Five more books mini-reviewed: two lit award-longlisted titles and three novels

As we enter the final month of 2014, I still have nearly four dozen reviews left to write if I am going to meet my goal of writing something about every 2014 US release that I read.  There are some quality works in this set of five mini-reviews, works that perhaps deserve more space.  Then again, there is a challenge to crystallizing thoughts into 3-5 sentences, something that hopefully readers here can appreciate, maybe as they glance at posts like this for inspiration for holiday book purchases.

J.M. McDermott, Maze

Mazes, or perhaps labyrinths would be a more fitting synonym for what transpires in McDermott's latest novel, too often are, in the minds of many readers at least, more about solving and less about coming to terms with the oft-inexplicable nature of them.  McDermott does not set out to "solve" anything in this wonderfully complex and multilayered story of people (or machines, or beings, etc.) caught up in a labyrinth that moves through mythological, scientific, and metaphysical realms, leaving the reader to sort through what may or may not be of paramount importance here.  McDermott's prose is more than up to the task of conveying this sense of semantical and plot confusion and while there are few, if any, mysteries solved by the novel's end, the journey is more than worth the effort necessary in order to grasp the multitude of meanings and concepts that McDermott packs into this novel.

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (2014 National Book Award-longlisted title for Fiction)

The nine stories in McCracken's latest title contain some of the more moving moments of any short story collection that I have read this year.  McCracken's characters go through times of trial and suffering and their coping strategies, while not perfect, are so familiar and yet worded in such a pitch-perfect fashion that it is easy for the reader to empathize with their plights.  Her deft turns of phrase, coupled with these deep, penetrating looks into human reactions to suffering and self-doubt make Thunderstruck & Other Stories one of the more memorable short fiction collections in a year chock full of excellent collections by new and established masters of the short story form.

Lucius Shepard, Beautiful Blood

This year bore the sad news of the passing of Lucius Shepard.  A talented SF writer, his prose, especially in his short fiction, was some of the best genre writing I have ever read.  Yet there are wide swathes of his fiction with which I am unfamiliar, including the dragon Griaule tales, the setting of which his posthumous novel Beautiful Blood takes place.  Beautiful Blood was excellently-written, yet my unfamiliarity with the other Griaule tales made for a sometimes-confusing moments.  Yet the original takes on dragons and cities near them ultimately made for an enjoyable, rewarding reading experience.  Certainly a novel that fans of Shepard's previous writing will want to read.

Josh Weil, The Great Glass Sea

Weil's debut novel, set in an alternate present-day, post-Communist Russia, begins with an audacious SFish public project that sounds similar to similarly outlandish Soviet projects:  the utilization of giant reflective space mirrors in order to create near-continuous daylight in a remote Russian town.  While the concept may sound ridiculous, Weil manages to make it just plausible enough (it helps that he does a good job with developing characters and their reactions to this project) that it is easy for the reader to suspend disbelief.  Yet there are times where the action falters and the dialogue lags, making The Great Glass Sea a flawed yet mostly enjoyable first effort.

Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus (2014 National Book Award-longlisted title for Poetry)

Readers familiar with the New Testament accounts of the Resurrection should immediately recognize the scene hinted at in the title and eponymous poem.  Reece's poetry collection revolves around a middle-aged Episcopal priest who during his travels across the globe encounters a similar range of sinners and sufferers to what Jesus might have embraced both before and following his crucifixion.  Reece's poems contain a subtlety of voice and shades of meaning that contrast excellently with his in-depth exploration of faith in the midst of suffering and the search for understanding.  The Road to Emmaus I thought would have made for an excellent choice for the National Book Award shortlist and while it was not chosen, it certainly is one of the better poetry collections that I have read in recent years.

Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion

I will never contain the whole of it, he said,
the mirror too small for the long-necked lamp
floating swanlike near the angle of incidence.
Never, he said, stepping back from the lectern

and long-necked lamp, the mirror he held too small
for the swan.  To reflect the object entirely,
he said, stepping back to the lectern,
the glass must be half the source's height.

To reflect the object entirely – the lamp,
or a swan, or my figure before you – 
the glass must be half the source's height.
Unlike thought, which easily triples the whole.

– from "On Reflection," p. 60

Although for generations of benighted English/literature students he is most well-known for his thesaurus, Peter Mark Roget was a multi-talented person of science who also invented the slide rule and who wrote an 1824 paper on the illusion of forward-moving wheel spokes seeming to spin backwards.  It is this illusion of backwards forwardness that is both the title and major theme of Linda Bierds' 2014 National Book Award-longlisted poetry collection, Roget's Illusion.

Divided into three parts, each prefaced with a "Roget's Illusion," the majority of the poems in Roget's Illusion are akin to that found in the excerpt from "On Reflection" quoted above.  Breaking down the beginning half to "On Reflection," we encounter a narrator who is convinced that he is unable to position things just so in order to capture an image of the whole in a reflection.  The mirror, apparently "too small" for the swan-like lamp casting light, is itself a reflection, as seen in the second stanza, where the lamp has apparently become the swan, and the reflection/mirror has to be half the source's height in order for it to work.  But then there is another element, thought, that comes into play and which destroys and amplifies the reflection/illusion through its treple quality.  If the mirror, as the narrator goes on to claim, is "bound by harmony," then what is thought but a transformative quality that reflects back perceptions and appearances, until it is lost in the impossibility of never quite being able to "contain the whole of it."

This is a deceptively complex series of metaphors transpiring within the simplicity of a lamp, an image, and a source.  Utilizing Roget's theorems on distance and light casting illusive images, Bierds here has made that disorienting sense of backwards forwardness palpable, eloquently presenting the artifice before the trick, catching us thinking of it all, only for us to complete the illusion in its totality in our minds.  Yet despite seeing just how it all unfolds, despite it all being explained to us, there is still magic in the event.  There is a similar quality to discussing Bierds' mechanics here, as she lays out her approach for the reader to discern, yet in considering the wires and framework, the reader still gets caught up in the thrill of the unfolding image, seeming spinning backwards as it moves forward in poetic space.

Although this seemingly paradoxical quality is explored in several of Bierds' other poems, they are not refracted in the same fashion.  Take for instance "Details Depicted:  Insect and Hair," which begins with these lines:

In the prison of an unnamed century,
on paper coarse as sackcloth,
someone has written No reason exists 
and the innocency of my actings
in the midst of the late revolutions. 
Then stopped – and circled two perfect artifacts,
caught years before in the damp plup:
in the margin beside his curving s, 
a single fly wing, dried to a gauze,
and far down the page, an arc of amber beard hair. (p. 73)

Here is another natural object, a single fly wing, to serve as a point of comparison to another intruder, a strand of amber beard hair.  As the narrator continues to write his political tract, he circles back to that singular wing and that solitary hair, seeing in their placement a sort of transcendence of order.  It is this illusion of placement, of how chance is turned into an engine of order, that creates the illusory effect here.  There is a slight echo of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" here, at least in the sense of how choice's tryanny comes to hold sway over us all and how we often wish it were not so, but Bierds' take centers more on the illusion of that control, as the political screeds embedded here serve as a reminder of how ethereal it all really is if we were but to provide a Johnsonian kick to this metaphorical rock.

These two poems serve as exemplars of Bierds' concerns and her ability to manipulate image and rhetoric to create these illusions.  The rest of the collection is largely on par with these two and it was a delight to consider each of them at length.  Roget's Illusion is a powerful collection, one that can surprise readers with its depth and artifice, and it certainly is well-deserving of its place on this year's Poetry longlist.

National Book Awards longlist for Poetry

Day two of the four-day rollout for the National Book Awards longlist is for Poetry.  Being a long-time reader of poetry, I already owned one of the longlisted titles (Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night) and have since bought two others.  Likely will own the majority, if not all, of the longlisted titles before the shortlist is revealed in mid-October.  Certainly will review at least three of the titles before then, however, and maybe as many as 6-7.  Here's the longlist of 10 poetry titles:


Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion 

Brian Blanchfield, A Several World

Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night 

Edward Hirsch,  Gabriel:  A Poem

Fanny Howe, Second Childhood

Maureen N. McLane, This Blue

Fred Moten, The Feel Trio

Claudia Rankine, Citizen:  An American Lyric

Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus

Mark Strand, Collected Poems


Based on the three I've already read, some enjoyable titles for those who are curious about contemporary American poetry.  Will likely have reviews up in the next 48 hours for the Bierds and Reece.

Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated 
pilgrims rather than wanderers:

– From "Parable," p. 6 iPad iBooks e-edition

There is a silencing quality to night that dims the day's bright nights and muffles its outlandish roars.  The night is for lovers, or for the inconsolable, or those feverish saints and melancholy sinners.  It is where we lose ourselves and find ourselves again.  In Louise Glück's newest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, all of these nocturnal attributes and more are explored in wry, sometimes detached, poems that combine to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

In the opening poem, "Parable," the narrator muses on the Franciscan call to "divest[ing] ourselves of worldly goods."  As we meditate on this, she goes on, the "word" becomes "translated as a dream," something desired and yet not quite obtainable, while through it all, the weather shifts, with snow (and its blanketing quality) and rain (with its purifying quality) washes over these erstwhile pilgrims, changing them, making for them a purpose they had sought after, albeit one they had not expected. 

This mingling of the natural and the mental, of image and desire, continues in the next poem, an adventure, where the night takes on yet another quality, that of passions and of death:

I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death,
thought why this landscape was so conventional
I could not say.

– from "An Adventure," (p. 7)

The visions of this poem, with flesh evaporating into mist, of objects fading into insubstantial shadows, are haunting, yet here, like in other poems in Faithful and Virtuous Night, it is a sense of things lurking on the edges of our personal horizons rather than anything that can be perceived directly.  Silence lies at the heart of Glück's poems, and at the end of the eponymous "Faithful and Virtuous Night," she lays out one of the principal themes of this collection:

I think here I will leave you.  It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings. (p. 16)

This theme of indefinite, perhaps infinite, endings to stories is played out over and over again in various iterations.  In one, it is likened to a religious ceremony in which the congregation's standing about waiting is the entire point of the ceremony, that beholding is the key, not any of the ancillary activities surrounding this.  In another, through the guise of a writer whose many lauded novels were much alike each other, the complacency that surrounds disguised suffering is the key to understanding the reflection of nature in art, of suffering encapsulated in formalized artifice.  And so it goes until this chilling question is raised in "The Story of a Day":

But if the essence of time is change,
how can anything become nothing?
This was the question I asked myself. (p. 54)

The overall effect of these images, carefully embedded throughout the collection, is to create a sense of space, where answers die and contemplation of inscrutable life begins.  Night is the perfect metaphor for this and Faithful and Virtuous Night shows Glück in full mastery of image and metaphor.  It certainly is a poetry well worth reading for any who have any love at all for the poetic genre.

David Grossman, Falling Out of Time

Some of the most powerful writing can be born out of suffering and deep personal grief and anguish.  In 2006, Israeli writer/poet David Grossman learned that his son had died while fighting in the Second Lebanon War.  In response, he wrote a book, Falling Out of Time, that combines elements of drama and poetry to tell of a father's grief and his journey to discover his fallen son yet once more.

Falling Out of Time possesses a central narrative, that of the grieving father's search for something, anything, that will bring at least some semblance of his dead son to life again, and through the media of poetry and drama, lines, beautiful as they may be, that otherwise might be lost in a more traditional series of meditative poems gain a greater poignancy in this more unified verse-prose-drama.  Below is a scene taken from early in the story, as the father and mother realize that their son's death may have driven a stake through their own relationship:

MAN: 

I can remember
you without
his noneness – your innocent,
hopeful smile – and I can remember
myself without his noneness.  But not
him.  Strange:  him
without his noneness, I can no longer
remember.  And as time goes by
it starts to seem as though
even when he was,
there were signs
of his noneness. 

WOMAN: 

Sometimes, you know,
I miss
that ravaged,
bloody
she.
Sometimes I believe her
more than I believe
myself. 

MAN: 

She is the reason I take
my life
in your hands and ask
you a question
I myself
do not understand:
Will you go with me?
There –
to him? 

WOMAN: 

That night I thought:
Now we will separate:  We cannot live
together any longer.  When I tell you
yes,
you will embrace
the no, embrace
the empty space
of him.  (pp. 20-21 iPad iBooks e-edition, translated by Jessica Cohen)

Grossman's distillation of grief into such short, sharp lines benefits greatly from the recasting of the Man's grief into dramatic poetry.  There are no wasted lines, nothing but raw, visceral emotion behind his confession of his loss of his son to "noneness."  Equally, the Woman's realization that their son's death has driven a wedge between them is said succinctly and yet with great emotion behind those few words.

And yet Falling Out of Time is much more than the separations caused by death.  As the father/Man sets out to discover answers, he becomes in his walking a symbol of the peripatetic traveler, that stock character of so many classical tales.  But wanderers are not always alone and his particular case, he finds gathered around them other grief-driven pilgrims to places to which they do not comprehend.  One such companion is a centaur who has tried to capture his grief in words and has found those words to fail:

CENTAUR:  You're back.  Finally.  I was beginning to think you'd never...that I'd scared you off.  Look, I was thinking:  You and I, we're an odd couple, aren't we?  Think about it:  I've been unable to write for years, haven't produced even one word, and you – it turns out – can write, or rather transcribe, as much as you feel like.  Whole notebooks, scrolls!  But only what other people tell you, apparently.  Only quotes, right?  Other people's chewed-up cud.  All you do is jot it down with a pen stroke here, a scribble there...Am I right?  Not even a single word that's really yours?  Yeah?  Not even one letter?  That's what I thought.  What can I say, we're quite a pair.  Write this down then, please.  Quickly, before it gets away: 

And inside my head there's a constant war comma the waspskeep humming colon what good would it do if you wrotequestion mark what would you addto the world if you imagined questionmark and if you reallymust comma then just writefacts comma whatelse is there to sayquestion mark write themdown and shut upforever colon atsuch and such time comma inthis and that place comma my soncomma my old child comma agedeleven and a halfperiod the boyis gone period (pp. 67-68 iBooks e-edition)

In this passage, Grossman expands the grief, makes it more universal without ever reducing its intimate, personal pain.  And as the wandering man/father continues his journey, he comes upon a profound realization, one that does not lessen his sorrow but it does at least provide an understanding he did not realize he was seeking among the other understandings he has partially grasped by story's end.

Falling Out of Time moves the reader because Grossman's dialogues within the poetic stanzas feels both realistic and something more profound than the banalities we often utter when expressing our (sometimes half-hearted) words of condolence.  The imagery evoked is simple, but its directness cuts away at our protective layers that shield us from strong emotion, leaving the reader bare and receptive for the raw power of the dramatic poetry.  The result is one of those narrative poems that show that even today, long after many have presumed the poem to have lost its power to move souls, that poetry can tell a story even more effectively than prose and that in its imagery and expressions, meanings can be found that do not require anything more than empathy for them to work their wonders upon our hearts and souls.

Kofi Awoonor, The Promise of Hope

The fact of our lives,
full of achievements
vilification, praise
or contempt from those
who surely do not measure
eternity becomes a quotation
posted on the billboard of a single life.
Passions are exhausted
love, renewed again
and again
to satisfy a basic longing,
journeys made, departures recorded
deaths foretold again
and again 

– from "What More Can I Give?", p. 23

The late Ghanian poet Kofi Awoonor, who died at the hands of terrorists in Kenya in September 2013, is perhaps one of Africa's most celebrated poets.  This collection of a half-century of verse, The Promise of Hope:  New and Selected Poems 1964-2013, was planned before his murder and yet there is a sense of death lurking in his most-recent poems.  But it would be a mistake to construe this as being a wholly negative affair, as Awoonor's poems here address a wide spectrum of human emotions and reactions to that nebulous thing called hope.

The quote above captures this multifaceted quality excellently.  From the "facts of our lives" being vilified or praised by those who do not merit the poet's consideration to the renewal of exhausted passions, all leading to deaths foretold again, quite a lot of emotional ground is covered in one stanza of a poem that concludes:

I did not know it will return
this crushing urge to sing
only sorrow songs;
the urge to visit again
the last recesses of pain
pluck that lingering hair with a wince.
how long shall my God
linger in a brass pan
the offertory unreceived? (p. 24)

This sorrowful conclusion, however it might represent the dominant theme of his 2013 era poetry, does not capture the width or breadth of Awoonor's poetry.  The interesting thing about The Promise of Hope is that unlike most anthologies of a single poet's work, it does not begin in 1964 and conclude with the 2013 poems.  Instead, it operates in reverse, as we see the poet through younger, more fiery selves, concluding with a poet beginning to find his voice.  It is an unusual choice, but it works very well here, as the downbeat quality of his last poems is offset by the outraged optimism of the younger Awoonor.  Below is a sample from the second-presented section,  1992's "Latin American & Caribbean Cookbook," the last two stanzas from "Of Home and Sea I Already Sang":

Let the dream not die, master;
Let the dove coo at dawn again,
Let the masthead rear its head
out of the storm
and share the night with me on this sea.
Let me sing the song you gave me. 

Before death comes, master,
Let me dance to the drums you gave me.
Let me sit in the warmth of the fire
of the only native land you gave me. (pp. 43-44)

While the death element is still present (the poem references an 1980s American military shooting down of an Iranian civilian plane), there is more of a pleading tone, of not letting a dream not, of permitting a song given to be sung.  It is more plaintive than the latter poems, but even within this somewhat-begging note, there is a sense of hope burning under the surface, a sense that the other poems in the 1992 collection provide, mostly through the guise of outrage over socio-political injustices, many of them perpetrated by the United States.

From 1978's "The House by the Sea" comes this poem written in memory of Henoga Vinoko Akpalu, called appropriately enough "For Henoga Vinoko Akpalu":

You said once
You said the tear
was the pear of the soul
food for gods at sacrifice
Huge now the platter
like the music of crumbling walls
fools and poets
are the same mother's children. 

I fled to America
in blonde pleasures
reliving my cosmopolitan
nay international dreams
new, new man, my voice
my manners
so I lost the faculty
of defecation
with the miracle of the wild lily 

I sailed my own ship
to Byzantium to see the youth
for elders in the reversal
A young man Hasidic to his skull-cap
eyed me nervously
mistaking me I hope for my beard
for a panther.  So I march now
with the armies of Caesar on Rome
a companion now of Hannibal
freshly out of Africa ex Africa aliquidsemper elephantes
for the alps the alps
Europe the Sartrean negritude
and Dantesque lower region
My Africa the bullshit concentric
     circle
For a song please vomit Blood
in Capetown, murder me Vorster
and Allende in Santiago
For a dance give me Christ Castro's
     head since the Baptist died
of American bullet in Bolivia 

Who said the work of man is not done (pp. 151-152)

Here the post-colonialist voice is strongest, here comparison of the US to Byzantium, with its decadent, hollow nod to multi-lingual gatherings, is constructed.  Awoonor mixes in ancient Roman, medieval Italian, and modern 20th century events to create an arresting image of a middle-aged man seeing that in order for a dream to be achieved, a lot of work and suffering lay ahead.  This is perhaps one of the more biting poems in the collection, but it does represent a way station along Awoonor's journey, via verse, from a frustrated man to an elder who has come to accept his mortality even before it was violently taken from him at a Nairobi shopping mall.  It is fitting to stop here and let the reader ponder just how this "promise of hope" has driven the poet over his last fifty years of life.  For myself, it was a very moving and excellently-constructed collection, full of memorable stanzas and poems.

Poetry is my drug of choice when I get overstimulated on life

I'm perhaps by nature slightly extroverted, needing social stimulation in order to feel "alive" and the experience of new situations often is quasi-intoxicating (I frequently babble and chatter like a drunken squirrel when I meet someone new who interests me).  But there are those times where the "feedback" can be too much, leaving me with a sense that others' emotional states, especially stress-related ones, are "reverbing" within me, leaving me with a quickened heart rate and more irritability than usual.

This has been the case in recent days, getting acclimated to waking up 5-6 hours earlier than before and working 9-14 hours for 7 days/week at two jobs through the end of May.  I like the new experiences, getting to know more students, but after a while of dealing with dozens of raw emotions from middle school students, I feel the need for a bit of quiet, for repose.

I frequently turn to poetry, not prose, for these situations.  And as luck would have it, I was reading some of Iranian writer Sohrab Sepehri's poetry (his posthumous collection, The Oasis of Now, was a runner-up for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry) tonight when I came across these lines from "The Surah of Observation" (translated by Karim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati):

I said,

"He who sees the garden in the memory of wood
will forever feel the torment of love like a gentle breeze."

"He who makes friends with the birds flying in the sky
will have the calmest sleep on earth."

"He who plucks light from the branches of the tree of Time
can open every window with just a sigh."

And with those few lines, written decades ago, I feel as though there is something to consider here that relates directly to dealing with life's frustrations and desires.  It too is intoxicating, but more in a personal, spiritual sense.

And here is a lovely poem by Jaroslav Seifert that I enjoyed reading today

This is from the collection The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert and is taken from the publisher's website.  This is a fragment of the poem "Transformations," with the translation by Edward Osers:

A lad changed to a shrub in spring,
the shrub into a shepherd boy,
A fine hair to a lyre string,
snow into snow on hair piled high.

And words turn into question signs,
wisdom and fame to old-age lines,
and strings revert to finest hair,
the boy's transformed into a poet
the poet is transformed once more,
becomes the shrub by which he slept
when he loved beauty till he wept.

Whoever falls in love with beauty
will love it to his dying day,
stagger toward it aimlessly,
beauty has feet of charm and grace
in sandals delicate as lace.

 Here Seifert utilizes the metaphor of the shrub in spring (and later an old stick) to discuss the changes from callow youth to something perhaps a bit more mature but certainly not in a pejorative fashion.  As I'm turning 40 later this year, I found myself particularly drawn to the third stanza (the final two are not quoted here and can be read by clicking on the link above) and the discussion of beauty within this concept of the aging boy/poet.

Having finished The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert this afternoon, I cannot help but think he is one of the best 20th century poets, even in translation, and that his 1984 Nobel was well-deserved.

I started reading Kofi Awoonor's posthumous collection, The Promise of Hope, when this poem caught my attention

Although it'll be another 2-3 months before I begin the Literary World Cup posts, I have been busy ordering some books to be read/reviewed as part of this.  One of them, a posthumous poetry collection by the Ghanaian poet/diplomat Kofi Awoonor (who tragically died in the September 2013 terrorist attack in Nairobi, Kenya), called The Promise of Hope:  New and Selected Poems, 1964-2013, was just released this month.  As I was reading the prefatory material, one poem of his, "Songs of Sorrow," was singled out for being his most famous.  So turning toward the back of the book, I started reading it. 

What I found was a very poignant poem (you can read the full poem here).  This stanza in particular caught my attention:

My people, I have been somewhere
If I turn here, the rain beats me
If I turn there the sun burns me
The firewood of this world
Is for only those who can take heart
That is why not all can gather it.
The world is not good for anybody
But you are so happy with your fate;
Alas! the travelers are back
All covered with debt.

So much is contained within a few verses that I believe I will need to re-read and consider this poem at length over a period of days before I could even begin to comment on the themes/images present.  Truly a powerful poem.

Can you name some poets whose lines have inspired book titles?

Late Sunday night/Monday morning on Twitter, I was quoting lines from several poems by William Butler Yeats, when it occurred to me that lines from "Easter 1916" (a terrible beauty is born); "The Second Coming" (things fall apart; the centre cannot hold); and "Sailing to Byzantium" (That is no country for old men) have inspired several memorable book titles.

I found myself musing tonight on my drive back home from work on what other poems have inspired book titles.  If you can think of a poet, ancient or modern does not matter, whose lines provided titles for books, would you please list them below?  It'd be interesting to see what titles we recall collectively after this.

Of the three original genres, I find myself thinking more and more on poetry

Perhaps I should do a regular feature on poetry, maybe on Fridays.  Or maybe I should just contemplate it and wait to see what poems have fermented my mind with their symbolic images and music.  Certainly wouldn't hurt to ask, if just this second once, for others to list their favorite poems, like I did nearly three years ago.

Here is one that I recently read in translation, by Czech writer (and Nobel laureate) Jaroslav Seifert (translation by Ewald Osers):

Parting 

So foolish are the hearts of many women,
of beautiful and ugly ones alike,
their footprints are not easy to distinguish
in the sands of your memory.

But what you minded most
at our final parting
was that in my poor rags
– but was it not the costume of a beggar? – 
you couldn't see your tears as in a suit of armour.  

Goodbye, you swarm of flies
which buzzed into my dreams,
goodbye, my quiet evenings and
my cigarette case with the engraved rosette!

Opening the door I heard the screams
of angels hurtling down to hell.

Any favorites you'd like to share?

This short poem by Nobel Prize-winning poet Jaroslav Seifert contains a lot of truth, no?

This poem was translated by Ewald Osers:

Philosophy 

Remember the wise philosophers:
Life is but a moment.
And yet whenever we waited for our girlfriends
it was an eternity.

Now I find myself remembering those times of my youth when I would wait anxiously for a "yes" or "no," or even more dreadfully, for that "maybe" to come out of their mouths.  Funny how time runs so differently when the façades of eros are involved...

A few thoughts on Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen's "Os Navegadores"

Eles habitam entre um mastro e o vento. 

Têm as mãos brancas de sal
E os ombros vermelhos de sol. 

Os espantados peixes se aproximam
Com olhos de gelatina. 

O mar manda florir seus roseirais de espuma. 

No oceano infinito
Estão detidos num barco
E o barco tem um destino
Que os astros altos indicam.

They live between a mast and the wind.

They have salt-whitened hands
And shoulders reddened by the sun.

The frightened fish approach
With gelatin eyes.

The sea sends its rosebushes of foam.

In the infinite ocean
They are held on a boat
And the boat has a destination
Which the stars on high indicate.

Any errors in the English translation are my own.  I just finished reading Portuguese poet/writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen's Mar, an anthology of her poetry that focuses on the sea and its real and metaphorical impact on people.  In reading "Os Navegadores" ("The Navigators"), I found myself thinking of old dreams, dreams of the wind, sea, and stars, of venturing forth into the unknown, surprising other life just as our ancestors were surprised in turn at what they discovered.  The imagery of the "salt-whitened hands" and "shoulders reddened by the sun" create a physical "realness" against the more ethereal "rosebushes of foam."  Add to this the more stock connections of ocean/stars being symbols of destiny/destination and this is a poem that appeals to the more Romantic side of me.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur

'Now never again     from northern wars
shall Arthur enter     this island realm,
nor Lancelot du Lake    love remembering
to thy tryst return!     Time is changing;
the West waning,     a wind rising
in the waxing East.     The world falters.
New tides are running     in the narrow waters.'

– from Canto II, lines 144-150 (p. 32)

For nearly a millennium, ever since the fanciful writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth gained a wide audience and inspired generations of poets and prose writers to write about the Round Table, the betrayal of Mordred, the Holy Grail, the legend of King Arthur has fascinated listeners and readers alike.  No matter the medium selected for the story, the tale entrances readers who already know the basics by rote.  Its themes and tragic elements mixed with romance are not just the stuff of which dreams are made, but they are more "real" to us than even ground upon which we trod or the air which we breathe. 

I have been a fan of "The Matter of Britain" for nearly three decades now.  I have read Arthur's story in many forms, ranging from Tennyson's The Idylls of the King to Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles.  Each storyteller, great and lowly alike, have explored facets of the legends that most fascinated them, often with good results.  Therefore it was with great interest that I look forward to reading the incomplete poem that J.R.R. Tolkien left behind on the downfall of Arthur and his kingdom.  Although the unfinished poem runs only just over 950 lines divided over four complete cantos and a partial fifth, there certainly is much to admire about the poem.

Tolkien decided that alliterative verse, traditionally used in pre-Norman conquest England and other Germanic-speaking lands, best suited the tale he wanted to tell.  He stripped away most of the courtly romance, focusing instead on the final, tragic part of the Arthurian legends:  the news of Guenevere's tryst and Mordred's betrayal.  The action begins in media res, with Arthur returning from his "Eastern campaign" to surprise Mordred and his Saxon allies:

Arthur eastward     in arms purposed
his war to wage     on the wild marches,
over seas sailing     to Saxon lands,
from the Roman realm     ruin defending.
Thus the tides of time     to turn backward
and the heathen to humble,     his hope urged him,
that with harrying ships     they should hunt no more
on the shining shores     and shallow waters
of South Britain,     booty seeking.

– from Canto I, lines 1-9 (p. 17)

There is a sonorous quality to good alliterative verse, the way that "war" and "wage" rise and then on the second half-verse (the spaces denote a caesura or breath break) it descends to "wild."  There is no rhyme nor set metre, but instead a dependence upon a rhythm set by the rise and fall of words whose first syllables alliterate.  It is not a poetic form often seen in Modern English and there is a portion of the book devoted to explaining how to read this.  Being somewhat familiar with alliterative verse, primarily through some translations of Beowulf, it was easy for me to settle into the rhythm of the poem.

Rhythm is very important here in The Fall of Arthur, as Tolkien attempts to capture a bleaker, more urgent movement of forces.  Arthur here is more the hero of an edda than the king in background of the medieval romances.  He is driven, relentless in his purpose.  Time is changing, all is under assault.  This mood might remind some of the tone present in his fantasy writings and there certainly are thematic similarities, such as the passage quoted at the beginning of this review.  The west wanes, the world falters, new tides are running.  Here the struggle against the forces of Mordor finds its immediate predecessor, as The Fall of Arthur was composed sometime between 1933-1937 according to internal evidence.  And yet here are other connotations present:  the Celtic west falling before the Saxon east, the world of the Britons changing irrevocably.  Tolkien does an excellent job of foreshadowing that calamity throughout The Fall of Arthur.  Doom certainly is more present here, with religious imagery used to underscore the differences between hero and heathen:

Foes before them,     flames behind them,
ever east and onward    eager rode they,
and folk fled them     as the face of God,
till earth was empty,     and no eyes saw them,
and no ears heard them     in the endless hills,
save bird and beast     baleful haunting
the lonely lands.

–  from Canto I, lines 61-67 (p. 19)

The overall effect is a melding of the later accruals of Arthurian myth (Lancelot, however, is relegated to a relatively minor role and Gawain instead rises in importance) with the style and imagery present in Beowulf.  In some respects, The Fall of Arthur feels like a "lost" work of the 10th century that has been translated into modern English; the metaphors and imagery can apply equally to the invasions of the 5th and late 9th centuries.  It is little wonder, then, that one of Tolkien's fellow academics, R.W. Chambers, wrote to him in December 1934 saying:

"It is very great indeed... really heroic, quite apart from its value in showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English."..."You simply must finish it." (p. 10)

But yet like so much of his superior work (The Lord of the Rings I consider to be one of his lesser achievements as a writer), The Fall of Arthur tragically was left undone.  If it were complete and published during the author's lifetime, it easily could have cemented Tolkien's legacy as a writer.  Instead, he is now primarily known for a lesser-accomplished work that influenced over two generations of pulp writers to write fictions that are bereft of the soul of the original masters.  But for those who do love Arthurian tales and who do have some knowledge of the various poetic and prose compositions over the past millennium, The Fall of Arthur will certainly be a work well worth reading.  For those who are not as familiar with these works, Christopher Tolkien has provided three long essays on the poem's origins, its connections to his father's fantasy writings, and how the poem evolved during various drafts.  In addition, Tolkien's 1938 BBC radio lecture on "Anglo-Saxon Verse" is provided as a coda to the work.  Some will find these essays to enhance the work, others might find them to be less useful due to their own prior knowledge of the subject.  Regardless, The Fall of Arthur, incomplete as it is, I consider to be Tolkien's best composition and it is a shame that it was left unfinished during the final 30+ years of the author's life.

Library of America's American Poets Project

Realized this weekend when I was reshelving my Library of America books that I had forgotten to list the volumes that I own in their American Poets Project.  This ancillary series contains selections of poets, including introductory essays written by the volumes' editors that explain the context of the poems and the reasons why certain poems were selected over others, from all walks of American life over the past few centuries.  Below are the volumes currently available, with bold being books I've read, italics for unread books that I own, and plain for books I've yet to buy:

1.  Edna St. Vincent Millay:  Selected Poems
2.  Poets of World War II
3.  Karl Shapiro:  Selected Poems
4.  Walt Whitman:  Selected Poems
5.  Edgar Allan Poe:  Poems and Poetics
6.  Yvor Winters:  Selected Poems
7.  American Wits:  An Anthology of Light Verse
8.  Kenneth Fearing:  Selected Poems
9.  Muriel Rukeyser:  Selected Poems
10.  John Greenleaf Whittier:  Selected Poems
11.  John Berryman:  Selected Poems
12.  Amy Lowell:  Selected Poems
13.  William Carlos Williams:  Selected Poems
14.  Poets of the Civil War
15.  Theodore Roethke:  Selected Poems
16.  Emma Lazarus:  Selected Poems
17.  Samuel Menashe:  New and Selected Poems
18.  Edith Wharton:  Selected Poems
19.  The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
20.  A.R. Ammons:  Selected Poems
21.  Cole Porter:  Selected Lyrics
22.  Louis Zukofsky:  Selected Poems
23.  Carl Sandburg:  Selected Poems
24.  Kenneth Koch:  Selected Poems
25.  American Sonnets
26.  Anne Stevenson:  Selected Poems
27.  James Agee:  Selected Poems
28.  Poems from the Women's Movement
29.  Ira Gershwin:  Selected Lyrics
30.  Stephen Foster & Co.:  Lyrics of the First Great American Songs
31.  Stephen Crane:  Complete Poems
32.  Countee Cullen:  Collected Poems

Own 10/32, so not too bad so far.  A bit cheaper (usually $20 or less new) to acquire than the main LoA series, so I might complete this one first, considering my enduring love for poetry in its multitude of forms.  How many of these have you read in these volumes?  Thoughts on their quality/content?

2012 National Book Award finalist in Poetry: Tim Seibles, Fast Animal

I don't know what
I'm becoming:
from calm to fear
my mind moves, then
moves. Out there
is the place – streets,
storm drains, stores –
where everybody 
goes:  I point at that

then that.  There
are enemies of the world
in the world.
Know what I mean? 
I see them on TV.

– from the first two stanzas of "Later" (p. 3)

If only a single syllable could be deployed to describe Tim Seibles' 2012 National Book Award-nominated poetry collection Fast Animal, "kinetic" would be it.  Throughout the collection, the narrators are in movement, going from place to place, emotional state to emotional state, calm to fear, confusion to clarity.  The poems feel as though they would be best read in a breathless rush, perhaps with the reader herself moving about while engaged with the poems.

Seibles charts a semi-biographical voyage in these poems, beginning with this bit from "Born":

Is this 
how it begins:

a cry that
does not know

who's crying:  consciousness
filling your head (p. 7)

In this and subsequent poems, the narrators express confusion about the world in which they move.  Is it a place worthy of settling down in, or should it be upended, tossed about, made into something new?  The poems of Fast Animal do not skimp on the confusions of youth, such as this bit from "Terry Moore":

...That paperback you found, Nurse

Nadine – the way she treated her patients: (what

exactly was a blow-job     and how long would it be

till we knew?)  Our fathers were scary men – younger

than we are now – and ready to make themselves clear 

without saying anything, especially when we got too cool

to listen, too big to hear.  Did they believe in sex

the way we were starting to? (p. 14)

Seibles' poetry is simultaneously male-universal (speaking to the fears of rejection by women and worries about our bodies) and yet race-specific, when he discusses the perils and curiosities involved with interracial love in "Allison Wolff":

I can't remember Allison's voice

but the loud tap of her strapless heels

clacking down the halls is still clear.

Autumn, 1972:  Race was the elephant

sitting on everybody.  Even

as a teenager, I took the weight

as part of the weather, a sort of heavy

humidity felt inside and in the streets.

***

In so many ways, I was still a child,

though I wore my my seventeen years

like a matador's cape.

The monsters that murdered

Emmett Till – were they everywhere?

I didn't know.  I didn't know enough

to worry enough about the story

white people kept trying to tell. (pp. 49-50)

"Allison Wolff" perhaps is the most emblematic poem in Fast Animal.  Here the raw emotional state of youth is laid bare, yet coupled with "loud" images, that of the tapping of Allison's strapless heels, clacking as she moves; the "heaviness" of racism, appearing here in the guise of a humidity that pervades the soul and then wafts out into the streets to grab another.  The fear and worry here is palpable, but it is mixed with youthful yearning and confusion:  after all, what harm does a couple in love holding hands pose to any other than those who fear love itself?

Seibles, with the possible exception of Cynthia Huntington's Heavenly Bodies, is the most "personal" of the five National Book Award poetry finalists.  There are moments of triumph intermixed with more subdued moments, if not quite defeat, then rather something akin to a sigh of resignation before the struggle is resumed once again in another poem.  The poems build up one another, as themes introduced in one poem, perhaps with a question or metaphorical shrug of the shoulders, is explored further later on the collection.  The result is a collection that is much stronger than the sum of its parts.  Fast Animals, along with Susan Wheeler's Meme, might be one of the two strongest collections in this year's shortlist.  Certainly it is a collection that will be worth re-reading multiple times in the years to come.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Poetry: Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies

My grandmother lived to ninety-seven years
through cunning and fornication,
but never came to visit or to claim me.
I was found beneath a tree by a herd of wildebeests
who fed me on salt water and tears of the dead.
I endured innumerable blows inflicted by hypocrites.
I lay cast out on the ground.  No one
pitied me or looked on me with kindness.
A woman bore me and consented to have me killed.
I believe I have a human soul.
My name is Sorrow.  I fell into the earth like a seed
and grew like the grass of the fields
and I am alive today by no one's grace or will.

– from the final stanza of "Bastard's Song

Sorrow, solitude, suffering – these are things that poets utilize in their stanzas and singers express in their lyrics.  In her latest collection, Heavenly Bodies, Cynthia Huntington explores topics ancillary to the struggles that women have had over the centuries in Anglo-American (and in extension, the world, although the forms of those struggles can differ in some regards).  In poems such as "Bastard's Song," Huntington notes with some bitter irony the ways in which women have been (mis)treated through space and time:

My mother was a whore, a midget, a human sacrifice,
and a candle guttering at the top of a stair.

Yet within this callous observation is the sense of something else:  the mother as being described as these but not defined by them.  Earlier, the mother-as-"priestess of suffering" is introduced, again as a means of referencing the crone-whore-holy virgin triad in which so many women are shoehorned in cultures and their literatures.  It is a bitter world into which these women (the mother, the grandmother, and the narrator/poet) emerge:  sorrow and suffering is their subsistence, yet is not their substance, as Huntington's later poems explore.

Huntington often utilizes stark, searing images to go at the heart of certain contentious issues.  Take for instance the opening to "Meds":

Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch,
what doesn't kill me only makes me dizzy.
Pain dissolves like chalk in water,
grit on the bottom of the glass.

 In this poem, Huntington expresses eloquently the mindset and language of that unwitting junkie seeking her next high.  Pain, masked by Percocet and Percodan, together with the steroid Prednisone, become the center of the narrator's life.  The mind races, the images spill out "Razzle-dazzle razz," as a werewolf in a white suit is seen, a new friend is made, one that may destroy her.   The adjectives spill forth in a rush, creating a sense of unnatural speed and alteration of bodily rhythm, as the "mind explodes in the dark of space," doomed to a forgetfulness that leaves the narrator wanting more.

Several of the other poems in Heavenly Bodies describe characters on the wrong end of the stick, wary of tradition, pushing back against what is forbidden to them.  This sense of incipient rebellion is directly referenced in "The Judgment," which also contains elements of parental/child conflict:

Her palm raised to strike.  Do not come down
again today, or let me see you.  Do not cross
my sight, she said, to save me

from punishment, to keep herself
from hurting me.  Mad child that I was,
did I want to make her hurt me?

Huntington in this collection does not go easy on the reader.  Again and again she comes back to the images of the drug-addled, the lost, the repressed, or the rebel, finding subtle new ways to reconfigure their place in a cold, distant society that seems content to view them as lesser than what they are.  It perhaps can also be viewed as a metaphor of sorts for the general treatment of women in societies over time.  If meds are required, then obviously the woman is being "emotional" or "weaker" than a male in a similar situation would be.  If there are rules, those rulebreakers, like the grandmother in the first quote from "Bastard's Song," will be seen as little more than whores or sluts, largely deprived of true reasoning faculty. 

Needless to say, Huntington does not subscribe to these beliefs.  Her "heavenly bodies" are those women who are strong when others might find them to be weak, "sinners" whose "sin" is merely the rejection of that which degrades them.  These elements run throughout her poems, making Heavenly Bodies the most thematically unified of the four National Book Award Poetry finalists that I have read.  Yet despite this, there are times where the metaphors are a bit too direct, lacking a necessary subtlety that would imbue her poems with even more depths of meaning and possibilities.  Although this is a minor complaint, it does make it difficult to view Heavenly Bodies as being as uniformly excellent as Susan Wheeler's Meme or Alan Shapiro's Night at the Republic.  Yet even despite this, Heavenly Bodies is a collection that most readers could re-read multiple times, taking something new from it each time. 

2012 National Book Award finalist in Poetry: Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic

Only the edge
is visible of the tightly spooled
white miles
of what is soon
to be the torn-off-
inch-by-inch receipts,
and the beam of green light in the black glass
of the self-scanner
drifts free in the space that is the sum
of the cost of all the items that tonight
won't cross its path.

– second stanza from "Supermarket"

Poetry, for myself at least, is more than just an ode to a Grecian urn or a sonnet rhapsodizing on whether or not a mistress's eyes are anything like the sun.  Poetry, at least that produced by an adept, can transform the mundane into something profound and even frightening.  It is one thing to take the splash of water from the shower head and create a sensory buffet of metaphors and similes to describe the emotional state of the person taking a shower; it is a very different thing to take an ATM transaction and create something memorable from it.

In his latest collection, Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro does just that.  His poems touch those hidden recesses in our minds, shedding light upon the crevices where we have those passing thoughts at 2 AM about that lonely street light shining above a deserted basketball courtyard or those crumbling gas station bathrooms, where the mold sometimes seems to overpower in smell even the most foul of human waste residue.  Take for instance that excerpt from "Supermarket."  There is a confluence of human traffic and impersonal produce within such buildings.  Where Allen Ginsberg could find Walt Whitman stalking its aisles, eying the meat (and the grocery boys), Shapiro finds poetry within the hail of torn, discarded receipts, the green lights of the scanners, with registers that are "too precise" and "too intricate to feel."  It is, perhaps, "[a] paradise of absence," where the imprecisions of humanity come into direct contact with the cold, unfeeling exactitude of machines.

What world is this in which we live where the glow of the phosphorescent lights and LED screens have become our moon and stars?  That is the sort of question that Shapiro explores in his poetry.  He finds a semblance of eternity within a barbershop:

Eternity is the spiral up the pole
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday's Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting.

– first lines from "Barbershop"

The association of eternity with the antiquated tools of a barbershop, itself a relic of a neighborly past that is fading in our consumerist "stylist" culture, works on several levels.  First is the visual power of Shapiro's lines, as the tools of the barbershop, itself a cutter of strands that any of the Fates might appreciate,  serve to remind the audience of the fleetingness of our own conceptions of "eternity."  Then there is the metaphor of the "swept floor," where all of the cut hair (time) has fallen, only to be gathered up and disposed of in a bin.  Beauty fades or is altered through these passages of time and hair, until another replaces the customer in the chair.  "Barbershop" is one of the more haunting poems in Night of the Republic, as there is much that could be gleaned from re-reading its two pages, most of that leading to disturbing thoughts about the ephemeral nature of ourselves and our desires.

This sense of a sweeping time that gathers us in only to dispel us is echoed in the poem "The Family":

Three million years ago, three barefoot people – 
A father and mother and a little child – 
Were walking close together in moist ash.

– First stanza from "The Family"

Readers familiar with the discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa by the Leakeys know what is being alluded to here.  Who has not seen the traces of long-dead beings and wondered what traces that they themselves might leave behind (a grave, a mausoleum, a pyramid?) for succeeding generations to ponder?  What ever happened to that ancient family?  Did they escape the volcano's eruption?  Were they made a meal for fearsome carnivores?  Or did they survive to give birth to the most complex and neurotic omnivores of our day?  Shapiro's poems provoke several questions about ourselves, our identities, and how we relate to the world around us; he is not interested in providing possible answers or solutions.

Night of the Republic is a subtle collection.  It sneaks past our guarded selves, forcing us to consider the questions that underlie something as "ordinary" as a supermarket or a barbershop.  Shapiro's verses are sharp, while seeming to be effortless.  The metaphors created by the placement of concrete items (such as a gas station bathroom) in the midst of his ruminations are mostly fully-realized, with few that ring false.  Night of the Republic is a strong collection, one of the best in this year's National Book Award poetry shortlist, and it certainly is deserving of multiple readings in the years to come.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Poetry: David Ferry, Bewilderment

Then, truly, wretched Dido, overwhelmed
By knowledge of the fate that has come upon her,
Prays for death; she is weary of looking at
The overarching sky.  And to make sure
that what has been begun will be completed
And that she will depart from the light, she saw
As she set out her ritual offerings
Upon the incense-burning altars, how – 
The horror! – the holy water darkened and
The wine was changed to an excremental slime.

– From "Dido in Despair," translation of Aeneid, IV, lines 450-473 (p. 40)

Translation is a difficult art as I have come to know over these past few years as an occasional freelance translator.  The rhythms differ from tongue to tongue, as idiomatic expressions do not traverse freely from idiom to idiom.  This is doubly true when it comes to poetry.  Good translators will not be afraid to "break" the structure of a poem composed in another language in order to do what Humpty Dumpty's would-be repairman could not:  to put it all back together again, the "yolk" now housed in a new form.

Acclaimed poet-translator David Ferry's latest collection, Bewilderment, is an odd collection, in that the author's poems on the experiences of advanced age (he is now 88 years old) and his various translations from the Latin verse of Horace, Marcial, and Vergil often seem to clash in terms of content and even form.  As I read through this collection, I kept trying to understand why the poet's verses appear next to the translator's renderings with such frequent interminglings.

When considered separately, the translations perhaps are slightly stronger than the original verses.  In reading the excerpts published within Bewilderment of his forthcoming verse translation of Vergil's Aeneid, I found his translations to highlight the emotional impact of such scenes as that of Dido's impending demise over her despair of Aeneas' departure from Carthage.  The images are generally faithful to those of the Latin original (which I consulted before re-reading Ferry's verse translation), although the imagery does change curiously on occasion.  One such example would be the changing of the wine, which is "latices nigrescere sacros fusaque in obscenum se vertere vina cruorem" in the original.  Ferry's "excremental slime," while evoking the scatalogical or the horrors of certain natural excretions, does not fully capture the literal bloodiness of this change as "the sacred water darkens, pouring out obscenely, changing into gory wine [my near-literal translation]."  Yet this is one of the few occasions where Ferry's departure from the imagery of the Latin original is noticeable (not to mention questionable, at least for this particular image); otherwise, he eloquently captures the spirit of the original verses.

Ferry's original compositions, such as "Soul," contain some eloquent lines:

What am I doing inside this old man's body?
I feel like I'm the insides of a lobster,
All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic
Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment,
And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what,
God knows, vague memories of friends, and what
They said last night, and seeing, outside of myself, (p. 7)

Here the poet lays forth his bewilderment over his life, his need to confront the development that he is now old, that he is confused, trying to recall what memories he has of life, food, friendship, and love.  Ferry's images and metaphors ring true in this poem and in several others like it, for they address directly those life questions that we have had at various points of our existences.  Yet at times the free verse is a bit too formal in feel, as those Ferry trusts not his metaphors and images to be unbound.  When working with classical motifs, this is acceptable, but there were a few times were I sensed that too heavy of a hand was placed upon some of these poems, that perhaps they were stuffed into models too strait for comfort.

This is not so much a condemnation of the poet (or the translator) as it is an acknowledgement that there was this sense of a missed opportunity in places to take greater risks and thus "free" the poetic metaphors and images to be more daring, original works, unconstrained by conventions or expectations.  Bewilderment is a good collection, but it is not an excellent one and in comparison to other National Book Award poetry finalists, it perhaps suffers due to its perceived shackling to older conventions.