Victims of a Map by Samih al-Qasim, Adonis, and Mahmud Darwish

Victims of a Map
Edited and Translated
by Abdullah al-Udhari
Al Saqi Books (London)
(1984)

It's a rare delight to find an anthology with purpose, of readable length, and with an offering of never-before-printed work. Victims of a Map is just that. Published in 1984, this bilingual (Arabic / English) anthology presents three undeniably influential Arabic-language poets. At 165 pages (half of which are in Arabic), this is a slim volume, and one that can be opened and read in one sitting. Abdullah al-Udhari offers an introduction to the book as well as a brief introduction to each poet, which does a succinct job of grounding each writer and his work in a historical, social, and artistic context.

Perhaps the least known (at least here in the US) of these poets is Palestinian Samih al-Qasim. Born in Jordon in 1939, al-Qasim has published dozens of poetry volumes and has been imprisoned numerous times for both his writing and political activism. His work represented in this anthology is unabashedly political. He chooses direct discourse over the image and lofty language, and crafts poems that are equal parts outcry and indictment.



ABANDONING


I saw her
I saw her in the square
I saw her bleeding in the square
I saw her staggering in the square
I saw her being killed in the square
I saw her...I saw her...
And when he shouted
Who is her guardian?
I denied knowing her
I left her in the square
I left her bleeding in the square
I left her staggering in the square
I left her dying in the square
I left her...



HOW I BECAME AN ARTICLE


They killed me once
Then wore my face many times



END OF A DISCUSSION WITH A JAILER


From the window of my small cell
I can see trees smiling at me,
Roofs filled with my people,
Windows weeping and praying for me.
From the window of my small cell
I can see your large cell.



During the past decade here in the US, translations of Mahmud (also spelled Mahmoud) Darwish's poetry have been on the upswing. Born a Palestinian in 1942, Darwish has published numerous books and has been translated into several languages. The Olives of Oblivion highly recommend the following Darwish titles, all of which are easy to find in used, reasonably-priced editions on abebooks: Memory of Forgetfulness (California, 1995); The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse University Press, 2001); Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (California, 2003); Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (Archipelago, 2006); The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006). Like al-Qasim and Adonis, Darwish writes of a wounded people and a wounded landscape. Darwish is a poet with a broad range and an expansive style. Though his poems often employ beautiful and romantic imagery, he never averts his gaze from the edge of the abyss:



THE EARTH IS CLOSING ON US


The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage,
XXXXand we tear off our limbs to pass through.
The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could
XXXXdie and live again. I wish the earth was our mother
So she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks
XXXXfor our dreams to carry
As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last
XXXXof us in the last defense of the soul.
We cried over their children's feast. We saw the faces of those
XXXXwho'll throw our children
Out of the windows of this last space. Our star will hang up its
XXXXmirrors.
Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the
XXXXbirds fly after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We
XXXXwill write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our
XXXXblood will plant its olive tree.



IF I WERE TO START ALL OVER AGAIN


If I were to start all over again I'd choose what I had chosen:
XXXXthe roses on the fence.
I'd travel again on the road which may or may not lead to Cordova.
I'd hang my shadow on two rocks for the fugitive birds to build a
XXXXnest on my shadow's branch,
I'd break my shadow to follow the scent of almonds as it flies on
XXXXa dusty cloud,
And feel tired at the foot of the mountain: come and listen to me.
XXXXHave some of my bread,
Drink from my wine and do not leave me on the road of years on
XXXXmy own like a tired willow tree.
I love the country that's never felt the tread of departure's song,
XXXXnor bowed to blood or a woman.
I love the women who conceal in their desire the suicide of horses
XXXXdying on the threshold.
I will return if I have to return to my roses, to my steps,
But I will never go back to Cordova.



Adonis (born in Syria in 1930) is the pen name of Ali Ahmad Said. Adonis is described in the introduction by al-Udhari as having had the same influence over Arabic-language poetry as Pound and Eliot have had over the poetry and poetics of English-speaking countries. Of the three poets featured in Victims of a Map, Adonis's poems are certainly the most varied, complex, and inventive. Adonis has the keen ability to combine the abstract and lyrical with the grounded and direct. The Adonis portion of the book is quite large because al-Udhari includes the poem "The Desert (The Diary of Beirut under Siege, 1982)," which is an expansive lyric poem in 35 sections. There are several excellent Adonis translation titles in the US. Here are just a few worth looking for, all of which are readily available on abebooks: The Pages of Day and Night (Marlboro Press, 2000); If Only the Sea Could Sleep (Green Integer Books, 2002); Mihyar of Damascus (Boa Editions, Ltd., 2008).



A MIRROR FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY


A coffin bearing the face of a boy
A book
Written on the belly of a crow
A wild beast hidden in a flower

A rock
Breathing with the lungs of a lunatic:

XXXXXXXXXXThis is it
XXXXXXXXXXThis is the Twentieth Century



WORRIES


They arrived naked
Broke into the house
Dug a hole
Buried the children and left...



THE WOUND


1.

The leaves sleeping under the winds
Are boats for the wound.
They buried past is the glory of the wound.
The trees growing in your eyelashes
Are lakes for the wound.

The wound is in the crosspoint
When the grave reaches
When patience reaches
The tips of our love, our death.
The wound is a sign
The wound is in the crossing.


2.

I give the voice of the wound
To a speech with choked bells.
I light the fire of the wound.
For a stone coming from far away,
For a dried up world, for drought,
For time carried on a stretcher of ice.

When history burns in my clothes
And blue nails grow in my book,
When I shout at daylight
"Who are you, who's thrown you on my books,
On my virgin land?"
I see in my books, in my virgin land
Eyes of dust.
I hear someone saying:
"I am the flourishing wound
Of your small history."


3.

I have called you a cloud,
Wound, turtle-dove of departure.
I have called you a feather and a book.
And here I am starting conversation
With a noble word
In the shifting of islands,
In the archipelago of the noble fall.
And here I am teaching conversation
To the wind and palm trees,
Wound, turtle-dove of departure.


4.

If I had havens in a country of mirrors and dreams,
If I had a ship,
If I had the remains of a city,
Or a city
In a country of children and weeping

I'd have made out all this for the wound
A song like a spear
Piercing trees, stones and heaven,
And soft as water,
Overpowering and amazing like a conquest.


5.

Rain on our deserts,
World charged with a dream and longing.
Rain and shake us, we the palm of the wound,
And snap two branches for us
From the trees that love the silence of the wound,
From the trees that stay awake over the wound
With arched eyelashes and hands.

World charged with a dream and longing.
World falling on my forehead
And drawn like a wound,
Don't come closer, the wound is nearer than you,
Don't tempt me, the wound is more beautiful than you.
The wound is beyond the fate
Your eyes cast
On the lost civilizations.
It's left no sails
Nor islands.



As its title indicates, Victims of a Map is unashamedly politically charged. Perhaps the most admirable aspect of this collection is al-Udhari's decision not to form this book into a polemical or didactic work. Rather, he has selected a small group of poems that expresses a range of pain and beauty centering on the conflicts inherent in the relationship between nationhood, cultural identity, and the individual citizen. Victims of a Map has recently been reprinted, and should be ordered from your local independent bookseller.



*

3 Books by David Wevill

3 Books
by David Wevill
Penguin Modern Poets 4
Penguin (1963)
Birth of a Shark
Macmillan (1964)
A Christ of the Ice-Floes
Macmillan (1966)

Without a doubt, the poetry of David Wevill is one of the best-kept secrets in the US literary landscape. He was born a Canadian in Yokohama, Japan, in 1935, moved to Canada before the outbreak of the second World War, graduated with Honors in English and History from Cambridge in the late-1950s, lived in Burma and Spain during the 1960s, and moved to Texas in 1970, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin until his retirement.

Wevill’s work was first showcased in A. Alvarez's anthology The New Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1962). Alvarez's inflammatory, truculent, finger-pointing introduction to The New Poetry made the book both an instant controversy and an instant success; Alvarez railed against the gentility, decency, politeness, and bourgeois conservatism he found at play in the canon-accepted English poets of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. In its first edition, The New Poetry postured itself as an all-British anthology, which clearly was broadly defined as such considering it contained work by David Wevill, a Japan-born Canadian. Poets featured in the first edition of The New Poetry included, among others, Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Michael Hamburger, Christopher Middleton, Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn, Peter Porter, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, George MacBeth, and Ian Hamilton. In its revised and enlarged edition (pictured here), published by Penguin in 1966, The New Poetry shed its British-only parameters and featured poems by Berryman, Plath, Lowell, and Sexton alongside those from the original table of contents.

Preceding his publication in The New Poetry, Wevill gained recognition as a promising new voice due to his association with The Group, an unofficial "workshop" collective of young poets in London. Whether by design or by chance, the poems generated by The Group served as a stark contrast to the creative efforts generated by the so-called Movement. The Movement poets were featured in Robert Conquest's 1956 New Lines anthology (Macmillan) and tended toward a conservative, somewhat neoclassical, and traditionally formal aesthetic. Alvarez openly attacked the work of the New Lines poets in the The New Poetry as follows:

Of the nine poets to appear in this [New Lines], six, at the time, were university teachers, two librarians, and one a Civil Servant. It was, in short, academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgeable, efficient, polished, and, in its quiet way, even intelligent. What it had to offer positively was more difficult to describe.

The Group was initially facilitated by Philip Hobsbaum in 1954, then later by Edward Lucie-Smith in 1959. In addition to David Wevill, the ranks of The Group included noted poets such as Zulfikar Ghose, George MacBeth, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, Fleur Adcock, Nathaniel Tarn, and Ted Hughes. When Hobsbaum left Cambridge to lecture at Queen's University, Belfast, he organized the so-called Belfast Group. During its tenure, The Belfast Group included, among others, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, and Paul Muldoon. In 1963 Edward Lucie-Smith edited A Group Anthology (Oxford University Press), which included 5 poems by David Wevill, the anthology's only North American voice.

England's early 1960s also gave rise to one of the greatest English-language poetry venues in the postwar era, The Penguin Modern Poets series. Eschewing the traditional hardbound single-author volume, Penguin struck out by publishing three authors in each of its Modern Poets titles, all of which were sold as inexpensive, pocket-sized paperbacks. From 1962 to 1979, Penguin published 81 poets (27 books) in this format, including Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski, John Ashberry, Edwin Muir, Kenneth Koch, as well as several poets featured in A Group Anthology and The New Poetry.

Penguin Modern Poets 4 gave rise to Wevill's reputation as a premier poet of his generation. It was in this volume that readers first caught a full glimpse of Wevill's distinct style and haunting obsessions. These dense, image-driven meditations center on the menacing relationship between our world and the much darker one that walks beside it. Here are two examples from the then-28-year-old Wevill:



MY FATHER SLEEPS



Who brought from the snow-wrecked
Hulk of winter his salvaged
Purpose; who came, blind but friendly
By these lines his mouth and his eyes
Have fixed; and without further talk
Taught me at last how to walk,
Until by his power I came
Out of innocence like the worm’s flame
Into daylight. What practical need
His patience had, and anger bred
Of disillusionment, has gone with age.
I have this white-haired image,
Arrogant perhaps, and too much the hero
For our friendship’s good: Lear, although
Afraid of words as of madness,
Of procrastination as of disease—
A lover of plain-spokenness—
Though not where it hurt, that he could understand.
If I trace the scars in my right hand
They tell me of purpose disobeyed,
Of old and factual truths my head
Cannot alter. And watching him thus
Sprawled like a crooked frame of clothes
In the sleep of sixty years, jaws firm,
Breathing through the obstacle of his nose
A stubborn air that is truth for him,
I confront my plainest self. And feel
In the slow hardening of my bones, a questioning
Depth that his pride could never reveal;
That in his sleep stirs its cruel beginning.



THE TWO-COLORED EAGLE


The last days wrenched her inward completely.
Her beak scraped inner brain,
Her skull turned to old rocks and the wine seeped out dry.

Under her hooded scrutiny now
The Rhine flows on, without help; she can’t stop it.
In the perfect dead breathless quiet
Her only sound is the blind deep drumming of barges
Tugging her weight, tapping
Northwards, against the current.

Snow must fall like bone-meal here,
And success fledges no new eagles. We paw
In the cold, towards her warm red side
Of sunset, where the aching black
Grapes shiver their tinsel warnings at birds.
On either side her wings are folded, hard.
Her back is against the south,
Her brackish beak is raised to the North Sea.

Now her iron-age furnace heart
Hardens too, with October, the dead in our bones.
It is a grim place to bring love.



Just one year after the publication of Penguin Modern Poets 4, Wevill produced his first full-length collection, Birth of a Shark (Macmillan, 1964). This book contains the best work in Penguin Modern Poets 4 as well as an ample selection of new work. Birth of a Shark resonates both tonally and thematically with his first publication, continuing Wevill's search to create a language for the precarious relationship between death, life, and the organic realm of rot and decay.



FUGUE FOR WIND AND RAIN


We come into a new time; the heavy-mooned
Darkness hangs its orange crater flare
Above the sea.
My beaches are quiet: not a crab
Shuffles to disgorge its load of soft bulk from its outworn
Shell and die
In patters on the sand. Tonight
The wind sickens with heat: late strollers loaf
And stumble over curbs; and all
Earth’s energy’s coiled with this soaking sheet wrung
From the insomniac’s dreamed sleep of the windstorm.

We come into a new time,
The world and myself: parable of the dog
Who buried his sense of smell with the bone-scraps,
And could find neither.
Consuls, lictors, slaves—
Dipped in Caesar’s blood, blood of the fishes;
Men and their knives of rule, manners, lives, hypocrisy
Of bride and groom, ride on
Bloodily to rebirths. In my effort to call them back
I make slaves of everything I see: that ditch
Where wineskin-fat cactuses gripped
The white solid fortress rock,
Where red-black beetles fought and tore at each other’s
Strung nerves: in the violence of thunder off the hills’
One rainstorm in a month,—
In our bodies gored by the flame of July night.

Night along the sea promenade,
Black as my boots and finer than hair,
Drifts with the flickering torches of ships towards that far
White mustering of daybreak—
Time of the Greeks and before, the sea, these coasts
A haze of bound chapters now.
Over this nurturing ache of black
Nothing breaks; but is made to know its final breakage plain
And whole as a part
Of the fissure it came from. I look,
And can see no change: but am myself
The sign itself of change in everything: the clean, sharp
fissure that bleeds the cactus, the deadly
Rote and scrabble of the red
Beetles spitting out their eggs…

Storm draw the water out of me.

This sea has many coasts,
And every inch and brown pool
Is a fingerprint. The gannets come
Plunging, wreck their sight; the sea-salt keeps
The crab-flesh it corrodes; and the grape-
Avenging Dog-star locks
These fiery lives to the pillows we drown on.
Age his its lovers:
And neither history nor bad experience can ever redeem my one
Fault-finding
First error. I look for the change of light, now
Over this sea: which tomorrow promises only by small chance
To reveal, be re-revealed
Through its weak heart of water, my body, my blood.



A LEGEND


The sinewy nerves of a cabbage now
Contain my head. Its pulse-count
Falls to a trickle, under the icing of hope.

I am more things than a vegetable,
Or a landscape battered blue my March;
I run over them. I perpetrate
Cruelties at their roots. And still they follow
Their needs and ways: burns
Heal in the generations, old wounds grow stony
And bother nothing but the mind.

Through it all, my telltale streaks in the wind
From her quarter. I am more
Than these things. Who would judge my secrets?

So I wake one morning, and tell my legs
Of the difficult journey made
Aghast in the dream. How small I must make myself!
And how great—

With catastrophe! The beating of rain
Eats into the sun’s thaw. I have gathered wood
To build my shadow a fire—
Is she female? At lunch I chew my meat
Slowly, wondering if I am vegetarian.

I nibble dryly at crusts and become
The whole, huskless grain before an aching fire.
A pride like mine must have
More lives in its hands than one,
And in such generous variety that
The stars seem egotistical. Who would complain

Of the number of swordblades and plowblades
Through which the earthworm now
Pushes his waste? And still

The deserted, the dead, and the blind go underground,
To weep at these monstrous remains
That never grew in them.

I watch them now;
My altars of fire and sunlight become
Too crowded with worshippers. I go down
Hoping, Eurydice, to find you there.



TWO RIDERS


Loose, tethered loose
This horse combs serenity with its eyes,
Though fly-troubled.
The bigger man dismounts,
Moves round the horse’s rump into full shadow.
The smaller one basks under his broad hat,
Under the strong sun that wrinkles a desert horizon
And sets lizards thinking.

This scene I just imagine.
Why is it so important—
Why erase the hazardous energy of life with what’s
Merely apparent in the mind—
This tethered horse, the two contradictory men,
Different in habit, endurance and build,
Circling the one animal heart?

The men do not know me.
The horse in repose is companionable
Only in this moment of fatigue and trust.
The men must continually forgive each other
Their differences: they share this horse forever.
Probably trusting the horse they trust each other.
They have only stopped to rest themselves
Briefly in my mind: they are welcome.

The world, as they pose now, cannot change them much;
The true sun blacken or desert them
Beyond either’s endurance.
The horse is all heart—,
Its resting heart goes pounding on like hooves
Any movement to gallop the desert to sweat on its back,
And be stabled at nightfall.



Wevill's second full-length collection, A Christ of the Ice-Floes, appeared two years later in 1966. Of the three volumes discussed here, this is perhaps Wevill's most important. A Christ of the Ice-Floes carries on the same dark, obsessive tones and themes of his previous work, yet it differs in three distinct ways.

First off, the poems in this volume, arguably, are Wevill's most Canadian--not in the sense of nationalism or populism, but in the sense that many of the poems deal directly with details of landscape and place exclusive to the Canada of his adolescence (see "A Christ of the Ice-Floes"). In fact, A Christ of the Ice-Floes was runner-up for Canada's 1966 Governor General's Award, the country's most esteemed literary prize. (Margaret Margaret Atwood won for her collection The Circle Game.)

Secondly, the poems in A Christ of the Ice-Floes marked the beginning of Wevill's experimentation with the fragment and non-traditionally organized line-breaks. These stylistic elements have a direct correlation to Wevill's movement toward a more inward-looking, philosophical poem (see "Diamonds" and "Either / Or"). Indeed, nearly all of Wevill's successive volumes use this style as a mode of self-interrogation, an exploration into the notion that the self is a tortured amalgamation of the lives of others, both past and present.

Thirdly, we find in this collection, for the first time, Wevill's direct engagement with the ethics surrounding modernization, mechanization, and environmentalism (see "Wherever Men Have Been").



A CHRIST OF THE ICE-FLOES


To the trees at the waterline—
Birches, a few elms, a glove of willows, a thorn—
His footprints crushed the snow
And stopped, where the ice was still heavy,
The river’s current tearing at its shelves.
Was he deluding himself? Coming here…
It was neither a time of questions nor
Of answers, this in-between season—
Man remaking himself in the image of March,
His testicles drawn in,
His penis shrunken. In the black mid-current
A family of mallards crashed the ice
And swam away downstream…He heard their talk,
Biting the wind, and behind him
The forest dripped, trees
Distilling to earth, roots, leaves,
The monotonous melting. ‘Father’ he said, ‘father’—
Who had imagined, once, his colonies
Of steaming chimneys, earth-proud, God-fearing,
Complacent but watchful, ready now
At the thawing to welcome him home.
The trick was to go away and then return
Later, without promising when,
Without foresaying relief or hope of his kingdom’s
Homecoming…He was the word,
They the deed: and the deed deserted by the word
Meant nothing to them: or meant
Too much for their memory of him to outlast his going
And return. They were able—
His people. Upriver his eyes swung
With the turning wind; he saw the big houses,
Shacks, mansions, boathouses, a length of beach,
And the ice-floes ducking downriver like drowned sheep
Or so many souls, in the mind,
Starved water, without fish rising…
It was cold, this halfway season,
White, with the false purity of whites,
Wind-chafed skin, the brown earth breaking.
He’d come to imagine his future, not theirs;
He saw now the need of his coming was their myth,
Powerful as the strengthening of each season—
As inevitable, as unbelievable as the first
Bud or flake or brush of puberty—
He took up a stone near his feet
And shied it skittering over the drift ice…
Its brief splash broke him awake…
He felt the water forming round his ankles,
Swaying, rising…he didn’t know he was walking
Until the last ice gave, and he stood in the river,
As the stone’d stood—
Less than an instant—,
The brown hair vanished, and the thorn tree drowned.



DIAMONDS


Every man
Carries a scandal
At his heart.

The woodpile hides
A baby, or
A dead wife’s bones.

In an ice-house down by the lake
On the damp sawdust, a coffin holds
The baker who went out hunting ‘to steady his nerves.’

Nature a memory now—
Don’t raise wild sap in a frivolous tree.
The land will not remember,
Or the sand, or the old stockbroker
Who drank his last martini in the lake one autumn night.

Leaves shake in the dust
Along the summer roads;
A cow gives birth to her calf, the world
Goes slack. Blood dries on the tines of straw.

And hay-stalks whistle through the field
Where a rusted car, its glass knocked out
Moans in the sun beside a plough,
A lesser ribcage, half-buried.

The pineforest
Heavy with dinosaurs—
In their depth the black is moving—

Blueberry bushes in the scrub
Stained our pails and fingers,
Boy, girl, and the breath of the blue juice.

And later the dirt,
Outhouse, hole of a mother skunk,
A prickle of flies and disease, streaming over the lake
To spider islands…

We killed a crow by the rainbarrel,
Peppered it with B-B shot.
Three nights the crow slept in my bed,
The fourth day I took and broke my gun.

Later I made amends—
My mind the temper of the lake
Changing like the color of an eye,
Or rooted: an Algonquin burial mound
Whose hair of cedar hides the old scalp wound.

In the slow fall of needles
Two old pines
Remembered they were man and wife.

Faded blueflower curtains,
Pinewood walls,
Pimples plucked by flashlight in the mirror—

This house was my body once,
My first two skins, water and wind.

Now shadflies go the way of salt
Over a shoulder, through the pores of screens.

Such delicacy as I caught
In the nighthawk’s cry, the kindred
Whip-poor-will, like the cry of a young tree

In its growth…
The nail is in the tree’s heart,
Hammered home with the flat of a shoe.

The house is up for auction soon.
Small fish turn tail and plunge through the pools of oil
To fresher waters.

I,
Down the same darkness,
Retrieve my lost diamond.



EITHER / OR


I
XXXyou
XXXXXXXwitnesses—

the doors between us XXglass doors
through the clothes and skin
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand the senses’
XXXXXXXcircuit
from event to event
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXare interlocking circles
XXXXXXXnever concentric
never the same wound in the same place
XXXXXXXbut a shift in the air
like a mouth riding aloneXX through the spaces
XXXXXXXof rooms: speaking
whisper-cautionsXX less than thatXX lip-readings

There is no vanishing-point
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXbetween people
where either is the other, one is both
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXand the crime is single—
XXXXXXno betrayal
XXonly the mouths of each
for whom the same words have bone-different meanings

As in this rest-house
high in the Shan mountains
watching the fire die down
which our hands built like a house

I fret for the futureXX but am at peace in the now
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand no new thing
XXXXXXXXXXXXXcan blend us or divide us
XXXXXXbeyond what we are
and will be.



WHEREVER MEN HAVE BEEN


Wherever men have been, this
Snail-luster trail of scent remains permanent.
The wild animals test
Their lives against it; the spoilt forests
Remember a fugitive dream of shadows
Cautious and as slow as the rise of sap,
A muttering of herds, the first
Tentative fires. The sea remembers
A thrill of keels, the feel of an outgoing ship
And the slower complacent homecomings—
Wives widowed, the hominy fields and hill
Made fertile by the burial of a fish.
The trail winds round and round—
Other trails cross it: hot at the touch of a nose
It blazes briefly, is torn in the brain of the tiger
And leaps rivers; and if one
Stumbles and drowns and drifts back to the sea,
Their mourning is brief as shock,
And the trail continues. Withered arm,
Withered eye—
The spearman’s blunderbuss and the hunter’s bombs
Disrupt little: the earth resettles—
Broken cities, books burnt,
Blood-trail leading nowhere but a patch to die alone in,
Winding, winding round,
Carrion of the quick mistake,
Ill-luck and the mastery of gunfire—
Till the monsters become flesh,
And the trail grows claws and follows on its belly,
Footsteps ghostly following through the elephant grass
To where sewer-grilles breathe
Gases and mice in the face of a waiting cat.
Don’t turn now, don’t look back—
Is there a need to know more than they know
Already, where the feet have walked,
Crawled, or run…where the circle of sick slaves
Waited for death as a dying man waits for God?
Nerves, flies…the brain eats through its skull,
An acetylene impulse sears the stomach away
And the trail quickens. Where are their inventions?
Don’t ask now, don’t look back—
A ticket will take you farther than you know.
One by one the animals leave the earth
and the trail goes broad and deserted…
What are they to you but the tenants now
Of a fiery disillusion? Wherever men go to,
Not like the elephants or the slaves to their last
Glade, those mammoth hills of skulls
Discovered, and the scrambled tusks and hoofs,
Earth doesn’t answer, the noises don’t answer.
The frigidaire hums its song to the North Pole,
And one bleak outcast dog answers, howling…
Years and years and years—
The rusk-whisper of grass at heel,
The binding vision of the first man born.


Despite having published 11 collections subsequent to A Christ of the Ice-Floes, and despite having lived in Texas for nearly four decades, Wevill remains an all-but-unknown figure in the US. It's a mystery why lackluster poets are championed and true originals are neglected. To get a sense for Wevill's translation and prose endeavors, check out his translation of Ferenc Juhász's selected poems (which appeared in the Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1970) and Casual Ties (Curbstone, 1983), a book-length sequence of linked prose poems. To find Wevill's early books, you may need to do some digging. Penguin Modern Poets 4 is readily available in inexpensive used editions, but Birth of a Shark and A Christ of the Ice-Floes are becoming increasingly uncommon--both can be found on abebooks from between 20 to 100 dollars, though you may have to order them from UK booksellers (shipping costs can be quite high, and delivery quite slow). Wevill's third and fourth full-length collections, Firebreak (Macmillan, 1971) and Where the Arrow Falls (Macmillan, 1974), tend to run in the same price range, though the less expensive editions of all four titles are typically ex-library books. The two anthologies discussed here are also worth adding to your home library. Alvarez's The New Poetry typically runs for under 5 dollars. Lucie-Smith's A Group Anthology is very difficult to find here in the US; the few copies we were able to find though the links at The Olives of Oblivion Bookseller Hall of Fame ran from 50 to well over 100 dollars. We here at The Olives Oblivion can't recommend Wevill's writing enough--help us bring the books of this unique North American poet back onto the shelves of contemporary readers.

Click here to read the 1977 open letter to the Prime Minister of Iran drafted and signed by Reza Baraheni, David Wevill, Denise Levertov, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Ginsberg, Howard Zinn, and others. This originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.

The books of David Wevill:

Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Penguin, 1963); Birth of a Shark (Macmillan, 1964); A Christ of the Ice-Floes (Macmillan, 1966); Penguin Modern European Poets: Sándor Weöres and Ferenc Juhász (as translator) (Penguin, 1970); Firebreak (Macmillan, 1971); Where the Arrow Falls (Macmillan / St. Martin's, 1974); Casual Ties (Curbstone Publishing Company, 1983; Tavern Books, 2010); Other Names for the Heart: New and Selected Poems 1964-1984 (Exile Editions Ltd., 1985); Figure of Eight: New Poems and Selected Translations (Exile Editions Ltd., 1987); Figure of Eight (Shearsman, 1998); Child Eating Snow (Exile Editions Ltd., 1994); Solo With Grazing Deer (Exile Editions Ltd., 2001); Departures: Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2003); Asterisks (Exile Editions Ltd., 2007); To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill, edited by Michael McGriff (Truman State University Press, 2010).





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Killing Floor by Ai

Killing Floor
by Ai
Houghton Mifflin Company (1979)

The Lamont Poetry Selection was established in 1954, from a bequest made by Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont, widow of the investment banker and partner at J.P. Morgan. This annual second-book award given by The Academy of American Poets includes money, publication the subsequent year, and the promise of 1,500 copies purchased by The Academy and distributed to its members. In 1995 this award was endowed by the Drue Heinz Trust and renamed the James Laughlin Award in honor of the poet, publisher, and editor at New Directions. Killing Floor was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection, chosen by Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, and Charles Wright.

This visceral collection is a box of devils in waiting. Once the cover is opened, Ai’s other-worlds descend, wreak havoc on our quiet existence, and question our true relationship to empathy by creating a fully-imagined world of human suffering. All of us have violent notions; some might say a touch of evil. Ai gives a narrative to the full spectrum of human desire, and does so by showing us the things we want to do in anger, fear, lust, and greed. Ai expresses these horrors and nightmarish satisfactions with beauty and intelligence. Where others might be afraid to go, Ai pushes on without apologies.



THE EXPECTANT FATHER


The skin of my mouth, chewed raw, tastes good.
I get up, cursing, and find the bottle of Scotch.
My mouth burns as darkess [sic], lifting her skirt,
reveals daylight, a sleek left ankle.
The woman calls. I don’t answer.
I imagine myself coming up to my own door,
holding a reed basket in my arms.
Inside it there is a child,
with clay tablets instead of hands,
and my name is written on each one.
The woman calls me again and I go to her.
She reaches for me, but I move away.
I frown, pull back the covers to look at her.
So much going on outside;
the walls could cave in on us any time, any time.
I bring my face down
where the child’s head should be and press hard.
I feel pain, she’s pulling my hair.
I rise up, finally, and back away from the bed,
while she turns on her side
and drags her legs up to her chest.
I wait for her to cry,
then go into the kitchen.
I fix a Scotch and sit down at the table.
In six months, it is coming, in six months,
and I have no weapon against it.



OTHER LAMONT POETRY SELECTIONS

Li Young Li, The City in Which I Love You (1991)
Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living (1984)
Carolyn Forche, The Country Between Us (1981)
Lisel Mueller, The Private Life (1976)
Peter Everwine, Keeping the Night (1972)
Stephen Dobyns, Concurring Beast (1971)
Donald Justice, Summer Anniversaries (1959)
Donald Hall, Exiles and Marriages (1955)

Ai’s other books include Cruelty (1973); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Fate (1991); Greed (1993); Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and Dread (2003). Good news for you--Ai's books undergo large print runs, which means they are easy to find in inexpensive used editions. To find a hardback first edition, featured here, you'll need to kick down around 25 to 50 dollars, though banged-up copies can be found for about 10.



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The Night by Jaime Saenz

The Night
by Jaime Saenz
Translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
Princeton University Press (2007)
Facing Pages
Nicholas Jenkins, Series Editor

The work of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) was virtually unknown in the US until poets Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson released their translation of Saenz's selected poems, Immanent Visitor (pictured below), through the University of California Press in 2002.

The Night, the last poem Saenz wrote before his death (undoubtedly resulting from years of cocaine and alcohol abuse), is a book-length, tortuous, ghost-riddled meditation. The poem is divided into four parts--"The Night," "The Gatekeeper," "Interval," and "The Night." The night, the poem's central and controlling image, represents a series of opposites, paradoxes, and crossings-over: time and space, self and other, death spilling over into life and life into death, victim and attacker, the organic and the technological, the tyrannical and the marginal. The Night is sweeping and outward as well as claustrophobic and internal. Ultimately, the night is the battleground where one man confronts his own self, which contains contradictions and complexities so vast that death and life begin to blur. Here are four excerpts from the book, one from each of its sections:



from THE NIGHT, part 3


XXXXActually, the other side side of the night is a supremely esoteric realm,

XXXXand alcohol has conjured it.

XXXXNot anyone can pass to the other side of the night;

XXXXthe other side of the night is a forbidden dominion, and only the condemned enter there.

XXXXWhat is the nature of the night's other side?

XXXXTo put it bluntly, it is the nature of the night's other side

XXXXto sink into your spine and colonize your eyes, to see through them what it can't see on its own.

XXXXAnd then a very odd thing happens:

XXXXat a certain moment you begin to see the other side of the night,

XXXXand you realize with a start it is already inside of you...



from THE GATEKEEPER, part 3


XXXXWho is that, the one with bull's neck and lion's mane?

XXXXHe appears from nowhere in the doorway, this gatekeeper of the threshold, blocking those who would pass through.

XXXXThere is sunlight, and water, and air heavy with breathing,

XXXXand there are people.

XXXXThe air hums with the fluttering and fluttering and fluttering of beings.

XXXXAnd this humming, which resounds in every realm, rising to a roar,

XXXXis nevertheless a silence more profound than pure silence.

XXXXThere are two worlds, there are two lives, there are two deaths,

XXXX--whatever they call the One and Absolute doesn't exist.

XXXXThere are two faces, two edges, two abysses.


XXXXThe gatekeeper wearies...



from INTERVAL


XXXX...What's more, there were prominent and despicable technophiles among them,

XXXXand their one purpose was to devastate and murder.

XXXXOften, there were mass round-ups of children and of the most vigorous and healthy adolescents;

XXXXand these were corralled into the huge warehouses of the Customs Bureau, augmenting the supply of meat...



from THE NIGHT, part 3


XXXXThe space your body takes up in the world is equal to the space of the body into which someone has retreated;

XXXXand, if so, no one has any reason to bother or pester you;

XXXXin the space of your body, where you are absolute sovereign,

XXXXyou can stand on your head, create and decreate, and
wander at ease,

XXXXfree at last of a nightmarish world full of swarming specters and skeletons who siphoned your life.

XXXXIn any case, your dwelling, your city, your night, and your world boil down to your body;

XXXXand the one who dwells there is not you, but the body of your body.

XXXXFor the body that dwells in you is, in reality, you;

XXXXit's only that your body leaves off being you,

XXXXand passes into itself...



After reading Gander and Johnson's introduction to The Night, the only word to be uttered is paradox. Here are a few facts from Saenz's life: as a teenager he was a Nazi Youth member in Bolivia and gained military training in Germany during the late 30s; he later used his military experience to lead members of the working class (which included the indigenous Aymara) in a people's uprising against Bolivia's right-wing oligarchy in the early 50s; he was openly bisexual and portrayed sympathetic homosexual characters in his prose fiction; at one point he stole a leg from a cadaver and stowed it beneath his bed during a period in which he lived with his mother; he was so fearful of waking up in his coffin after he died that he insisted to his friends that they sever his carotid arteries after his death--apparently, this request was honored. These are just a few of the many nearly-unbelievable facts Gander and Johnson discuss in their introduction.

If you are unfamiliar with the titles in Princeton's Facing Pages series, then hop on to this link immediately. Not only does Facing Pages offer a diverse selection, it offers the option of either a paperback or a well-made hardcover. Ah, hardcover books...a dying format in the poetry world. All titles in this series are in print and ready for your bookshelf. For other excellent translation titles, check out the catalogs at Copper Canyon Press, Sheep Meadow Press, and Oberlin College Press.



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Keeping the Night by Peter Everwine

Keeping the Night
by Peter Everwine
Atheneum (1977)

There's really nothing better than a book designed and/or edited by Harry Ford, the creative and editorial mastermind who formed Atheneum's reputation as one of the premier poetry publishers of its time. Genius is not a word to be thrown about lightly, but when it comes to the late Harry Ford, no other descriptor seems appropriate. Ford championed and edited (both at Knopf and Atheneum) poets such as Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Langston Hughes, and James Merrill. If you crack open Philip Levine's Sweet Will (Atheneum, 1985) you'll find that it's dedicated to Ford (pictured below), a gesture not uncommon among the poets Ford worked with and fought for. Alas, Atheneum is no more. Atheneum was sold to Macmillan in the late 80s, a transaction that ended a significant chapter of Ford's legacy as well as a major catalog of essential American poetry titles.

Keeping the Night is one of three books that Peter Everwine published with Atheneum. His first full-length collection, Collecting the Animals, was awarded the 1972 Lamont Poetry Selection. His translation of Israeli poet Natan Zach, The Static Element, was published in 1982, and marked the Hebrew-language poet's first major publication in the US.

Everwine is a poet whose sparse style, dense images, and surrealistic leaping allow him to delve into the mysteries of an oftentimes dark human psyche. Everwine has the uncanny ability to combine the abstract with the real, a process that shows the reader both the balance and tension between the empirical and the mystical. Everwine seldom employs the narrative as a poetic device, though his writing suggests a sort of inner narrative, an interrogation between the speaker in the poem and his philosophical struggle to find meaning in both objects and ideas. Here are two poems representative of the work found in Keeping the Night:



IT WAS AUTUMN


It was autumn,
its iron gates darkening
with smoke and oils.

In the fields
the water turned in its nest,
the weed put down its plow and slept,
the minerals awakened.

In the heart of a tree
the moon was building a small fire.

And by its yellow light
the crickets assembled and read
from the book of crickets:

the generations
the labors
the black rains milling at sea.



DISTANCE


The light pulling away from trees,
the trees speaking in shadows
to whatever listens...

Something as common as water
turns away from our faces
and leaves.

The stars rise out of the hills
--old kings and animals
marching in their thin tunnels of light.

Once more I find myself
standing as on a dark pier, holding
an enormous rope of silence.



Though currently out of print, Keeping the Night is easy to find. There are several copies on abebooks for less than 10 dollars. Everwine's first book, Collecting the Animals, which The Olives of Oblivion highly recommend, is currently available as a new reprint in the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries Poetry Series. Our hats off to Carnegie Mellon! Much to our delight, the University of Pittsburgh Press recently published his new and selected poems under the title From the Meadow. From the Meadow contains many of the poems found in Keeping the Night. Though his poetic output has been relatively small in terms of books published, Everwine's contribution to contemporary poetry has been, and continues to be, vast.



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