A Plenitude of Poetry
Rothschild, Matthew
Books A Plenitude of Poetry Given By Wendell Berry Shoemaker Hoard. 152 pages. $22. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan Foreword by Adrienne Rich Copper Canyon. 649 pages....
...She adds, many stanzas later: The trouble with America Is that her morale is still too high She needs to be a bit more depressed Before she starts behaving better...
...This is both "an elegy for the century I was born in" and "an elegy for this century born in blood and bombs/and for the simple rights we once took for granted...
...In another, "Renovation" (where she writes about "the carpenter who looks uncannily like my gynecologist"), her teenage son complains about having to wash dishes in a pan in the yard, so she asks him how he would he like to be in Palestine, where his home could be totally demolished...
...But even in this first half, "You," she can't keep the problems of humankind at bay...
...Several of Mikhail's most powerful poems relate to her immigrant experience...
...This brings me to The War Works Hard, an urgent book by Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet who served as the literary editor of The Baghdad Observer but then fled Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1990s, eventually settling in the United States...
...13.95 You & Yours By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions...
...Kumin then takes a sweeping view in "Appropriate Tools: An Elegy and Rant...
...Freedoms candle will be snuffed out by freedoms sworn defenders, chanting hourly the praise of freedom...
...The poet Jimmy Santiago Baca once said that no leader should be allowed to invade another country until he could name a poet and a novelist and a singer from that country...
...84 pages...
...June Jordan knew how to say so and oppose, as anyone who remembers her essays in The Progressive can attest...
...I Was in a Hurry" resonates, as well...
...Continuing on in this long series of poems, "Sabbaths, 2003," he calls us to the barricades: All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be, is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve undiminished the land and the people...
...The first section consists of ten aphoristic couplets ("When we sacrifice lives, including our children's/evil becomes as common as breathing...
...In relief which she knows will be ephemeral, she exhales: No reruns today of the bombings in Vietnam 2 million civilians blown apart, most of them children...
...If national conduct forsakes these aims, it is one's patriotic duty to say so and to oppose...
...12.95 My Nature Is Hunger New and Selected Poems: 1989-2004...
...78 pages...
...What lines should we all be crossing...
...When U.S...
...And some are born to wonder, wonder, wonder...
...I took my annual tour of those shelves, and have come away again impressed by the quality and range that contemporary poetry has to offer...
...1550...
...136 pages...
...In Given, he warns: This, then, is to be the way...
...Please don't ask me, America/I don't remember," the poem begs...
...Consider "Your Weight, at Birth," about the difference between Israelis and Palestinians: One is born to wear a helmet, carry large artillery...
...She also has a beautiful poem comparing stateless Palestinians to migrating whooping cranes: By now the sorrowing people make secret refuge in the sky...
...Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive...
...In "America," the narrator fends off questions from an immigration officer...
...I'm drawn to those poets who engage in some way with politics...
...Alicia Suskin Ostriker, in No Heaven, has a poem entitled "Elegy Before the War...
...authorities wouldn't let Robeson travel to Canada, "He sang into Canada./His voice left the USA/when his body was/not allowed to cross/that line...
...In one poem, she is "running from the headlines...
...In "He Said EYE-RACK," Nye imitates Bush's rhetoric as he launched the war: Relative to our plans for your country, we will blast your tree, crush your cart . . . Freedom will feel good to you too...
...She writes: "Greedy teeth smile at the microphone./They know where the oil is...
...23.95...
...Please acknowledge our higher purpose...
...This tone predominates in the second half, "Yours...
...It is not a nice ending...
...Iadmire the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye for her own work, and for her discerning selections for The Texas Observer, which, like The Progressive, devotes a page to poetry every issue...
...Nye's latest book, You & Yours, displays her sensibilities to good effect...
...And so we find a poem about her lover who mowed down her primrose patch by accident, and an ode to airports, and a paean to a Scottish pier, and a narrative about canoeing with alligators...
...Jack and Other New Poems By Maxine Kumin Norton...
...From there, he writes, like Nye, about our stymied system of government: "This is a democracy that doesn't care that people care...
...In "Our Time," a knockoff of Robert Frost, she writes: We grew up proud of our country Forests of wonderful words to wander throughfreedom, indivisible...
...She asks: "Where does yours' end...
...Here is how she ends "From Sea to Shining Sea": This is a good time This is the best time This is the only time to come together Fractious Kicking Spilling Burly Whirling Raucous Messy Free Exploding like the seeds of a natural disorder...
...112 pages...
...As she explains further down, "If you send something about a mound of lentils,/I will be intrigued...
...The title poem continues in this sardonic vein: How magnificent the war is...
...Stop your questioning, America/and offer your hand...
...Yesterday, I lost a country/I was in a hurry/and didn't notice when it fell from me," Mikhail begins, adding later: "If anyone stumbles across it, return it to me, please...
...Jordan died in 2002, and it is a treasure to have all of her poems between two covers...
...Early in the morning it wakes up the sirens and dispatches ambulances to various places, swings corpses through the air, rolls stretchers to the wounded, summons rain from the eyes of mothers...
...As in Mikhail's book, the Iraq War casts a pall over You & Yours...
...it is not intended to be...
...She agonizes in this work about our obligations as citizens, and she urges us to sing-and to listen-across borders...
...The first half of Nye's book is quieter, more conversational and observational, than the second half, which grapples with weightier political matters...
...14.95 By Matthew Rothschild Aplenitude of poetry ushers forth each year, with the slender shoulders of the newcomers jostling against the greats on the bookstore shelves...
...In her first poem, "Bag of Bones," she slaps her readers awake with her opening lines about a mass graveyard: "What good luck!/She has found his bones...
...Now we have Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, with a loving and insightful foreword by Adrienne Rich...
...The War Works Hard By Dunya Mikhail New Directions...
...One is born to be thin, to wear raggedy clothes & be shot in the leg...
...For instance, Luis J. Rodr?guez, in My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989-2004, presents "Nightfall: Poems to Ponder in War and Uncertainty...
...What songs travel toward us from far away to deepen our days...
...She opens with an invocation about Paul Robeson, "Cross That Line...
...And in 2005, a year shadowed by the Iraq War, I turned especially to poets who got out the chalk to sketch it...
...In a poem or two in their latest works, which cover a variety of topics, they offer guidance and challenge and rebuke for our time...
...She nods to this in "Fold," where she says: "I am partial to poems about/little ruminations, explosions of minor joy...
...If the ground satisfied their dreams, the sky would miss them...
...They have plans, big plans/To connect the imperial dots...
...No Heaven By Alicia Suskin Ostriker Pittsburgh...
...How eager and efficient...
...He includes a stanza at the end that is awfully harsh: He faults the parents of a soldier who died in Iraq for their "quiet complicity, their confused collaboration," even as they memorialize her...
...I enjoyed these for their light touch...
...The general potency and power/of humankind, however, is hard for me to get my mind/around...
...I give her the last word...
...So she asks: What countries may we sing into...
...The same could be said of our own country, so carelessly discarded by Bush and by all of us who are letting him get away with it...
...By Luis J. Rodr?guez Curbstone.149 pages...
...In "During a War," Nye takes off from a friend's salutation, "Best wishes to you & yours," a phrase she grabs for her title...
...I called on some old favorites on my tour...
...Her praise for the diligent war, which "entertains the gods/shooting fireworks and missiles/into the sky" and "paints a smile on the leader's face," ought to enter the anthologies of peace poems...
...What else have we to live for...
...Wendell Berry is worried about those simple rights, too...
...Many of these poems express themselves in the simplest language...
...Similarly, Maxine Kumin, in Jack and Other New Poems, has a prewar poem, "New Hampshire, February 7, 2003...
...She wonders, "What could we have done/differently" about this war, which "we did not want,/we tried to stop,/we were not heard...
...Now my horse is lost in a sheen of lies...
Vol. 70 • February 2006 • No. 2
