At some points in the book, the poems are joyous celebrations, and elsewhere the reader enters a landscape of history.
April 9, 2007 (Press Release) --
Kevin Young's strong fifth collection, the first two poems in Martin Espada's newest book The Republic of Poetry are reason enough to purchase it, as they introduce a reader to the possibilities and responsibilities of poetry, moving between pleasure and witness.
The first poem describes a mythical republic of poetry, an inspired location where poets get all the breaks and everyone enjoys language -- monks write their words on chocolate, making poetry edible as well as wonderful.
Countering this joyful landscape is the somber "Not Here," written in part about the tumultuous overthrow of the Allende government. The poem weaves layers of attentiveness, blindness and avoidance into a heartrending history. Espada is such a good writer that it never feels like a lesson; the images become terrifically real, magnified as he contrasts his own incrementally detached experience.
On the day of the overthrow of the Allende government, the poet was a teenager, countries and a lifetime away. For him it is only a radio story on the other side of the world. Against the poem's enumerated horrors, Espada brings to us the phenomenon of distance, of knowing about horror elsewhere but not yet understanding how everything is related.
We can thank poet Galway Kinnell for Silence Fell, a new, wonderfully restrained book by Josephine Dickinson, whose two previous collections published in England so impressed him that he passed them onto Houghton Mifflin. Deaf and married to a Cumbrian sheep farmer more than twice her age, Dickinson records the experience of living and working on the farm with a startling clarity that like the proverbial still water runs exceptionally deep. She has a naturalist's understanding of her world and, to put it perhaps simply, an optimist's response, so the work is rigorous, musical and quietly significant.
Like Emily Dickinson, to whom she has been compared, she writes in a quiet voice. We have to lean in closer, so to speak, and suddenly it feels like we are in the poems. That's because Josephine Dickinson has a talent for conveying the inaudible, the aura around us that can't be heard but can be felt. Her poems are deeply felt. "April" supposedly details the gains and losses in that month on the sheep farm, but in this landscape of perseverance, the tasks of every day become tiny studies on faith.
In the midst of the everyday details of running a farm, a new lamb struggles to survive, yet it ultimately dies. Yet the poem continues, as life on the farm must continue, and ends with a surprising sense of hope. "I have no idea why / I find this so moving," she writes. "That's just life."
In her poem "In Place of Belief," from The Broken String, Grace Schulman observes a painter who has lost her vision and so can no longer paint. In the face of such limitations, the painter's adaptations are surprisingly beautiful examples of the human desire to survive, and of the role faith plays in that survival.
Source: http://www.msn.com
Posted by Amy Newman
The first poem describes a mythical republic of poetry, an inspired location where poets get all the breaks and everyone enjoys language -- monks write their words on chocolate, making poetry edible as well as wonderful.
Countering this joyful landscape is the somber "Not Here," written in part about the tumultuous overthrow of the Allende government. The poem weaves layers of attentiveness, blindness and avoidance into a heartrending history. Espada is such a good writer that it never feels like a lesson; the images become terrifically real, magnified as he contrasts his own incrementally detached experience.
On the day of the overthrow of the Allende government, the poet was a teenager, countries and a lifetime away. For him it is only a radio story on the other side of the world. Against the poem's enumerated horrors, Espada brings to us the phenomenon of distance, of knowing about horror elsewhere but not yet understanding how everything is related.
We can thank poet Galway Kinnell for Silence Fell, a new, wonderfully restrained book by Josephine Dickinson, whose two previous collections published in England so impressed him that he passed them onto Houghton Mifflin. Deaf and married to a Cumbrian sheep farmer more than twice her age, Dickinson records the experience of living and working on the farm with a startling clarity that like the proverbial still water runs exceptionally deep. She has a naturalist's understanding of her world and, to put it perhaps simply, an optimist's response, so the work is rigorous, musical and quietly significant.
Like Emily Dickinson, to whom she has been compared, she writes in a quiet voice. We have to lean in closer, so to speak, and suddenly it feels like we are in the poems. That's because Josephine Dickinson has a talent for conveying the inaudible, the aura around us that can't be heard but can be felt. Her poems are deeply felt. "April" supposedly details the gains and losses in that month on the sheep farm, but in this landscape of perseverance, the tasks of every day become tiny studies on faith.
In the midst of the everyday details of running a farm, a new lamb struggles to survive, yet it ultimately dies. Yet the poem continues, as life on the farm must continue, and ends with a surprising sense of hope. "I have no idea why / I find this so moving," she writes. "That's just life."
In her poem "In Place of Belief," from The Broken String, Grace Schulman observes a painter who has lost her vision and so can no longer paint. In the face of such limitations, the painter's adaptations are surprisingly beautiful examples of the human desire to survive, and of the role faith plays in that survival.
Source: http://www.msn.com
Posted by Amy Newman
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