Simic, Charles. Sixty Poems. Harcourt Books, 2007.
U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic’s book Sixty Poems spans twenty years and nine books and sixty poems in which the intelligence behind the poetry reflects on both happiness and unhappiness, beauty and pain, but never abandons the sense of humor that might be the warmest humor in the history of poetry. These poems are presumably Simic’s own favorites, and to read them is to be let in on a process of important self-reflection. Nearly all of these poems try to nose out that unnamable something that compels so many writers to write as a way of being in the world. Reading Sixty Poems will make you grateful for the existence of poet Charles Simic.
Sharma, Prageeta. Infamous Landscapes. Fence Books, 2007.
Sharma pushes long lines into long sentences and long sentences into long stanzas in her third book, Infamous Landscapes. Aside from its intriguing form, its content is decidedly ambivalent about the self being something and wanting anything in a world that is similarly ambivalent. Some of Sharma’s trademark word play is present in this book (her poem titled “Worries Ajar” starts “In a tank, a small cistern in the body” and ends on an image of a fishbowl). However, her observations more often take a direct, frank tone than in either of her previous two books: “I wanted what everyone seems/ to want in Brooklyn, New York”; it is no coincidence that Infamous Landscapes starts with a poem called “Candor.” If you liked Bliss to Fill or The Opening Question, this book will certainly broaden your notion of poet Prageeta Sharma.
Four New Books in the Collection
Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad: Editors. Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Soft Skull Press, 2007.
The editors of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry trace the tradition of collaborative poetry back to twelfth century Japan, as well as back to the French Surrealists, The New York School, and feminist writing in the 80s. According to the editors, collaborative poems usually find their way into obscure periodicals, while this book marks the first “substantial collection in more permanent, more readily accessible anthology form.” The anthology includes collaborations between friends, parents and children, and romantic couples, and though most of the poems were written by pairs of poets, some were written by several. This collection fulfills its promise to expose readers to the joys of this form that often “ups the ante,” allowing poets to create “ingenious ways to both entertain and outsmart each other.” Contributors include Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac, John Ashbery & Kenneth Koch, Bill Berkson & Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan & Robert Creeley, Eileen Myles & Anne Waldman, Olga Broumas & Jane Miller, Norma Cole & Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, Reginald Shepherd & Gene Tanta.
Colby, Kate. Fruitlands. Litmus Press, 2006.
Though many books aim to negotiate the dual terrain of the global and the local, Fruitlands makes it its project and succeeds. Kate Colby makes quick shifts from the quotidian to the surreal, from washing dishes to plate tectonics, and rather than making tidy analogies between the personal and universal, Fruitlands grinds them together and pulls them apart like pieces of Pangaea. “She” often stands in for “I,” “we” both includes and excludes the reader, and names like Doris and Franziska appear only once and without warning in these poems in which “plotting coordinates of neither nor or boundaries in between” make for “an impossible dialectic” that despite its refusal to answer our questions, engages and invigorates us.
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