{"id":72230,"date":"2023-04-19T14:14:16","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T18:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=72230"},"modified":"2023-04-20T12:06:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T16:06:57","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-poetry-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2023\/04\/19\/i-arrogantly-recommend-poetry-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend poetry… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honor of Poetry Month, we asked Tom Bowden to share reviews of his favorite poetry books from the past four years of arrogantly recommended<\/em> columns. All links for books are to Bookshop.org<\/a> an online ordering service that supports Indie Bookstores or direct from the publisher. Book Beat stocks most of these titles or can order them quickly for free pickup. Call us at (248) 968-1190 or write to: bookbeatorders@gmail.com<\/a> Thank you for supporting Indie Bookstores!<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Seriously Well<\/a><\/strong>
\nHelge Torvund
\nThe Song Cave<\/p>\n

This book-length poem considers the joys of reading, creating, and living\u2014with a recently discovered tumor. Seriously Well is avowedly joyful and appreciative of the \u201cenigmatic art\u201d of writing\u2014\u201csigns \/ resembling tiny insects,\u201d that \u201ccan make the outer world \/ and the inner imagination \/ meet.\u201d Writing allows us<\/p>\n

To be in contact
\nwith another human being\u2019s
\nmind, visions and feelings
\nthrough letters.
\nAs if a letter
\nwas a magic wand.
\nPerhaps
\nthe enigmatic in this
\nis what keeps me
\ngoing.
\nThe feeling that such
\nan almost impossible thing
\nreally can happen.
\nThat by using the language
\nin a certain way,
\nyou can establish some kind of
\ndirect contact
\nbetween that which is existing
\nin you and that which exists
\nin another person.<\/p>\n

A more laudatory appreciation of literature\u2019s work I can\u2019t imagine. But its admirable achievements are tempered by the fact that, alas, we don\u2019t have world enough and time to explore them all: Time enters into the picture, forcing us to realize the limited period we are granted to appreciate creation.<\/p>\n

I suddenly became
\ncompletely aware of
\nthe fact
\nthat Death always walks by my side.
\nI stretched out my hand.
\nI said: OK; so there you are then.
\nI might as well shake hands with you,
\nand accept that you are here.
\nIn this way I included Death in my life.<\/p>\n

The gift of creation, in Seriously Well, is represented by a jazz pianist\u2019s improvisation:<\/p>\n

Now.
\nThis is the moment.
\nWhen your fingertips
\nmeet the keys
\nnobody knows what
\nis going to happen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s crucial to point out that, in the moment of creation, \u201cnobody\u201d\u2014including the pianist\u2014”knows what \/ is going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

You put your fingers down
\nand the world is black and white.
\nAnd from the black and white
\nyou start to create
\ncolors.
\nAll the sounds
\nall the tone colors
\nfrom green to blue
\nand from grey to
\nyellow.<\/p>\n

Then, in light of these boundless enthusiasms of color, the diagnosis of a tumor.<\/p>\n

A feeling that told me
\nthat when it is darkening around the heart,
\nand the time is shrinking,
\nyou have to embrace the fear
\nand give yourself over
\nto an insane confidence.<\/p>\n

A beautiful, sustained meditation on the life-enriching and -affirming places where \u201cthe outer world \/ and the inner imagination \/ meet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Words<\/strong><\/a>
\nHelena \u00d6sterland \/ Paul Cunningham
\nOOMPH! Press<\/p>\n

Helena \u00d6sterland is a Swedish writer whose first book in 2010 won the Bor\u00e5s Magazine Debut Award. This newer book, Words, consists of three poems\/sections\u2014\u201cWas,\u201d \u201cIs,\u201d and \u201cWill\u201d\u2014written in minimalist, incantatory cadences that are rhythmic and hypnotic. The spare vocabulary is often-repeated in the manner of a toddler, say, coming to recognize itself as distinct from the world but with a limited number of words learned so far. In more highfalutin terms, imagine Gertrude Stein\u2019s permutations of monosyllabic words mixed with Descartes\u2019 Latin concision (\u201ccogito, ergo sum\u201d) about himself in relation to the world, pared down to its roots in the senses, primarily sight, where sensation equals knowledge. In the case of Words the pared-down world is one mainly of frozen solitude among snow and ice.<\/p>\n

I said the word
\nSnow
\nI said the word
\nI had a voice
\nIt was not silent
\nIt was not white
\nIt was not wet
\nThe voice was a voice
\nI was not the voice
\nI had the voice
\nAnd I believed in it.<\/p>\n

The middle part, \u201cIs,\u201d slowly builds upon what it is to \u201cknow\u201d something, including oneself by introducing another creature\u2014a raven\u2014to react to in a way that seems to allude to Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u201c13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird\u201d:<\/p>\n

It is white light
\nAnd the grass is white light
\nAnd the grass moves
\nI ofe in the light
\nI am in the light
\nI move in the light
\nAnd move until I stop
\nAnd I stop
\nI see that there is something
\nAnd it is not white light
\nIt is something
\nIt stands in the white grass
\nAnd it is black
\nIt stands in the light
\nIt is in the light
\nBut it is not light
\nI see there is Light
\nBut it is black
\nI see that it is black
\nI know the word for it
\nI see that it is something with eyes
\nI see that it is something with black eyes
\nI don\u2019t know what it is
\nBut I see the eyes seeing
\nI don\u2019t see what they see
\nBut I see the eyes seeing
\nI don’t know what they see
\nBut I see that it is a raven<\/p>\n

\u2014a raven whose eyes the narrator eventually crushes.<\/p>\n

But in the last part, \u201cWill,\u201d the narrator sees a (white) fish but tells himself to leave its eyes (and body) alone, leaving us with a contrast in attitudes between forces of light and dark, of innocence and experience. The entirety of Words can be seen as an alternative Genesis, in which words create relationships among other words, our knowledge of them and of ourselves.<\/p>\n

Paul Cunningham\u2019s translation does well at translating \u00d6sterlund\u2019s rhythms and cadences into rhythmic cadences of idiomatic English.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Every Child Is Beautiful When Born: Selected Poems<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Esad Babacic \/ Andrej Pleterski
\nDalkey Archive<\/p>\n

This well-arranged (as opposed to chronological) sequence of poems from across decades of Babacic\u2019s (b. 1965) published works in Slovenia marks the poet\u2019s first anthology published in English, highlighting themes that have remained consistent obsessions over time.<\/p>\n

The shorter pieces are epigramic, usually only a single sentence \/ stanza, often beginning with the phrase \u201cSometimes you,\u201d such as the Bukowski-like \u201cSometimes you go all the way \/ even if you\u2019ve lost your way\u201d and \u201cSometimes \/ you clench \/ the fist \/ in which \/ you\u2019d bring \/ flowers.\u201d (Cf. Bukowski\u2019s \u201cYou Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The topics often cover some variation on the theme of alienation from a culture that embraces faceless, mechanical impersonalism in exchange for access to cash. For instance, \u201cA Green Land\u201d begins like this:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a manic
\ndepression of economy,
\na psychosis of taking away
\nheartlessly,
\na manic depression
\nof constructive engineering,
\na depression of graves
\nnever in short supply.<\/p>\n

The opening to \u201cThe Body Scent\u201d reads like an Eastern European cross between Rainier Fassbinder and Simon Hanselmann\u2019s Megg and Owl:<\/p>\n

The sun has risen above the Golovec and breathed through
\nmy room.
\nThe state would call it the sun of freedom. With slow and
\ndrowsy gestures
\nI crawl toward my pants, thinking whether I should eat today
\nor get fucked-up.<\/p>\n

Babacic writes the kind of poetry people who usually don\u2019t like poetry like: The words are familiar, the images direct and concrete, and writer\u2019s life is also one in which diligence and decency have few rewards.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>In a Bucolic Land<\/a><\/strong>
\nSzil\u00e1rd Borb\u00e9ly
\nNYRB Poets<\/p>\n

Szil\u00e1rd Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s In a Bucolic Land<\/strong> describes growing up impoverished in Hungary during the \u201860s and \u201870s as a member of a despised religious minority among despised minorities living under the thumb of atheist Soviet Union. The \u201cbucolic\u201d of the book\u2019s title is ironic not elegiac\u2014Nature is as brutal and unsympathetic as parents toward their children and the community at large toward each other as everyone struggles to exist at mere subsistence-level.<\/p>\n

Borb\u00e9ly names as \u201cthe gods\u201d the indifferent forces of whim and fate that seem to decide the lives and deaths of people toiling to get by. This is a tendency I\u2019ve noticed among European writers unconvinced by Romantic, transcendental swooning over brooks and glens. Instead, writers I\u2019ve recently reviewed\u2014such as Jean Giono and Adabelt Stifter, and In\u00e8s Cagnati\u2014illustrate the brutality needed to merely survive, where \u201cChristianity\u201d is a patina barely covering the avowedly pagan world the characters maneuver within.<\/p>\n

In\u00e8s Cagnati in her novel Free Day<\/strong>, left an impression of poverty that has stayed with me since reading it: To send her daughter to school, where she has won a scholarship, the mother must sacrifice the only paper bag she owns for her daughter to carry her books in. Similarly, Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s bucolic setting is barely discernable from medieval conditions: Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s mother dreams of a home with a wooden rather than dirt floor, a twin bed with nightstands on either side, and\u2014most importantly as a measure of living above mere needs\u2014a dresser-and-mirror set:<\/p>\n

And when she finally had everything she desired, there was no point anymore. On the ground, between the left leg of the dresser and the door to the next room, was the largest pool of blood, congealed, I scraped it off with a small shovel. I only conjectured that this was my father\u2019s blood. . .<\/p>\n

(This is as explicit as Borb\u00e9ly describes the in-home attack on his parents that killed his mother and significantly wounded his father, physically and psychologically.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIcarus in the Housing Project\u201d describes that urban squalor that replaced the bucolic:<\/p>\n

The thudding sound of kittens thrown out
\nof the tenth-story airshaft window produced only the
\nfaintest of echoes.<\/p>\n

My buzzer rang after midnight, at that hour it was
\nthe always cheerful gym teacher asking me
\nto let him in because his spouse and his small children were already asleep
\nand he could see through the light in my window I was up working. And so our
\nacquaintance in the urine-smelling lift began, then it continued next
\nto the garbage shut smelling of roach repellent
\nand disinfectant. I would have left, but he
\nheld me back. Every one of his movements
\nbegged me: Don\u2019t leave me here.<\/p>\n

Translator Ottilie Mulzet\u2019s afterword clarifies and situates the personal and historical background to Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s works, in addition to conjuring lucid renderings of his poems.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets<\/a><\/strong>
\nWanda Coleman
\nBlack Sparrow Press<\/p>\n

Originally published in sections across various of her poetry collections, Heart First into This Ruin<\/strong> finally collects into one volume the complete 100 American Sonnets, Coleman\u2019s contribution to the sonnet form and the aesthetic expression of her experiences as a Black woman in America, un-degreed and unmarried\u2014experiences simultaneously singular and familiar, unique and shared, compressed to 14 lines (the only formal element her sonnets share with traditional sonnets). The lines and stanza lengths vary from poem to poem, suggesting that Coleman tries to tailor each poem\u2019s meter to its subject, the way it is talked about, described. And this she does very well, covering family, erotic love, work, chronic poverty, racism, and the damned knowledge that she is better than what she receives from American society. Here\u2019s Coleman in meditative form, \u201cAmerican Sonnet #76\u201d:<\/p>\n

there be the fog outside and the fog inside
\nsettling over the gravesites and skin
\nclimate fit for ghosts and amnesiacs, befogged,
\nintrusive skirtings thru filters, cracks
\nand secret spots, mist forming at my lover\u2019s
\nkiss in the pretty air, the kiss hovering and diving
\nbefore it strikes me. mist oceanflow from resistance to
\npeace time, mist taking root in the brown chair at the
\npine desk, composing, there is internal fog and external
\nfog. a garden of spirits and drums, sprites
\nthrilling on the ooze, of firs, walking naked, cold and
\nhungry for smoke, the east, want borne on wickedness like
\na shot, or kiss, before diving into blankets and history
\nto embrace the fog to give it form and flesh<\/p>\n

An essential collection of American poetry from the late 20th century.
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