fragments of contemporary poetry

HAND RELIQUARY, AVE MARIA LANE



God knows that there is no proof
that part returns to wholeness
simply because miracles happen
at a single church-going.

Her verdant branches labelled
with the names of the five senses,
the garden not ours, she prayed
for her illness to last beyond the grave,

and be the unsealer of that tree.
She might have been dead for a week,
though she went on with her deep
dying, her womb a transparent crystal

turning into a brown relic
even before her death. The blinding
beauty of her hood opening
acted upon me as my own ghost ... {excerpt}

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/p...aindx.htm#ryan From the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine based anthology of poets known and not-so-well-known. Reader friendly format enticing one to subscribe. Poets like...Bly, Collins, Hirshfield, Kunitz, Matthews and Kay Ryan.

LOST PARROT


She can cry his name from today to tomorrow.
She can Charlie him this, cracker him that, there
in the topmost he hangs like
a Christmas ornament,
his tail
a cascade of emeralds and limes.

The child is heartsick. She has taped messages
to the mailboxes, the names
he responds to, his favorite seeds.
At twilight she calls and calls.

Oh, Charlie, you went everywhere with her,
to the post office and the mall, to the women's
room at the Marriott where you perched
on the stall, good-natured, patient.

And didn't you love to take her thumb
in your golden beak
and, squeezing tenderly, shriek and shriek
as if your own gentleness
were killing you? ... {excerpt}

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/bo...r=1&ref=review --- My Daughter’s Murder

By DAVID KIRBY
Published: April 10, 2009
"At what point does life become art? 'Life being all inclusion and confusion,' Henry James wrote, 'and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which alone it is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.' Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s searing lines about the murder of her daughter are all sniffing, no finding. There may indeed be 'hard latent value' in the calculated slaughter of a child; if so, you won’t find it here" ... --- SLAMMING OPEN THE DOOR

By Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

61 pp. Alice James Books. Paper, $15.95

XII. Here’s Our Clean Business Now Let’s Go Down the Hall to the Black Room Where I Make My Real Money

You want to see how things were going from the husband’s point of view---
let’s go round the back,
there stands the wife
gripping herself at the elbows and facing the husband.
Not tears he is saying, not tears again. But still they fall.
She is watching him.
I’m sorry he says. Do you believe me.
Watching.
I never wanted to harm you.
Watching.
This is banal. It’s like Beckett. Say something!
I believe

your taxi is here she said.
He looked down at the street. She was right. It stung him,
the pathos of her keen hearing.
There she stood a person with particular traits,
a certain heart, life beating on its way in her.
He signals to the driver, five minutes.
Now her tears have stopped.
What will she do after I go? he wonders. Her evening. It closed his breath.
Her strange evening.
Well he said.
Do you know she began.
What.


If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you.
Why.
To tell it to.
Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake.
Pain rested.
Beauty does not rest.
The husband touched his wife’s temple
and turned
and ran
down
the
stairs.

--Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos
{excerpt} -- http://www.fort.org/carson_xii.html

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/no...d/matthews.htm --- DAVID WOJAHN
Review | Search Party: Collected Poems, by William Matthews,
edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly
(Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

Search Party brings together the best work of a uniquely eloquent poet, one of the most original voices of his

generation, and surely the most readable. And the book comes along at the right time, for among those poets born

roughly between 1935 and 1945—a group which includes Glück, Hass, Wright, Palmer, Williams, Bidart, Plumly, Pinsky,

and Olds, among others—Matthews is the one whose reputation has seemed most at risk. Although Matthews was something

of a ubiquitous figure on the literary landscape of the 1980s and early '90s, recent anthologies have ignored him,

and his work has attracted little critical attention. Perhaps this has to do with Matthews' early death from a heart

attack in 1997, but I suspect that it has more to do with the writing itself: Matthews' mature style remains

blissfully indifferent to most of the prevailing literary fashions. Although his early work derives from the

surrealist-tinged poetics of Deep Image poets such as Merwin and James Wright, and he never wholly abandoned the Deep

Image predilection for startling pyrotechnical metaphors, the values of his mature work are Horatian—and Matthews

translated Horace—arising from good sense, wit, an insatiable curiosity, an affable authorial presence, and a

slightly shambling quest for wisdom. Matthews was not interested in the earnest disassemblings and assaults on

linearity which have come to be such an important aspect of our period style, nor did he display the self-indulgence

and mere schtick which contemporary poets have often confused with wit. Search Party makes a very persuasive case for

Matthews' continuing importance, thanks not only to the poems but also to a superbly insightful introductory essay by

his friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly. The book is not a definitive Matthews—a good number of worthy poems from

his individual collections and even his 1992 Selected Poems have been omitted, and Plumly and his co-editor Sebastian

Matthews have culled only a tantalizingly small portion of the many poems which Matthews published in journals but

did not include in his books. Ideally, a Complete Matthews will be available someday; in the meantime, this book does

ample justice to his writing. {excerpt from review... Blackbird Archive}

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/ar..._r=1&ref=books --- Deborah Digges, Poet Who Channeled Struggles, Dies at 59 (obituary, Margalit Fox, 4/16/09) Quoted in this obituary is the poem "Searsucker Suit" -- To the curator of the museum, to the exhibition of fathers,

to the next room from this closet of trousers

and trousers, full sail the walnut hangers of shirts,

O the great ghost ships of his shoes.

Through the racks and the riggings,

belt buckles ringing and coins in coat pockets

and moths that fly up from the black woolen remnants,

his smell like a kiss blown through hallways of cedar,

the shape of him locked in his burial clothes,

his voice tucked deep in his name,

his keys and the bells to his heart,

I am passing his light blue seersucker suit

with one grass-stained knee,

and a white shirt, clean boxers, clean socks, a handkerchief.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/ma...html?ref=books --- "Since Seidel published the first of his

10 collections nearly 50 years ago — a complete gathering of them, “Poems 1959-2009,” will be published this week —

his poetry has remained largely unknown to the general public while attracting heated critical commentary. Seidel has

numerous distinguished admirers inside the literary world — poets as famous as Billy Collins and Paul Muldoon,

critics as respected as Richard Poirier and Adam Phillips, novelists as laureled as Norman Rush and Jonathan Franzen

— and has been called by the critic Adam Kirsch perhaps “the best American poet writing today.” Meanwhile, from other

corners of that world, Seidel has earned different and more complicated epithets: “sinister,” “disturbing,” “savage,”

“the most frightening American poet ever” and even “the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry.” ...{excerpt from

article, NYTimes magazine} re: Frederick Seidel

from THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE..CXVIII

By default, as it so happens, here we have
good and bad angels caught burning
themselves characteristic antiphons;
and here the true and the false
shepherds discovered
already deep into their hollow debate.
Is that all? No, add spinners of fine
calumny, confectioners of sugared
malice; add those who find sincerity
in heartless weeping. Add the pained,
painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition.
Sidney: best realizer and arguer
of music, that ‘divine
striker upon the senses’, steady my
music to your Augustinian grace-notes,
with your high craft of fret. I am glad
to have learned how it goes
with you and with Italianate-
Hebraic Milton: your voices pitched exactly—
somewhere—between Laus Deo and defiance.
{excerpt}

Stone's Secret



Otter-smooth boulder
lies under rolling
black river-water
stilled among frozen
hills and the still unbreathed
blizzards aloft;
silently, icily, is probed
stone's secret.

Out there --past trace
of eyes, past these
and those memorial skies
dotting back signals from
men's made mathematics (we
delineators of curves and time who are
subject to these) --
out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived
processional of space. ... {excerpt}

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/bo...l?8bu&emc=bua2 --- Constantine Cavafy ---

COLLECTED POEMS

By C. P. Cavafy

Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

547 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35


THE UNFINISHED POEMS

By C. P. Cavafy

Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

121 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30

A review... "A Poet's Progress" by James Langenbach, April 17, 2009

BIRDWATCHERS OF AMERICA -- I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I received a singular warning: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

BAUDELAIRE, Journals


It’s all very well to dream of a dove that saves,

Picasso’s or the Pope’s,
The one that annually coos in Our Lady’s ear

Half the world’s hopes,
And the other one that shall cunningly engineer
The retirement of all businessmen to their graves,

And when this is brought about
Make us the loving brothers of every lout—

But in our part of the country a false dusk

Lingers for hours; it steams
From the soaked hay, wades in the cloudy woods,

Engendering other dreams.
Formless and soft beyond the fence it broods
Or rises as a faint and rotten musk

Out of a broken stalk.
There are some things of which we seldom talk; ... {excerpt}

Look at that rhyme scheme on the above one, it's almost effortless, but the skeleton is so dominant - how does he do it!

NABOKOV'S BLUES


The wallful of quoted passages from his work,
with the requisite specimens pinned next
to their literary cameo appearances, was too good

a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,
why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered
and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood

at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read
and look, you could be happy a month in that small
room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen:

he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble
to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel
apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly

of his back and the small wedge of face that shows
brims with indifference to anything not on the page.
The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light

over the page, too far away for us to read.
We also liked the chest of specimen drawers
labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians,

“Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials
the thousands he examined for his monograph
on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues.

And there in the center of the room a carillon
of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been
three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there,

and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue
(Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov),
a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak,

an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak,
the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida:
in the series Nabokov did on this beauty

he noted for each specimen the altitude at which
it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say,
“and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower

was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt
it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,
The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues

flew by, and we improvised a path through cars
and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow
to wherever we went next. ..... {excerpt}

Review of her new book, "Darwin: A Life in Poems" --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/books/18pade.html?em --- Darwin’s Descendant, on Origin of Poetry

By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: April 17, 2009
"The British poet Ruth Padel, a favorite to be named the Oxford Professor of Poetry this spring, is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, though for much of her life she has preferred not to dwell on the connection.

“A feature of Darwins is that they’re quite reticent,” she said last week during a visit to New York that included a stop at the American Museum of Natural History."