Anvil and Rose 10
Andean Nuclear Spring / Primavera nuclear andina by Agustín Guambo, translated by Carlos Moreno (Carlos No). Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019 ($10.00)
“the skull of the sea shines in the Andean paramo,” begins this beguiling bilingual chapbook, in Spanish and English, a book that will leave you wanting to hear much more from this Ecuadorian poet. Andean Nuclear Spring feels like a lost book from an apocalyptic nuclear bible, found in a lead vase, with teeth marks along the edges, in a cave in the Andes. The poetry presents many challenges to the reader, and translator, and printer, with some lines spaced across the page (“inside my brain rustic sounds age its skin”) and some lines in larger fonts, with an extra space between letters (“c o n s t e l l a t i o n o f e v a p o r a t i n g w a t e r”). One can only hope that Ugly Duckling Presse will bring us more of Guambo’s work soon. How else will we learn more about “the remnants of an Andean rhino kissing the blood of constellations”?
Poems in the Manner of by David Lehman. Scribner Poetry, 2017 ($18.00)
There are two ways to look at this strange book of poetry, which “channels” poets from Catullus to Joe Brainard. If you’re not convinced that Lehman can imitate any poet you can name, at the end of the book, just for good measure, he includes his satirical lyrics for songs by Bob Dylan, Lorenz Hart and Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Lehman can parody anyone, with aplomb and humor. Here’s his tribute / goof on Bashō’s famous haiku: “Pond / Frog / Splash.” So, on the one hand, the book is a display of brilliance. But on the other hand, it wonderfully illustrates where contemporary American poetry is — driving forward by looking in the rear-view mirror. This book implies that the best poetry is behind us. The new and improved poets who have rose petals tossed at them by critics for their shockingly new and improved poetry pale in comparison to the poets listed on the front cover of Lehman’s book: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda. OK, Ernest Hemingway not so much. Damn you, David Lehman. You’ve left me elated and depressed.
Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez. Penguin, 2018 ($20.00)
Some poets want to shock the reader, and who can’t sympathize with that? Martinez, with his conceptual archive called “Museum of the Americas,” presents poems describing photographic (or should they be called pornographic?) postcards taken by Walter H. Horne featuring hanged bodies of “bad hombre” Mexicans fighting with General Francisco “Pancho” Villa. And there are a series of poems about General Santa Anna’s artificial leg (made of wood and cork). While these poems should rightly shock the gentle American reader into facing up to our nation’s treatment of our Mexican neighbors, all too often the poems lapse into exposition: “the Mexican — all virgin talisman / when mailed in a sepia ruin / whose only wound is postage” and “the calligraphic script underscoring each panel doesn’t name these figures with specific proper nouns; rather the calligraphy titles each figure a representative of a general racial species . . . .” It’s as if Martinez doesn’t really want to shock us too much. Or he doesn’t believe that the postcards or the artificial leg will sufficiently shock and educate his museum-goers. Or, worst of all, he believes we come to the museum just to read the placards.
This Blue by Maureen N. McLane. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014 ($14.00)
“A rosé’s a rosé’s a rosé’s,” we learn from McLane in a poem about Spain. Take that, Gertrude Stein. Perhaps this oh-so-bored, jaded tone is fitting for a book contemplating “another day in this here cosmos” with a side of environmental devastation. But it gets old, fast. The poems in This Blue (perhaps it should have been titled This Here Blue) display a desire to create a lyric that can both eulogize the planet (“embroidered earth / refusing an undesigned mind / uphold me now”) and encompass the cynical emotions of the poet (“Nothing’s beyond / my airconditioned ken”). The end result often creates grating lines: “and lo! Damn see how these heavenly bodies do what they do” and “Luke Howard having taxonomized the little buggers [clouds]” and “So let’s go skying.” Some may find this poetic ennui in the face of environmental annihilation refreshing or brave, but then there are those who will buy an electric Hummer SUV and tell their friends how they are saving the planet.
Baby, I Don't Care by Chelsey Minnis. Wave Books, 2018 ($18.00)
If you like film noir, and you like listening to femmes fatales on speed, then this is the book for you: "Baby, I might not be any good," and "Let me be the first to pour your tears down the drain." I'm thinking of Gloria Grahame, after a few highballs, chain-smoking, cocking an eyebrow, telling her latest lover / mark: "I always want to cut a soft belly, I can't help it." At first, it's hilarious: "I can hurt you with a poem or hurt you in bed" and "You want to know what poetry is? A flea circus." But after a bit, it feels, well, like you're stuck in an elevator with a robot that has only one setting, and the “Baby, I don’t care” noir shtick makes you start begging the smart elevator to go into freefall. "I can amuse you for months," this femme fatale promises, or should I say threatens? If you want to practice for a role in a film noir, recite a few pieces from this book aloud to a mirror. Otherwise, Baby, I’d rather chew on galvanized carpet tacks.