NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS |
Countering chaos with hope in poetry collection
There’s something burning at the center of Richard Hoffman’s new collection of poetry, “People Once Real” (Lily Poetry Review). Fury, for one thing. For the children killed with guns; for the dark and crumbling chaos of this American moment; for injustices and violations both widespread and personal. Grief, for another. For what and who’s been lost (“I miss my brothers”); for innocence; for a navigable sense of the future, “when clarity remains at least as hard and/ honesty much harder.” The flames of grief are less white-hot than fury’s, and more the sparking tangle of electrical wires snaking beneath the floor. “If you’re not a prisoner, you’re a guard,/ walking the catwalk, weighted with keys.” And so how to conceive of a future in this grave state? “Let’s leave metaphor for another day./ Here we sit facing one another, our knees/ touching, hands joined, frightened, learning/ what we need, what each of us will need to do.” The book burns, too, with love and the hope — however wearied, however tattered — that it brings. That hope, that glimmering sense that maybe something more or better is possible, raises the question of what one can do. “What is the word for the way/ the starling’s sheen and the carapace/ of the Japanese beetle seem alike?/ And if I find it will the dying stop?” Hoffman will read from the book on Wednesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. at Porter Square
Books in Cambridge.
Boston-area poet documents the ordinary with spare precision
The epigraph of Jason Tandon’s latest collection of poetry, “This Far North” (Black Lawrence), includes lines from a poem by Robert Bly called “What Did We See Today?” In some ways, the collection that follows is an extended answer to that question. Children bending cattail stems. “The sky so white/ there is no sky.” A squirrel who “snuffs the earth./ Scrapes up a nut.” A crow entangled with a cloud. “Today I saw a rainbow.” Tandon, who lives in Framingham and teaches at Boston University, does much with few words, with delicacy, precision, and occasional humor; some have a haiku quality. One called “Blue Skies, Calm Water” reads “All day long/ a beeping steamroller/ in reverse.” He reminds us there’s meaning to be found in the act of attention itself.
Coming out
“Work-Life Balance” by Aisha Franz, translated from the German by Nicholas Houde (Drawn and Quarterly)
“Hit Parade of Tears” by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett, Helen O’Horan, and David Boyd (Verso) “Juno Loves Legs” by Karl Geary (Catapult)
Pick of the week
Rachael Imnerarity at Porter Square Books in Cambridge recommends “The Bitter Seasons’ Whip: The Complete Poems of Lee Yuk Sa” translated by Sekyo Nam Haines (Tolsun): “A frequent political prisoner in Korea during Japanese occupation, Lee Yuk Sa still found the grace and composure to pen these 36 delicate, wistful poems, which serve as a paean to the natural world of his homeland and a testament to the strength of the human spirit. Superbly translated by local poet Sekyo Nam Haines.”