fragments of contemporary poetry

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/bo...ks&oref=slogin -- Robert Lowell and

Elizabeth Bishop review of "Words in Air"

The Lemons
by Eugenio Montale
translated from the Italian by Millicent Bell

But listen—those famous poets
everyone studied in school—they got stirred up
among plants we don’t know here: box privet or acanthus.
As for me, I love the roads that shrivel
into parched, weed-cluttered
ditches where boys
catch a skinny eel or two in a puddle;
the paths that follow the banks and sidle
down between clumps of cane
and put you down in the lemon groves, among the trees.
{exceprt}

By PETER STEVENSON
Published: November 7, 2008
“In childhood nothing happened.” So Donald Hall writes in his enchanting memoir, and what’s admirable about that

sentence is not just the pleasure in coming across such a cheeky volley in the opening pages of an account of a life

in our post-Freudian age, but the choice Hall made not to insert a comma between “childhood” and “nothing.” A comma —

“In childhood, nothing happened” — would have insisted on a dramatic pause that the reader would be expected to

applaud politely, nodding at the poet’s foreshadowing that clearly something did happen and it must have been simply

stupendous, and here we go. But Hall means what he says, repeating the phrase “Nothing happened” twice, like a chorus

or incantation, on the following page. ...cont.
UNPACKING THE BOXES

A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

By Donald Hall

195 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/bo...html?ref=books

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/bo...html?ref=books -- Changing Light



By AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
Published: November 7, 2008
The poetry of James Merrill is a good deal closer to a Haydn piano trio or Boccherini quintet than it is to Walt

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” Like the 18th-century Galante style in music, Merrill’s work has a high, almost lacquered

finish and prizes the qualities of refinement, intricacy of design and formal containment. It is music for the court,

for the knowledgeable and cultivated listener. At his best — in a handful of poems where he’s most restrained and the

emotional core of the work, however camouflaged or subdued, is most intense — Merrill has few peers, and none among

contemporary *poets working in meter and rhyme. -- SELECTED POEMS

By James Merrill. Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser

298 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. Paper, $16

Related
Compare Several Drafts of 'The Kimono' (randomhouse.com)
An Excerpt From James Merrill's 'Selected Poems' (randomhouse.com)

From Collected Poems 1920-1954
(revised bilingual edition translated
and annotated by Jonathan Galassi)

from Noons and Shadows

HOUSE BY THE SEA

The journey ends here:
in the petty worries that split
the heart that can't cry out anymore.
The minutes now are regular and fixed
like the revolutions of the pump.
One turn: water surfaces, resounds.
Another turn: more water, and some creaking.


{excerpt}

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1749.html -- signandsight -- Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan

from Collected Poems 1920-1954

from The Occasions 1928-1939
[to I.B.]

from Part I

GERTI'S CARNIVAL

If your wheel gets snared in tangled
shooting stars and the stallion
rears in the crowd, if a long
shiver of pale confetti falls like snow
on your hair and hands, or children raise
their plaintive ocarinas* to salute
your passing, and faint echoes
float down from the bridge onto the river;
if the street empties, leading you
to a world blown inside a trembling bubble
of air and light where the sun salutes your grace--
it may be you've found the way,
the route a piece of melted lead
suggested for a moment on that midnight
when a calm year ended without gunfire.


{excerpt}

{from the Rivised and Bilingual Edition,
translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi} [*ocarinas...n. A small terra-cotta or plastic wind instrument with finger holes, a mouthpiece, and an elongated ovoid shape.

[Italian, from dialectal ucarenna, diminutive of Italian oca, goose (from the fact that its mouthpiece is shaped like a goose's beak), from Vulgar Latin *auca, from *avica, from Latin avis, bird; see awi- in Indo-European roots.]

Book of Isaiah
by Anne Carson


I.


Isaiah awoke angry.


Lapping at Isaiah’s ears black birdsong no it was anger.


God had filled Isaiah’s ears with stingers.


Once God and Isaiah were friends.


God and Isaiah used to converse nightly, Isaiah would rush into the garden.


....

{from one of four parts}

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/bo...html?ref=books -- Donald Finkel, 79, Poet of Free-Ranging Styles,

Is Dead



By MARGALIT FOX
Published: November 20, 2008
Donald Finkel, a noted American poet whose work teemed with curious juxtapositions, which in their unorthodoxy helped

illuminate the function of poetry itself, died on Nov. 15 at his home in St. Louis. He was 79....{cont.}

from Poetry magazine, December 2008

PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE

..................

Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It's not
sleeplessness, it's fear of what the dark will
do if don't keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars' prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well--
I've hardly enough arms to gather them.
{second of two stanzas}

Close your eyes
Unwinding the bitter onion–
Its layers of uncertainty are limited,
Under brown paper its sealed heart sings
To the tune of a hundred lemons. ... {one of two stanzas of CHOPPING}

From Five Songs For Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky

The rock weeps into its own whiteness.
Sunny meadow slopes, the gentians,
far above.
The sun, too, tumbles down. A symphony
of spruce boughs sinks into the fiery moss.

Jewel-music, the amber roar of the falls.
No one thinks of home.
Waiting in the cool shadows,
we are dappled with hope.







The fascination of water
is the laughter of geometry.
Wind plunges down the hillside:
a longing to embrace.

The mountain drifts in twilight.
When we draw the blinds at dusk
is the moment we most want to open
them again.

JBI:

Would you be so good to provide the current pronunciation of Jan Zwicky?

Chasestalling

I don't know - I just call her Zwicky, rhyming with picky. and the Z pronounced as in Zebra.

From Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 by Jan Zwicky

That we shall not forget to honour
brown, its reedy clarities.
...

That the mind's light could be filtered
as: a porch, late afternoon,
a trellised rose,
which is to say
a truth in nostalgia:
if we steel ourselves against regret
we will not grow more graceful,
but less
...