Review: Zoland Poetry
From American Book Review, v 28 #5, July 2007
Why another poetry anthology? The question hangs over the inaugural issue of Zoland Poetry, a new annual from New Hampshire independent house Steerforth Press, like a tacit rebuke. Bookstore poetry sections are clotted with anthologies of every stripe, and the market for poetry being presumably a zero-sum game, the advent of another entry into the tightly-packed shelves bears the weight of self-justification. Any modestly attentive and industrious reader of poetry, a rare enough creature to begin with, must sometimes feel the urge to throw her hands in the air and flee to the relative safety of the thrillers.
Happily, Zoland Poetry stands a much better than average chance of luring her back. What the inaugural issue lacks in focus and consistency it more than makes up for with a determined catholicity of taste and a quirky, cheerfully inclusive sensibility. Editor Roland Pease has assembled a roster of poets whose provenances range from Iceland to Persia and whose prosodies run from austere haiku-like meditations to feral free-verse explosions. If Pease’s selections indicate a lack of a strongly coherent vision, it is in the service of experimentation and openness, qualities lacking in many contemporary anthologies.
On record of this book, Pease seems willing to follow his nose to whatever unlikely places it may lead. Unlike David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series, which often seems like the paper equivalent of an old folks’ home for superannuated poets of the New York School and their descendants, Zoland Poetry caters to no specific mode, although it does perhaps run a bit heavy on the irony-laden postmodernism-lite common to the Boston subgenre of contemporary poetry. Depending on the reader’s inclinations, this eclecticism has produced either a charmingly diverse overview or a messy, diffuse hodgepodge, with this reviewer tending toward the former judgment.
The strong presence of many foreign poets, whose translations are without exception handled with grace and wit, is enough to make the difference. The indifference of American publishers and readers to non-English language literature, and especially poetry, is the one of the secret disgraces of our time: according to The New York Times, only three percent of the books published in the United States in 2005 were translations, compared to twenty-seven percent, for example, in Italy (Smith, April 21 2006). Out of the thirty-five poets included in Zoland Poetry, eleven are foreign writers represented in translation: a commendably cosmopolitan sampling. Of course, a commitment to publishing poetry in translation, however noble, will stand as empty tokenism if the poems in question don’t deliver the goods.
The translations in Zoland Poetry do. The central achievement of the anthology is the inclusion of a suite of brief, lacerating poems written by Henia and Ilona Karmel, two young Jewish sisters imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp in 1942. The Karmel poems, which translator Fanny Howe observes are expressions of “what it is like to dwell at the center of anti-miracle” (197), have a calmness and concision that in light of their setting is devastating. Ilona Karmel’s poem “The Demand,” for example, begins with the balanced, chilling lines, “I have something to say to you. / It’s grim, outrageous” (200) before proceeding to deny the possibility of happiness or peace in this world. Stunning as they are, the Karmel poems are just the beginning. The German poet Zafer Senocak conjures up a desolate Berlin where “brother spy embraces brother mass murdered in the back courtyard” (117), a noir nightmare out of Kanon or Mann; Amelie Rosselli conjures and chants like an Italian John Berryman (“Those / drains I’mprinted there fore I / self-plagued so / ferociously” (220); and Iranian exile Mina Assadi contributes “Waking Dreams” poems that are models of distilled imagist precision.
The English-language entries, oddly, are much more erratic in their scope and in their quality. There is much fine writing here: Sarah Fox unreels some expressive lines, Dean Young’s “Hey Baby” has a welcome swagger, Gian Lombardo offers some tautly-structured free verse, and Patricia Smith, as usual, burns with intensity and eloquence. Some of the other poetry, however, seems slightly underfed when presented side-by-side with the more mature and potent offerings. The gravest misstep is the inclusion of a long, rambling, self-indulgent double “interview” between Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian. Both are worthwhile poets who do not benefit from undue emphasis, especially in the rich context of this anthology; in toto the two command a whopping forty-four pages, which serves only to remind one of their limitations and to wish that the space had been better used to unfold even more unfamiliar new voices.
A certain amount of inconsistency is only to be expected in any anthology, however, especially the first installment in a new venture. The hit-to-miss ratio of Zoland Poetry places it somewhere between highly recommended and essential, and one hopes that the book and the series will somehow find the attention it deserves in the crowded world. In his introduction, Pease writes that “literature can help us see and feel and think more than before, more than ever. Listening and learning will never go out of style” (xi). This expression of good faith, so simply and touchingly expressed, is made manifest by the pages that follow. At its best, Zoland Poetry is a reminder of the sudden force that poetry can effect on even an unsuspecting reader: “ a good poem,” as Tanya Larkin puts it, “shoots me like trash into space” (7).
Michael Lindgren is a bookseller and musician whose reviews and essays have appeared in The L Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, and Rain Taxi. He divides his time between Manhattan and Pennsylvania.
Source:
“Found in Translation: Endangered Languages” by Dinitia Smith, New York Times, April 21 2006.