Two Poets, Both Alike in Dignity: A review of Paul Muldoon’s One Thousand Things Worth Knowing and Joseph Harrison’s Shakespeare’s Horse
Two poets, both alike in age and erudition, both accomplished: one as famous as poets in the 21st century can be; the other likely unfamiliar to you.
One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, Paul Muldoon’s twelfth collection, begins with “Cuthbert and the Otters,” an occasional elegy composed for the funeral of Seamus Heaney. The central narrative, developed at intervals throughout the poem, concerns Saint Cuthbert and the otters who took care of him while he prayed beside the sea. As the poem progresses, the otters become confounded with the monks who carried off Cuthbert’s remains to protect them from invading Danes. Both the otters and monks, then, become the pall-bearers (of whom Muldoon was one) carrying Heaney’s coffin. Other strands bring in Vikings and Celts, the 82nd Airborne and sundry other historical figures and settings. The poem, thus, is a collage, and it seems Muldoon composed the layers separately, then ...
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Rebecca Foust: Paradise Drive
Rebecca Foust’s new book, Paradise Drive, the winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry, is a diary in verse, reminiscent in subject and technique to Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. Drawing on Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s allegory of trial and redemption, as well as the English sonnet’s tradition of spiritual encounter, Foust’s sonnet sequence dramatizes the protagonist’s journey toward greater self-awareness. In the beginning we see Foust’s alter-ego Pilgrim adrift in Marin County, California, where life is la dolce vita, a never-ending party. Unfortunately Pilgrim has been party to the party for too long; her life of privilege has become both Vanity Fair and Slough of Despair.
Yet much as this book recalls Bunyan’s Puritan epic, it is also something quite different. There is a joie de scrive in these sonnets, which is both counterpoint to its heroine’s quagmire as well as its objective correlative. How long have ...
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Apollonius of Rhodes: Jason & the Argonauts (translated by Aaron Poochigian)
Aaron Poochigian’s new translation of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Jason & the Argonauts demands to be read aloud—lines of perfect, unforced iambic pentameter make it as lyrical as Shelley or Frost. When reading the text, I kept pausing to recite the verse, repeatedly, with different points of emphasis, in an attempt to do justice to the euphony of Poochigian’s English translation. So many of the lines drip from the tongue:
She dropped her gaze, but as she did
a smile as sweet as nectar spread across her face.
Her heart had flamed beneath his flattery. (III.1305-7)
Over and over flood tides leave the mainland
and then come rushing back to drag salt water
across the sand. One of these tides abruptly
dropped the Argo so far up the beach
that little of the keel was still in water. (IV. 1592-6)
To complement the lulling meter of the ...
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Mary Mackey: Travelers with No Ticket Home
In a sense, Travelers with No Ticket Home is a study in ethnobotany, the ways people and their cultures relate to the plants in their environment, the plants in this case being the lush and abundant flora, including hallucinogenic mushrooms, of the tropics, the people being two transplanted Americans fresh out of college. At its best, the book is an immersion in a phantasmagoria of landscapes whose surreal and liminal quality in these pages doubtless owes something to a narrator's not being native to it, a Conrad describing the interior of Africa, a Kafka in Amerika. It’s a tropics of “beauty and mystery,” Mackey tells us in her “Acknowledgments,” she first fell in love with as an eighteen-year-old sophomore while auditing classes with Richard Evans Schultes, father of modern Ethnobotany at Harvard. Mackey spent a decade in Central America in the 1960s and 70s and later traveled extensively in Brazil, ...
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Jeffrey Bean: Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
In terms of both the geography and the straightforward diction in which his work is rooted, Jeffrey Bean is a very middle-of-the-U.S. poet—Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio—with a style that brings to mind early William Matthews. But Bean’s voice in his chapbook Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is very much his own. (Published this spring, it won the 2013 Cowles/Copperdome Chapbook Award.)
The images and descriptions in Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window’s poems are startlingly beautiful, but they don’t startle, they’re not set off like jewels to draw the eye. They rise naturally from the landscape of the language, spoken by authentic voices who have a hell of a feel for rhythm. (And, like landscape, and like early Matthews, are in danger of being driven past without attention by readers who are looking for adrenaline-spiking turns).
The first poem in the chapbook, "The ...
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Jessica Piazza: Interrobang
An interrobang is a little known punctuation mark that depicts a question mark and an exclamation point joined together, sharing the same dot. Jessica Piazza could not have picked a better symbol to encapsulate the effect her book, Interrobang, had on me.
The best books (poetry and otherwise) make the reader smarter. They make us look things up. They make us question (Interro-) things we previously believed, or they make us learn new facts or words (or punctuation marks) we hadn’t known before. Jessica Piazza’s book taught me a boatload of new words—most of which had to do with fears (phobias) and loves (philias). With each read, Interrobang teaches me things because it’s smart. Smarter than I am. But its intelligence doesn’t leave me cold. Because it’s smart without being the tiniest bit pretentious. I mean, Piazza uses italics as well as ALL CAPS IN ITALICS, sentence fragments, wordplay, and sayings like, “Holler back.” That’s where ...
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Joshua Beckman: The Inside of an Apple
Not every hour calls for a poem, not every sensation, every mood. Some want only a walk in the cold, or a bourbon, or another hour’s sleep. But for a poet, as for any writer, there is always the fear of failing to produce. What a good poem does, nothing else can do, and it’s easy to get addicted making that happen. So certain obligations nag. Coming up with material. Getting oneself writing. Being a poet.
I wanted to stop writing
and the poem said
it’s a beautiful blue night
stop writing.
Thus ends Joshua Beckman’s third book, Your Time Has Come. It’s a little book, no thicker than a DVD case and half the height. Not a poem inside it comes to more than four lines. And four lines are plenty.
I don’t love many living poets. The ones I do I treat warily, reading ...
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Shara Lessley: Two-Headed Nightingale
One of the central concerns pervading Percy Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry is the idea of vital metaphor, that poetic aspect that makes the serious poet’s work different from amateurs, or those searching for personal vainglory. For Shelley, vital metaphor leads to the truest form of expression, the expression allowing a poet to move past him/herself and into participation with “the one, the infinite, the eternal.” Shelley is, of course, talking about the collective imagination of poetry through the ages that contributes to the ongoing understanding of ourselves as human.
In our contemporary moment when so many poets seem focused on the individual poem, Shara Lessley’s Two-Headed Nightingale reminds is there is a greater cause for poetry. Lessley’s deftly crafted lines lead to poems that are greater than the sum of their lines, and a collection of poems exhibiting an investigative perception of the world fueled ...
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Jonathan Galassi: Left-Handed; John FitzGerald: The Mind; David St. John: The Auroras
“Men at forty,” as Donald Justice wrote, learn to turn their backs, or close doors—“softly”— on youth and long-passed opportunities as part of their accommodation to a life of mortgages, the body’s increasing betrayals, and other failures of middle age. Perhaps the most painful of these stem from love and marriage, as well as the domestic life that sometimes confines men as inescapably as it does women, though the emotional content of poems that are mirror-images of Justice’s abound too—just pick up any journal and let your eyes fall on lines exulting in “parenthood at fifty.” (Or sixty.)
Not that my gender is innocent of producing lame, unmusical domestic anecdotes. I suspect that we see fewer such efforts in print because male and female editors laugh them off the table, whereas their response to The Male Mid-Life Crisis Poem, and the resultant period style, tends to be more respectful. Sir Stephen ...
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Lisa Russ Spaar: Vanitas, Rough
In Lisa Russ Spaar’s new book, though never mentioned by name, Persephone is the presiding genius. Persephone’s presence is felt severely, mostly in meditation of the Underworld or winter just outside its domain. In the first poem, “St. Protagonist,” we begin, “It’s bedtime. Tell me a story.” No children’s book here. Thrust into this acute irony of “bedtime”, we begin at the end. In these poems, we will encounter the poem beyond a story “improbable...but nonetheless believed,” the more ecstatic world that night affords us: sex, insomnia, death, and what Wallace Stevens calls the “mind of winter.” The cover image of the book is a still life featuring on a white plate, what else?—a pomegranate.
Due to the compact lines of the poems and an intense diction throughout, the words are vivid as the objects of avanitas, or a particular kind of still life (in ...
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