John Taylor on German poetry

John Taylor was so kind as to send me an offprint of his review of several recent volumes of German poetry in translation, which is in the current issue of the Antioch Review (Winter 2009, vol. 67, no. 1). John takes a look at five books: Michael Hofmann's anthology of Twentieth-Century German Poetry (which features two of my translations of Lutz Seiler and which I discussed here), Hofmann's translations of Durs Grünbein in Ashes for Breakfast (which I discussed here), Rosmarie Waldrop's translation of Ulf Stolterfoht's Lingos I-X, and my two volumes of translations of Dieter M. Gräf, Tousled Beauty and Tussi Research.

Eagle-Flown Sky

An eagle-flown sky, almost empty.

Yet the certitude that the sky had been flown, was soon to be flown again. Occasional sightings ...

Eagles soaring thus—visibly, invisibly—in the summit of heaven.

John Taylor, "Eagles of Fortune and Misfortune," The Apocalypse Tapestries

*

I spotted a large raptor on a fence post while driving the other day. It reminded me of the above, though the "eagle-flown sky" that I then saw was a sky in which I had never seen an eagle, but in which there must have once been one.

There's something going on here about defamiliarization—which reminds me that I recently realized that no artistic work that works with defamiliarization can completely defamiliarize the objects or events that it is referring to. If it did, then one would not be able to see the thing anew, because one would not be able to see it at all. "Make it new," but don't make it so new as to be unrecognizable.

Depths and Surfaces

Peer through surfaces if you can: rock, river, fire.

And if you cannot, celebrate surfaces.

(John Taylor, "Depths and Surfaces," The Apocalypse Tapestries)

Birds seen from trains

"Still further on: a solitary ash-gray heron stands motionless in a misty pond formed by the backwaters of the Loire. The giant bird's long beak remains perfectly parallel to the surface of the pond, but its eyes no doubt continue to peer into the shallow water, attentive to the slightest shadow or darting movement."

This is from "Ingrandes," part XVII of John Taylor's Apocalypse Tapestries (which I already posted about here). There's a lot of train riding in Taylor's book, and then he sees birds from the trains.

There's something so vivid about a bird seen from a train: a Little Egret seen from a train in Italy, and then seen again on the way back; a Bald Eagle flying alongside the train from Bellingham to Seattle. So vivid that Taylor later refers to another bird apparently seen from a train:

"A sparkling white egret on the bank of the brackish north fork near Le Cellier." ("Oudon")

If that were in Italy instead of France, Taylor might have seen the same bird I did.

Measuring the Temple

"The inebriation of obtaining a solution." (John Taylor, "Measuring the Temple," The Apocalypse Tapestries)

Completing a first draft of a poem, whether in the rush of composition or over many weeks, is an incredible rush. ("Enivrez-vous sans cesse.") In "Measuring the Temple," Taylor identifies another rush: obtaining a solution to a difficult mathematical problem.

But he, too, made the turn that I did:

"You had long carried out the labors of mathematical deduction; now you withdrew from them completely."

Pomegranates of Kandahar

I had a burst of reading poetry books the past week or so, including David Harsent, Galway Kinnell, and John Taylor (along with the books by Jill Alexander Essbaum, Edwin Morgan, and Daljit Nagra that I posted comments on already). Now I'm reading Sean O'Brien.

I also read Sarah Maguire's The Pomegranates of Kandahar (as well as her Spilt Milk, which has been on my shelf for ages). I was not very impressed by the book as a whole, but it had a couple of lovely poems, including this one, which so powerfully captures the layers of meanings that a landscape (or in this case a seascape) can have for people who look at it from different perspectives:

EUROPE

Merely an idea bruising
the far horizon, as a cold mist tightens into rain –

but at dusk we still wait
by the Bay of Tangier, on the old city walls, gazing northwards

till the night comes on,
and a necklace of light gathers the throat of the sea.

The young men burn –
lonely, intent on resolving that elusive littoral

into a continent of promises
kept, clean water, work. If they stare hard enough, perhaps

it will come to them.
Each night, they climb these crumbling ramparts

and face north
like true believers, while the lighthouse of Tarifa blinks

and beckons,
unrolling its brilliant pavement across the pitiless Straits.

*

I did find it a bit odd that the first two poems in the book that really struck me were both mentioned on the back cover, the second being "Landscape, with Dead Sea" (she's got a thing for shores and seas—or maybe I do).

All in all, Maguire's work strikes me most when something begins to push the poems to go further, whether it be the historical and geographical elements that drive "Landscape, with Dead Sea" or the anaphoric negations of "The Jardin des Plantes": "Do not go to the Jardin des Plantes." (That poem, like "Europe," is available as part of a .doc file here, though it takes some searching to find it.) In "A Village of Water," a village slowly and cinematically overflows, "as though / it had rained all night." The poem might be about the disappearance of a village because of the construction of a dam, but it leaves the literal meaning open enough to give the poem the feel of a parable. "From Dublin to Ramallah" is dedicated to Ghassan Zaqtan, "because they would not let you travel from Dublin to Ramallah," and again the external motivation lifts Maguire's writing to another level.

And then there's this, from "In Passing" (my apologies to Maguire, as these lines are supposed to be staggered):

I stepped on the platform
just as a goods train passed through.
The length of it winded me—

boxcar after boxcar after boxcar
furiously intimate, close enough to touch:
the whiplash of turbulence,

the aftershock of silence.

*

I'm deeply impressed by some of Maguire's poems, but in the end I'm not that impressed by her collection. It's up for the T. S. Eliot Prize, but so are Edwin Morgan's A Book of Lives, Matthew Sweeney's Black Moon, and Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark, all of which are much more impressive overall. (And those are the only others on the list that I have yet read.)