Some New Books, Winter 2005-2006

Christopher Davis. A History of the Only War. New York, Four Way Books, 2005.

Davis’ third book, in which he is more out and about, more eagerly full of despair, stalking the low gay lands for sensibility, and sensitive himself to the point of a halogen nightmare. Still, he wants to save everybody, knowing he can’t. A severe book, a little off balance, a little skewed, screwed, dire and thoughtful, worthwhile.

Ian Sinclair. Edge of the Orison: in the trace of John Clare’s “Journey out of Essex.” London, Hamish Hamilton, 2005.

Sinclair is one of England’s weirdest, widest ranging writers. This joins his other equally unique books. Now he is the following in the footsteps of 19^th century poet John Clare’s escape from the lunatic asylum, out of madness into a variety of sanities and truths. A book which bends genre’s, melding biography, memoir, travelogue, mystery, history and novel.

Jean Gallagher. This Minute. New York, Fordham University Press, 2005.

In the realm of ekphrastic poetry, the most difficult is that which takes its inspiration from a photograph. This is doubly so if the photograph is famous. “Episodes in the History of Photography” are scattered throughout this book, and are descriptive at their core, of the invisible life of the photographed, the thoughts, fears and hopes of other times, other ages. Another series of “Ovidian Prayers” provides a lyric counterpoint, as do the more daily of the poems without series.

Marisol Limon Martinez. After you dearest language. Brooklyn, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005.

A long poem in the form of a dictionary, or of a thesaurus. A web of connections throughout provides a narrative, fractured in time and space. Daily life in Paris, New York, Madrid, Montenegro and many other elsewheres.

John Yau. Ing Grish. Philadelphia, Saturnalia Books, 2005.

The troubled relationship between the delirious abstract and the declarative, actual is the main subject of these poems and perhaps too of the artwork. Language, in other words. Labeled a collaboration, it is hard to tell in what order, or with what connection between artists, this book was created. Nevertheless, the art fits the poetry and vice versa. Also, a beautiful book, physically.

Brian Turner. Here, Bullet. Alice James Books, 2005.
A sincere, in the best and old sense of that word, work. Certainly years from now they will be saying “that was what it was like.” A line by Carolyn Forche seems appropriate:
“These are the words no longer. These are the photographs taken when we were alive.”

Pam Rehm. Small Works. Flood Editions, 2005.
Observations, in the style of Lorine Niedecker, whose works provide an epigraph for the book, this resembles nothing more than a modern George Herbert (as Patti Smith said, its better not to be any gender, or something like that). A postmodern prayer book, a hymn to animals, a rosary for the angels.


Geraldine Monk. Escafeld Hangings. West House Books, 2005.
From an English poet, an English book, taking into counsel Charles Olson’s admonitions to write about the local, to exhaust the local, Monk, in this case creates a poetic suite of imaginings centered on the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots imprisoned in Sheffield, from 1570-1584. Inventive and quirky, imbued with a wild play of language.

The Tenth Muse: An Anthology. Edited by Anthony Astbury. Carcanet, 2005.
A strange anthology of poems chosen by the poets spouses or children. The concept of these poets as muse doesn’t really work, as few of the choosers have been mused by their chosen, really. But, its interesting to see what poems are chosen by intimates of the poets, who are,
for the most part, not, with the exception of Dylan Thomas, household names: George Barker, Thomas Blackburn, Lawrence Durrell, David Gascoyne, W. S. Graham, Robert Graves, Harold Pinter!, Anne Ridler, C. H. Sisson, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan and then Edward Thomas, David Wright. A very Fifties, very British collection.

100 Essential Modern Poets. Selected and Introduced by Joseph Parisi. Ivan R. Dee, 2005.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Strand. Norton, 2005.

What are the purposes of anthologies? These two make one really think about it. Of course, the adjectives “essential” and “great” are eminently impossible, even if the are not preceded by “The.”
Essentially, these are Strand’s and Parisi’s favorite poems, their commonplace poems. Strand’s choices are more unusual and more interesting, Parisi’s being commonplace indeed. However, Strand provides no context, and Parisi’s short introductions are usually at least interesting.
Both are anthologies in the sense of bouquets or garlands of “verse.” Perfect examples both of the current flood of miscellanies, rivaling the anthology craze of the latter half of the 16th Century.

Jane Yeh. Marabou. London, Carcanet, 2005.
Formally but misleadingly neat and clean poems. Uncanny and psychically subversive re-imaginings of a variety of culture’s objects, Watteau, orchids, Vermeer, adultery and sheep, varied historical events and demented corgis. Very original pieces, perhaps even sneaky in their concerns, which are more visionary than it appears.

Elizabeth Alexander. American Sublime. St. Paul, Graywolf, 2005.
An important book of high seriousness and great beauty. Fascinating stories, histories and little biographies about being black in America. Elegy and Exhaltation alternate. Hear the book:

"and are we not of interest to each other."

Merrill Gilfillan. Selected Poems, 1965-2000.
New York, Adventures in Poetry, 2005.
Gilfillan, it turns out, is a former New York School hangabout from the sixties who moved to Kansas sometime along the way and has written a dozen books of poems and several books of not poems (fiction, essays?). As Tom Raworth said:

"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be."

And also, although the size, coloring, typography and layout of the book are really nice, someone should have written an introduction.

Aaron Smith. Blue on Blue Ground. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
It might have taken a lot of courage for Pittsburgh to publish this book, but you would imagine if they let Denise Duhamel judge a prize they would know what would happen. Lyric and loungy, an uncouth and sometimes unlovely book about being gay. Jean Valentine has this to say:
“”How quickly I am made strange,” says the daughter of a dying man seen accidentally by a stranger walking by the hospital window and stopping to watch; and reading these often beautiful poems, how quickly we are made strange, alive to ourselves.”