Winter Poems

In poetry,its voice that makes the speaker memorable. Sure,it helps for a poet to be a master of metre,a lord of the poetic line

Dana Jennings

In poetry,its voice that makes the speaker memorable. Sure,it helps for a poet to be a master of metre,a lord of the poetic line. But thats not why,say,we still read Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. Each poet here,too,writes in a vital and original voice,from a Vietnamese-American tale spinner to an alter-ego cockroach crashing headlong onto the keyboard.

SÔNG I SING

by Bao Phi

In this strong and angry work of what he calls refugeography,Bao Phi,who has been a performance poet since 1991,wrestles with immigration,class and race in America at sidewalk level. To hip-hop beats and the squeal and shriek of souped-up Celicas stalking the city streets,he rants and scowls at a culture in which Asians are invisible,but also scolds his peers Bleached by colour-blind lies/ Buying DKNY and Calvin Klein/ So our own bodies are gentrified.

No worry of that,though,with Phi,who was born in Vietnam but raised in Minneapolis. His heart and soul still lie with the poor boys who ran through the streets/with heads spinning,languages spilling into summer/sticking into cracks on sidewalks,/pulling up weeds with our laughter. Every poem Phi writes rhymes with the truth.

TRES

by Roberto Bolaño

Since his death in 2003 at 50,the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been best known for labyrinthine novels like The Savage Detectives and 2666,even though he always thought of himself as a poet first. Tres is Bolaños second collection translated into English,after The Romantic Dogs,and its made up of three dreamy sequences.

Prose From Autumn in Gerona consists of poems that describe stills from an imaginary film: Two in the morning and a blank screen. My protagonist is sitting in an armchair,in one hand a cigarette and in the other a cup of cognac. Its another skewed Bolaño love story,laced with faint traces of noir menace evinced in references to two assassins, the night in the hotel, a secret agent. While Gerona echoes with loss and shadows,The Neochileans is a fable of youth and inexperience that follows a rock band on tour in small-town Chile: With a resigned gesture we boarded/The van our manager/Had given us in a fit/Of madness/And set off for the north.

Tres closes with A Stroll Through Literature,a phantasmagoria in which Bolaño communes with writers like Georges Perec and Philip K. Dick,Mark Twain and Carson McCullers,Kafka and Stendhal. He treats these writers like postmodern ruins meant solely for his exploration. And on the very last page of Stroll he,in a sense,tells us what hes been up to in the volume: I dreamt that a man was looking back over the anamorphic landscape of dreams,and his gaze,though hard as steel,splintered into multiple gazes,each more innocent,each more defenseless.

SEEING STARS

by Simon Armitage

Story continues below this ad

Give a listen to the loquacious and irresistible sperm whale who narrates The Christening,which opens this collection: I have a brain the size of a basketball,and on that basis alone am entitled to my opinions, and My song,available on audiocassette and compact disc,is a comfort to divorcées, and Dont be taken in by the dolphins and their winning smiles,they are the pickpockets of the ocean. Forget about Moby Dick,this blowhole should get his own talk show on Animal Planet.

Armitage spins out surreal satires sharpened by his wicked wit. In Cheeses of Nazareth he writes,I fear for the long-term commercial viability of the new Christian cheese shop in our neighborhood. His irreverence is a bracing antidote to just about any edition of the evening news: I hadnt meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins, he says in The Experience,but he can be very persuasive.

HAPPY LIFE

by David Budbill

Nesting on Judevine Mountain in Vermont,where he has lived for some 40 years,David Budbill is a no-nonsense free-range sage who celebrates tomatoes in September,the whistle of a woodcock and sweet black tea and ancient Chinese poems. He watches the seasons,the years and his own thoughts pass,embracing it all,as in September Visitors: Im glad to see our friends come:/talk,laughter,food,wine./Im glad to see our friends go:/solitude,emptiness,gardens,/autumn wind.

THE BEST OF ARCHY AND MEHITABEL,

by Don Marquis

This nostalgists delight skims the free-verse cream from Don Marquiss cockroach litterateur,Archy,and his alley-cat pal,Mehitabel. Marquiss conceit of a keyboard-crunching roach let him dissolve writers block and meet deadlines while amusing the readers of his newspaper column from 1916 and into the 1930s. These poems are as charming as the best silent films. Heres a small sample of Marquis/Archys verse: you should be glad/you re not a tomcat/for when all is said/and done/you know youd hate/to pay insurance/on nine lives instead of one.