Speech Lessons
2012; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 86; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2012.0182
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumo74 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews has been instrumental in shaping a poetic style of uncommon lucidity, a voice that speaks directly and with philosophical force. Gilbert is a juggler of contradictions , delighting in their strangeness the speaker of his poems is continually invigorated rather than daunted by the paradoxes of life; deprivation and loneliness may come but are seen as ultimately fruitful. In “How Much of That Is Left in Me?,” the poet reflects on the productive tension that emerges from the dual states of yearning and celebration, contentment and discontent, concluding, “What fine provender in the want. / What freshness in me amid the loneliness.” He is someone who relishes transitions: he doesn’t fear change but embraces it. In “What to Want,” a man feels the potential for growth in a sudden series of shifts in his life: “The budding / amid the random passion. . . . What interested him / most was who he was about to become.” Although Gilbert eludes classification , there is an argument for seeing him as a romantic. The women in his life hold a central place in these poems, yet his passion for them and the pain he feels over losing them are never expressed sentimentally. Instead , they are meditatively revisited, often through metaphors of music or dance, as in “After Love”—“He is watching the music with his eyes closed. / Hearing the piano like a man moving / through the woods thinking by feeling ,” or in “Waiting and Finding”: “Meaning love sometimes dying out, / sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives / silent in the middle of the world’s music.” Despite his impulse to savor life’s richness and to bring pleasure and suffering into balance, Gilbert ’s speaker is also vigilant, quietly braced by the awareness of mortality, described in one poem as “a cello inside him.” His speaker watches himself , the foreign landscapes through which he travels, the gestures and moods of beloved women, and the inevitable aging of the body with a cool, mesmerized absorption. In “Meanwhile,” the speaker muses on the constant state of suspension felt between life and death: “For nine years in me it has waited. / My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing / and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.” Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey John Montague. Speech Lessons. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2012. isbn 9781930630598 Speech Lessons exhibits all the lyrical grace of John Montague’s previous volumes without ever slipping into easy nostalgia. His poems of memory do not simply look backward into a personal past but are woven into the fabric of history and, sometimes , mindful of what is to come (the volume ends with “the future, already whirling past”). Although he is known for his evocations of childhood , of family and community, and of Ireland’s difficult twentieth-century history, these themes inform one another so that we view the personal through the communal, and the singular self is poignantly present but never egotistical or self-enclosed. This is what gives Montague’s work its broad scope. He is known as a stylist, and rightly so. Speech Lessons exhibits Montague’s care for the stanza form: each poem has its own stanzaic form, which is often disrupted to great effect, as when the poem suddenly offers a surprising final impression , a change of speaker, or unforeseen burst of feeling. Montague is a master of measure and melody, establishing regular cadences and irregular but noticeable patterns of rhymes: harmonies are often formed by echoes across lines and across Benjamin Stein The Canvas Brian Zumhagen, tr. Open Letter Jan Wechsler discovers gaps in his own memory when he finds a book in his suitcase, and Amnon Zichroni believes he has the gift of experiencing other people’s memories. The protagonists’ lives are intertwined through the controversial “Holocaust Memoir” of Minsky. Both sides meet in the middle of this captivating novel, where two versions of the same story are told on different sides of the book. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Apricot Jam and Other Stories Kenneth Lantz & Stephen Solzhenitsyn, tr. Counterpoint Noble Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final work is a collection of nine short stories...
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