,

                        Or a drunk ex-soldier angry at God

                        And country for making him a cripple.

 

But not all the poems in this collection are so insightful or revealing. Some poems seem to be just “fillers” as he publishes a book once every two or three years. That was the same feeling I had back in 1986 when I read his Unending Blues. But still, there are some 80 poems in this collection and for the sales price of $24.99, it is like getting a poem for 40 cents. And if just one or two can profoundly help the reader to delve deeper into things, it is worth it. And the language is everyday speech. You get wisdom and not machinery. And so yes, I think we should come closer to Charles Simic and listen to what he is musing about.

 

 

                       

 

                       

                       

    

 

Review of "Turtle Soup," poem by Marilyn Chin by Koon Woon

 

Turtle Soup

Marilyn Chin                                    

From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Fall 1991, Vol. XIII, No.4

for Ben Huang

 

You go home one evening tired from work,
and your mother boils you turtle soup.
Twelve hours hunched over the hearth,
(who knows what else is in that cauldron).

You say, “Ma, you’ve poached the symbol of long life;
that turtle lived 4,000 years, swam
the Wei, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze.
Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang,
grazed on splendid sericulture.”
(So, she boils the life out of him.)

“All our ancestors have been fools.
Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles
to kill a famous Manchu and ended up
with his head on a pole? Eat, child,
its liver will make you strong.

“Sometimes you’re the life, sometimes the sacrifice.”
Her sobbing is inconsolable.
So, you spread that gentle napkin
over your lap in decorous Pasadena.

 

 

 

Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong.
The golden decal on the green underbelly
says, “Made in Hong Kong.
Is there nothing left but the shell,
and humanity’s strange inscriptions,
the songs, the rites, the oracles?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                   

 

 

The Turtle No Longer Swims in the Soup *

 

      With mirth and impeccable diction, in her whimsically serious poem, “Turtle Soup,” Marilyn Chin explores the incongruity, the dying traditions, the roles of the sexes, and the persistence of meaningless rites in the reluctant assimilation of Chinese Americans in a new land. With the voice of someone who straddles two cultures and in the varying tones required for the poem, Chin points to artifacts (the cauldron, toy turtle) that reinforce the persistence of culture however vacuous they have become in the new land. In this short narrative poem featuring dialogue as well, in second person plural and in third person omniscient, Chin deftly encapsulates Chinese civilization, history, religion, and filial piety with a critical eye. She does not do this out of self-contempt but with a sense of resignation. For their bitter-sweet sacrifice for economic survival, Chin is sympathetic to the older immigrant generation and their sense of becoming a burden for the young and their trying to matter. In this sense, the Chinese assimilation in the United States, with some serious bumps along the way, is still in progress, not unlike the assimilation of some other nationalities. While this poem touches quite a few immigrant nerves, it remains that the unsaid is the real poem.

     Chin, in the very first line of the poem in conversational tone, presumably addressing a Ben Huang, possibly a colleague, for whom this poem is dedicated, “You go home one evening tired from work” occupies a strategic placement because historically, the Chinese came to America for economic survival in the 1800s, China was devasted by the Manchus who set up the Qin Dynasty, and built the Forbidden City in Beijing (formerly Peking) that excluded entrance to the Chinese. So, it is not surprising that in strophe three, an Uncle Wu “rode ten thousand miles to

 

kill a famous Manchu…”  Because of war, bandits, pestilence, and drought, and the availability of a gamble in the United States for survival, especially work building the railroads (my great-grandfather immigrated to the US for that very reason), Chinese “coolies” came to the US as “indentured servants.”  Indentured servants were explicitly barred from citizenship and for this reason, many Chinese came to risk their lives for a fortune and go back to China for retirement.

So, this very first line of the poem can mean (but I doubt) as far reaching as returning to China after a long labor contract.      See Koon Woon,   Paper Son Poet

 https://www.amazon.com/Paper-son-Poet-When-rails-young/dp/0692689168

     The last two lines of the first strophe have the mother spending twelve hours “hunched over the hearth” cooking turtle soup in a cauldron with dedication and maternal love. The word “cauldron” is important as it serves both as a cooking pot, a vessel to drink from, as well as an urn for incense offerings. Yet the second strophe irreverently, after Ben Huang presumably telling the significance of the turtle as a symbol in Chinese history, Chin mocks it as something one “boils the life out of…”  The mother does this out of ignorance of Chinese history herself, for Chinese women of her generation are seldom educated, and this tells us that she is not from a Mandarin or upper class in China, but most likely of peasant heritage as most of the Chinese in the US of that generation were. But the belief that eating turtle will increase one’s longevity is a myth since ancient times in China. One might note here too that sometimes people confuse the symbol for a thing for the thing itself, as in the very first line in the second strophe, the “you” addresses the mother like this: “Ma, you’ve poached the symbol of long life;” presumable, the

 

mother believes that eating turtle is efficacious to health, thus what the turtle symbolizes is taken to be the case literally. Notwithstanding, the mother in strophe three rather thinks of self-preservation at the expense of honor in her calling “Uncle Wu” a fool who set out to kill a particular famous Manchu. Perhaps “Uncle Wu” did not eat enough turtle soup and consequently was not strong enough and the Manchu slaughtered him as a consequence and paraded his head on a pole? The role of the mother, from the mother in the poem, is to obey husband and sons and try to make them “strong,” because, as the first line of strophe four summarizes her duty as to preserve the patriarchal lineage through the son, and therefore, the mother’s concern is this filial piety.  

     The second strophe, Ben Huang enumerates the geography of the life giving and sustaining rivers and accomplishment of the Chinese civilization over four-thousand years, including the Silk Route via central Asia to as far as Greece. But how he knows these histories is not explained. The Silk Route was so named for the heavy trading of silk, which came from the sericulture in China. The Bronze Age also reached its peak and so did the Tang Dynasty reach a cultural peak. But the mother was not impressed and retorts with, “All our ancestors have been fools,” implying that trade, travel, and high culture was not valued by her, especially when she betrays her defeatist attitude by saying, “(an Uncle Wu) traveled four thousand miles to slaughter a high-ranking Manchu only to have his head chopped off and exhibited on the top of a long pole. She attributes this to his not eating enough turtle liver. It is unkind here that Chin mocks peasant stupidity unless she is just being realistic and protesting that ancient China and China

 

under its patriarchal society failed the women by not educating them and in this way, keep them in intellectual bondage as it were.

     Furthermore, when the mother sobs, “Sometimes you’re the life, sometimes the sacrifice,” the mother is trapped by her mentality of being subjugated by filial piety and the patriarchal system for so long that sacrificing for her children is the normal duty in life, especially to the one, the oldest son, who carries the family line. She sees the self-sacrifice being completely obligatory and natural. Chin up to now has been addressing s certain “Ben Huang” who at this time feels guilt that he is the cause of his mother’s suffering and so he “…spread that gentle napkin / over [his] lap in decorous Pasadena.” Pasadena is the part of Los Angeles that is his life which is full of Victorian décor. One sees the incongruity of the world views here between mother and son. And then in the fifth and final strophe, Chin speaks but this time to her peer “Ben Huang” in the jargon today’s youths speak and with a feminist slant. Chin  calls “Ben” baby and refers to a high “priestess” rather than a priest who “got it all wrong.” The turtle in the rite is fake! It’s got a “golden decal on the green underbelly / [which says] made in Hong Kong.” Chin then angrily bemoans that everything has been lost of the genuine culture and probably berating herself for hanging on when there is “nothing left but the shell, … strange inscriptions, / the songs, the rites, the oracles.” Chin is upset because the true culture of China is reduced to empty gestures and meaningless motions.

     Ostensibly, there are three speakers in this poem, Ben Huang, the mother, and  Chin herself. But basically we see everything through Chin’s eyes. It is her voice and tone that gives this poem

 

its power and subtlety. On the one hand, she is only talking about one immigrant family, but in doing so, she makes oblique references to the historical weaknesses as well as the strengths of China. One such weakness is the secondary role of women in its patriarchal system, as when the mother “[sobs inconsolably] / Sometimes you’re the life, sometimes the sacrifice.” This can refer to sacrificing for her son or that women in general were “sacrifices.”

     The complex tone of this poem carries the problematics of transplanting in a vastly different culture as in the mother sobbing while the son “spread that gentle napkin / over your lap in decorous Pasadena,” showing both respect and guilt toward the mother’s sacrifice.

 

 

 

* Turtle in Wudang Tai Chi form 

Wudang Sanfeng Taiji Quan 28 by Master Zhong Yunlong (slo-mo) - YouTube

 

** Oracle Bones  by Keith Holyoak from Goldfish Press  

https://goldfishbooks.com

https://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Bones-Poems-Time-Misrule/dp/0978797523

 Koon Woon,   Paper Son Poet

 https://www.amazon.com/Paper-son-Poet-When-rails-young/dp/0692689168

David Gilmour reviews David Booth

With a title that begs a telling about something mattering, David Booths’ Menippean satire, being prose and poetry, or versa vice and a request for response in the title: Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter [sic] What is the matter? What is matter? What matter? Depends, what matters to you. Playing with language is a sport of poet’s, not always intellectual conundrums, but funny sounds and changeable meanings. As with “matter,” above. The experimental flare of Booth’s collection of prose, with both coherence and syntactic order and also with word, page graphics, and all sorts of Sternean and Joycean ways to take it. The experimental variety of styles and subject matter, are a bricolage of bits and pieces made for a storytelling bricoleur. There is a feeling of a Clearing Warehouse for every prosaic and poetic motif imaginable. It is a cathartic run at times. A reduction from intellectual knowledge into babble, admitting the pull of childish play: “What’s a dun forest in Blake’s ode to an evening star, that “Fair-hair’d angel.” Venus hanging in winter branches after sunset. What’s dun itself. Why not look up dun and not let knowing guide us.” Eventually the floral poetic imagery becomes sonic: “Watercolor, forest, grayscale. dun [sic] forest NORTH for dunforst dunfoerst dun furst done forced dunne forst dunne first dumb luck done fast well done dumb furst duhn ferst dunn forest “ etc. Once given license by concrete poetry grids and every variation of sound and sense on trial for the right key, the poet is flying hands free. “Look Ma, No hands.” The miscellany, the garland, and the anthology of prose and poetry are certainly gilded with Aldine white-space patterned language blocks or spires or spears or arrowheads. The combination of styles within a page of prose, and the aesthetic play with formats and graphic effects are evidence of a deliberate shift to a novel genre. Not an obsessive “Nouveau Roman” but a return of the ancient classical “modern” styles, changing subjects and media, styluses, letter hammers, pots of Shadrack, Meshak and Indigo. This is not always fun to read, not always clear what the matter is, and if the author does want feedback, provokes it, then who is going to tell him from all of us reading his book? A reviewer who does not know the answer to What the Matter Is, or any variation of it, Tell me please, you say. OK. The great variety of styles and play with language is highly entertaining, and even kaleidoscopic at times. This mantra-like quality of dunning the reader (indeed, I could tell the fun you were having, dun fun) is a happy racing movement and carries the eye along swiftly. Say the word enough times, over and over, eventually you don’t know what the word is in meaning. “Chip Shop” was my mantra that became mushy peas before I lost consciousness. I never liked peas. Hated peas, especially the fresh, shucked peas, little crumpled bags of green algae, very squashy and can catch in the throat if you are mortally averse to their texture. We ought to thank David Booth for releasing the stuffy tried and traditional to space trash and giving another artistic reach a chance. It is quite all right to imitate the ancient genres of Menippean and Milesian satire, mixing prose and poetry with a semblance of a plot, a memoir, a picaresque adventure. The concrete poetry is an addition from a later modern date, beginning with Aldus’s experiments with patterns of words and words in shapes, not to forget geometrical page designs. Some ancient Greek poets experimented with geometric poetry: the famous double-axe (labrys) pattern. The equilateral triangle. I cannot remember what the words said, but I did remember the design of words into pyramids, triangles and bats wings. Booth plays intellectual egoist with cramming facts into his writing, which reminded me of Harper’s final page of “Findings.” No rarer facts delivered in non-sequitur juxtapositions of discontinuity. For example: “The first Canadian in space died. Physicists explained microwaves’ imaginary time delay. The mass distribution of the first stars was found to have a greater than anticipated effect on the twenty-one-centimeter signal.” (Harper’s Magazine, September, 2025, p. 54.) There is the same zany combination of words, funny connections, others non-plussing: Two Boys on a Bed with a Guitar Let’s rock. Say what? I don’t know. You said it. Said what? Do you even know what it means? My grandfather says it Why do you say it? Everyone thinks I’m uptight. What will you do? I’ll smash my instrument on the stage. [He rises.] I’ll buy a front-row ticket [He drops to the floor.] I’ll throw my pick at you. [He throws.] From the cover of David Booth’s Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter Poetry & Prose, cover art by Vivienne Legg (Wichita, KS: Blue Cedar Press, 2025). “The beautiful have come e stumbli ng in vari uds and al ght, light l de a line o and barns to . . .” The design is a great part of Booth’s presentation, concrete poetry being pictorial as shape and word-worthy in “syllables” and “sequences.” Vivienne Legg was chosen for her word-tree, language tree, root-word-tree, walking beside a line of Oaks. In perfect tune with the play of the collection. The inventiveness is everywhere and at times demands serious attention. With an ADHD friend I have experienced this racing flow of accounting, explicating, narrating and all in general motor-mouthing. Were the footnotes a nod to Thomas Sternes or just to protect from suspicion? When David Foster Wallace used footnotes heavily in some articles (the Dictionary study) and famously in Infinite Jest, I was not particularly amused at the didactic parody. The playfulness of the poetry and prose so easily contrasts with the flat factness of the footnote facts. Then again, some of those notes were attractive to read through as findings. – David Gilmour (8/27/2025)

Nancy E. Wright ------------ book review

Ultimately Unslaked

Review:  Quench,  by Amy Orazio  CW Books, 2018, 101 pp. $15.95

                                            by    Nancy E Wright

Quench, by Amy Orazio, exposes, examines, and ultimately slakes the thirst of longing at first drop by drop, then with increasingly steadier flow, though never to the point of saturation. This collection, the poet’s first, guides the reader through distinct and disparate spaces—desert, city, harbor, and headwater—from the reader’s spiritual aridity to enlightenment through recognition and acceptance of the inseparability of body and spirit. 

Following the Table of Contents but prior to the first poem is the poem, “Stone Would be Water,” by Samuel Menashe, the final five lines of which are:

                        Who makes fountains

                                Spring from flint

                                  Who dares tell

                                    One thirsting

                                  There’s a well

Quench is the well of which Orazio dares to tell us.  Four sections comprise the collection: they are “Desert,” “City,” “Harbor,” and “Headwater.”  In all sections the poems consist of relatively short lines, with the majority of the poems no more than one strophe. The effect is to suspend the reader between yearning and fulfillment, and most of all to recognize the depths and details of that yearning with each poem. “Exit Scene,” the first poem of the section “Desert,” and of the collection, speaks of a place “Where the amber sings to dark/ darkness rings,” thus initiating the reader’s pilgrimage at nightfall rather than at the more predictable sunrise.  The third poem, “By This I Mean,” echoes Menashe’s stones in the aforementioned poem with the statement “stones do right/ before seeing, asking/ help and what/are you thirsty for?”   The poems, “Early Ash” and “Miracle,” that follow refer respectively to Good Friday and Passover, the latter with the line, “I read Exodus by George Oppen.  So I was hoping to see.”   Yet another biblical reference occurs in “Past the Brook,” the second strophe of which states:

                                    The widow has her own song

                                    she is setting supper

                                    but her bread is gone

                                   can you pray for oil?

The final strophe, however, reverses the scenario with the statement, “I need oil to pray/ to unearth these desert tricks.”  As the reader nears the end of the first section, these lines evoke the words of the Old Testament prophet Elijah to the widow that the oil will not run out until God sends rain; at the same time, the desert—and metaphorically the desert of one’s yearning—replaces the prayer for oil with the need for oil as a prerequisite to prayer. Thus the poem’s speaker dares to question—indeed perhaps even to deny—the power of faith in the absence of evidence.  For the speaker, proof is the prerequisite to belief.  Yet so often proof itself is elusive, hence those who yearn for it remain thirsty.

            “Of Angels,” the opening poem of the second section, “City,” contrasts sharply with the introduction to “Desert.” Instead of nightfall, a “circle of light” carries the speaker to the aqueduct, to an artificial channel for transporting water, which the speaker needs in order to survive.  Then,

                                    I asked for this shroud

                                    for this city in me

                                   to be laid bare.

Succeeding poems-- “Is Thirsting Seeing,” in which the last line is ‘the new son sings,” “Incarnate,” and “Transfigure,”  speak of birth and renewal in process, and of hope, as expressed in “Sink:”

                                    when the sun sinks low

                                   bruising the sky

                                   beautiful

                                    can be a troubling word

                                    I still believe in it though

                                    like angels

                                   who wear faces

Seeing beauty certainly can quench our own thirst for it; yet beauty and pain are so often companions, like the sun setting on a day with so much yet unfinished, with so many still thirsty.

            “Harbor,” the shortest of the four sections, brings the reader closer to sources of actual and spiritual water with poems such as “Cargo,” “Reservoir,” “Rinse,” and “Remain,” with the last of these stating “There is a jar where I keep the sea/ when it shuts off its sounds.”  Still, the ultimate arrival at the proverbial well occurs, if it occurs at all, only in the final section, “Headwater,” and only when loss opens space, as spoken in the section’s opening poem, “Thin Places:”

                                                C-shaped section of a river

                                                for bending

                                                or laying

                                               when loss

                                               makes room for

                                              what happens at the water’s side.”

            If a headwater is a tributary portion of a river close to its source, then the beginning of quenching spiritual thirst is the space created by undoing, expressed in the section’s poems such as “Unhinge,” and “In Between,” which ends with the lines “How good does it feel / to unsee.”

Moreover, just as in the previous section the speaker needs oil in order to pray, in “There You Are,” the speaker is able to recognize that for which she thirsts only when she is able to drink.  The spiritual thirst is inextricably at one with the body, as espoused in “Water to Live Water to Die,” “Except that--/ this is not a metaphysical choice / this is gut.”  Ultimately, as the “Ripening,” the last poem in the collection states, “water is the prayer/ ready enough to be sung.”

            Throughout the collection the sparseness of lines and the near absence of punctuation give the reader simultaneous clarity and confusion. Images of “magnets in green-violet ears / hover where north and east / are unzipped as a ribcage” (“Faults Are Present”), “six wings black against a sherbet sky” (“Backlit,”), “Sunday’s head is heavy / already leathering” (“Sabbath), and “The stars are drowning too / a deep hum at midnight / thick on our tongues:” (“In Between”)  engage the senses; yet the pictures are neither clear nor situated in context.  Rather than analyze to understand, however, the structure of these poems somehow invites—indeed almost compels---the reader to release understanding and instead journey deeply into the caverns of one’s own longings and, once exploring that emptiness, find the path to filling the vacuum.  Nevertheless, unlike some poetry that seeks to satisfy, Quench dares not satiate completely, but rather leaves that task to the reader.  Yet the poet reminds us that this freedom, this autonomy the reader has to quench or not to quench, is an innate part of the inevitable continuum of longing, simply by virtue of the fact that we are human, and that we are body and spirit inextricably joined.  Thus this inevitable, inescapable thirst itself becomes the source of its own quenching.

   

               

                       

Assistant Poetry Editor Jerry Austin reviews Bethany Reid's book of poems Sparrow

A Book Review Of Sparrow By Bethany Reid (Winner of the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize)

                                                                        Review by Jerry Austin

As a general rule--and this is shockingly pervasive--academics do not write good poetry. The most powerful exception I know of, at present, is Bethany Reid. I consider her one of the best poets in North America, and having read her Master's Thesis, "Calling A Daughter," more than thirty times, I do not say this lightly.

Her newest book is immensely readable, and... enjoyable. By a timely coincidence, I met with an old friend a few days ago. When I told her I would be writing a review of Sparrow, she said, "Yes!.. I read it yesterday, cover to cover. It was so good I couldn't put it down." I smiled because Dorianne Laux writes the same, nearly verbatim, in the book's forward.

It is best to understand Bethany's poetry in the context of all her poetry. She grew up in rural western Washington, and has long written about her childhood. Before earning her doctorate in American Literature from the University of Washington, Bethany wrote: 1) "The Sorrel Mare," an epic-length narrative poem of unusual emotive quality (it reduced to tears several readers I personally know); 2) The Coyotes And My Mom (poems published by Bellowing Ark Press); and 3) her Master's Thesis (mentioned above). It is my opinion that Bethany Reid's poetry should be collected in some form and published so as to be accessible to a larger audience.

Bethany's earlier poems tend toward greater inclusiveness of narrative detail, whereas her more recent poems tend, musically, toward the lyrical (though technically most remain narrative in that they move through time). 

Her poem, "The Horse" (from Sparrow), while in free verse, reminds me of Frost (in a good mood) and conveys some of the magic of Wordsworth's Prelude, though it differs very much in essence from the English poet. There is a haunting ambiguity about the identity of the horse, which I will leave for the reader to discover in the original. In any case, direct experience is the provenance here; this is written by someone who has owned and cared for farm animals, who has observed them with empathy and awe: (lines 14-20)

       She had a way of turning when happy,

       trotting down the path to the open field,
       her powerful legs suddenly loping, rolling her

       through the high brown grass. Her brown coat
       shone in the sun. In rain

       she stood beneath the orchard trees,
       her forelock hanging in her eyes.

There is more poetry in those lines than in most books I read. It may be analyzed, but is meant first and foremost to be experienced.

A major theme in the new book is bereavement, a theme which recurs frequently in Bethany's writing, hearkening back to loved ones and the death of the Sorrel Mare. We discover honesty and grief, as well as surprising and cogent triumphs. The title poem "Sparrow" from the new book exemplifies: (lines 1-11)

       What could the Bible mean
       when it says no sparrow falls
       without God's notice?
       They do fall.
       "The Bible": that's too impersonal.
       It was some writer of the New Testament,
       some Hebrew poet turned Christian
       who chose "sparrow," a metaphor
       for the least things, the small
       and innumerable mouths
       at the breast of the world.

The poet is standing with her daughter (one of three daughters) and preparing to bury a young sparrow that has died after falling from its nest and being cared for by the daughter. Referring back to the biblical poet, we are told: (lines 12-18):

       Maybe our poet had a daughter who carried to him
       in her cupped hands a baby sparrow.
       Maybe they tried to keep it alive
       on sugar water and cat food,
       and when they failed, he wept,
       not knowing how to teach a child
       that life is worth the trouble and the grief....

This is good stuff--albeit sometimes painful. It fascinates and inspires me, how her poems take on more and more meaning within the context of her work in its entirety. I've seen this when reading poets from the past; it's magic if sometimes haunting to witness it among an artist in our own time. I am hopeful that the full range of her poetry will become available to the public.

Out of the Dust --- by Klaus Merz, Tr. Marc Vincenz, as reviewed by Koon Woon

Out of the Dust by Klaus Merz, translated by Marc Vincenz; Spuyten Duyvil, NY, NY, 2014.

Reading this volume of 80 pages by Klaus Merz, Out of the Dust, as translated by Marc Vincenz, I had to ask: why do some of the short lyrics hit with the aphoristic depths of Nietzsche, with the precise language of the lawyer/poet Jean Follain, and with the beautiful music of “Dust in the Wind,” an immensely popular song of the 70s American rock group Kansas, while some other of these poems are opaque and seem to hang as the dull moments of life itself? Is the complaint the usual complaint about translations, especially of poetry? But MarcVinzenz is a veteran translator of the German and himself has six volumes of poetry to his credit. The fault must lie with me to some extent of my complacent laziness not to really distinguish the signifier from the signified. In Zen terms, I am mistaking the moon for the finger pointing at the moon.

Let's start with Merz's “Biography (p. 31)” – “In the passing of time, / I became a pencil myself, / a pencil that also remains a pencil / when it doesn't write.” This is a very modest self-assessment considering what the publisher Spuyten Duyvil of NY, NY tells me. Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau, Switzerland, and has published twenty volumes of poetry and numerous works of fiction, has been recognized with major awards, including the Herman Hess Prize in Literature in 1997 and the Holderlin Prize in 2012.

Here is the rub; the problem may lie with me. Born just a few years later than Merz, I am a village boy transplant from China and know nothing of the German language or much European culture. I have to take the English words of the translator Marc Vincenz for its veracity and faithfulness in its rendition from German to English. Vinzenz is British-Swiss and was born in Hong Kong, a city I had briefly lived in. Although I have lived in the US since 1960, I am no less of an exile than all the immigrants and refugees whose recollections of their homeland now only exist in solipsistic memory. The world has transformed this global village, and so I should perhaps try to discover some sort of permanence that poetry can afford the soul and to find it in Merz's work.

It become quite plausible to connect with Merz, for he is an unobtrusive commentator of life. Since the Chinese are like watercress that when strewn anywhere there is mud and running water, it thrives. I personally connect with “In Command (p.19),” a poem Merz's grandmother speaks to her brood, from the couch to narrate family history, and Merz comments, “already we are all over the hills.” My maternal grandmother was such a matriarch who in fact had her feet bound and her brood is all over the world. The reader is able to fit the shoes Merz provides whether he/she is musician who “transform their / impermanence into tones / and reconcile us in time,”or be he/she simply be anyone living in a region who comes “to know themselves / as the head that doesn't / fit into their hat.”I find the word choice “hat” astonishing for when I was young, my Uncle in China told me, “Never wear a tall hat,” which variously means “do not take false compliment,” “do not be corrupt as an official,” or simply “don't be a dunce.” As an aside, the Supreme Leader of China Deng Hsiao Ping had been paraded in public wearing the dunce hat. Merz is indeed a master of the precise apercu.

This volume of poetry is divided into five sections of thematically related poems with headings like

“Residue of a Dream,” “Big Business,” and “Beyond Recall.” It is also illustrated by Heinz Egger with what resembles Sumi-e ink brush work. One possible reason why it is just making an inroad to the American poetry scene is Merz's unassuming and unannounced subtlety, of which I recall great American poets like William Carlos Williams and Donald Justice. But it reminds me also of Chinese poetry whose use of poetic devices is sparing and whose meanings are multiplicities. In “Wiepersdorf, later, (p.10),” I found this incredible imagery “the carcass of a rabbit still fleeing (my italics),”and in “Repose (p.14),” about farm life, after the labors and the harvest, “Behind the silo the farmer / leans on the farmer's wife.” Yes, we ought to give credit to where credit is due. The title of the book “Out of the Dust” almost implies that we will also “Return to the Dust,” but before all that, there is a little “waiting game,” as in Merz's poem, “Happy Days (p. 15),” where Beckett's nephew is seated / in a corner” and he is waiting “for the wrinkles / to appear in his face.” Likewise, I am waiting as Robert Creely said, “If you wander long enough, you will come to it.” I have come to the end of this review, but I will be wandering in Klaus Merz's poems some more. He has inspired me “to waste more time (Robert Bly)”, and that's because unlike much contemporary American poetry, Merz's poems are not just for himself, as a masturbatory exercise in “construction” or “employment of devices.”

Listen to a recital in German

Reviewed by Koon Woon

Five Willows Literary Review

August 1, 2014

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