Anvil and Rose 9
The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed. Coffee House Press, 2020 ($16.95)
Bursts forth a poetry collection of extraordinary range, chameleonic and sure-handed in its embrace of form, yet without being formalistic or formulaic. The Malevolent Volume lives up to its promise of inducing discomfort. “But feeling that I needed to be beaten into stillness/ended where I knew it would: I slept in the shape of a saint, palms upturned as if to blossom/gladly into wounds.” Feeling that I needed turns martyrdom from generic grievance into the fated grief of historical consciousness, right at the point where time-bound knowledge touches metaphysical truth. “Head of the Gorgon,” its couplets like equestrian jumping fences, keeps knocking us off our mounts into the satisfying and gnarly, dense thicket of its purposeful language play. “As the reedy sonata of squelch and blade-spun air cinches its/climax like a drawstring sack around us, I did not hide behind/the broken pediments monolithing men who always meant/to unbuckle burdens here then look away.” It’s hard to find a bad line in this prickly collection, one whose might-controlled violence makes Ted Hughes look effete. Its forebears are less epigraph-dropped than palm-smeared into paste that hardens into a poem. “When I Made a Monster,” “Minotaur,” “When I Had the Haint,” “The Personal Animal,” “Aubade: Apocalypse”: each title suggests the plunge in this poet’s quest to torment us with stinging, hard-won compassion and merciless self-exploration, staged as mythos, awaiting the reader who braves the labyrinth. A marvel of construction, it is a good place to get lost.
Violet Bent Backward Over the Grass by Lana Del Rey. Simon and Schuster, 2021 ($24.99)
This sultry pop icon of the mildly disillusioned may be the next poet to perform at the Super Bowl. The paradoxical singer-songwriter of Lust for Life and Born to Die brings the soap, if not the opera. She is no Amanda Gorman, rather she seems not to have a patriotic bone in her willowy California body, but in a self-involved, downbeat way, she keeps it simple for the people, who can muse, as they gaze at this coffee table–worthy, gorgeous tome, “Oh yeah, I know her, she’s that… ah, tip of my tongue.” Thanks for pulling out all the stops, Simon & Schuster. You should print one million copies of this book, like Penguin Random House is going to do x3 for Gorman. Chock full of photos Del Rey apparently took with her dad’s childhood Polaroid, close-ups of stark industrial gates and urban water towers (real!), palm trees, dandelions and streetlights, much of the verse has literally been photocopied from typescript and digitized (digi-real!). A typical verse is: “you thought i was rich and i am but not how you think.” Another, as if written by Amanda’s emo sister, the one who didn’t get invited onto the talk shows, is “Every night I die/when I give myself to you/sad but beautiful.” The good news for America is that every pouty/giddy/hot adolescent with a diary or a poem s/he wrote super quick on a NotePad can now have a major modeling contract, or drop a new hit track whenever they want, with quick-poems and breakup diary entries from the file that got deleted, but not permanently (whew!). Or as Lana Del Rey more eloquently puts it: “I don’t have a pretty couplet to give resolution to this poem/nothing very eloquent to say/except that I was brave.”
Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. FSG, 2020 ($15)
Of depredations committed in the name of literary populism, this is one of the jolliest. It comes from the school of translation meant to make “great” literature relevant to high schoolers, by defiling it with slangy equivalence. (Reminiscent of the condescension displayed by “cool” teachers who play pop lyrics to show that they are also poetry.) The translator is explicit about her method. Its inspiration began when, as a child, Maria Dahvana Headley caught sight of a book heroine who “seem[s] to give precisely zero fucks.” Result, years later: this is not your mother’s Beowulf. Or is it? Parenting a baby taught her to be guided by sound. “Belly hurt—longing—empty breast.” (The rad fade and tattooed half-naked skull of the translator photo remind us she’s still got game, mom or no.) Bill and Ted are cited. Burton Raffel is not. Then comes the astounding populist insight: “Every translator translates this poem differently.” Ye gods! As for the text, it begins with a pepper shaker of exclamation marks, exactly as one might expect. “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!” 3182 verses later, the saga ends as much in the vulgate as it began. “He rode hard! He stayed thirsty!/He was the man!/He was the man!” In between, puzzlingly, the text is dominated by a serviceable, conservative translation style that ranges from workmanlike to competent, void of dazzle, filled with a de rigeur roll of alliteration and the long, sprawling lines we faithful readers of “Beo” have come to know. “I’d sacrificed myself to save every subsequent seafarer.” The rest is slang pidgin, much of it more dated than the original text. The potential moments of true stylistic innovation and radicalism have been passed over for the mere ruse of fresh dissent, leaving the reader to give zero fucks about yet one more tame entry in a long line of translations of this quirky, enduring classic.
If Men, Then by Eliza Griswold. FSG, 2020 ($16)
Socially conscious poetry bespeaks a noble intention, felt in these sincere pages. Yet that very earnest tenor can make the lean, beguilingly truthful impulse smack of journalistic voyeurism, the sculpted quality of which has left out the essential part in favor of verbal photo-realism. “The bright clatter of boots/on the slats of a bridge/the mustachioed laughs,” in “Prelude to a Massacre” reduces slaughter to melodrama. The self-flagellation of the guilty liberal in a war-torn country shows up in “Friday afternoon with Boko Haram.” “There must be so many of us, spies who are really academics/checking into obscure hotels, drinking contraband beer.” Elsewhere, eco-conscience gets expressed as a vague, vain wish. “Fragments of men who meant to be better/are you doing the work of our world/riddled with woes?” Mentions of Eliot and Stevens hearken to a modernist pedigree, yet that mainly manifests in the starkness of the lines, and the book’s general less-is-more vibe. Griswold’s best poems are rooted in her fluency with folk culture, as in “Libyan Proverbs,” where she relaxes the high-modern idiom and lets flow less forced, less event-driven, less socially-focused verse.
In a Broken Star by Norman Finkelstein. Dos Madres Press, 2021 ($18)
An Everyman in the manner of John Berryman’s Huffy Henry, this one, named Pascal Wanderlust, brings casual erudition to an impressive book-within-a-book, sporting a naïf reader of culture high and low. A lower-case cosmic observer, half-detached, half-engrossed in the phenomenology of the everyday, he brings concision of expression in a manner one sometimes wishes for when reading Whitman’s lumbering lines. “I wander about/among the nurseries of the stars/I wander the fields/where the planets are born.” In six Books consisting of twelve 12-line block stanzas, Finkelstein, via his alter ego (?) Wanderlust, lets loose syntactically, the long sentences wandering, like him, over lines, to create an intellectual psychodrama. “Was it only yester-/day or the day before, or was it uncounted/moons ago, when Wanderlust, abandoned/on the outer rim, vowed never to go beyond/the limits of that double being, the psychic/range of that uncanny name?” Yet go he does, beyond and beyond, a hermeneutic Argonaut.