BOOK reMARKS

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Li-Young Lee is a poet of the core elements of human experience, shunning the transitory. His work encompasses loneliness, fatherhood, love, the inner life of children, and many other experiences familiar to readers of today, yesterday, or tomorrow. The poems of Book of My Nights are not very long as a rule, focusing with spare language on the things one tends to ruminate about in the hours between dusk and dawn.

On the death of his brother, in "Black Petal":

Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story

On the concerns of a father, in "Words for Worry":

Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.

Worry trimmed the child's nails before
singing him to sleep.

On youth and mortality, in "Stations of the Sea":

Once forsaken, I remain
hidden in the dust, a mortal threshold
unearthed by crying.

Crying, my body turns to dark petals.

The poet has been well-laurelled in his life as a poet, winning multiple Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Perhaps the most prominent of Asian American poets, a collection of interviews entitled Breaking the Alabaster Jar was published in 2006. His poems have been anthologized in major works like the Norton Anthology of American Literature, signaling both provisional inclusion in the oft-debated canon and the regard in which his work is held.

Cabell Library PS3562.E35438 B66 2001

Cabell Library PS3562.E35438 Z46 2006 Breaking the Alabaster Jar

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Reviewed by Allison Titus, Library Specialist I

Lisa Lewis' poems are sweeping things that read like short stories. They remind me of Aimee Bender's short fiction: composed with a carefully crafted simplicity; conversational with lyric tendencies; hinged not on sharp fragments but instead on sort of inverted moments: the language is manipulated to surprise but always remains conversational in tone. There is a simplicity within these poems—sometimes conjured by a series of parallel sentences and the repetition of totemic words—but the poems aren’t simple. They move ever outward in gathering arcs to relate a progression of events or objects or ephemera. Ideas and experiences are linked one after the other to create a vast container of images, yet the poems manage to feel instinctual in these accumulations. These are natural, complicated meanderings that trace a pattern to the core. Lewis’ melancholy is a plainspoken, energetic melancholy, and she offers devastating observations that feel right on—as absolute as waking, where ordinary truths turn monumental but are not contrived-profound.

From "Animal Bodies":
I knew how animals play/ in the rivers and the locked rooms after we've fallen asleep./ I knew dark moved to light and light moved to dark, I wanted/ to try talking about it, what if I said, here are my hands, bird, where are your claws?

From "The Lamed Mare":
But the past doesn't die. Doesn't/even fade, not much, for all the paper/stapled over memory, like those fly-specked/bulletins hung in every barn, phone numbers/of blacksmiths, Labrador puppies for sale.

From "Drought":
It rained/last year, it rained all year, I believed/my sorrow would never end, but it slipped/ through itself like a knotted thread. Too much river is no worse than too little./it's just that I'd thought, as anyone would,/that drowning was the way to die, not/sighing like a spark struck into thin air./

From "The Hummingbird":
It thought the light/meant the wind should be closer, the tree limbs'/tips, the evening sky, whatever comforts a bird/flies home to…Hummingbirds never stop flying, their thready legs/won't brace them up, or maybe their feet won't lock/around grass blades, their wings' pulse treading /each side of their hearts. I could hardly imagine/a bird so small; I could hardly imagine a life/so hard no rest belongs there./

There is remarkable inclusiveness to Lewis' speculation—room enough for her to try out multitudes and variations with "or maybes" –and still to keep us by her side, guessing and hoping to know and relieved at certain moments when something fundamental gets stated. Lewis allows us to witness her thoughts unwinding to some place solid even when that includes hesitation. The poems in Silent Treatment offer no sentimentality, no false gestures.

Cabell Library PS3562.E9535 S5 1998

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Night Picnic: Poems is a fine 2001 collection by Charles Simic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yugoslavian-born poet best known for surreal, often dark work. The poems presented here are clearly the work of an older poet, confident in himself and in his work. The poems' narratives are stronger than those of Jackstraws, his deeply imagistic 1999 collection, and more relaxed than the tight, spare pieces prevalent earlier in his career, as represented in 1982's Austerities.

Much of Simic's poetry in the past has sprung from the horrors of World War II and its aftermath in Eastern Europe. Along with Czeslaw Milosz, his somewhat older Polish contemporary, Simic has done much to bring the rhythms and life the "Other Europe" to the English-speaking world. Night Picnic is clearly Simic's work, from the "butchery of the innocent" to the confused wanderers of nameless cities:

… they do not see anyone,
Nor do they catch sight of themselves
In dusty store windows
Drifting in the company of white clouds.

Many of the poems here are playful, and that playfulness often appears in the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated objects: "[t]wo pebbles from the grave of a rock star, / [a] small, grinning windup monkey." Here more than ever before, the poet takes an earthy delight in the rituals of human love and lust. While still recognizably the work of Charles Simic, many of these poems read like the work of a man whose burdens have been, if not lifted, then at least lightened.

Cabell Library PS3569.I4725 N54 2001

Cabell Library PS3569.I4725 J33 1999 (Jackstraws)
Cabell Library PS3569.I4725 A95 1982 (Austerities)

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