I have benefitted from some recently-expressed enthusiasms of contributors
to this list and thought it was time I passed on a new-ish discovery of my
own.
Peter Cole is an American poet, 40-ish, resident in Jerusalem, and a
magnificent translator from Hebrew (books by the medieval Shmuel HaNagid
plus moderns Aharon Shabtai and Harold Schimmel - though I've only seen the
HaNagid and Shabtai so far).
His second full-length collection <Hymns and Qualms> has just appeared from
Sheep Meadow Press (PO Box 1345, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY 10471), at $12.95,
and is one of the finest voumes of new poetry that I've come across
recently. His first book, <Rift> is unfortunately out of print.
Some excerpts from H&Q (in the first and third, the lines are deliberately
ragged: I hope they survive translation from my software to yours):
Blessings Echo Will Traumatize (poem XVI from the sequence <Speech´s Hedge>
My aim at high choirs
in each maybe arrives
meshed with hackneyed knickknacks
or similes
echoes will traumatize--
which might be what it means
to follow out design,
to take one's cue from feeling
as it's felt, not filtered,
or smeared.
The pain of loving you
is almost more than I can bear,
said Dowson; not Dowson,
who was it? (Lawrence--.)
And yet it has to be borne,
or else we wilt in painlessness.
I was loyal to feeling's form
although it brought me
negative love, not fame,
and vintage heartache.
Was I loyal--
out of shame alone
or fear? Fiction's coward,
I was loyal out of love
which soured
and has to find a new flame.
I wasn't qualified -- and found it
where the old had died,
in ash and air,
and made of it a choir
for those whom echoes bring.
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Multiplex (Shmuel HaNagid, 11thC)
The multiple troubles of man,
my brother, like slander and pain,
amaze you? Consider the heart
which folds them all
in strangeness and doesn't break.
--------------------------------------------------
Perfect Pitch
Through thinking come like
eyes to lie
like clouds
or ewes
by slopes that face the
deads' incline
and unquaint perch
on resurrection--
a church-fueled
geo-religious formation
conducting dust and meaning
which drained where screams of
offered innocence settled
and continents abut:
Remember coming to die --
and not to self alone--?
and now alone with trapezoids
of sky
and deadened sea
to build a garden waiting
(walled) or warding off what was
to be a cult of plainness,
a busy if bladeless altar
of *does* confused with *is*--
an oasis to funnel
what breaks along
the rim of it
in algebras of coming,
composite truth instilled, not preached,
or preened,
but shining,
slope to thinking's slope.
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* indicates an italicised word.
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