ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Book Reviews
December 2005
My Kafka Century - Arielle Greenberg - Reviewed by Mark Tardi
Transparencies Lifted from Noon - Chris Glomski - Reviewed by Raymond Bianchi
Whither Nonstopping - Harriet Zinnes - Reviewed by Rodney Robinson
Forge -Ted Mathys - Reviewed by Raymond Bianchi
Inner China - Eva Sjodin - Reviewed by Raymond Bianchi
Arielle Greenberg
Action Books, 2005
ISBN 0-9765692-2-1
Reviewed by Mark Tardi
The follow up to her debut collection Given, Arielle Greenberg’s latest offering My Kafka Century is billed as a raising “of the gothic, European ghosts sealed under the glib facade of contemporary American culture.” Thankfully Greenberg was uninterested in applying her lens to write a Holocaust narrative and wisely steers clear of that belabored terrain. Instead, we’re offered her more personal reflections on family; Hebrew school; baseball; the saintliness of the everyday; along with Edwardians; whodunits; and a hyper-condensed gloss on Kafka’s famous letter to his father.
Readers familiar with Given and her chapbook Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials are well accustomed to Greenberg’s quick wit and sarcasm. She isn’t short on cleverness or laughs, which can be refreshing, sure. But taken as a whole, this book begins to feel plasticene, with roughly as much emotional range as a visit to the American Girl™ restaurant.
If M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs and the classic baseball movie Field of Dreams had an affair, I imagine their love child would be the poem “Center Field,” which renders both aliens and baseball cartoonish:
I sure hope the aliens come and get me
from their dear place out in the corn.
We can play when they do: baseball, a game
with diamonds in it, and sing
a song with birds in it and nests in it,
and amidst all those twigs,
an icon among icons.
Never mind that as an avid baseball fan, I don’t have the faintest idea what “lob a fast one over to center field” means.
Meanwhile, I suspect the poem “Saints” with its sassy three sections––Knives, Chives, and Lives of the Saints, respectively––is coyly alluding to Butler’s classic Lives of the Saints, while moving to extol the virtues of the quotidian. So those of us who wait tables or fully commit to suburban couch-potatoing become a brand of hero? Good to know. It rings as disingenuously as a Greenwich Village hipster making a film about the beauty and simplicity of small town life in Georgia.
In his collection of essays Defense of Ardor, Polish poet and critic Adam Zagejewski astutely notes:
Some authors flog consumerist society with the aid of irony; others continue to wage war against religion; still others do battle with the bourgeoisie. At times irony ex-presses something different––our flounderings in a pluralist society. And sometimes it simply conceals intellectual poverty. Since of course irony always comes in handy when we don’t know what else to do.
Amidst all the tinsel bohemianism the economical poem “Gospel” gives a glimmer of what Greenberg usually holds back:
No abide with me,
not in this hymnal.
But blow me open, God.
No song in this throat,
just blow me open.
This displays a depth of sensitivity, spiritual wonder, reflection and sympathy that––considering the texture of the poems around it––I found startling frankly. And deeply moving. Which brings me to a crucial point: Greenberg is not lacking in talent. Her sharp sense of rhythm and timing, and fluid vocabulary are everywhere evident. What troubles me is the application, that her array of obvious skills are spent on the same cheap laughs. (It’s a problem I find evident in the work of Gabrielle Gudding as well, another smart writer who leans too heavily on humor and sarcasm, and writes himself into a corner.)
American poetry is hardly short on linguistic acrobats or dancing skeletons. As I read My Kafka Century I was enjoying Denise Duhamel’s 2x2, and I suspect Greenberg could learn a great deal from Duhamel’s sense of volley. Instead, she wrote the book Sylvia Plath would have written if she had been less depressed and more bratty.
Chris Glomski
Transparencies Lifted from Noon
Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2005
ISBN 0-923389-70-9
Reviewed by Raymond Bianchi
To say that a book of poetry is the best written in a year is often presumptuous but saying that about Chris Glomski’s Transparencies Lifted from Noon is no overstatement. Glomski has done something rarely done today succeeded at being interesting finely written, and worth sitting with for many hours.
Most poets writing today in the American idiom are one trick ponies. They can do one thing being Neo Formalism, Experimentalism or other poetic tricks and their work is vapid and empty and not very well formed. Chris Glomski does not suffer from this problem. Glomski’s book Transparencies Lifted from Noon is a tour de force and is worth the time to sit and injest like a fine Italian meal with the right wine and the right conversation.
You begin reading this work with the words of Salvatore Quasimodo “Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra…” it is the sheer breadth of this work that makes it so engaging. The first poem IL LA fuses prose poetics with concrete poetics and uses language in ways that only a person who is intimate with language and its uses can understand. He fuses Chicago images with Italy images and opens up his own inner geography to the reader in a way that few poets seem to do or even care about. There is no stupid irony here and no
Hipster sense; this is real poetry in the way Ungaretti, Pound, Stevens and Neruda are real. The fusion of Italian images with all too familiar EL stops in Chicago makes this poem a journey and we happily take it and before long we are transported to a literary world that most readers of poetry are denied the fine and well crafted book..
Then right when you think you have figured Glomski out, he throws you a hard curveball. The next group of poems “Fuel”are fusions of all kinds of forms and tones and music and these come together to make something truly new. “Chew right through themselves. Parts eaten” is a good example of the solidness of this work. The changes and varieties of writing in this book stand as a testament to how bad so much of today’s poetry concerned with ironic hipsterism and fake intellectual vapidness has moved and how much Glomski has overcome this. In some ways I felt while reading this clean and filled and the work motivated me to want to call in sick to work and spend the day writing.
In the end Chris Glomski’s work has a sense that is not to be found much in American poetry. As Americans rush to be ironic and to denude their writing of all sense of craft and innovation the work becomes banal in an avant garde way, Glomski’s work stands and as a testament to poetry as an artform being what is it a feast of language and innovation without pretense.
Harriet Zinnes
Marsh Hawk Press
ISBN 0-9759197-6-8
Reviewed by Rodney Robinson
Harriet Zinnes is Professor Emerita from CUNY Queens college and a prominent New York writer and critic. Whither Nonstopping is a poetry book that requires that you envelope yourself in the realities of Zinnes’ work because some of the poems can lead to hyperbole and the language can be a little too precious for the average reader of poetry.
Only in great Poetry could we get away with lines like “
“The matter of it all
Of Mentality
Oh the Scars of War”
Or
“Hell has its sores
Love its wounds and enraptures”
Zinnes seems to want to share with us every erudite thought and idea she possesses and the work is very effective and interesting if you are a poet living in Brooklyn but for the average or even literate reader much of this work is so opaque as to become the color of a silver grey sky without color or light.
Then once you think you have Zinnes in your sights she changes, innovates and keeps drawing you into a place that is different and strangely intimate. As one reads Zinnes work a sense that one is reading Akhmatova or Mandelstam comes over you and then you understand the gravity of the work and its import. There are some great lines in this book but the sheer deluge of intellectualism and words and ideas envelope the reader into a world that someone must feel is comfortable with but where most readers do not dwell.
Ted Mathys
Coffee House Press
ISBN 978-1-56689-178-3
Reviewed by Raymond Bianchi
Ted Mathys is a Midwestern poet inspite of the fact that he lives in New York. Mathys is also a star which normally would lead me to hate his work since I am profoundly bigoted against stars, but inspite of this Mathys’ work is a triumph.
Mathys work has appeared it seems everywhere but his book is so well crafted and so tight that you find yourself stopping to rest between lines just to catch your breath. I think what makes this work so compelling is the wide of use of experience and sources coupled with challenging language that does not assume that the reader is an intellectual but also does not assume that he/she is dumb either. He avoids that kind of super intellectualizing but he lures you in with depth that I have not found in many poets of his age (Mid Twenties). While so many younger male poets are either soft and mushy sissies that you feel might just break down in tears or are too ironic to be take seriously Mathys walks the line well and uses language to become something more.
I think the thing about Mathys work that is so genuine is the fact that he is an obviously intellectual man but he is also a normal early 21st century person as well and thus you do not feel that you have to retreat to the Salon or to the Algonquin Roundtable to understand the work. I think that it is the lack of irony and the central earnestness that is not effected that makes this work the triumph that it is .
So many poets try to fit themselves into someone else’s experience women writers try to become Plath or Stein men Williams or Stevens and they ignore their own lives to validation Mathys has not done this and his work is real and genuine in the process.
Eva Sjodin
Litmus Press
ISBN 0-9723331-7-7
Reviewed by Raymond Bianchi
Spareness
Is not something that most poets aspire to.
Neither is heaven.
Inner China is a new translation of the work of the Swedish poet Eva Sjodin by Jennifer Hayashida. First off this is a physically beautiful book, square and the cover art by Brenda Iijima is perfect in color and sense for the poetry within. Since I do not read Swedish I cannot know if Hayashida’s translations are good but they are poetic and are good poetry in their own right.
This poem is a tale in the way that the Illiad or Purgatorio is a tale. It leads the reader to a new place and leads us to discover things we may not want to know. The language is spare and haunting….
“ Look around:
Someone carries me, carries with him the imprint of my body. Fresh,
Glowing”
The use of white in this poem is also interesting and well used this is an art so neglected by most poets and the rests are well needed in this work. Inner China-Eva Sjodin-is not a work to be read fast you need to take time and digest it but it is quite a work. This book tells us that our American poetry is sometimes poor compared to the world of poetry out there that is never published in the US. Inner China makes many of us wish that fewer first books from Iowa and Naropa MFA’s would be published and more international works would take their place on our poetry bookshelves.