Little Library of
the Lair
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Pequeña
biblioteca comentada
Poetry
Auden, W. H. Collected
Poems
Jiménez,
Blas R. El
Nativo (Versos en cuentos para espantar zombies)
Jordan, June. haruko/love poems
June Jordan, Kissing God Goodbye:
Poems 1991-1997.
Loynaz, Dulce María. Melancolía de Otoño.
Machado, Antonio,
Galerías
Mejía Godoy, Luis E., "Mi venganza personal."
See Mermaids and Other
Fetishes
Miller,
Walter James. Love's Mainland: New and Selected
Poems
Nemerov,
Howard. The
Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
Auden,
W. H. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York:
Vintage International, 1976. 926 pp.
"This book
contains all the poems that W. H. Auden wished to preserve, in
a text that honors his final intentions." Editor's Preface,
xvii. Wise, witty, cantankerous, often lovely, sometimes irritating
(Auden had strong opinions), but always intelligent. Among my
favorites is the line about how "language ... worships those
by whom it lives," in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."
(Auden, Feb. 21, 1907-Sept. 29, 1973)
Jiménez,
Blas R. El Nativo (Versos en cuentos para espantar zombies). Santo Domingo: Editora Búho,
1996. 70 pp.
Mi favorito es
Núm. 14, que empieza así: "Cuando el hijo
del general trajo la moda de los espejuelos oscuros. ... Cuando
la intelectualidad era cómplice y culpable." Dedicado
por el autor, en la Librería La Trinitaria, 16-02-2001
Jordan, June.
haruko/love
poems.
Foreword by Adrienne Rich. New York: High Risk Books, 1994.
Lucky Haruko,
whoever he was, to be so loved. You can hear June Jordan herself
read one selection, "From the Talking Back of Miss Valentine
Jones," by clicking here.
June Jordan,
Kissing
God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1997.
The title poem
alone is worth the price of the book, but also be sure to read
"Letter to Mrs. Virgina Thomas, Wife of Whatzhisname Lamentably
appointed to the Supreme Court, U.S.A.," and for something
really timely, "The Bombing of Baghdad."
Loynaz,
Dulce María. Melancolía de Otoño. Poesía. Pinar del Río
(Cuba), Ediciones "Hermanos Loynaz": 1997. Edición
financiada por el Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Jerez de la Frontera,
España. 92 pp.
In Havana's Plaza
de Armas every morning of the week, hundreds of men and women
strain to pull low-slung, steel-wheeled wagons to their reserved
spots, where they begin unloading boxes of books, tables and
homemade folding display racks. By ten a.m. or so, they are displaying
thousands of titles. Most are products of a publishing industry
that thrived during the optimistic days of the revolution, but
has now been cut down to almost nothing by shortages of everything
from paper to ink to electricity to run the presses. There is
also a terrible shortage of anything to buy with Cuban pesos,
which is why schoolteachers, accountants, pharmacists, architects
and even surgeons have given up their state-salaried jobs to
peddle whatever they can -- including books -- to foreign visitors.
That's why last January a vendor was delighted to let me have
this slender volume for a couple of dollars.
Dulce María
Loynaz was born in 1902 (I gather from the introduction) and
died some 90 years later, after producing many volumes of poetry
and fiction. In 1992 she was awarded the Premio Cervantes, Spain's
highest literary prize. This volume is a posthumous homage, composed
of things she had written in her 20's and rediscovered many decades
later. They are romantic, elliptical, sometimes just plain silly
-- which is no doubt why she had never sought to publish them.
Yet there are gems here. Here is one:
Hay gente que si pudiera,
arrancaría los rayos
de la
luna, para amarrarse Los zapatos.
(There
are people who would, if they could, pluck out the moonbeams
to tie their shoes.)
-- Dulce
María Loynaz (Cuba)
(See my essay
on bookselling and book-making in Cuba, in Linnaean Street, spring 2000.)
Machado,
Antonio, Galerías (1899-1907), LXXXIII
 Guitarra del mesón
que hoy suenas jota,
mañana petenera,
según quien llega y tañe
las empolvadas cuerdas,
guitarra del
mesón de los caminos,
no fuiste nunca, ni serás, poeta.
Tú eres
alma que dice su armonía
solitaria a las almas pasajeras...
Y siempre que
te escucha el caminante
sueña escuchar un aire de su tierra.
(On the web,
see Antonio
Machado.)
Miller,
Walter James. Love's Mainland: New and Selected Poems.
Middletown NY: Lintel, 2001. 88 pp.
Always
intelligent, always artful, often poignant, Walter Miller's writing
is most effective when it captures some immediate sense experience
-- visual, tactile, sometimes aural --and translates it in words
that make us feel something like that original sensation. That's
quite a trick. One example that especially impressed me is the
poem "A Rocky Mountain Cloud," which includes this
description of waking up at a campsite:
Aspens
titter among the solemn spruce, a wind
hints into the tent a day can die of chill
and lifts and lilts the blanket of my goldlint child
who
rouses when I leap up when an indignant grouse
like a motorboat that shouts its startled starting
flushes up and churns a tumult through the spruce
If
you've never heard the loud churning of an indignant grouse,
maybe this will do nothing for you. But if you have, you know
the description is just perfect, as is that glow of affection
for a sleeping child. "Noon Whistle," a celebration
of skyscraping construction workers "swinging down/ from
their hammered iron oath that squared/ the air..." is another
bright gem. Also included is the verse play, "Joseph in
the Pit," a fascinating anthropological speculation as to
just what was going on between Joseph (he of the coat of many
colors) and his ten brothers in that polygamous tribal culture.
And here are other poems inspired by such experiences as: induction
into the US Army (in World War II) and getting mustered out ("Honorable
Discharge" is one his most celebrated poems, and justly
so); amatory, comradely and professional relationships, and the
search for life in the deadening routine of a college writing
instructor.
Several
of the poems were new to me, but others I've known for almost
as long as I've known Walter, which is since I was a student
in his "New York University Summer Writers Conference"
about 15 years ago. But that is only a small portion of his experience
on this planet, which began in 1918. This collection spans nearly
60 years of work and play with words, and it's good to see that
Walter James Miller is still so playful.
(To
purchase this book, send $16 for hardcover or $12 for paperback
edition, along with $2 shipping and handling, to Lintel, 24 Blake
Lane, Middletown NY 10940-7370. (914) 344-1690. And while you're
at it, ask them to send you my book of short stories, Welcome
to My Contri.
Enclose another $9, and if you're ordering both books at once,
just $1 more for shipping and handling.)
Nemerov,
Howard. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981. "The Image and the Law
(1947)," pp. 1-48.
Striking images,
oddly timely. This is from "Frozen City":
I saw by moonlight
New York
Which was called in my dream
The Island of God, and achieved
In the paralysis of distance
A splendid fixity, as though the parable of a town.
Cold space parted me from
The marvelous towers
Towards which I strained.
The young Nemerov
had little patiences for "the snide/ Incredulous stares
of the/ Proprietors of contemporary thought," in "The
Place of Value."
And from "Metropolitan
Sunday":
The Chrysler
building points
With obscene derision at the bland
Submissive sky, ...
Obviously depressed,
the poet asks
Could not one
be
Elsewhere, or in Boston?
Now that's depression, when a New Yorker
fantasizes being in Boston! 02/05/20
Vulpis Literarius
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This Chauntecleer, whan he gan hym espye,
He wolde han fled, but that the fox anon
Seyde, "Gentil sire, allas, wher wol ye gon?
Be ye affrayed of me that am youre freend?
Now certes, I were worse than a feend
If I to yow wolde harm or vileynye.
I am nat come your conseil for tespye,
But trewely, the cause of my comynge
Was oonly for to herkne how that ye synge."
"The Nonnes Preestes
Tale" - Geoffrey Chaucer
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For treason is but trusted like the
fox,
Who, ne'er so tame, so cherish'd and lock'd up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.
King Henry IV, Act 5, Scene
2 -
William Shakespeare
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