Samuel Daniel, _The Civil Wars_, ed. Michel

An epic poem about what we got used to calling the Wars of the Roses, composed mainly in the 1590s--about 900 ottava rima stanzas in eight (of a projected twelve) books. It wouldn't make most people's summer reading list, but I have had a vague hankering to read this for years. Reading Caleb Crain's Overthrow, in which one of the characters is working on a dissertation on the poem, did the trick for me. This is the summer I read The Civil Wars. 

And it is great. I am baffled why it is not better known, more widely read; not only is it not in print (aside from "on demand" services), but it does not even have a Wikipedia entry. I mean...even City of Dreadful Night has a Wikipedia entry.

It covers many of the same figures and events as Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies, from the deposition of Richard II to Edward the IV's surprise marriage to Elizabeth Woodville (since Daniel's poem is unfinished, we don't get the battle of Tewksbury, the death of Henry VI, or anything at all about the Duke of Gloucester/Richard III). A great deal of the scholarship on Daniel addresses Shakespeare's debt to the early books of Daniel's poem, especially in Richard II and both parts of Henry IV; some of the scholarship argues that the later books of Daniel's poem were influenced by Shakespeare's early plays about Henry VI.

You know what, though? It's a great poem even if you don't get into the weeds of who influenced whom. For one thing, the narrative line could be the archetype for Game of Thrones--a few closely-related families scheming and lying and maneuvering, betraying and making war on each other to seize power.

But beyond that, Daniel has a number of (it seems to me) astute observations on the politics of monarchy. Is having a legitimate but incapable king better or worse than having an illegitimate but capable one? Might one be a good, even saintly man but a terrible king precisely by virtue of one's goodness and saintliness?

Or try this, stanza 31 of the eighth book, the last Daniel completed (the subject of the verb "beholds" is the beleaguered Henry VI):

   Beholds there, what a poore distresséd thing
A King without a people was: and whence
The glory of that Mightinesse doth spring,
That over-spreds (with such a reverence)
This under-world: whence comes this furnishing
And all this splendor of Magnificence:
He sees, what chayre so-ever Monarch sate
Upon, on Earth, the People was the state.

Interesting, no? Not exactly a full-blown statement that the government's power derives from the consent of the governed, but a step in that direction. I need to look around in the more recent Daniel scholarship a bit, because I think Crain's fictional grad student was on to something.

Jennifer Moxley, _The Open Secret_

 READING MOXLEY'S NEW book of essays brought to mind that I was a couple of collections behind on her--a mistake, given that she is one of my favorite poets, but easily fixed, no?

Handsomely designed (by Quemadura, which I think is Jeff Clark), The Open Secret (2014) works mainly with the somewhat relaxed but basically iambic pentameter blank verse line that Moxley has been using for quite a while now. The rhythm of her line and her willingness to use sophisticated syntax (she puts me in mind of James Merrill in that regard) combine to give her work a traditional cast--without, however, it ever sounding like a fetishistic or finicky re-production. It stays firmly contemporary in its concerns.

Highlights for me in The Open Secret were two longer poems, "Coastal" and "Evacuations." 

"Coastal" is a letter to a friend, painter Monique Van Genderen, that rolls out with the same sense of intimate-communication-meets-major-artistic-statement that we hear in the poems Wordsworth and Coleridge addressed to each other or in Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Moxley touches on 9/11 in one passage, in another on how hard it is to find a patty melt in Maine. She can be hilariously dead serious:

How would you like the politics in your poetry?
How about in your painting? Romantic and sad
or smart and structural? Whatever your answer
you will leave here thinking you've done
a little something for the good of mankind.
BUT IN THIS CASE YOU'D BE WRONG!

"Evacuations" somehow reminded me of Coleridge, too, the Coleridge of "Frost at Midnight" or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," where he seems to be just following a thought wherever it goes, but in more of a butterfly line than a beeline. The butterfly in this case hovers around a lot of serious questions for contemporary writing--the nature of the present, of resistance, of naming--but here again irony, a sense of the ridiculous, and matter-of-fact lucidity leaven the poem and keep it from sinking into ponderousness.

Moxley is one of America's best living poets, for my money.

 

Jennifer Moxley, _For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds_

 I HAVE NOT read There Are Things We Live Among, but I have a feeling that book is the closest analogue to this one in Moxley's corpus.  Each chapter in For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds looks closely at a (usually famous) poem (or other literary text) about a bird, stirring in some of Moxley's own experiences with or observations of birds and a few reflections on her own poetry. Hardy's thrush, Tennyson's swan, Whitman's mocking-bird...but with some surprises, like Félicité's parrot in Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple, Creeley's nightingale rather than Keats's, a bird-man out of one of Max Ernst's collages, and an opera or two.

The book may be too literary for people who like to read about birds and too avian-centric to make much dent as literary criticism, but I read it just because I like Jennifer Moxley's writing, so I was quite happy with it.

As apparent also in her memoir The Middle Room, poet Moxley writes great prose. The sensibility and landscape are contemporary, roughly, but the grace and poise in the prose hearken back to a pre-Didion, pre-Hemingway pace and amplitude--like Pater (but not as perfumed) or Ruskin (but lighter on its feet) or Newman. Moxley has, like the rest of us, read her Adorno et al., but she steers well away from anything that sounds like jargon. Her prose breathes a more oxygenated atmosphere than we usually get in lit crit, and I am grateful.

Roberto Bolaño, _2666_, trans. Natasha Wimmer

 THIS IS THE fifth Bolaño novel I have read, and the first I would hesitate to recommend. I started it two years ago and just finished it, mainly because Part 4 was a labor for me. 

Four of the five parts of 2666 are swift reads embodying Bolaño's characteristic virtues. 

In "The Part about the Critics," we meet three scholar-devotees (one French, one Italian, one Spanish) of the legendary and reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. The three of them perform a tangled but comical erotic minuet around a fourth scholar-devotee, an American woman, before showing up at a conference in Santa Teresa, Mexico, where, it is rumored, Archimboldi himself may appear.

In "The Part about Amalfitano," we meet one of the organizers of the conference, an Italian academic who has landed in Santa Teresa. His chief concern at the moment, though, is his teenaged daughter Rosa, who is hanging out with dubious new acquaintances.

The the third section, "The Part about Fate," is not about fate in the abstract sense, but about Oscar Fate, an American journalist. He has been sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, in the course of which assignment he accidentally stumbles across some of the town's organized crime underworld and helps get Rosa Amalfitano disentangled from it.

In the fifth section, "The Part about Archimboldi," we get the story of the legendary and reclusive German novelist to whom the critics of the first section have devoted their careers, a veteran of the Eastern Front who has detached himself from his past and from society in general to devote himself to his writing. Near the end of the section--that is, near the end of the book--we learn why he has agreed to travel to Santa Teresa.

Throughout these sections, we get the usual pleasures of the Bolañesque: deft portraiture of specialized sub-cultures (the depiction of the academics in Part 1 rivals those of the young poets' coterie in Savage Detectives and the Catholic reactionaries in By Night in Chile); skillful, knowing deployment of noir conventions (esp. in Part 3); wizardry in folding backstories into the main story (esp. in Part 5).

My problem is basically with Part 4, "The Part about the Crimes." Santa Teresa is largely based on Juarez during the years when scores of young women were being murdered. Part 4--all 280 pages of it--is about those murders. Roughly every other page, the novel describes the  finding of another dead young woman, usually with explicit detail. I don't want to try counting them, but there must be at least a hundred such passages. The efforts of journalists, politicians, police, and outside "experts" to solve the murders get some attention, Part 4 is mainly a catalog of violation, mutilation, and murder. It's a gallery of horrors. 

How does all this fit together, if it does? I wonder how finished it really is--it was published posthumously, written while Bolaño knew he was dying. Perhaps something about a core of misogyny in authoritarianism was supposed to hold the book together? But Part 4 was a long trek through the desert that I'm not sure was worth the effort.

Justin Phillip Reed, _The Malevolent Volume_

 THIS IS REED'S second collection. His first, Indecency, which won the 2018 National Book Award  for poetry, but I have not read it... to tell the truth, I'm not completely sure how I acquired this one. My copy came with a shipping slip bearing the handwritten message "Thank you for your support!" Is this just an acknowledgement from a small independent press (Coffee House) that appreciates any sale or did I make a donation to something for which this was a thank-you gift? I'm at a loss.

I do plan to look around for Indecency, though, since The Malevolent Volume is a good book. Reed is queer and Black, and the poems engage those dimensions of his identity with a white-hot intensity. A few pages are printed with white letters on black ground, and I was wondering whether those poems are more particularly connected to the theme of blackness. I don't know, though--some of the black-letters-on-white-ground poems definitely connect to the theme of blackness as well. Queerness themes show up often--"What's Left Behind after a Hawk Has Seized a Smaller Bird Midair," "The Lorelei," "The Queen"-- and in some cases the Blackness and Queerness themes memorably braid: "The Whiteness of Achilles," "Minotaur," "In a Daydream of Being the Big House Missus."

What really makes me want to find Indecency, though, is not Reed's engagement with dimensions of identity, fierce though that is, but that he is language-drunk, like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane. Samples chosen nearly at random from several poems:

Morning dusted blush across the yawn of a visible mile

through which a prison break of ravens cropped

   ("When What They Called Us Was Our Name")

 

I toed over a storm-blown bit of limb or a jay's broken corpse

the bluebottles had yet to bejewel and swamp with gentles.

   ("Ruthless")

                              Pinky finger

and a clutch, a fist of gloves, shoulder-waist

isosceles like a Dutch chocolate slice [...]

   ("The Hang-Up")

There's something wonderful about young poet taking this much delight in juggling phonemes. Reminds me of Paul Muldoon in his twenties.

Forough Farrokhzad, _Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season_, trans. Elizabeth T. Gray, jr.

 FOROUGH FARROKHZAD (1934-1967) is roughly contemporary with Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974), and like Plath and Sexton she is famous for pushing the envelope of the poetic tradition she inherited to make it better accommodate a candor about female experience that had not previously been visible in the tradition. As with Plath and Sexton, that gunpowder smell of transgression creates much of a reader's first impression, but if you stick around and keep reading you will start to hear the grain of a unique voice.

As I read, I found myself thinking most of all of Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva, Plath, Sexton, and Farrokhzad have a kind of situation in common, composed of their candor, their boldness in giving the tradition something new to talk about, their flipping of the tables to turn abjection into exaltation, and the absence of anything that sounds like acquiescence. It's Tsvetaeva who seems like Farrokhzad's real kindred spirit, though, the one having least truck with how her culture wanted women to present themselves.

This volume's translator, Elizabeth Gray, mentions being less interested in the earlier work than in the later, and on the evidence here included, it's hard to disagree.  The poems from the first three books have a lot of attitude but mainly recycled imagery; those from Another Birth, the last volume to appear in Farrokhzad's lifetime, and especially those from the posthumous collection also titled Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season are fresher, stranger, more audacious, closer to the bone.

I need to reread Solmaz Sharif's poem on not translating Farrokhzad. It's the right call, I'd say, in that Sharif is not daemonic in quite the way Farrokhzad is, but I'm not sure that's why Sharif declined the gambit. Maybe she declined it precisely because it seemed like a gambit?

Solmaz Sharif, _Customs_

SHARIF'S SECOND COLLECTION is tougher, sharper, and generally more impressive than her already impressive first collection, Look. She stands in serious jeopardy of winning a big prize, I suspect, a prospect that might not even please her that much, given the disillusioned view of the poetry world on offer in "Patronage":

Poets convinced they are ringmaster

when it is with big brooms and bins, in fact,

they enter to clear the elephant scat.

The gap between the prestige attached to poetry and its lack of power to accomplish anything in particular--the irony that one can win lucrative prizes for doing it well even though it "makes nothing happen"--is just one of the abysses the book stares into it. There is also the gap between Sharif's having grown up in the United States and gone on to live and work here while being routinely perceived as a foreign presence. But when she visits her mother's hometown in Iran, she is not "of" that place either: "A without which / I have learned to be." "Without Which" is the name of one of the two long poems that anchor the book, and it formally enacts the sense of incompleteness through spatial gaps where sections of the poem seem to have gone missing. 

Sharif can be satirically funny about this sense of incompleteness, as in "Self Care," a list of all the commodities one can buy to remedy that feeling of lack: 

Have you tried

rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz

in a steel bottle

of glacial water? Tincture

drawn from the stamens

of daylilies grown

on the western sides

of two-story homes?

Pancreas of toad?

Deodorant paste?

Have you removed

your metal fillings?

The lack may be the work of patriarchy, as suggested by "The Master's House," or estrangement from might have been one's sources, as suggested in Sharif's poem on not translating Forough Farrokhzad ("Into English"), or the general public's obtuseness about poetry ("He, Too"). It resists naming. It isn't going anywhere.

Yet the cloud lifts towards the end of the book's second long poem, "An Otherwise." In defiance of Lear's declaration that "nothing will come of nothing," does Sharif find that absence can be constructive? Or maybe it was as simple as deciding to keep her fillings:

I knew not the poem, only the weather.

I knew not the listening, only this landscape, its one clear channel.

The metal in my teeth caught its frequency.

The iron shavings of my blood pulled towards this otherwise.

Rebecca Giggs, _Fathoms: The World in the Whale_

I'M STILL DRAWING on the momentum I picked up from Sheldrake's amazing Entangled Life and so picked up this prize-winning debut from Australian writer Rebecca Giggs. Fathoms abounds in astonishing information about what whales, not least dead ones, contribute to the eco-system of the oceans (especially the deepest parts of it), about their vocalizations, about how humans have hunted and consumed them (as fuel, as food), about how humans have become fascinated by them and decided to try to protect them, about how the trash we dump in the ocean may be doing whales even more harm than our hunting of them did.

Giggs's style is energetic. "A whale warrants pause--be it for amazement or for mourning" is a sentence that arrested me in the early going (p. 17), and then there was the carnival of imagery Giggs gives us in describing marine life in the deepest of depths : "It [a dead whale sinking to ocean's bottom] drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish but resemble instead bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging, and musical instruments turned inside out" (19). By the middle of the book, I found myself wishing she would occasionally dial the lyricism back a notch; I like rich prose, but the cholesterol count was getting high at times. I'd certainly be interested in what she does next, nonetheless.

Speaking of recent lyrical expositions on whales, I wonder if Giggs knows Bathsheba Demuth? Demuth's "On Mistaking Whales" in Granta 157 seems to be coming from a perspective not unlike that of Giggs.

Renee Gladman, _The Ravickians_

 THE NARRATOR OF the previous novel in Gladman's series, Event Factory, is a student of Ravickian language and culture making her/their first visit to Ravicka, anxious to impress, to avoid any faux pas, to convey somehow her/their genuine love and engagement with Ravicka. The visit does not go altogether well, though. She/they never finds exactly the right note, although many try to be helpful, like the poet Zàoter Limici. Just as the narrator is about to leave, she finds a copy of the most Ravickian of Ravickian novels, Luswage Amini's Matlatli Doc, and even accidentally passes by Amini in the street, but doesn't say a word. The connection does not  happen, and the narrator goes home.

"The Great Ravickian Novelist," the first section of the series' second volume, The Ravickians, is narrated by Amini herself. We immediately notice a bristling isolation, a denial that the essentially Ravickian is knowable in any but its own terms. "If, for example, you are reading these lines in French or German, Basharac or English, these are not the lines you are reading. Rather, these are not the lines I wrote." Only in Ravickian can one know the Ravickian.

At the same time, something is amiss in Ravicka. The narrator of Event Factory had a vague sense of this throughout that novel, and she/they seems to have been right in her intuitions, for Amini and her friends are anxious about the future. Amini is looking forward to a lecture later in the evening by Zàoter Limici, who may have some insights into the problem. His lecture is the novel's second part ("Please Welcome Zàoter Limici"), and it seems to be an esoteric performance, proceeding mainly by quotation and allusion, but it also may be about opening up, letting things in, as if Ravicka has been too isolated. "I have gone on too long, my brothers," he apologizes. "And have brought the outside in with me. Your faces confirm it."

The third and final section, "Grand Horizontals," is a freewheeling, somewhat tipsy post-lecture conversation among who knows  how many people, likely including not only Amini and Limici but also Ana Patova, Amini's long-lost love. There is a lot of talk of bridges--might there be some possibility of exchange or communication between the Ravickian and non-Ravickian after all? Would an influx of otherness be exactly what will restore Ravicka to health?

The next installment is titled Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, so I feel there is reason for hope.