Sleeping on Fists by Alberto Ríos

Sleeping on Fists
by Alberto Ríos
Dooryard Press
(1981)

It's no secret that we here at The Olives of Oblivion are big fans of the chapbook, one of the fine traditions in poetry and bookmaking. Printed in an edition of 500, Sleeping on Fists has a letterpress cover, a beautiful frontispiece (shown below), and 16 poems printed on deckle-edged Rives Light paper. Tasty.

Sleeping on Fists appeared right before Ríos's first full-length collection, Whispering to Fool the Wind, which was selected by Donald Justice for the Walt Whitman Award in 1981 and published by Sheep Meadow Press in 1982. Sleeping on Fists, however, is not Ríos's first book; this honor goes to the very obscure Elk Heads on the Wall, which appeared in 1979 from UC-Berkeley's Chicano Studies Program through their chapbook series. A slim 23 pages, Elk Heads on the Wall was the 4th title in this series (edited by Gary Soto), and had a run of 350 copies.

Born in 1952 in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, Ríos has earned a reputation as one of the finest poets now writing in the US. Border, perhaps more than any other word, best describes Ríos's style and obsessions. The border between Mexico and the United States. The border between the mundane and the magical. The border between self and community. The border between the secular and the sacred. Ríos has spent much of his career exploring the implications of such borders, as well as exploring where these borders blend together. Indeed, the synthetic moment is where Ríos finds and creates his meaning-making as an artist.


OUR OTHER MAN


Carlos is the name
by which loneliness
knows each of us.
Carlos the distant relative
worse off than we are
who drank the medicines
of poverty and died
not in his sleep
but wide awake
clutching the red chair
because alone
his most powerful act
was this.
Carlos who lives inside
pain in each of us
knowing the woman--
it was her brother that died
and that was all,
he was dead
and everyone was sorry
because her hands
were too heavy to lift.
Carlos at this moment
wanting desperately other women
looking out through my eyes
making my tongue his
speaking my words
hearing his meanings.
Carlos who is the name of a boat
and the fisherman and the anchor.
Carlos who is the cold
and the women and the night.
Carlos who wants only
to age with each of us,
to grow old, to be happy.



AFTERNOON


She didn't raise her head for so many years
she forgot all about the sky.
Suspicions grew about the woman
who wore her purse close like an arm
in a third black sleeve.
But when she sat one afternoon
to wait for death in the plaza
she remembered the sky like her husband.
She waited. She didn't look up.
Her intimacy now was the night
and it slipped into her
and wore her like a sleeve.



Several of these poems are reprinted in Whispering to Fool the Wind, which is a very common and inexpensive used title. For those of you in search of Sleeping on Fists, good luck. This title is quite scarce. Currently, there are no copies listed through the ABAA, nor are there any listed on abebooks or bookfinder. Don't despair. Like any book on your list of dream books, it will be sitting on the shelf at your local bookseller's one day for just a few bucks. For further reading, check out Ríos's 2002 poetry title The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press), an Olives of Oblivion favorite.




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Ocean Avenue by Malena Mörling

Ocean Avenue
by Malena Mörling
New Issues Press
(1999)

Ocean Avenue was selected by Philip Levine for the 1998 New Issues Poetry Prize, an annual award given for a first collection of poetry by New Issues Press (Western Michigan University). Over the past few decades, Levine has developed a reputation for selecting excellent books by emerging women authors for a variety of book contests: Roberta Spear's Silks, a National Poetry Series selection (Holt, 1980); Dorianne Laux's Awake, a New Poets of America Series selection (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1990); Jane Mead's The Lord and the General Din of the World, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize (Sarabande Books, 1995). These 3 titles are uncommonly excellent, and Mörling's Ocean Avenue fits nicely onto this list of Levine-championed books.

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm in 1965 and raised in southern Sweden. Like her countryman Tomas Tranströmer (undoubtedly an enormous influence), Mörling's poems ferry back and forth between the physical and the mystical, often leaping into the surreal. The voice in Mörling's work is in ecstatic awe of every aspect of quotidian life--cows in a field, bus drivers, train passengers, pigeons, subways. At every turn she surprises by finding the universe in a grain of sand. Here are a few representative pieces:



THE DARK DRINKS THE INSIDES OF MIRRORS


As the day sinks into pockets
and into the bedside water glasses
of the sick,
I think of every gesture,
every word I uttered
and thought of uttering
in doorways and elevators,
in the long living room of the train.
And of every drop of bird blood on the pavement
below the immaculately polished windows.
We are skeletons
with nothing on
except a thin suit of skin
to keep the liquids inside
from pouring out like thought--
as when the body is crushed
in a car accident
or when it is cut open
by the toothed disc of a circular saw
in the finale of a magic show.
The blood arcing
out of the slender body on the table
and the magician turning to the audience
smiling and inviting them up on stage
to examine the intestines.
I was on a bus with wings,
I saw the beggar
sprint across the square
with both crutches under one arm.
I saw the bald child
weep into his rusty pail.
I was on a beach so bright
I could not think.



STANDING ON THE EARTH AMONG THE COWS


When I was driving through Wyoming
past fields of just-overturned earth
black in the noon sun
and past thousands of cows
totally at home in the open,
I stopped the car to stop moving
and got out to stand among them
and I said nothing in English or Swedish.
Now I want to be whoever I was in that moment
when I discovered my own breathing
among the cows' breathing in the field
and studied their satin bellies
and udders slowly filling with milk.
I was not separate from anything living, I was
equally there and there was nothing to wait for.



VISITING


In the shape of a human body
I am visiting the earth;
the trees visit
in the shape of trees.
Standing between the onions
and the dandelions
near the ailanthus and the bus stop,
I don't live more thoroughly
inside the mucilage of my own skull
than outside of it
and not more behind my eyes
than in what I can see with them.
I inhale whatever air
the grates breathe in the street.
My arms and legs still work,
I can run if I have to
or sit motionless purposefully
until I am here and I am not here
the way death is present
in things that are alive
like salsa music
and the shrill laughter of the bride
as she leaves the wedding
or the bald child playing jacks
outside the wigshop.



Perhaps the most striking poem in this collection is the dreamy, 6-part title piece, "Ocean Avenue." Too long to reprint here, this poem exemplifies Mörling's ability to follow her imagination wherever it takes her. Despite the poem's length, she sustains an ecstatic, philosophical tone. Luckily for us, Mörling has published a second book, Astoria (Pitt Poetry Series, 2006). Both books are easy to find in inexpensive paperback editions on abebooks. New copies, of course, should be ordered from your local independant bookseller. The hardcover edition of Ocean Avenue, shown here, weighs in at around 40 dollars.

New Issues Poetry and Prose was founded by the poet Herbert Scott (1931-2006). The Olives of Oblivion would like to give Mr. Scott a 21-olive salute for his vision and dedication to the art of poetry and publishing.



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20 Poems by Tomas Tranströmer

20 Poems
by Tomas Tranströmer
Translated by Robert Bly
Seventies Press (1970)

Regarded by many as one of the great poets of the 20th century, it's difficult to imagine a time when Tomas Tranströmer's work was new to readers here in the US. In 1966 New Directions 19 (edited by James Laughlin) featured 15 Tranströmer translations by Eric Sellin, thus marking the Swedish poet's first North American ink. Four years later, Robert Bly published the first Tranströmer book in the US, 20 Poems, in his groundbreaking Seventies Press.

Born in a working-class Stockholm neighborhood in 1931, Tranströmer has lived a unique life as a poet. He has never been affiliated with a university, an artistic school or movement, a literary magazine, a publishing house, or the Swedish Academy; instead he made a living as a prison psychologist in a juvenile corrections institute. He has also earned a reputation as a skilled literary translator, entomologist, and classical pianist. He suffered a stroke in 1990 that has hampered the mobility of his right side, yet he continues his life as a poet (and performs one-handed piano recitals throughout Europe).

Tranströmer's is a style best described as engaged with the liminal. He probes the connections between the realms of the conscious and subconscious, the visible and the invisible. His poems often begin in the empirical world and leap forth into the mysteries of the unseen. 20 Poems is deftly translated, and represents the period of Tranströmer's writing that established him as an important and influential poetic figure.



THE COUPLE


They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven's darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy's painting.

It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.



AFTER A DEATH


Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armour of black dragon scales.



Like many of Bly's Seventies Press books, Tranströmer's 20 Poems is becoming an obscure and expensive title. The paperback (featured here) runs between 30 and 100 dollars, and the hardcover generally runs well over 100 dollars. Consult our Bookseller Hall of Fame to find this and other Tranströmer obscurities. For those with shallow pockets, we recommend the following, all of which are in print and easy to find: Selected Poems: 1954-1986, edited by Robert Hass (Ecco, 1987); The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly (Graywolf Press, 2001); The Great Enigma, translated by Robin Fulton (New Directions, 2006). If you would like to hear over an hour of Tranströmer reading in English, click on The International Poetry Forum link under Audio Olives. Click here to read a recent translation by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl.



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