Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version reviewed by Katie Eberhart

The Russian Version
Elena Fanailova

Translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler
Introduction by Aleksandr Skidan
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010
ISBN 978-0939010-98-1

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

The fine thing about Elena Fanailova’s book The Russian Version is getting a poet's view of Russia in recent years. In this bilingual collection of poems time passes and some things change, and some only shift. Themes which demand attention are the presence of doubles and how both structure of the poems and the poet's interests change. Fanailova has a keen eye for details of story and scene, but also the even more complex terrain of motivations and dreams in a place where even the dead are denied peace (even from those who were closest to them). The second part of the poem The Land of the Dead (a poem in four parts from the work With Particular Cynicism, 1998-1999) begins:

...A willow sprouted from her grave.
A year later it cracked the tomb apart to the rose-colored stars.
Its roots grew through her ribs and entwined her heart.
But father took an axe and a saw
Pried out the root and chopped down the stalk. 

Peter Waterhouse's Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel
Peter Waterhouse
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (2009)
U.S. publisher: Burning Deck/Anyart, Providence, RI.
Originally published in 1989 as Sprache Tod Nacht Aussen (Rowohlt Verlag GmbH).
125 pp.

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Reading Language Death Night Outside is like traveling to a foreign country except the country you travel through is not merely landscape but a web of the narrator's observations, experience, points of reference, and language. The subtitle Poem Novel suggests more freedom and fancy than a single genre but also more responsibility to deliver both story and poetry, or a poetic story. Clearly, there are multiple ways these forms coexist and Waterhouse has found many, including a narrator's view which switches between moment-by-moment observation and reflection, and investigation of what occurred in the past. The story is centered around Vienna, Austria but spreads outward to places like Chernowitz and Zagreb as well as southern Austria and Italy. On the first page the forces are established, including poetry and the death of the narrator's grandfather.

In the fall of 1984 I heard poems by Andrea Zanzotto. The poster had announced a hermetic poet. I was working on a long essay on Paul Celan. My interest jumped over. Zanzotto canceled. A bilingual reading with rough translations took place without the poet. The rough translations convinced me. Two hours. A survey of the work, I could not get the poems out of my mind. . . (7)

Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Primeval and Other Times
Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague 2010
248 pp

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

This novel begins with the boldly presented idea that Primeval is both a place and more than a place. The first thing we learn is that “Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe” and I reminded myself of Primeval's exceptional location as I followed the intergenerational tableau anchored within a normal-seeming landscape in Poland of roads and forests, farms, rivers and lakes but along the borders four archangels are said to protect against certain human shortcomings.

In Primeval and Other Times each chapter or section begins “The Time of . . .” and the novel unfolds as separate but interlaced stories where characters appear, and reappear, sometimes in their own story and sometimes in another character's story. Many characters are related to other characters by family, or accidental encounter, dreams or beliefs, and the characters are staunch in what they believe, whether it is a higher power, believing that the midwife switched the babies at birth, or a game that becomes an obsession.

Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, reviewed by Megan Burns

Julie Carr
Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Coffeehouse Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56689-251-3
6x9, 74pps
$16

Reviewed by Megan Burns

A Doubled Woman: Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

This slim volume is a meditation on birth, death, grief, and nature in a series of poems designated by Carr as fragments, lines, and abstracts. The poems echo one another in images of birds, shores, rain, leaves, salt, and honey. The subject matter of the mother, the daughter, conception, and death are also woven into the tapestry, but it is the language, the sounds themselves, that interconnect and create a whole in a book that speaks about what is in pieces. The loss of the mother, a double loss due to the mother’s Alzheimer’s, is complicated by the speaker’s pregnancy. Images of birth and death as well as daughters and mothers become blurred and confused in the poems as the voice attempts to tease out with language an order built upon internal sounds. Sounds become a mainstay, propelling an investigation into complicated gestures.

The book begins with a poem titled “Landlocked Lines,” an important departure as the poems that follow seem to flow further from the shore and into the abyss. “It would be absurd to imagine the absent person in the margins of the book” this poem tells us, and here we begin to confront the idea of elegy and how this form shapes the person who is lost. This first poem introduces ideas or images that resurface, much like memories of a lost loved one; a physical object like the “red wall,” birds, and stories about giving birth to save a life all return in later poems. Alliteration and internal rhymes ground most of these poems; they escalate to a frenzy especially when grief seems to overpower the speaker:

now rectangles of fluorescent, of bold blonde daylight on walls of old dreck now shine like gestalt or defense, like splayed hair. Now old odes or seeds of thought turned snug in gummy mugs: I’m alone here in a day like an arrow or a lance in a gash. Day, don’t say things, don’t order (12).

Aaron Belz's Lovely, Raspberry reviewed by Joseph Harrington

Aaron Belz
Lovely, Raspberry: Poems

ISBN 978-0-89255-359-4
Persea Books, 2010
80 pages, pbk.
$15

Reviewed by Joseph Harrington

“You expect me to tell you about the interior of the room/ in which I’m typing this, and connect that to my feelings,” begins Aaron Belz’ second full-length poetry collection, Lovely, Raspberry. Readers of his first book (The Bird Hoverer) needn’t be told that he won’t make that facile connection. Like some of the poems in that volume, this one proceeds to elaborately eviscerate contemporary “mainstream” poetry, with its predictable rhetorical moves and taken-for-granted subjectivity. At the same time, it dives into one of Belz’ major concerns: the ultimate impossibility of easy connections – whether between lovers, reader and writer, word and referent, subject and self. “Lets put our heads together/ and try to think up a third room unknown to either of us” – this book is that room. But by the same token, You can’t connect with I: “I cannot even begin to do it, for I am a ranch boy/ and not even a very good one; I live in El Bandito, Texas.” Like the other poems in Lovely, Raspberry, “Direction” takes a detour down the rabbit hole, to a place weird, hilarious, and utterly unexpected – even by the writer, one infers.

John Dermot Woods's The Complete Collection of people, places and things reviewed by Lindsey Drager

.

John Dermot Woods
The Complete Collection of people, places and things
BlazeVOX, 2009. 178 pp, pbk.
$16

Reviewed by Lindsey Drager

John Dermot Woods’s epigraph to The Complete Collection of people, places and things comes from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It reads:

By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before.

While the obvious allusions to Anderson’s book don’t reach far beyond the opening chapter, it is difficult to ignore the gaping ambiguity in this sentence; that is, there is no referent for “it”. It can be argued that opening a book as such is a risky move, but here it seems more an experiment in the cannon as archive. In other words, you have to look it up.

Anderson’s quote surfaces in the first chapter of Winesburg, in a section entitled “The Book of the Grotesques”. In it, an elderly writer composes the book in response to “a dream that was not a dream” in which “all of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques”(Anderson, 24). The “it” of Woods’s epigraph refers to the narrator’s summary of this writer’s book which he recalls as such:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. (Anderson, 25)

Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog reviewed by Elizabeth Moore

Joseph Massey
Areas of Fog
Shearsman Books, 2009
ISBN: 9781848610521
Paperback, 116 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Elizabeth Moore

At first glance, Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog appears tediously Minimalistic, and indeed, with his affinity for brevity, Massey risks accusations of pretentious purism. But linger on Massey’s poetry and the suspicion proves vastly misconceived. Far from supercilious, Massey seems almost humbled, struck by the unassuming beauty of ordinariness. Whereas other Minimalists exert control through perfected precision, Massey uses concision to allow space for thought. Massey, who quotes Clark Coolidge’s idea that “[t]he line is an assemblage of broken smaller pieces,” follows in form. Divided into five parts, the book threads together impressionistic observations and subtle commentary – a fluid merging of shadowy existence and vibrant life. Massey drifts with focused intensity, and readers hover on the edge as witnesses to a quiet confrontation with the world.