Surface Effects in Winter Wind, poetry by Tobi Cogswell

"Where kisses are given
and kisses received,
the charted course of
coffee and the smell
of jasmine outside
sweet as gold."

---from "This Kitchen"

Real people inhabit the world of Tobi Cogswell's poems in her collection, "Surface Effects in Winter Wind"---they breathe, eat, and sleep in a dreamy reality made beautiful by lovely word choices and unique images.  I loved the sense of life that the poems contain.  Not always happy life, but a life that is never lived with reluctance.

The most revealing is "Family Portrait," where Cogswell begins with the flat image of a staged family portrait: "They are frozen in time, not like the peeling wallpaper behind them, ticking off the years with nonchalant carelessness."  But she doesn't leave it there, in the place where "affection is not present."  Instead, she reveals what is happening off-camera and how the family history goes far deeper than the surface picture.  They are examined in past, present, and future, revealing that while "they are clean, stiff, poor and worn as the shirts", their future holds a certain stability made apparent in the sauce "always on the stove, the smiles always just out of reach".  In just a few verses, she's recreated their legacy and proved to be far more accurate than any superficial portrait could ever display.

The subject of family comes up often in her verses, such as when a generous tip becomes an emblem of "a good kitchen table with smiles, a pinch or two and misbehaving" in "Saturday at the Farmer's Market".  This poem journeys from the noisy market to a private room, capturing the sounds that start with a crowd full of noise that decreases incrementally until the last stanza is simply a whisper. She contrasts dandelions with roses, talks of music and avocados, and reveals a core of affection that travels the entire route.

"The Boy at Cannon Beach" is probably my favorite, simply for the images of a foggy California beach, with a sky like a "sodden marshmallow".  In it, a solitary boy, lost in thought, explores the beach in that singular way that can never be explained; a stream of consciousness that can be imagined but never shared or understood.  He examines "the hands that will save him, his own private clock in his own human time". As he continues, "damp footprints remind him and everyone that we love the best we can and then we're gone". The universal nature of the sea, the way it invites somber reflection and daydreams, seems to contrast with the what we may imagine as immature-the nature of a child-leaving us with a complicated depiction of age and time.  And given that the image is one of quiet, it's only afterwards that you realize she never actually uses the words "silence", "quiet", or "alone".  It's all inferred, not by synonyms but by images. 

The entire collection features a thread of romance that appears as a confident assurance of loyal companionship.  A hasty gambler, an angry waitress, and images of bacon make surprising appearances in poems that never feel too precious or aloof, but explored with warmth.

Special thanks to Kindred Spirit Press for the Review Copy.

Update: Eastern European Reading Challenge

We're five months into the Reading Challenge...how are you doing?  Are you anywhere near your goals for tourist, scholar, or ambassador?  Hopefully this post will help inspire you to stay motivated.

First off, check out this link:
http://www.theblacksheepdances.com/2011/01/links-to-your-reviews-of-eastern.html

At that link, you'll find other links to reviews by a number of diehard participants in the challenge.  Damian has reviews for titles from Blatnik, Teodorovicis, Kompanikova, Stiks, Nodas, and Kovalytis.  Linda has links to her reviews for Kadare, Slouka, Kertesz, Nadas, and Dragoman. Chrissie discusses Fraser, and Bernadette has reviews for Akunin and Eastland.  Alister also discusses Akunin.  Colleen reviews Pasulkas title and Jose reviews Miloszewski.  WonderBunny tackles Lukyanenko, as Melwyk tackles Barclay.  Lastly, CaptiveReader reviews Ignatieff and Pick.

I didn't even bother with spell-check on that paragraph!  Check out that link to discover the reviews and also enjoy the blogs of some of the participants.

Next up:  this link gives you a whole bunch of titles suggested by participants.  Daisy really outdid herself with titles to explore:  http://www.theblacksheepdances.com/2011/01/suggest-title-for-eastern-european.html.  Lisa also has a link to her blog where she reviews some of the deepest of the Russian genre.

It's appropriate that we are covering Eastern Europe, as Russia is currently the hot genre in publishing.  The London Book Fair earlier this year focused on Russian novels and poetry.  It's expected that Russian literature is going to dominate the next 18 months as Scandinavian crime did last year.

Here are some brand-new or forthcoming titles that should be mentioned:

Slavenka:  A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism:  Penguin Books.  Animals in fable-like stories act as symbols for the Communist era.

Andrey Kurkov Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost.  Melville House.  Russian based detective/crime with a humorous twist.

Vladimov, Georgi.  Faithful Ruslan.  Melville House.  A guard dog acts as motif.

Ulitskaya, Ludmila.  Daniel Stein, Interpreter.  Overlook.  True story of man who saved many Jews during the Holocaust.

Bronsky.  The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine.  Europa Editions.  Russian emigrants, three generations of women.  (One of the best covers this year)....

Sadulaev.  I Am a Chechen!  Tin House Books.  Short stories.

Akunin.  He Lover of Death.  W&N.

Many more to come....

Lastly, there's a slew of Russian, Czech, and Slavic movies now available on Youtube and Netflix.  One, "Before the Rain" was discussed in detail Slavic Review's Spring Issue...it looks good but I haven't seen it.  It's set during the Bosnian Wars and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. 

Coming up this week on this blog, a review of Molotov's Magic Lantern and a Serbian title called, enticingly, Leeches.

Finally, the winner for the giveaway of Sofi Oksanen's Estonian novel, Purge, is Hamna.  She's got 48 hours to respond.  The next giveaway will be announced soon!

Black Life by Dorothea Lasky (poetry)

Dorothea Lasky’s new book, Black Life, brims with the chaos of real life and real people, fighting to express themselves when shiny and happy words aren’t sufficient. A unifying component of the poems is frequent references to her father’s battle with dementia, and sprinkled among these are tiny images, made all the more terrifying for their brevity: helpless rest home patients with bald baby heads being beaten by staff. Fire as both purifier and destroyer also makes appearances in unexpected contexts.

Talking about life, she twists around the state of health into the dimensions of inner and outer well-being, with the two often in fierce juxtaposition. She muses on Emily Dickinson’s muse, on anorexia, and refers to pop culture as freely as old boyfriends and husbands. Her voice alters from that of a hyperactive teen, to a stalker, to an overly-kind ghost.  In all of it, she is seldom quiet or sedate.

In frequent references to poetry, she contrasts the kinds of poetry that exist: pretty and intangible or ugly and real. Therein, she makes it appear that it would be worse to be ignored than blasphemed, and that flowery prose often hides an uncertain intent. From “I Am a Politician”,

I am a politician
Just watch:
I will be very nice to you
But when I turn around I will write the creepiest poems about you that
Have ever been written.
Or worse yet,
I will write nothing about you at all
And will instead
Write about the water cascading endlessly in the ocean
Full of flowers and lovers at their very best...

She doesn’t hide from revealing insecurity, such that her poems often appear inspired by it. In “I Just Feel So Bad”, she expresses both loneliness as well as the concept of needing pain in order to function, trying to understand what she has to give and what she can take when thinking “nice” thoughts doesn’t work. Her answer is in the final phrases:

I have no home
No bread
I am destitute
But inside me
Is a little voice
That must speak
It gets louder when you listen

"ARS Poetica” has a kinesthetic energy to it, almost as if it's the adverbs that matter most...being whatever needs being, but in a big way.

There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I only feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point

The collection is varied and intense.  Being about a decade older than Lasky, there were moments when I wanted to tell her to relax a bit and slow down.  To realize that not all problems will be resolved as quickly as we'd like, but that it's okay to wait them out.  The vivid descriptions and staccato action at times felt like it was too edgy to get close to, like the wild person at the party who gets the attention and the laughs but who is terrifying to be alone with for more than a moment.  Yet the liveliness prevails and relays an enthusiasm that I hope essentially remains.
 

Special thanks to Wave Books for the Review Copy.
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Keep an eye on Friday:  Big Giveaway coming!
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Birds for a Demolition, Manoel de Barros

Translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey

“Poetry is to flap without wings.”

Birds for a Demolition is a compilation of a variety of poetry styles by Manoel de Barros, with some arranged more formally in stanzas and others appearing as short proverbs. A repeating topic is his early life in Brazil, in a region called the Pantanal. His small town and his childhood home next to a river clearly holds significance. He talks about the river often, and even uses the word as a verb at times. His voice is both somber and humorous, and when he gets a bit nostalgic, he reveals both.

In Invented Memoir II, he writes of his birthday as a boy, when his mother had no gift to give him. So she gave him a river.

…The same river that had always passed behind our house.
I liked the gift more than if it had been candy from the peddler.
My brother pouted, he liked the river as well.
Our mother promised him he’d get a tree for his birthday.
A tree covered in birds.
I heard this promise and thought it was fine.
The birds would spend the day on the banks of my river.
At night, they’d sleep in my brother’s tree.
My brother teased that his present got flowers in September.
And a river doesn’t get flowers!
I told him a tree doesn’t get piranhas.
What united us was swimming naked in the river with the herons.
In this regard, our life was a caress.

Apparently, the river was something he held on to, both as a personal touchstone and a poetic motif.  While the poetry within this covers almost 50 years of his work, the focus remains much the same. Vines, lizards, adobe buildings, trees, and even ants are woven into more serious topics.

In Ants,

I didn’t need to read Saint Paul, Saint Augustine,
Saint Jerome, or Thomas of Aquinas,
Not even Saint Francis of Assisi---
To arrive at God.
Ants showed him to me.

(I have a doctorate in ants).

In just these six lines he does two things: reveals his inferred truth regarding life and creation, yet throws in a twist of humor with his doctorate remark. This pattern of mixing the serious with the blithe makes the collection much more vibrant and appealing. He does this in short proverbs in “The Book of Nothing”:

There are many serious ways to say nothing, but only poetry is true.


My dawn is going to open at dusk.


To have more certainty I have to know more imperfections.


I wanted to be read by stones.


Words hide me without much care.


Wherever I am not, words find me.


There are histories so true that at times it seems they are invented.


I want the word that fits in the beak of a small bird.

Note that the proverb style he uses above uses large breaks of space (caesuras or caesurae??) to give you time to stop and reflect rather than move quickly through the verses. 

Lastly, he applies a paragraph form to some self-deprecating words of explanation in a section called "Desiring to Be":  "I write an archaic Manoel-esque idiolect (Idiolect is the dialect idiots use to speak to the walls and with the flies.)  I need to upset meanings.  Purposelessness is healthier than solemnity.  (To cleanse a certain solemnity from words, I use manure.)...The cerebral touches in my writing are just a precaution to avoid succumbing to the temptation to make myself less foolish than others.  I am highly regarded for my foolishness.  Of this I deliver certainty."

Special thanks to Cynthia Lamb of Carnegie Mellon University Press
 for this Advance Review Copy. 

This title releases today, September 30, 2010.

World's End by Pablo Neruda

Translated by William O’Daly

Pablo Neruda never disappoints. There are many great poets but he is one that seems to say so much with so few words. Succinct and concise. That said, World’s End, the final of the series of Neruda collections from Copper Canyon Press, feels different somehow. He addresses larger issues and concepts than his previous collections. In places, his tone feels more defiant. Of course, his picturesque lexicon and love for Chile still pervades, despite the clear sense of disappointment he seems to have placed on himself.

In “The Wars”, he speaks to the scars and remains of war. He talks of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the labor camps of Siberia, and despite his familiarity with heartache and violence, he still appears mystified by the waste.

Come here, fallen hat,
burnt shoe, toy
or posthumous pile of eyeglasses
or else man, woman, city
rise from the ash
as far as this weary page,
deprived by the weeping.

Come, black snow, solitude
of Siberian injustice,
frayed remains of pain
when close ties were lost
and the fog of the inexplicable night
overtook the righteous.

He talks about his homeland, Chile, and describes it as a mother whose appearance has changed. Neruda served as a senator at one time, and was active politically and hands-on in his duties.  He could see that for the common people, time had not been kind. In “Ports”:

Seated, she sees the flowing water
of the dark irrigation ditches,
the detritus of the outskirts,
the assassinated gills,
and the stiff dead cats.

In the books, mother country
was the color of oranges and snow,
and through her hair fell
a cascade of cherries.
So it hurts to see her
seated in a broken chair,
among potato peelings
and rickety furniture.

A favorite of mine was “Little Devils”, wherein he describes both individuals as well as political entities and their quest to raise themselves above others, crushing the voiceless with their agendas. He ends it by acknowledging that for all his contributions, he could not create significant change.

I have seen how the rich one
would prepare his character,
the social climber his alibi,
the gold digger her nets,
the poet his inclusions.

I played with blank paper,
each day facing the light.

I am a working fisher
of verses, living and wet,
that go leaping in my veins.

I never knew how to make anything else
or knew how to curb the needs
of the natural braggart


…leave me alone with the sea;
I was born to small fish.

As in the other collections, William O’Daly prefaces the collection and contributes greatly to understanding Neruda’s intentions and state of mind in World’s End. He reveals “If Neruda never allowed disillusionment and heartache to destroy his hope, he credits his powers of renewal, as a man and as a poet, to forgetting (p.XXIV).” O'Daly also identifies and clarifies some of Neruda's allusions to military leaders such as Castro and Stalin, a knowledge that helps the reader understand Neruda's own understanding of world events.

Special thanks to Janet Jones of Copper Canyon Press for the Review Copy.

Where I Live, Maxine Kumin, Saturday poetry

Maxine Kumin seems like a sweet older woman.  Harmless, it would appear.  After all, she begins her book of poetry with a focus on nature, and makes insightful observations on little things that are often overlooked.  For example, in "Lore", she talks about a book she's read about blue jays, and how many acorns they ingest each season.  She describes the oak trees that result from the blue jays losses, but takes notice of an even more interesting thought:  who is the person, "an aspiring Ph.D." that actually counts these and compiles such data?  It's that little bit of twist, from observing nature to questioning a source that make her unique, and makes you realize this is not a simple collection of pretty words.  Most of all, as you continue reading Where I Live, you see that she isn't as harmless as you might suspect.

Her topics vary greatly and her observations are often are anything but sweet.  In talking about Iraq, she doesn't back away from revealing the discrepancies between the suffering caused by liberators and a religious leader claiming there is a "spiritual value of suffering".  She concludes that the sun comes up, "staining the sky with indifference".  She also contrasts the ideals of the Geneva Convention with vice-presidents and Supreme Court justices who engage in what she calls "canned hunting".  In "Please Pay Attention as the Ethics Have Changed", she wonders what kind of Humane Society (a word play on "human" society) would permit such cruelty to an animal (or moreso, to a person).  From Daniel Pearl's tragic death to contaminated drinking water, she reveals her heart in her words.

She also speaks of stray dogs and abandoned cats with great feeling, and you get the impression that it isn't simply the immediate sadness that she's getting at...she's driving at the attitudes that make people shut their heart up to others.  And while sometimes we may stereotype a poet as distant and focused on things beyond real life, she shows she's firmly planted in the here and now.  In "The Chambermaids in the Marriot in Midmorning", she finds another life in their chatter:

"Behind my "Do not disturb" sign I go wherever they go

sorely tried by their menfolk, their husbands, lovers or sons,

who have jobs or have lost them, who drink and run around,

who total their cars and are maimed, or lie idle in traction...

I think how static my life is with its careful speeches and classes

and how I admire the women who daily clean up my messes,

who are never done scrubbing..."

The contents are divided into sections: New Poems, Looking for Luck, Connecting the Dots, The Long Marriage, Jack and Other New Poems, and Still to Mow.  Simple chores, farm work, famous women authors, childbirth, the Red Sox, misbehaving pets, redemption, corporate greed, and travel all are portrayed as she sees them, not sugar-coated nor politicized.  The collection as a whole feels like a book of sage advice from a favored aunt-the feisty one-the one that sometimes says what you don't want to hear but who you listen to anyway.  And while they are considered poetry, the verses often read with the detail you'd find in a short story.

Special thanks to WW Norton for this Review Copy.