“We are a solar people,” he said. “This is a solar city.”

Is there some kind of reciprocal agreement? Do Mexican papers quote Wendell Berry on the weather in Kentucky?

• Nox by Anne Carson
• The Eternal City by Kathleen Graber
• By the Numbers by James Richardson
• Wait by CK Williams
• Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder

Gone is an outstanding poet whose philosophical and heartfelt lyrics made this world greater and brighter. She was among the shining representatives of the sixties and became the symbol of a generation. Her works have already entered into the classics of Russian literature. It is an irreparable loss for the country and all who appreciate and love poetry.

I share your grief and mourn with you.

Dmitry Medvedev

Akhmadulina has repeatedly been translated into English – so luckily it is easy to find strong samples of her work. From ‘Fever’, trans. Geoffrey Dutton and Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin:

AUTUMN

Not working, not making a sound,
the beehive drowns into its essence.
The autumn grows more profound,
the soul more round from its experience.

It is involved in the form
the fat fruit takes from the slender sprays.
How tedious work becomes in autumn,
how heavy every phrase.

Days grow more burdensome
with Nature’s deliberate opulence,
as idleness that seems like wisdom
overshadows your mouth with silence.

Even a child may ride
a bicycle,
pedaling like mad,
and suddenly look at the wide
world and feel serene and sad.

 

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE SEVENTH OF OCTOBER

When I was twenty-seven years old
I was lucky enough to enjoy the miracle
of living in the close circle of a household
widened by a garden’s lovely circle.

I gave myself completely to the goodness
with which nature, always equable,
watches the withering in the pine forest
or decides the destiny of a vegetable.

I liked forgetting both sorrow and anger,
thought and speech, having no such duties,
tolerant of being cared for by a stranger
whose genius was the innocence of trees.

Suddenly I became healthy as grass,
pure in my soul as other plants in earth
having no more wisdom than a pine tree has,
no more alive than just before my birth.

At night I used to smile up at the ceiling
at the empty gap, where near and clear to mark,
the obvious god wrapped such tenderness around me
that I would push the fringe back from my forehead
to make it easier to kiss, and sleep profoundly.

And then for an age, centuries of descent,
I dived own into the earth and trees,
and no one knew at all how great the torment
closed behind the door of my aloneness.

• Lisa Roberton’s Magenta Soul Whip. By Lisa Robertson. (Coach House, paper, $14.95.) In these intellectual poems, the experimental curtains suddenly part to reveal clear, durable truth. [Original review here]
• The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010. By Edward Hirsch. (Knopf, $27.) Hirsch’s “living fire” is an irrational counterforce with which he balances his dignified quotidian. [Original review here]
• White Egrets: Poems. By Derek Walcott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The Nobel Prize winner’s latest collection is intensely personal, an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth. [Original review here]

Which is to say: Hayes might have the most accomplished resume of any living poet under the age of 40. Expect an actual appraisal of the book (and not his honors), which has been sitting on my bedstand for the past week.

For the moment, take a look at this review over at Coldfront of another finalist, Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City. A review which is similar to my reaction to the book, but perhaps too positive, even considering this note:

A fair criticism could be made that Graber relies too heavily on complex ideas developed by other individuals, and that she only really adds to them the specific nuances of her narrator’s life. A few of these meditations become labored, lack surprise, or simply work to reaffirm the concept forwarded by whichever philosopher supplies the epigraph.

Julia Copus won the prize for best single poem, with ‘An Easy Passage.’ Read the poem at the Guardian. Hilary Menos won best first collection with Berg (available here).

From time to time, I’ll post an overview of the reviews for recent books – starting with Human Chain. Some are ecstatic, praising his humble style and unadorned, meditative verse. Others are less positive, citing the same qualities. Brandon Robshaw, in the Independent, sums up critical opinion: ‘The poetic voice is quiet and contemplative – perhaps a bit lacking in fireworks. But that is what admirers of Heaney love.’ The reviews:

• Adam O’Riordan, Telegraph: A
• Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post: A
• William Logan, NY Times Book Review: D
• Kate Kellaway, The Observer: A
• Brandon Robshaw, Independent: B
• Alan Taylor, The Herald Scotland: A
• John Boland, Irish Independent: C
• Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times: A

• A fair amount has been written on the suicide of Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review.  Suffice it to say, Morrissey’s work at one of our greatest literary journals will be missed. At this time, the winter issue has been canceled.
• The Forward Prize announced its 2010 poetry shortlist for the UK’s best poetry collection. The Forward Prize shortlist: Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain, Robin Robertson’s The Wrecking Light, Lachlan Mackinnon’s Small Hours (reported by PBS as “Lachlan McKinnon”), Fiona Sampson’s Rough Music, Sinéad Morrissey’s Through the Square Window, and Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability. Before the winner is announced on October 6, I’ll be posting a roundup of criticism for the titles along with my own reviews.
• In case betting on high school track & field meets has gotten too tame for you. Ireland’s largest bookie has the Forward Prize spread: Lachlan MacKinnon on top with 5/2 odds.
• Rachel Zucker examines the long poem, leaving us with a strong and exhaustive list of modern pieces:
  

  I’m talking about “Hymn to Life,” “A Few Days,” and “The Morning of the Poem,” all by James Schuyler. I’m talking about The Descent of Alette, by Alice Notley; way, by Leslie Scalapino; Midwinter Day, by Bernadette Mayer; Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson; My Life, by Lyn Hejinian; “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg; “Song of Myself,” by Walt Whitman; Model Homes, by Wayne Koestenbaum; David Antin’s talk poems; “Not a Prayer,” by Heather McHugh; “A Poem Under the Influence,” by David Trinidad; Paterson, by William Carlos Williams; Iovis, by Anne Waldman; Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein; The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché; The California Poem and The Book of Jon, by Eleni Sikelianos; Plot, by Claudia Rankine; Deepstep Come Shining, by C. D. Wright; “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” by John Ashbery; Jane, by Maggie Nelson.

• The ALR’s poetry editor Jaya Savige takes a look at Australian literature and calls the publication of Philip Mead’s Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry a significant event for Australian poetry criticism. As of now, the book isn’t available for purchase in the US.

img/ Heidi Norton

The grim history of the twentieth century – something Brahms or Franck could never have foreseen, to say nothing of Matthew Arnold or Charles O’Connell – played its part as well both in discrediting the idea of redemptive culture and in undermining the authority of its adherents. The literary critic George Steiner, one such adherent, after a lifetime devoted (in his words) to “the worship – the word is hardly exaggerated – of the classic,” and to the propagation of the faith, found himself baffled by the example of the culture-loving Germans of the mid-twentieth century, “who sang Schubert in the evening and tortured in the morning.” “I’m going to the end of my life,” he confessed unhappily, “haunted more and more by the question, ‘Why did the humanities not humanize?’ I don’t have an answer.” But that is because the question – being the product of Arnoldian art religion – turned out to be wrong. It is all too obvious by now that teaching people that their love of Schubert makes them better people teaches them little more than self-regard. There are better reasons to cherish art.

Music in the nineteenth century, Richard Taruskin.

Spending the next few weeks in New York and Boston. Regular posting will return late August.

Low-hanging fruit:

• Rae Armantrout’s “Errands” in the New Yorker.  If you haven’t yet, check out her collection Versed, which won this year’s Pulitzer.
• Frederick Seidel watches 4th of July fireworks off the Hudson in “Downtown.” Independence Day poetry likely reached its acme with Elizabeth Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” though – which manages to capture the celebratory pomp of the holiday as well as a reticence to embrace it. Bishop hears the parade, muted through her library window:
  

  On the east steps the Air Force Band
  in uniforms of Air Force blue
  is playing hard and loud, but – queer –
  the music doesn’t quite come through.

• Also in the New Yorker: a former poetry teacher of mine, Catherine Bowman, with “The Sink.”
• Karl Kirchwey, “Wissahickon Schist” in Slate.

William Stanley Merwin has been named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, taking the reins over from Kay Ryan.  He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, most recently for The Shadow of Sirius.

A few years back, I was scheduled to eat lunch with the man, but didn’t for some awesomly memorable reason. Maybe I had to floss my cat, or double-booked with another classic American poet? Whatever it was, my excuse was clearly important. In lieu of an acceptance speech, imagine Merwin reciting the poem “Thanks” in his stern, New England baritone:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Collected in Migration: New & Selected Poems.

img/Yossi Milo Gallery