Recently poetry books have caught my attention by Cathy Wagner, Marilyn Nelson, Regina DeRieva, and Anne Hartigan:

“Brave” is the single word I would use to describe Catherine Wagner’s Macular Hole (Fence Books, 2006).  This book flinches at nothing—but not with the goal of causing shock.  Instead, its difficult exploration are necessary, filtered in the direction of growth:  “I took rectangular instruction of the wood.”  The book is full of mud, rot, hair, scabs— not for cheap viscerality value, but because they are integral substances. For a similar reason, while there is much playfulness here, it is not lite or superficial. Wagner’s bottom line is beauty, which can transform anything. She seems to agree with Keats that not only is beauty truth; truth is also beauty.

“Who admitted you?,” for example, graphically stretches the genre of mother/daughter poems to beautify the grotesque without pretending to transform it:

My mother

I was fucked for

a coupling inside of that inside her

a split and crack and grotesque growthery

a veiny fish and limbs alarming off

and thrash her good

and split her out, a yellow wrinkling

The coinages of "growthery" and "alarming" are typical of Wagner's offhand, unpretentious approach to her own originality.  It is a charming combination. My favorite in the book is the “song” called “Scary several light,” wherein Wagner mythologizes her pregnant self as her rhythmic ear rips out into trochees:

Once on Hays Sreet

Walking home in darkness

Saw car lights pass

Saw fence posts drive out and conquer

Black stripes pulsing over house

Over lawns and house

There was Wagner

Fearful walking

Saw the light split

By the driving ranks of

Shadows

Marching in the several light

The scary several light

Here is Wagner

Swaying in the hammock

Cover one big toe

Up with the other toe

Dying

In the scary several light. . .

I first heard Marilyn Nelson read her translations of acclaimed Danish poet Inge Pedersen many years ago at the West Chester Poetry Conference, and I remembered them so vividly that I jumped at the chance to read them in published form at last (The Thirteenth Month, Oberlin College Press, Field translation series, 2005).  As I remembered, these are luminously wise poems, amulets that can withstand repeated turnings in the light or the darkness.  Nelson’s own luminosity of vision, and her sensitivity towards the use of space and the linebreak, do the poems justice.  Her translations of Pedersen's short metaphysical lyrics, oracular yet cryptic, are some of my favorites:

GO FAR

Go far

make a big detour

around silence

that quicksand is dangerous

forget

your ostrich longing

MAYBE TODAY

Maybe today the shutters fly away

And something comes in

It sits on my hand

Around midnight it demands wine

It would be hard to imagine these poems, with their self-restraint coupled with an easy familiarity with metaphysical abstraction, being written by an American.  Nelson's versions convey both their unfamiliarity and their familiarity.

Regina Derieva's new book Alien Matter (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006) collects poems written over decades by a well-respected Russian poet long-exiled and now living in Sweden.  They are remarkable for their pain and lyricism, and she should be better known in the States. Here is my favorite, translated by Alan Shaw:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

Consisting as I do of scraps of dreams,
of lands I've never seen, of underpinnings,
of air and salt, of elemental things
unmeddled with by endings or beginnings,

of clay and iron, and of ocean wave
and shingle crowds of feet have trod upon,
of faith and hope, stood at the wall, to brave
the rifles, turning into heavenly stone,

of quiet and simplicity, bestowed
upon us by a woman among women,
of emptiness that stretches like a road
into a vastness where things lose their meaning,

of whisperings, of looking long at that
which goes among us by the name of God,
at death, which never was, and now is not,
at life, of which so little can be had.

On a recent trip to Ireland, I came across a remarkable book published by the brave and unique Irish press Salmon Publishing some years ago:  Anne Hartigan’s Now is a Moveable Feast (Salmon, 1991).  Hartigan is a playwright as well as a poet, and this book-length poem moves simply and movingly between different voices, centered on one house and rooted deeply in land older than houses.  This is from a section called “Winter: The Woman”:

God:  What is it that hath been/

           The same thing that shall be?

           What is it that hath been done?

           The same that shall be done.

                                                       Ecclesiastes 1.9

                                 What pain ails me

                                 What fear nails me

                                 The moon full gliding?

                                 No wind’s wild blowing

                                 No rain’s soft knowing

                                 Takes this dread dying.

                                 The bracken makes a bed

                                 For winter’s maiden head

                                 For this cold crying.

The poem has been broadcast on radio and set to music. Jeanne Marie Beaumont remarked to me recently that she feels poetry-writing should be taught among the fine arts such as music and painting; Hartigan’s book, illustrated by the author with striking impressionistic ink drawings, is a reminder that poetry is, or at least can be, an art among arts.