Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Summer Requiem

2016; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2016.0150

1945-8134

Sudeep Sen,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Reciprocity between cacophony and repose is likewise mirrored in “But out into,” a poem in the collection’s second section. Much like the first poem in the selection, underwater movement takes place. What characterizes this poem as different, however, is the gradual disappearance of sound; the writer portrays what happens when one slips silently under the surface: “your feet giving way out there and no / sounds of crunching anymore and no / clinking just more / gurgling again / and again the same / vague thoughts.” Instead of granting a reflective ending, “But out into” renders underwater immersion as dubious at best, a repetition of hazy, albeit persistent, thoughts. Thoughts come and go and repeat themselves throughout much of Raeber’s work, uniting at times a disjointed syntax with a mixed stockpile of religious and natural imagery. Close reading of his poems therefore requires readers to face a turbulent arrangement of both lexis and syntax. The poem “Beetles” explicitly trains the reader in this: “A few beetles vivify / the leaves, freezing in the light . . . Your fingers / trembling suffice, and the leaves turn, die: / be quiet!” This poem, which directly instructs the reader to be still, also scripts no sounds and relies solely on the visual. It also begins with life and ends with death. Through rich imagery and surprising grammatical constructions, the poems in this collection overwhelmingly show that, while true quietude represents death, tumultuousness leads to focus, to clarity, to life. Andrea Dawn Bryant Leipzig, Germany Vikram Seth. Summer Requiem. London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2015. 66 pages. “My hands dissolve in water. / My body wastes away. / The air drifts past and through me / Each night and every day. // Bright darkness is my comfort, / Dark daylight is my friend, / And even I can’t reckon / Where I subsist or end.” This poem, “Bright Darkness,” adorns the back jacket of Vikram Seth’s new slim volume of poetry, Summer Requiem. The oxymoronic irony of phrases like “bright darkness” and “dark daylight” set a melancholic tone that underlies much of the book. In Summer Requiem, Seth pays homage to his mentor poets—Wang Wei and Pushkin, part of the subject or inspiration of Three Chinese Poets and The Golden Gate, respectively. Among my favorites in the book include translations he has done of Giacomo Leopardi. His poem “The Infinite ” ends hauntingly: “it is / Sweet to me to be shipwrecked in this sea.” Seth’s tensyllable iambic-pentameter translations lend a contemporary tone. In a cleverly constructed single poem, “Haiku,” many individual stanzas can work as freestanding haiku with its 5-7-5 syllabic -count tercets, while the agglomeration of fourteen haiku that form the whole poem paints Seth’s sleeplessness on a Delhi winter night: “a mosquito’s here — / out of season, out of tune, / homing in on blood.” Politics is an area Seth deals with in an oblique manner. In the poem “The Halfway Line,” each scorpion stretched “his claws towards the halfway line / Marked on the broken glass, and retched / Out venom from an absent spine.” Telling comments on politicians and political parties who would do anything, using fair means or foul, to reach the halfway line required to secure a parliamentary majority. Seth commented at the recent Summer Requiem book launch in Delhi that “writers as writers and writers as citizens—they are both seamless.” This remark takes on an added resonance in the current Indian political climate where many writers have returned their national awards in protest against both the country’s leading so-called autonomous literary organization and the ruling party for having stayed mute vis- à-vis recent killings and atrocities against Sergio Pitol The Journey Trans. George Henson Deep Vellum Mexican writer, translator, and diplomat Sergio Pitol blends fact and fiction in this second part of his Trilogy of Memory as he explores his time as ambassador to Czechoslovakia as well as a trip to the Soviet Union as cultural attaché. Witty, engaging, and regularly dizzying with its shifts between the real and the absurd, The Journey lives up to Pitol’s reputation as one of Mexico’s most intriguing writers. Oleg Pavlov Requiem for a Soldier Trans. Anna Gunin And Other Stories Mining his experiences working as a prison guard...