I saw this collection on the shelf at a bookstore and while I didn’t get it at the time, for some reason it gnawed me. I did some googling and read about the book and the author and, somewhat trepidatiously, finally sat down to read it.

Machi Tawara is not Yeats nor Dante nor Milton nor Eliot nor Ashberry – at least not in translation (I know that I am missing a ton of information and shading, not in the least because they are all written in tanka form and Japan’s specialized poetry forms don’t really translate directly to English without losing their form). They’re a little sappy, more than a little youthful, a bit twee, and they should be trite, but, instead, they are delightful. I can see why the book became a bestseller in Japan.

Mostly about falling in love, losing love, being in love (and a bit about being a teacher and living alone), there is nothing groundbreaking about any of it, but as soon as I had finished, I wanted to go back and read it again.

The individual tanka are translated here as three line verses (in Japanese, they would be a single, vertical line). Each one makes for self contained poem, while simultaneously making for a continuous narrative.

From a poetic sequence entitled Hashimoto High School (where the then twenty-something Tawara taught):

Girls in middy blouses
scurry through the streets
as if keeping someone waiting

Writing the character for “youth”
somehow I’m struck
by all those horizontal lines

Besides that first tanka‘s echoes of Pound’s metro station, each tanka works perfectly as a self-contained poem, but also lends itself to a clear, more or less linear sequence.

I became intrigued by Christian Wiman, the immediate former editor of Poetry, after seeing the tail end of an interview he gave to Bill Moyers. He was actually speaking mostly about a book he wrote about his faith (and the cancer that almost killed him).

I don’t actually know if any of the poems in Once in the West were written after receiving the diagnosis, but as someone who has had his own experience with a life threatening medical condition and an arduous and uncertain recovery, I certainly wore that lens over my eyes when I read them.

These poems are often religious, but less… theological… than, say Fanny Howe. I don’t think Wiman is Catholic. I could probably just google the answer, but I’m going to guess he’s that Episcopalian. He’s also funny and a little crude in his ‘conversations’ with God.

A solid portion of Wiman’s poetry here are unrhymed couplets. He’s got a prose poem or two, some ones with longer or more unusual stanzas (or no stanzas at all), but the couplets appear in half or more, I would say. Even without rhyme, it gave them a nice, old fashioned feel, like some modern day Alexander Pope.

Below is one of the poems. Not necessarily typical in its quiet, but it does show how the faint, almost but not quite rhymes, assonance, and alliterations give it a feel rather like a Pope or a Thomas Gray.

Less

 

Silas,
say less

than silence.
In a dawn

lost to all,
but me,

be,
Sila, beyond

the hay bale
harboring

kittens
no one now

has the heart
to kill;

and touching
nothing

touch
my head

so we can be alive,
together,

Silas,
as together

we are dead.

I’ve long admired Myles for her essays and poems in magazines and for her role as an poetry advocate/agitator and as a prominent (leading? I don’t know enough to say) figure in queer literature.

But, I’d never before read one of her books. Until now.

First of all, she’s very good. It reads quickly, but I actually read through the book a couple of times because it warrants it (and because it’s a quick read; let’s be honest, I’m not going to casually read War and Peace a second time without a lot thought about the investment I’m making in the project).

A wonderful melancholy thread runs throughout the short (though not broken) lines. A sense of loss of identity from trading New York for California. A fear of drifting from others or of not being able to connect with others like we feel we ought to… sometimes the ‘other’ seems to be a romantic partner (at least once, it’s explicit in that regard), but that also feels relatively unimportant. It is the dissociation that is important. She frequently writes in an almost ‘tough guy’ vernacular, but undercuts it at every turn.

So, very good.