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What the Tress Go Into by Marcia Southwick
Burning Deck (1977)
Few things compare to a letterpress chapbook, especially those from Burning Deck. Here, in Marcia Southwick's debut publication, the reader is first confronted by the simplicity and beauty of the letterpress cover design (the trademark of Burning Deck), then with the surprising heft of such a slim volume, and finally with the outstanding quality of the writing itself. The perfect balance of the book as a physical artwork and the book as a work of literature.
There are several joys of finding such a book at your local bookseller, but a few in particular are reading the colophon page and examining the review slip (which came with this particular copy). Here's the colophon note:
This book was designed and printed on Warren Antique by Leigh Dingerson. There are 350 copies numbered 1-350, and 26 copies signed by the author and lettered A-Z. This is copy 235.
And it goes without saying that the 235 was neatly hand-written in the empty space left by the typesetter, which in this case was with blue ink. The review slip of this book is particularly interesting. Here is an excerpt:
A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Marcia Southwick is now a fellow in the Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri. She edits, along with Larry Levis, a new literary magazine, The Missouri Review, whose first issue will appear this year...
It's difficult to imagine the contemporary literary landscape without The Missouri Review, and it's strange to think back to a time when Larry Levis was an emerging writer who spent some of his time starting up a literary magazine.
Book-as-artifact aside, this is truly an astonishing poem, which the review slip summarizes as a long poem which takes some of its material from The Golden Bough and Radin's African Folk Tales. The poem centers on a female character's courtship, marriage, and eventual death. Here's the first section of the poem:
I. COURTSHIP
The last snow
is lifting itself off the awnings
and I am thinking
if anything is bleeding
I do not want to see it.
In some ways
I am like the woman
who sends out her soul
in the form of a wasp
and in some ways
you are like the man
who catches the wasp.
When he closes his hand,
she sleeps.
When he opens his hand,
she wakes.
Now I can hear the rain
being quietly released
like grains from a sack
and I can hear you talking:
the tribes
who molded their skulls for beauty
used instruments
no more ingenious
than the common mousetrap
and remember,
in some villages
when the hunters leave
they make their women sleep
facing the direction
of their departure
and Goodnight; then you leave,
tying a live bird
to my bedpost.
Promise me something.
Tomorrow, when you come back
to release the bird,
please make it carry
my fever along with it.
There a few copies of What the Trees Go Into on abebooks for around 25 dollars. And The Olives of Oblivion suggest that you get while the gettin's good. Burning Deck books are becoming more and more collectible, and in book collecting, the ones who wait are those who pay the most. If you're the dog-earing, a-book's-just-a-book type, then fear not. This poem was reprinted in Southwick's first full-length collection, The Night Won't Save Anyone (University of Georgia Press, 1980), and can generally be found in paperback at abebooks for less than 10 dollars.
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Goldsmith Market by Liliana Ursu
Translated by Sean Cotter
Zephyr Press (2003)
Nothing pleases The Olives of Oblivion more than finding an individual collection from a foreign-language author translated in its entirety. As far too often is the case, works from authors writing in different languages show up in America only as selected or so-called essential editions. Not so with Sean Cotter's translation of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu. In this case, Zephyr Press has done the good work of giving Ursu's readers the opportunity to experience her vision in the way it was intended.
Goldsmith Market is a series of varied and haunting poems. Ursu never settles for one tone, style, or theme. Rather, she surprises at every turn by offering an ever-changing, and oftentimes sobering, vision of postwar Sibiu, the Romanian city (and author's birthplace) at the heart of this collection. Here are but three of the many fine poems from this book:
A DAY IN WINTER
I lean over the well to drink.
The ribbon of water barely breathes
but below the rusted pipe, a grass nest is so young
and fragile under a thick crust of ice.
The whistle of a train passing through a distant valley
slides over my cold, boiling mouth. Like this maybe
Death, over every moment of life.
A day in winter, a day in summer: same soul
same words, same list of things;
only wild ducks fluttering over the frozen green river
keeps them apart.
SKETCH
Theme:
Outskirts, a chair factory, the lake
Alcohol, women under a streetlight
the orphanage sign, an Autumn night.
Think!
Tomorrow. Tomorrow death will search you out.
The gods' blood is thick with wrath
and hay drives this city-stuffed skull crazy.
You should let your melancholy be torn from you
the way dogs tear meat from a holy animal.
Red moonlight fills the world.
Are you listening?
Every three hundred years
a meteor kills a man.
IN PERUGIA, ANOTHER ARTIST HAS COMMITTED SUICIDE
In Piazza San Marco
no duel, no blind man
no translucent cube.
Your hands petting some stone dogs.
Your hands prolong the arctic nights.
You feed pigeons from the barrel of a gun.
Pharaohs in shadows, nurse
their days under a jade canopy.
No meadow between us,
not even a fjord.
Horses harnessed to the pyramids
pull them toward your feet
over a green velvet carpet.
See
the world rests on the back of a turtle
who has no muscles or bone, but wisdom
and resignation.
In Perugia, another artist has committed suicide.
I walk ruby death on a leash.
It has rained for two weeks straight
Spearmint hangs from the beam to dry, pristine...
Goldsmith Market is from Zephyr Press's ever-growing catalog of essential poets from around the globe, which includes Ingeborg Bachmann, Mikhail Aizenberg, and Anna Ackhmatova.
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The Intuitive Journey and Other Works by Russell Edson
Harper and Row (1976)
Russell Edson is without a doubt a true model of the poet. Though The Olives of Oblivion has never met Mr. Edson, it's easy enough to guess that he writes what he wants, writes for himself, and answers to nothing but his own imagination and sense of purpose. While reading Edson you receive many gifts. First off, he's a true master of the prose poem. His brief, quirky fables are probing satires that carry with them both a sense of comic irreverence and deeply ironized sympathy for our bumbling human existence. Edson is also a strikingly gifted visual artist. His drawings fill many of his earlier small press editions and often adorn the covers of his numerous books.
Luckily for us, the Field Poetry Series / Oberlin College Press has published an ample selection of Edson's work in The Tunnel, thus restoring several gems that were previously out of print. In the past few years Edson has published full-length collections with both the Pitt Poetry Series (The Tormented Mirror) and BOA Editions, Ltd. (The Rooster's Wife). The Olives of Oblivion highly recommends hopping onto abebooks and ordering a used copy of The Intuitive Journey. They are a bit pricey at 25 to 50 dollars--but with 200 pages of flawless writing, how can you go wrong? Here are a few from the book:
THE LIGHTED WINDOW
A lighted window floats through the night like a piece of paper in the wind.
I want to see into it. I want to climb through into its lighted room.
As I reach for it it slips through the trees. As I chase it it rolls and tumbles into the air and skitters on through the night...
A JOURNEY BY WATER
When we set sail I had no idea that the sails would float with wind like pregnant women.
I brought this to the attention of the Captain.
He adjusted my offended modesty by saying that the sails were married, and that by no means would he allow prostitutes to bear us forth.
An immediate applause broke from my hands.
THE GENTLEMEN IN THE MEADOW
Some gentlemen are floating in the meadow over the yellow grass. They seem to hover by those wonderful blue little flowers that grow there by those rocks.
Perhaps they have floated up from that nearby graveyard?
They drift a little when the wind blows.
Butterflies flutter through them...
Ah, Russell Edson...
*
Apricots
by Carl Adamshick
(no pub.,
no pub. date)
One of the great traditions in publishing is the chapbook. The term chapbook comes from the 16th century and, according to the New Shorter OED, is defined as a small pamphlet of tales, ballads, tracts, etc., hawked by chapmen. So the tradition continues. The poetry aisle at any book store worth a damn will undoubtedly have shelves stuffed with all sorts of chapbooks--from stapled, photocopied manifestos made at the local copy shop to thousand-dollar, letter-pressed, hand-sewn, limited-edition artworks crafted by the world's finest artists.
Either way, the result is the same: something small and finite opens to the realm of the infinite. In his Santa Cruz basement, George Hitchcock literally published every poetic genius of his time in his seminal kayak magazine. These ragged, hand-made volumes were filled with strange clip-art and colorful block prints, and showcased emerging poets such as Frank Stanford, Charles Simic, Philip Levine, John Haines, Sharon Olds, and just about anyone else who struck out on their own to do something different. Following the example of Hitchcock, Robert Bly and James Wright started The Fifties, an out-of-pocket dissident magazine of poetry and opinion that ground against the literary and social status quo. Though kayak and The Fifties weren't exactly chapbooks, they continued the same tradition in alternative publishing as set forth by the street vendors of the late 1500s.
This book measures no larger than 2x3 inches, is held together by two staples, and contains 6 lyric poems, each of which explores a different metaphysical quality of an apricot. Carl Adamshick's Apricots is a study in the poetic series. Smaller and lighter than a passport, this tiny volume undoubtedly takes a reverential bow to Vasko Popa's "The Little Box," which also uses a controlling image (the little box) as a launch-pad into the unknown.
Here is the opening to the final poem in Apricots:
THE CONFESSION OF AN APRICOT
I love incorrectly.
There is a solemnity in hands,
the way a palm will curve in
accordance to a contour of skin,
the way it will release a story.
This should be the pilgrimage.
The touching of a source.
This is what sanctifies.
This pleading. This mercy.
I want to be a pilgrim to everyone,
close to the inaccuracies, the astringent
dislikes, the wayward peace, the private
words. I want to be close to the telling.
I want to feel everyone whisper...
There's a truism in book hunting that goes something like any book you want is for sale somewhere. At the moment, Apricots appears to be totally off the grid. Fear not--this sequence of apricot poems is reprinted in its entirety in Volume XXV Number 2 of The Mid-American Review under the title "The Ingrown Room." To see more of Adamshick's handiwork, head over to saucyman.com, the thoughtful and popular food blog where he writes the column "A Word from the Kitchen."
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The Ellipse
by Leonardo Sinisgalli
Translated by W.S. Di Piero
Princeton University Press (1982)
The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation
Like so many essential poetry collections, The Ellipse, sadly, is out of print. But don't despair, this landmark translation by poet and essayist W.S. Di Piero is floating around in used editions at The Olives of Oblivion-approved abebooks from 5 to 25 dollars.
Sinisgalli (1908-1981) is a big-hearted Italian poet, one who's unafraid to give himself over to the beauty, music, and ugliness of quotidian street life. Like Emerson's transparent eyeball, the poet leaps out of himself to float through the world, gathering up every scrap of common existence.
This is not to suggest that Sinisgalli is a populist poet, nor is it to suggest that he's strictly a poet of people and place. Indeed, Sinisgalli's is a personal voice emanating from a singular source. The poems he wrote near the end of his life are much more brief, philosophical, and inward-looking than his early- and mid-career efforts. Hats off to W.S. Di Piero for showcasing Sinisgalli's range. Here's a piece written late in the poet's life:
IN SICKNESS
He falls out of bed
terrified that they
might be burying him.
He drags himself
through the darkness behind his chair
toward the kitchen. He hears
the dark thumping of firewood
heaped high in the cellar.
And here, for The Olives of Oblivion's money, is the shining star of the collection, "Lucania." This poem appears in the 1927-1947 portion of the book:
LUCANIA
To the pilgrim crossing its frontiers,
moving down through the Alburni pass
or following the sheep-track on the slopes of the Serra,
to the kite snapping the horizon line
with a snake in its claws, to the emigrant, to the soldier,
whoever comes back from refuge or exile, whoever sleeps
in sheep pens, to the shepherd, sharecropper, and salesman
Lucania opens its barren plains,
its valleys where rivers crawl
like rivers of dust.
The spirit of silence is everywhere
in my grieving province. From Elea to Metaponto,
sophistical and golden, baffling and sly,
it drinks the holy oil in churches, goes hooded
in houses, dresses as a monk in caves, grows
with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages.
The sun slanting on laurel, the good
bighorned sun, tongue of sweet light,
sun greedy for children, here in the piazzas!
It trudges like an ox, and on the grass
and stones it leaves enormous stains
swarming with ghosts.
Land of huge mamas, of fathers dark
and radiant as skeletons, overrun by roosters
and dogs, woods and limestone, lean
land where the grain toils miserably
(wheat, corn, semolina)
and the wine is dark and chewy (mint
from Agri, basil from the Basento!)
and olives taste of oblivion,
flavor of sorrow.
In volcanic tinderbox air
the trees weirdly throb and breathe,
oak trunks fatten with the essence of heaven.
Heaps of rubble lie untouched for centuries:
nobody dares turn over a stone, afraid of the horror.
I know hell's navel lies under every stone.
Only a boy can lean over the edge
of the abyss and scoop nectar
from the shoot-clusters swarming with mosquitos
and tarantulas.
I'll come back, alive under your red rain,
I'll come back, guiltless, to beat the drum,
to tie my mule to the gate,
to catch snails in the garden.
Will I see the smoking stubble, the brushwood,
the ditches? Will I hear the blackbird singing
under the beds, and the cat
singing on the graves?
Speaking of gathering the scraps of common existence, check out Di Piero's essay, "Pocketbook and Sauerkraut" from his collection Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures (TriQuarterly Books, 1996).
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What the Tress Go Into by Marcia Southwick
