Resistant worlds.” “Never beg for mercy/from the poem,/since it can offer none./Do not ask/what language it speaks,/since the answer is none. “When I think of ‘possible worlds,’ I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. “Oh, body, where are you going,/body of the earth, lost/double, lost copy of the body/mute body of yesterday/in tomorrow’s shredded cloth?” These are poems about confronting the end, the end of one’s own time and time in general, about repetition (“That is why, each day, when I return/to the illegible page/I must begin again/from the beginning” “Let us begin, let us begin again/not from the beginning but from the end”) and the paradox of poetry, its ability to say the unsayable, to exist and yet remain unsaid, the utility of futility. (New Directions, 117 pp., paper, $16.95.) It was a good year for our older poets, with new books by legends like Frank Bidart and Louise Glück, and this, with its stunning first sequence of elegies that call to mind Rilke, Celan, Inger Christensen - there’s a way that even poetry written in one’s native tongue already feels translated, as though the language of the mind were always foreign. LITTLE ELEGIES FOR SISTER SATAN, by Michael Palmer. It can jolt us out of patterns, back into intelligence. Self lost in obsessive agony, Your primal passion - a flaming ferocity, The raging fire consumes your dignity, And shame put to slumber. It reminds me that poetry can rewire our thinking - can actually change our minds - by using nothing like the rote language we’re so used to hearing in speech and in prose. The Obsessive Agony Of Lust Chinedu Dike. “It takes a violent middleman for me to talk to myself.” “I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord … Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?” “I am weak first/Before anything, I first become weak.” “there goes the poet - killing without killing - don’t mind this.” Words are not the revolution itself, Eisen-Martin seems to say, and yet this book disturbed me more than any other I read this year. (City Lights, 107 pp., paper, $15.95.) Reminiscent of June Jordan in their near-embrace of violence, these poems have a powerful ambivalence about what effect they might have in the world they are very aware of being poems: “A non-future dripping with real people/I mean, real people … Not poem people.” “I write poems today/I kill america today.” “Has the poem started yet?/I will tuck your shirt into the earth.” The language is visionary, sometimes trancelike.
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