Omnibus Review
from Southern Humanities Review
Spring 2006
- Full Speed through the Morning Dark. By Matthew Tierney. Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 2004. 88pp. $15.00, paper.
- The Displaced of Capital. By Anne Winters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 62 pp. $14.00, paper.
- Minsk. By Lavinia Greenlaw. NY: Harcourt, 2005. 71 pp. $21.00, hardcover.
- Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems. By Durs Grünbein. Translated by Michael Hofmann. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005. 298 pp. $27.00, hardcover.
Some poets think they have it all figured out, and their poems testify to their hubris. Others think their every little thought deserves to be immortalized in deathless verse. Canadian Matthew Tierney, in his first book, Full Speed through the Morning Dark, is humbler and more judicious. Tierney’s genuine fascination with the infinitely strange human dramas he finds himself in not only allows him to craft charming poems but to express a generosity and sympathy we have not seen since James Wright. These poems find him working and traveling in Japan, avoiding and finding romance, and traveling—in Japan, across China and Russia, honeymooning in Ireland, and returning to a dying grandfather’s Wales. There are numerous strong poems, and the few weak poems are often almost entirely excused by some sharp observation. In “Pallbearers,” for instance, Tierney can’t resist the prosaic fact that families of suicides on Japanese train tracks must “reimburse Japan Railway for each minute/of lost time. Busier lines exact higher/compensation.” This data, however, is leavened by his curious paranoia as the only foreigner onboard a crowded Japanese subway: “I’m buried to my neck/in Japanese my head rising clear/the first to go in a sniper attack,” and nearly saved by this image at a station stop: “Nobody exits/passengers keeping their shape like/canned ham.”
Whereas many poets traveling to Japan try to get all Zen, Tierney wisely does not. Floating right of the titles of the first section’s poems are haiku that ornament the observations without pretension. In the opening poem, “Abracadabra,” with its haiku, “Why is everyone/looking at me?/I’m human enough,” some play of light and dark has produced a disorienting illusion on the train’s window, but,
When I turn, only rows of faces,
marionette eyes
an absence of dust.
Maybe the Japanese understand better
the properties of illusion
how to recognise a reflection
for what it is.
I too am learning how something
can be made to disappear
with nothing more than a curtain, a word.
There is great subtlety here as Tierney combines imagism, mūjo (the impermanence of all things), and Japanese etiquette. In “Hanami” (cherry blossom viewing), Tierney nods to the conventions of this most stereotypical site of Japanese poetry and dutifully observes cultural ritual, making nice tanka-like observations—“This turbulence of white/in the trees, cherry blossoms/along both banks of the Inokashira river,/a million smiles,” but the poem hinges on the out-of-place foreigners who have found others like themselves, escaping home: “Here, beneath a sky devoted to Spring/the four of us as perfect substitutes.”
“Last Call,” about a drunken, late-night spin on a scooter, demonstrates Tierney’s ability to craft clever lines even in narratives of little matter and to observe his absurdities without smarmy self-pity:
I’ve no idea what the natural life span
of an idiot is or how many drunks
it takes to screw in a light bulb but
true lucidity is a smooth right turn
into traffic another at the lights.
It’s knowing your top speed.
His self-examinations continue in “First Lessons,” where his half-hearted attempt to get through a Japanese lesson with his tutor is “like a lawn mower stuck/in really tall grass.” Even the simplest things become impenetrable Zen kōan. His tutor asks, what is the color of the sky:
“sora wa nani iro desu ka”
she asks straight-faced
posture prim as though
we all have to bear
little tests. The question
put to me is “What’s
the colour of sora?”
I’d be happy with
yellow I like yellow.
Hapless, he needs to be told: “’ao desu’ ‘blue’./’The sky is blue.’”
The long poem at the center of Tierney’s book, “Trans-Mongolian Express” is his best. With the subtitle “Beijing to Moscow (Second Class),” it takes us into Tierney’s berth, lets up look out his window at landscapes and at boys with their dogs begging scraps from passengers, and to feel his mix of admiration, pity, and self-criticism as writes: “I’m not certain what kind of trouble there is/for boys around here to get into/but I wish them luck, wave and grin.” Wondering if he’s given away too much, he still feels virtuous, “the way you can/from behind glass.” The stir-crazy claustrophobia of train travel is broken up by stops at stations where the question of whose turn it is to rush out for necessaries and risk being left behind is both a serious matter and a game, but Tierney is confident:
What we need is ingrained
after rooming so closely with its absence,
a list I expect to recite on my deathbed.
I drop my book, throw on my boots,
don’t bother with my jacket.
One leg out the exit, the wind pulls like an undertow
and away I go, untied laces flowing behind,
and it’s like playing chicken with a truck, only here
not a truck but a moment.
Gauging time, distance, need, and a pocketful of international currency, he enters:
I crouch towards the kiosk,
point to the closest recognizable objects, Mars bars,
hold up two fingers. Friend on the train, I want to say
as if it were important for the storekeeper to know
I wouldn’t eat them both.
Heroically retraining with booty for the next leg, his buddy asks, “Didja get the batteries?” as they sit idly in the station for another fifteen minutes. Tierney’s charming mixture of self-observation and wit continues throughout the book and demonstrates how capably he can work any topic, finding interesting angles to see landscapes and human folly in a way Bruegel and the old masters would appreciate.
The Displaced of Capital, Anne Winters’ second book, arrives nearly twenty years after The Key to the City. Waiting so long to publish a second volume is unusual, and probably admirable. Though it contains a few conventionally contemporary poetic moments, Winters more often resemble tendentious writers of the past, such as Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, and Roque Dalton. Like theirs, Winters’ Marxist sensibility sometimes leads her into didacticism, but at her best Winters uses the insights of historical materialism to uncover a New York City that hides in the light. In her observations of the poet’s life in relation to the lives of working people—especially those “displaced” from their native lands after the introduction of what capitalism calls “civilization”—Winters speaks in a voice that at once stands in the stream of history with the oppressed and exploited and above it, intellectualizing, challenging, sympathizing, immortalizing, and critiquing. Winters’ poetry can handle the stuff of the real world, even when all that is solid melts into air.
In the opening poem, “The Mill-Race,” Winters rides a cross-town bus in rush hour. She describes the bus, the streets, the season, but the poem comes alive when a group of working women boards the bus:
. . . streaming from lobbies
come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops
black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits,
one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows;
one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic;thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow’s curlicue and the fingers’; elbow-work,
heel-work,
are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus.
Winters maintains a certain distance from her subjects—not an ironic detachment, but a sympathetic awareness that the poet is not, after all, one of them, not a working girl on her way home from work, not herself subject to the spectrum of exploitation they face hourly. She writes from a position of greater privilege (but not as privileged as their exploiters), but she uses her privilege—education, leisure, verse—to see what perhaps they cannot and to portray them in ways they perhaps would not. The women, who have taken off their uniforms and donned “the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves,” are hoping for a night of fun, but Winters muses: “If there is leisure, bus-riders, it’s not for you,/not between here and uptown or here and the Bronx.” Released but temporarily, these women will ride this bus again in the morning, return to work as raw material, mostly “forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt-mill, that makes the sea, salt.”
In the title poem, “The Displaced of Capital,” Winters’ leisurely reading of the Times at a café table is complicated by the nightmarish transnational “shift in the structure of experience.” Winters finds she no longer needs to travel to experience the weird dreams of world: they come to her and make her an accomplice:
. . . can I escape morning happiness,
or not savor our fabled “texture” of foreign
and native properties? (A boy tied into greengrocer’s apron
unplaceable accent, brings out my coffee.). But, no, it says here
the old country’s “de-developing” due to its mountainous
debt to the First World—that’s Broadway, my café
and my table . . .
Winters looks deeply into the nature of our contemporary existence and finds, as Marx and Engels said in 1848, no halos but only “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
Each of Winters’ poems has hits and misses, but the few that outright miss result in preachy sentimentalism, as in “The Grass Grower,” a narrative of liberal guilt about pre-Civil Rights America and the poet’s pre-adolescent friendship with a Black man from Jim Crow Georgia living in the Bronx who cultivates a little patch of grass outside his radio repair shop. The book’s longest poem, “An Immigrant Woman,” is a catalog of her strengths and weaknesses. It is a narrative about an NYU grad-student in Classics who befriends a neighboring immigrant woman who works as a hotel maid near the UN. They meet as each becomes involved in the Ramp Committee’s protesting the dangers of the city’s work on the Brooklyn Bridge. Though there is often nothing “poetic” in the narrative’s prosy plot (“Luz told us Pilar has lost husband/and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned/death heap in the center of their village”), as the story unfolds and the speaker seeks a kind of intimacy with these Others, she realizes that her life is not like theirs and will never be, no matter how much her politics make her empathize. Unlike her new “friends,” she does not have to resort to “The thousand/stratagems of those who simply must not spend.” Instead,
. . . that summer,
I’d worked in my window like a scholar
in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises,
like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears “came ever
the sounds of buildings collapsing.”
Winters’ portrayal of her fascination with the exotic, politically-active, poor, foreign protesters, her tentative attempts to join their cause, and the ultimate futility of both is moving. The poem is most effective, however, when it’s about simple things: interacting with Pilar and her daughter, comparing the lives of the working poor with the poor grad student, contrasting how the movements of capital affect each differently. The city, its dangers, the protests, and the infinite diversity of labor brought these two women together for a brief utopian moment, to give them peeks into one another’s existences, but when tragedy strikes, the real social distance between them is unbridgeable: “All my laughable, my lovely, delusional studies,” the poet realizes, “were now an affront.”
A series of uneven poems called “A Sonnet Map of Manhattan” contains some stand outs: “McDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements,” “First Avenue: Drive-In Teller,” and “One-sixty-fifth Street: The Currency Exchange.” The best is “Sixty-seventh Street: Tosca with Man in Bedrock.” Inside the Met, Tosca is performed for an audience “in its stoles and fur tippets,” but underground is the world of proletariat Atlases supporting the superstructure:
. . . Straight down, past sallow platforms, sewer
outfalls and steam lines, the man in the bedrock
. . .
hears, through bell curves of pings, each note
vibrate off his shaft of Precambrian schist. Gray, void . . .
our Manhattan Schist, laid down too early for fossils.
Winters’ book will not appeal to everyone, and it is not perfect, but it is a valuable contribution to the tradition of political poetry. Winters adds possibilities to this tradition by giving deep emotional resonance to sometimes dogmatic assertions, and she does what all great poets ought to do: makes rational, trustworthy, moral statements that teach us what to see and how we ought to see it.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s third book of poems, Minsk, is her American poetry debut. Picked as a “Next Generation” poet in 1994, Greenlaw has become a major voice in British letters. Minsk, however, is disappointing. Harcourt could have easily produced a selected poems, as they did for “Next Generation” poet Simon Armitage, with a dozen major poems from Night Photograph, a dozen from A World Where News Travelled Slowly, and a dozen from Minsk. Such a volume would have better presented Greenlaw’s remarkable skills, her icy gaze, and her geological imagination to her new American audience. Instead, in Minsk, we have a poet in transition, trying out some new modes, not all of which fit (and a supremely inept introduction by Edward Hirsch).
Greenlaw’s early poems are full of careful observations—of the night sky and the earth, of those who study the earth and sky. When they do turn personal, Greenlaw creates enough distance to show she is working a theme rather than just telling us about the tribulations of last Thursday. This is not always the case in Minsk, where she too often recounts some childhood moment as if we had asked:
The piano years . . . Too young to drive
I played pedal to the metal
full reverb, wah-wah and fuzz,
a collision course bending Chopsticks
into hairpins, trilling the hell
out of cheesy Für Elise.
Thus begins “Essex Rag,” and while it has charm, Greenlaw cannot make something from nothing much. The contemporary post-confessional confessional mode is not her strong suit, and neither, it seems, are lists: “Picture this:/an estuary, where the eye can’t tell/sea from river, hill from valley,/near from far, first from last, in from out/—any one thing, in fact, from any other” (“Blackwater”); or, “It has no tissue, nothing/to touch or taste or bring to mind/a memory, no iris or artery, no gentian, aconite or anemone,/no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,/no titanium or turquoise,/no mercury or magnesium,/no phosphorous, sapphire, or silver foil,/no duck egg or milk jug,/no chambray, denim, or navy,/no indigo, octopus ink, no ink,/no element” (“Blue Field”). The only interest here is guessing how quickly she will run out of possibilities.
Other experiments also go awry: “A Strange Barn,” for example, with the conceit that historical events were occurring during the construction of sections in the British Zoo. There may be a scholarly interest in noting (as in “Spin”) that Ralph Waldo Emerson was peddling Transcendentalism, the Arc de Triomphe was being constructed, and Arkansas was becoming a state in the Union while the Giraffe House was being built in 1836, but it doesn’t make much of a poem. If these smell too much of the lamp, others smell too much of the TV tube, like “The Sun Sessions (after Otis Blackwell),” where Greenlaw’s attempt to dig that groovy Memphis vibe is as irritating as her compatriot Paul Farley’s attempt to be an American hepcat.
However, when Greenlaw’s talent matches her materials, she is as good as any living poet and better than most. Minsk’s first eight poems—dealing with Greenlaw’s parents and childhood malaise—are undistinguished, but having gotten those out of the way, the next four are masterful. “Clownfish” moves rapidly, and everything counts: “So bored we made a film of our lives/and played ourselves—botched reincarnations/of doctors, madmen, evangelists and spies.” Her listing here inspired; her diction nearly Lowellian:
Adolescents drowning in our own soup,
we crooned their baggy truths . . .
Only we knew how to dance The Hoe,
how to unrhyme slang, the rules, the angle,
the camber in the mini-snooker’s baize,
the warp and dimples of the ping-pong table,
the laws of croquet on a scuffed, erupting lawn.
Greenlaw captures seething adolescent boredom and the ignorance of teenage rebellion; meanwhile her mother engages in real revolt: “Taxes for Peace, telegrams for Amnesty,/lifts for strangers, the communist vote./She left Protest and Survive by the phone.” But, Greenlaw recalls, “Neither ever occurred to us.” Instead, “We lived smack dab in the village eye,/bubbling up to mouth obscene charms.” In “Zombies,” Greenlaw returns to these “fields of our years of boredom,” and asks:
Did we not remember the curse of this place?
How Sundays drank our blood as we watched
dry paint or the dust on the television screen.
How people died bursting out of a quiet life,
or from being written into a small world’s stories.
Who can see such things and live to tell?
In “Battersea Dojo” Greenlaw connects karate lessons, her crew cut that gets her thrown out of ladies’ rooms and kissed by gay boys, and I.R.A. bomb threats. She even pulls off an opening that flopped earlier: “The hardcore years./Towers emptied on the strength of a rumour./For all that, the skyline boomed like a graph./Inside the walls, money grew on trees.”
Many of the poems in the middle of Minsk seem to deal with a separation or break-up with a lover who is “like the dream which, early that morning,/had flicked its magnificent tail then was gone.” In “Faith,” the lover metamorphosizes:
Watching you walk off among rock pools,
your gaze, a rapid adjustment of angles
as jittery and acute as a blackbird’s,
I see how your black linen suit
makes you a preacher, or a preacher’s son.
Makes him, indeed, Edmund Gosse—mediocre poet, translator, and critic, son of a famous father Gosse spent a lifetime trying to escape. The failed relationship is also cryptically chronicled in “Mephisto,” “Lachesis,” “High Summer Weir,” “Ergot,” “The Last Postcard,” and “What Makes for the Fullness and Perfection of Life.” One of the book’s strongest poems, “Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos, 1603,” continues to jab, as she responds to a fictive letter composed by Hugo von Hofmannstal, recently published in a new translation, about Chandos’ abandonment of poetry and being “out of rhyme.” The last poems find Greenlaw away from all that, off the coast of Norway in the Lofton Islands or in Polar Regions, where the only real question, as in “A Drink of Glass,” is, “how to keep warm?” These reports from the field evoke the cold solitude of formidable, isolated places and show how one can see oneself anew in the brutal elements apart from the trappings of one’s past. Overall, however, Minsk lacks much of the power and authoritative tone of Greenlaw’s earlier poems. As she tries out new modes, she remains what other reviewers have said about her: a poet of remarkable talent but inconsistent; a poet of great if unfulfilled promise.
Ashes for Breakfast, a selection from five of German poet Durs Grünbein’s books from 1988-2002, is Grünbein’s English debut and the first major poetry translation by the German-born British poet, critic, and translator Michael Hofmann. In his preface, Hofmann confesses that he avoided poems that rhymed or were “too skillful, too euphoric, and too rhetorical,” picking instead those poems which fit his “line” and corresponded to his own “idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness.” Thus, if the facing German and English pages of Ashes for Breakfast does not give us all of Grünbein, it does let us listen to an on-going conversation between two estimable, brooding, brilliant poets and friends.
Grünbein’s landscapes are forbidding, empty, and confining; places stained or haunted by traces of the dead; cages or coffins one isn’t sure one wants to leave, or can. Written inside and outside the Berlin Wall, his poems move from the restrictions of a repressive state to the vast endless, pointless entertainments of capitalism. Though Hofmann and Grünbein share an affection for Joseph Brodsky, it is perhaps Gottfried Benn one hears most. If Grünbein lacks Benn’s callousness—the doctor pulling gold teeth from corpses to finance his whoring—there is the sense that humanity’s best days are over. Like Benn, Grünbein finds nothing transcendental in the world’s depravities, but he forces himself to see them. In the sequence “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog,” Grünbein writes,
Being a dog is this and that, taking instructions from garbage heaps,
A knuckle sandwich for dinner, mud orgasms.
Being a dog is whatever happens next, randomness
The mother of boredom and incomprehension.
The sequence “Variations on No Theme” finds the “skeptical, well read, irritated” Grünbein musing:
How many gestures are futile, and yet
Their inadequacy keeps them going.
To make menaces at a fly, to lower the head
In mute respect before the departed,
To sweeten your time in solitary by waving
Or greeting, can be diverting
Or decent. It’s all absurd anyway,
Against the slothful clouds.
Though absurd, Grünbein is still fascinated by grim things, even dismembered dogs by railroad tracks:
The longer you look, the more
His skin merges with the dirt, the pools
Of gravel in among the emerald grass.
And then the stain also of this life
Is fully laundered away. (“In the Provinces I”)
Or at other natural cruelties, like the raptor flying off with all but the rabbit’s foot, still twitching in the grass:
That was all that was left of a rabbit
Once the shadow of a wing crossed its path,
After its zigzag dash had been cut off by a claw, its panting
Breath by a well-aimed beak. How comfortless
This death must have been, helplessly splayed
On the wintry earth, the last convulsions. (“In the Provinces II”)
In Grünbein’s Ovidian world, there is no justice mortals can comprehend, nor any significance, since that bird of prey, perched in the trees, “like a bribed witness . . . ha[s] no recollection of anything,” and even “The grass, which had long since picked itself up, sees to it/That this was all there was to see, this rabbit’s foot.”
Grünbein isn’t always so morbid, but he is best so. When his eye turns from memento mori to culture he becomes glib, as in “Trilce, César,” about young, oppressed East Berliners who sit bored in libraries dreaming of New York City, and where once, in the restroom, Grünbein was “alarmed as an entire/swarm of blowflies at the//love of two men silently belaboring/one another/sweating and oblivious like strange/centaurlike creatures on an//overexposed photograph.” Or, in the title sequence, where Grünbein rehearses his knowledge of the classics at the urinal, “at the moment of voiding,” recalling such maxims as “All things flow,” or “Know thyself,” or “less Classical, remember to flush afterward.” Or in “On False Movements,” where all our everyday moments of bad luck—wasps in kids’ mouths, crushed toes, fish bones in the throat—are part of a plan: “In the crush, the plainest news assails the passerby/like the sodden film poster with its blurred ‘The-o-di-cy.’” However, when he is not masking his “own shocking helplessness with black humor,” as in “Vita Brevis,” where he sounds exactly like one would expect an intelligent, cynical, East Berliner to sound recounting his life behind the Wall, Grünbein is capable of writing the kind of world-historical poetry we want from our former-Communist poets. The eleven part “Europe After the Last Rains” has some of his most mature, elegant, and epic moments. In sixth section, dedicated to his grandmother who was ingloriously killed in the fire-bombing of Dresden, Grünbein follows panicked citizens as three waves of bombs hit the city. He writes, “On one twentieth-century night, planes/Delivered a second stone age./The odd bomb shelter, like the tomb behind the stone,/Housed were man, wife, and child, all done to a crisp.” And in the next section he almost laments the injustice that the atomic bombs were not dropped in Dresden, as initially planned: “How much more beautifully/The dazzling toadstool would have sprouted here,//Over the pale sandstone residence, as the logical pinnacle/Of so much Baroque.” While some poets spend a lifetime bewailing that Daddy didn’t love them enough, in Grünbein we find a poet who takes every huge horrific and destructive thing history can throw at him and whose only complaint is that a little better forethought could have made it all much more beautiful.
Joines Reviews 