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Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001

2012; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 86; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2012.0193

1945-8134

George Messo,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 73 Bernard Noël The Rest of the Voyage Eléna Rivera, tr. Graywolf Press Divided into three sections and written entirely in hendecasyllabic lines, The Rest of the Voyage is a reflection on travel, form, and how the way we write about what we observe can affect our experiences. This is the first volume of Noël’s poetry to be translated into English. Benjamin Moser Why This World Oxford University Press Clarice Lispector is simultaneously one of Brazil’s best- and least-known writers. More often compared to philosophers and saints than to poets and novelists, Lispector fascinated Brazil from her adolescence. This new biography, drawn from years of original research, reveals a turbulent past that shaped one of Brazil’s most intriguing figures. Nota Bene Kerry Shawn Keys. Night Flight. Rockford, Michigan. Presa. 2012. isbn 9780983125136 A good many of Kerry Shawn Keys’s poems can be characterized, if not explained, by the lines “Everything’s open to derangement” and “There aren’t any rules for the subjects in this medium.” One of the simplest examples is “The dogwood at the edge / of the park is barking out flowers,” but other poems, like “The Ache,” which opens Night Flight, have more consistently startling imagery. Many of the other poems celebrate , sometimes with considerable reservations, the power of the female principle and, especially in the first of the book’s two parts, the natural world, rural but hardly pastoral and sometimes sounding like that of Robert Frost—the American woodlands, in particular the birds who inhabit it. In the second half, the world is predominantly urban Vilnius, Lithuania , where Keys has lived for some years. These poems tend to have less wrenched or striking imagery, but they are at least as somber or guarded in their celebration. Readers who take comfort in paraphrasable sense may prefer part 2, but those more drawn to experiment will find the daring, imaginative flights more appealing. Read word by word, these can seem confusing , but they create an emotional undertone that uses a different kind of syntax. Throughout the volume, poems create a world both entrancing and confusing and reject the lures of pantheism or indeed any kind of theism. Near the end of “The Ache” Keys writes, “at last you understand the majestic indifference of the Promised Land,” though the last line offers “the rising sun.” To put it another way, throughout the collection , biblical and other religious texts offer frameworks for imagery but no solutions, but the end is not illumination but nothingness, for “this dream / of life is a little whiff of the opium / of death opening its womb.” Yet the overall effect of the book conveys the speaker’s joy in observing and recording. The poem just quoted ends with the central image of the octopus, which cradles and seems to sustain humanity, rocking “in a swish and suspense / Of children about to commence / a journey together into another space, / a spinning , a suction, a balance of grace.” Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma W. G. Sebald. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001. Iain Galbraith, tr. London / New York. Hamish Hamilton / Random House. 2011 / 2012. isbn 9780241144732 / 9781400068906 We know enough about translation to know that the poems of W. G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water are as much the work of prizewinning translator Iain Galbraith. Sebald has been particularly blessed by the quality and caliber of his translators. Michael Hulse, Anthea Bell, and Michael Hamburger have previously rendered Sebald so seamlessly into English that we’ve almost fallen into the habit of thinking of him as a British author. Galbraith’s timely book reminds us that he isn’t and, more importantly, underscores Sebald’s considerable achievements as a poet. The volume presents Sebald’s poems chronologically, from his early student days in Manchester right up 74 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews to his sudden death in 2001. Additionally , it includes some thirty-three poems gathered from unpublished manuscripts deposited in the author’s literary archives in Marbach, Germany. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Galbraith has chosen to omit all of the previously published poems from For Years Now (2001...