Anvil and Rose 13
Qorbanot: Offerings by Alisha Kaplan. Art by Tobi Aaron Kahn. SUNY Press, 2021 ($18)
The discreet beauty of this edition announces the quality of the poetry. Steeped in Jewish religious tradition, the book is divided into “studies” and “offerings.” Reverent, simple yet layered, it poses questions, via everyday life, about orthodoxy versus personal freedom. Some of the most revealing entries are the “guilt offerings,” in which the need for eros, for instance, is confessed. “(the chair I was afraid to sit in lest my skirt rise my sex I was afraid to look at till I was twenty-five”). In our vulgar, sharp world, some might find this verse disingenuous, even cute in its willful naivete. In truth, its modesty provides the relative cultural standard of a believer. We may ground, if we choose, orthodoxy against an overworked, shopworn, secular sense of knowledge. “A daughter of the sons of Aaron…[has] permission to consume the firstborn permission to stand on the ground covering the dead but…her role is to marry inside the tribe.” Given the bitter brain salad surgery of the current culture wars, this volume, with its chaste definition of propriety, and its presentation of devotion as the deliberate, necessary choice, offers nuanced absolutism. There is something compelling about a poet who quietly knows exactly what she wants, and hews to her community of faith, neither provoking nor letting herself get worked up. The paintings impress like runes, ceramic tiles, or brilliant dream visions, satisfying in themselves, yet an echo of the poet’s coloratura.
Salat by Dujie Tahat. Tupelo Press, 2020 ($13)
Salat is a Muslim pillar of faith. In this Filipino-Jordanian poet’s usage, it is a personal-political trigger. Unlike the case of culture cancelers, here praise comes before blame, turning introspection into perceptive social critique. Introspection — the missing ingredient from the trenchant verbal funnel cakes that dissenters from the new, hateful normal have been getting crammed down their throats for daring to have their own point of view. “I look forward to lengthen/my neck, and my father sees me/as if/on an executioner’s block./I meant only to show off/the gold/chains some Arabs have come to be/known for in popular American/culture. O pops, I stretch/my throat like oil slick A-rab/money.” The anxiety of fitting in comes from without and within, above and below. The pressure is personal, familial, and social, all at one go. His account of low-grade harassment while trying to board a flight doesn’t hammer us with a TSA employee’s obvious hatred. More damningly, it shows the attitude as ingrained, as casual as it is ineradicable. The final subtlety is quietly devastating. “I relax into my seat, knowing this feeling/only lasts as long as I am in the air.” If there is calling out, it’s a call to the reader, waiting for a response.
The Knives We Need by Nava EtShalom. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021 ($15)
The third poet of this week’s troika, hovering in sacred space, offers more of a ruckus, coming at us from the first line of the first poem, “God of Suicides.” “I have been wrong before, god of syntax/and understatement, god of slips in silk/and polyester, god of the laboratory, god of newsprint/and sunscreen” — and on it goes, evoking either polytheism, the recursive nature of the Absolute, or sheer redundancy. Other times, God is like a lover. “God took you, clouded and dense./God pushed the skin above your lip--/ was there honey on his finger? Did he/ask your mouth’s permission?” In this self-disavowing half-vaudeville, in which the speaker is Jewish one moment, Catholic the next, suicide is sportive and belief is fizzy water, a search for the bones of the patriarchs, probably in the wrong tomb, in a world of “olives and their afterlives.” This book, doubtless unintentionally, may serve as a critique of, and a corrective of, our current craven search for collective certainty, in which tribal affiliation comes first, defining us with false rigor, harping on allegiance, cornering us with ersatz dogma, demanding a reflexive and immediate stand. In relative terms, what used to be derided as “religious poetry” shows it can have the potency of a refutation of our contemporary, degraded version of the categorical imperative, one that circulates these days from hand to hand like a sand dollar passing itself off as a gold standard.
Be Holding: A Poem by Ross Gay. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020 ($17)
When you’re a university-based professor in a “major” program who has won all the awards, you may begin to feel anxious that you’ve lost your street, or never had game, the real kind, the one you only win on the hardwood court. What do you do? You write a book-length poem about Dr. J. Yes, that one, Julius Erving. (As if there were another.) There was that baseline move in the 1980 NBA Finals, driving past Kareem, that unforgettable finger-roll. Yes, that’s the first place this poem goes. In couplets as leaden as Dr. J was fleet, Gay offers language that lacks both the rigor of formal written poetry, and the verve of spoken word. “Doc, after catching the ball at the elbow/and taking one hard dribble toward the baseline/where the dunk would usually commence/could not access the paint/or the lane, or the key, which is what/we call the area nearest the goal.” And so it goes, for 108 excruciating pages, begging the question of who the intended audience is, if it needs to have explained the meaning of key. Constant pedantry aside, the poet commits the intermittent offense (pun intended) of trying to hang on these featherweight contraption pennants of social significance, like a commercial banner trailing from a hang glider headed for the ground: “the famous/war photo of the naked child fleeing/the wreckage of her own napalmed skin,/…the famous photo/of two black people falling/from a collapsed fire escape.” The poet cannot be bothered to tax his ingenuity. If it’s not already famous, e.g., readymade, it won’t fit into this Time-Life “best of the 60s/70s/80s, as-seen-on-TV excuse for a book of poetry. Even the ebonic title, “Be Holding” makes for questionable slumming, coming from a holder of an MFA and PhD. Poetry as condescension — be withholding.
A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin. Lost Horse Press, 2020 ($18)
This compendium of Zhadan’s poetry, taken from three separate books, forms part of the “one continuous work” chronicling Ukraine in post-independence. His language has the frank, direct, almost flat-footed, yet ultimately bracing style that begins as declaration and ends as quip. “It’s the third year of war; they’re repairing the bridges./I’d complain about you, but who’d listen.” Levity has a sinister edge. “I know your sister. I always had a thing for her./I know what you are afraid of, why, even./Who you met that winter, what you told him.” It used to be exciting to read Central European and former Soviet republic poets from the safe perch of our perceived democracy. Now we understand that the lives of others means us. We are the autocratic state where men no longer have to sit in vans with headphones, blowing on their cold hands while their partner runs to get stale coffee, in order to track our every move. Today, you can do it from your desktop while drinking vanilla latte. “Woe unto women who give birth in a time of pogrom./The city of betrayal, the city of sorrow, the city of poison.” Those wild-eyed and sexy-bitter, Chaplinesque Slavic foreigners used to let us outsource our conscience. All we had to do was stand in hypothetical solidarity. Words spoken on alien soil in the 90s, now freshly relevant, come stateside to mock our collective angst, “as if it wasn’t us who prepared/for the power of ice/born out of lovelessness./As soon as the damp cursive thaw appears in the air/the world explodes/like a crowd shown/the severed head of a tyrant.” If only Zhadan were less obvious, we could all close the book, compliment him on getting his people’s zeitgeist right, and get a good night’s sleep.