Earthly Pages by Don Domanski

Earthly Pages
by Don Domanski
Selected by
Brian Bartlett
Laurier Poetry Series
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
(2007)

There's a giant literary brick wall dividing Canada and the US. You can't see it, but it's there, and it's carefully and methodically at work to keep the work of US poets from entering Canada and vice versa. This phenomenon can't be blamed on advertising or distribution (though those undoubtedly factor into the situation), nor can it be blamed on laziness or apathy (thousands of individual volumes are printed in both countries each year and, for good or ill, hundreds of writing programs are in full swing on either side of our borders). The dissemination of poetry, perhaps more so than any other art form, is a word-of-mouth affair. Poetry is largely published by impoverished individuals, not-for-profit organizations, and budget-weary universities. Poets, book dealers, bibliophiles, and common readers don't (and can't) rely upon the New York Times for a poetry book suggestion, we can only rely upon one another to learn about "new" authors, and we keep the art alive by doing so.

In that spirit, we offer Earthly Pages, a slim selection of Canadian poet Don Domanski's work from 7 books spanning 22 years. The Laurier Poetry Series offers 12 titles, each of which is a selection of a major Canadian poet's work edited and introduced by a literary critic. Though brief, these paperback originals showcase enough work to be quite substantive. Earthly Pages is an excellent read cover to cover, and it showcases Domanski's obsessions with nature, development as a meditative poet, and stylistic range. Domanski's work is impossible to characterize or stuff into a neat category. Some have given in to the temptation to call him a "nature poet" or an "eco poet," but these confines simply won't do. To be called a nature poet implies a certain amount of tunnel-vision on the part of the author, with the scale being tipped toward the romanticizing of the wilderness and away from the impacts of modernization and industrialization upon the landscape. To be called an eco poet implies that the author is bound to the political and the partisan, and thus confined to shy away from the spiritual or Romantic connection between humankind and the organic. For Domanski, nature (and Nature) is the convergence between the outer life and the imagination, the happening where we are forced to confront the spiritual and philosophical, the violent and the calm, the bleakly finite and the mystically infinite. Help us get the work of this strikingly original Canadian poet onto US bookshelves. All LPS titles are in print and should be ordered from your local independent bookseller.



FATA MORGANA


you're walking alone in the forest
the moon is directly overhead
eating her supper of astronomy
and wedding-gifts

there's a thousand miles of trees
in every direction
which means there's just
enough blood to go around
so you mustn't spill a drop

of course every second tree
is the Tree of Death
every third one
the Tree of Life
while all the others
are doors to atonement
but you mustn't knock

you're like me
and want a straight line
through everything
but there aren't any here
no path from A to B
no A or B

you're not lost
this is the earth
you're not human
but a fox or a rabbit

your life behind a desk
was an illusion
the shining city a madness
brought on by fatigue

there aren't any cars or telephones
there never were
not a single clothesline or shoelace
in all the world

your heartbeats are so many
peapods being cracked open
between a finger and a thumb
your footprints swallow themselves
as you walk along

what I said about the moon was a lie
there were never any weddings
or any gifts
not an astronomer to be found

the moon is devouring you
just you tonight
with your long ears pricked up
in their sad salute to fear

this hour is called Abandonment
this night Bottomless
I would call you Insignificant
if you weren't already named Essential
if you weren't the very centre of the world.



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Emerson County Shaping Dream by Jo McDougall and Don Maxwell

Emerson County Shaping Dream
Poems by Jo McDougall
Directed and Produced
by Don Maxwell

This 16-minute short (shot on 16mm film) is a series of 8 dramatic monologues, all spoken by women. These vignettes use the text from 8 poems by Jo McDougall, and the result is surprisingly poignant. Don Maxwell is a noted director of short films (Prairie Fire and Ambrose Bierce: Civil War Stories), and his direction in Emerson County Shaping Dream is one of subtlety and understatement. Much like McDougall's poetry, he relies upon good dialogue and carefully chosen images for the creation of a dark lyricism. Click here to view a segment from the film (low-resolution reproduction).

Jo McDougall is a writer who, for whatever reason, has failed to garner the attention she deserves as one of our country's finest living poets. Though book blurbs seldom, if ever, truly represent the merits of a particular book or its author, McDougall's jacket endorsements certainly represent the range of poets and critics who value her work: Gerald Stern, C.D. Wright, Miller Williams, Fred Chappell, David Baker, and Howard Nemerov, among others.

There's a dreaded label in writing known as "regionalism." This term is usually applied in a pejorative manner, but, for our money, literary works borne of place have a rich and indelible tradition. Larry Levis can be labeled a San Joaquin writer, Frank O'Hara a New York City writer, William Stafford an Oregon writer, etc. The fact is that there are great writers and lousy writers, and these two labels seem to be the only decent categories in which to place our poets. For us, McDougall is a great writer, a southern writer, and a practitioner of the short poem, one of the art's most elusive traditions. Charles Simic has described the short poem in the following terms:

The short poem is a wonder of nature. Epics grow unreadable, empires collapse, languages and cultures die, but there are short, anonymous Egyptian poems, for instance, that have been around for almost as long as the pyramids, and that are still full of life today. The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. ...The short poem is the poetic imagination in its essence, the epistemological ground for poetry and the place where the lyric is forever renewed. ...The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe. (from the introduction to Night Mail by Novica Tadic).

Here is just one example of McDougall's short poem from her 2001 title, Dirt:


METAPHOR


After the coffin lid closes
over the body,
the silence
is sometimes described as noise.
It is not.
It is silence
and the mourners float upon it
like bathtub toys.



McDougall's books include Women Who Marry Houses (Coyote Love Press, 1983), The Woman in the Next Booth (BkMk Press,1987), Towns Facing Railroads (University of Arkansas Press, 1991), From Darkening Porches (University of Arkansas Press, 1996), Dirt (Autumn House Press, 2001), and Satisfied with Havoc (Autumn House Press, 2004). Emerson County Shaping Dream sells for 18 dollars and is distributed exclusively by Jo McDougall at jomcdougall@sbcglobal.net



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The House of Your Dream by Robert Alexander and Dennis Maloney

The House of Your Dream: An International Collection of Prose Poetry
Edited by Robert Alexander
and Dennis Maloney
The Marie Alexander Poetry Series
White Pine Press
(2008)

White Pine Press has published some of the best 20th-century poets--both foreign and domestic--for nearly 40 years. Tomas Tranströmer, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, James Wright, Miguel Hernandez--these are only the tip of the tip of the White Pine iceberg. This is no small feat considering that Maloney and White Pine, much like Hamill (now Wiegers) and Copper Canyon, have managed to survive from revenues generated by hawking their poetry-only wares.

As its title suggests, this is a collection of that most enigmatic of poetic traditions, the prose poem. This collection represents Maloney's history as both a publisher and editor, seeing as its roster of prose poets consists only of those whose poems have appeared in White Pine titles. It's one thing to arrange and edit a good anthology, and quite another when that anthology must rely upon the publishing history of a single editor for its contents. And take it from us, this is an excellent anthology. Here are a few of this collection's 90 featured writers: Paul Celan, René Char, Russell Edson, Jim Harrison, David Ignatow, Max Jacob, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Larry Levis, Morton Marcus, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Francis Ponge, Yannis Ritsos, Vern Rutsala, Charles Simic, Eva Ström, Tomas Tranströmer, James Wright, Gary Young.



Vern Rutsala

THE HOUSE OF YOUR DREAM


I enter your house with stealth, making sure I'm dressed properly--checking buttons, the shine on my shoes--trying to look normal because you say your dreams are so ordinary and I don't want to stand out. You say you spend your dreams packing and shopping, engaging in small talk. But inside your dream I notice a strange light, the light that colored your childhood, and your suitcases are covered with exotic stickers. The very streets you windowshop along are unlike any streets I remember--each store a museum of the mysterious, each window faceted like a diamond. I follow a few paces behind you as you buy tea and apples--the tea seems alive with the sounds of India and each apple has a window where families look out and wave. Each object you meet glows with that old light, even the sidewalk looks like a rainbow--because it is your dream and I am a stranger here.



At 181 pages, this anthology is long enough to be substantial and diverse, as well as representative of the prose poem tradition, yet short enough to be portable, readable, and enjoyable. The anthology is a tricky beast, and Alexander and Maloney appear to have tamed it. Ask yourself, when was the last time you picked up the Norton Anthology of Whatever? The House of Your Dream succeeds in both form and substance. If you're searching to create a good section of prose poetry in your home library, then we recommend the combination of The House of Your Dream and Models of the Universe (Oberlin College Press, 1995). Models of the Universe is essential reading; and its table of contents is arranged by the year of the author's birth, which allows the reader to experience the history and evolution of the prose poem with the turning of each page. Both of these titles are in print and should be ordered from your local independent bookseller.



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Martin Tytell dies at 94

We give Martin Tytell,
king of the typewriter,
our 21-olive salute.


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Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

Books: A Memoir
by Larry McMurtry
Simon and Schuster
(2008)

To deviate a bit from the poetry-only course, we thought we'd share a quick review of Larry McMurtry's latest nonfiction title, Books. In addition to writing and publishing scores of screenplays, novels, and essays, McMurtry is a full-time book buyer, book seller, and certified book nut. Books is a very readable, absolutely engrossing first-hand account of McMurtry's passion for the reading, buying, selling, trading, auctioning, and whatever-else-ing of books.

For those unaware of the ins and outs of the book trade, this is surely the best ticket to the best show in town. Books is a series of autobiographical anecdotes, arranged, for the most part, chronologically. Each chapter--there are 109 spanning 259 pages--runs just a few paragraphs. These vignettes chronicle a cast of characters so diverse, so unexpected and rich, that this little memoir takes on a life of its own, reading like part travel narrative, part bildungsroman, part ode, and part elegy.

Not only do you get a glimpse into the culture of book dealers and book shops, you get a good look into the tortuous and eccentric world of collecting and collectors in general. A drawer full of handmade leather gloves, a narwhal's tusk, a collection of human skulls, 400 Ezra Pound letters in an ancient Winnebago--these objects and more are just few of the oddities that circulate through the narrative of objects at play in Books.

Yet this isn't just a book of curious tales, eccentrics, dusty shelves, and odd bedfellows; ultimately, Books is an elegy for a culture nearing the edge of extinction. McMurtry offers a sobering account of book store after book store being forced out of small towns and major urban areas alike due to the combination of rising rents, apathy for physical (vs. virtual) objects, and a literacy rate going the way of the dodo. McMurtry talks of our culture as one with an increasing propensity toward "narrative interruption," a culture that can't find the time to set a few hours aside to read a book, much less think about creating a home library.

Perhaps the most moving moment in Books is McMurtry's articulation of his own mortality. With a sober eloquence, McMurtry discusses the sadness he feels for the simple fact that he doesn't have the earthly time to reread each of the individual volumes in his personal, 28,000-book library, which includes, among other things, one of our nation's best collections of women's travel narratives. We can't praise this book enough, nor can we encourage you enough to make a pilgrimage to Booked Up, McMurtry's vast book store empire (it takes up the entire downtown of his native Archer City, Texas) whose inventory is not listed online. Which means, of course, that you've got to dig through the stacks. Go to the physical place. And while you're there you can wander down the street for some ice cream at the Dairy Queen and, if you feel so inclined, read McMurtry's excellent essay on book hunting called "Scouting," which appears in his collection Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.

To read a review of Books by book dealer Charles Seluzicki, follow this link. Also, be sure to search your local independent record store for James McMurtry's many fine albums.

Happy book hunting.



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Entering a Life by Ernesto Trejo

Entering a Life
by Ernesto Trejo
Arte Público Press
(1990)

Originally from the Mexican province of Zacatecas, Trejo wrote and published books in both Spanish and English. Entering a Life, published a year before the poet died of cancer in 1991 (at the age of 40), is Trejo's only full-length collection in English.

Trejo's poetry deals directly with the world and its commonplace occurrences, and does so by grappling with the invisible, magic thread shared between people, objects, and places. As the title suggests, Trejo enters the stuff of life rather than dancing around it. Here's the opening poem:



ONE SUMMER


Against the elm
that spun its rumor
up and down the block
one afternoon
your bike leaned
like a drunk
among others
a pearl of sweat
on the handlebar

Your hero that summer?
The kid who climbed
the streetlights
and shattered them
one by one
with his baseball bat

Hair in the armpits
like weeds
in a vacant lot
Tyranny of tight shoes
your bones
stretching like a cat
at dawn

You bowed
to the crown of blood
your foot
pierced
by a rusty nail

you bowed to the stars
that came out
like shy students
and took their places

You bowed
to the warm shoulders
of desire
nudging you
like a brother
in the dark



"One Summer" creates a mystically gritty tone for the book, and Trejo continues this throughout the collection with poems that draw meaning from the tension that exists between the down-and-dirty and the ineffable. Here are two more poems, each of which show a different facet of Trejo's range:



YOU


This morning, for no reason at all,
I thought of you.
There's no mystery here.
You've been a tiny lump in my throat
all these years,
making house in the dark.

I imagine you in your other house,
posted behind the kitchen window,
waiting for your children
to step off the bus
and come to you, hungry.
A minute ago
you stumbled in and out of rooms,
looking for a way out.
But it was raining outside
and you too were hungry.



AUTUMN POSTCARDS


An arrowhead of birds heading South.
On a Greyhound bus, field workers
huddle at the rear and lip-synch
to their shiny radios.

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At the bottom of a dry canal,
among tires, beer cans, a shopping cart,
a child's lost ball, shoes, lamps,
what-nots, I saw the body of a woman,
impatient, like a Buick stuck in traffic.



Trejo has a suite of "E." poems that could be the Mexican cousin to Zbigniew Herbert's "Mr. Cogito" poems, that is to say, E. and Cogito are both ironical alter-egos that play the simultaneous roles of boogieman, hero, and anti-hero. Like Herbert, Trejo captures several moods and creates a ground for imaginative leaping, which can be felt just from reading a few of his E. titles: "E. at the Zocalo," "E. Gives a Name," "E. is in Love," "E. Curses the Rich."

It may be of little surprise that Trejo was a friend and student of Philip Levine in Fresno. Both Trejo and Levine reject the marble pillar and favor the street corner, and both create a felt landscape of magic imagery that comes straight from the gut. Trejo and Levine co-translated a selection of the late Mexican poet Jaime Sabines's poetry under the title Tarumba. Published in 1979 by Twin Peaks Press (San Francisco), Tarumba became an obscure title the moment it was released. The publishers of Twin Peaks--whose entire catalog consists of two excellent books--left the US for Holland immediately after Tarumba's release. "What became of those copies," Levine has written, "no one seems to know." For years this title has been virtually impossible to locate. Luckily, the folks at Sarabande Books reprinted Tarumba in 2007. This reprint edition contains several new translations as well as an afterward written by Levine called "Ernesto Trejo and the Making of Tarumba." For further reading, we suggest three Fresno poetry anthologies: Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets, edited by David Kherdian (Giligia Press, 1970); Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets, edited by Ernesto Trejo (Silver Skates Publishing, 1987); How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, edited by Christopher Buckley, David Oliveira, and M.L. Williams (Roundhouse Press, 2001). There are numerous copies of Entering a Life to be found both through our Bookseller Hall of Fame and through the database at abebooks. This title is still in print from Arte Público, and can be ordered for a mere 7 dollars from your local independent bookseller.



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Translations by American Poets by Jean Garrigue

Translations by American Poets
Edited by Jean Garrigue
Ohio University Press
(1970)

Without a doubt, one of the essential pleasures of the reading life is discovering writers in other languages. Do you remember the first time you read Neruda, Celan, Rimbaud, Amichai, Homer? Longinus spoke of the Sublime in terms of "transport," and certainly there's no better avenue to literary budget travel than by way of poetry in translation. What, after all, captures the complexities of a culture better than its poetic tradition?

Garrigue's Translations by American Poets is an exciting and wonderfully diverse collection of, well, translations by American Poets. Perhaps Garrigue decided that a book with such a rich table of contents didn't need to be dressed up with a fancy title. And make no doubt, the table of contents is rich. What's most refreshing about this anthology is its assortment of odd bedfellows. Here are the Americans: Ben Belitt, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Roberty Bly, Louise Bogan, Philip Booth, John Malcolm Brinnin, Stanley Burnshaw, Hayden Carruth, Babette Deutsch, James Dickey, Robert Duncan, Richard Eberhart, Dudley Fitts, Isabella Gardner, Jean Garrigue, Barbara Gibbs Golffing, Francis Golffing, Arthur Gregor, Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht, Ruth Herschberger, Edwin Honig, Barbara Howes, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Richmond Lattimore, Lynne Lawner, Denise Levertov, John Logan, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Stanley Moss, Kenneth Rexroth, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton, Louis Simpson, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Stephen Stepanchev, May Swenson, Allen Tate, Theodore Weiss, and Richard Wilbur. These poets translate numerous poets, both popular and obscure, from several language, including Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

One aspect we at the Olives of Oblivion find particularly compelling about Translations by American Poets is that it's organized by American poet, not translated poet, language, geography, or era. In Richard Wilbur's section, for example, Andrei Voznesensky is followed by Anna Akhmatova, who in turn is followed by Francois Villon, Joachim Du Bellay, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. This makes for a constantly surprising and very readable anthology.

To make matters better, there are several inexpensive copies of Translations by American Poets on abebooks. We found about 30 copies listed from between 1 and 20 dollars. The copy shown here is particularly interesting because it's signed by Garrigue not once, not twice, but three times. All the better for us.



Yvon Goll (translated by Galway Kinnell)

WHERE ARE THESE SHIPS TAKING ALL OUR SILENCE?


Where are these ships taking all our silence?
Where will they discharge the charcoal of our midnights?
The wild gold of our dreams?
Will they dump it into the trench of oceans
Into the human eye of storms?

I was the longshoreman who lugged the black evil
The oil of vice on his back
Bent under the tons of his destiny
Bowed down by the weight of his ridiculous flesh

I drank my sweat in long gulps
I chewed the crust of misery
I had to wash it all down with the fatal liquor
Schnapps made from death-root




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