A Thousand Mornings

Abstract

72 World Literature Today reviews He compares poetry to prose and asks why one writes poetry when no one has asked for poetry at the library for a year except for himself. His poem “Working Temperature” describes how he falls in love with poetry at the end of each novel he reads. His relationship with poetry is like that of a thief lurking by, trying to steal what he wants. Poetry as a profession doesn’t pay. He continually struggles with this, yet it doesn’t stop him from conversing with other poets such as Homer, Horace, Rumi, Whitman, and Shakespeare . How can one live and go on with all the bad news around us, he asks in “Fruit Trees,” as did Adorno after the Holocaust. In the middle of the book, he has a fourteen-part poem, “Zvezdara,” about his ulcer and hospitalization. Even at the hospital, he can’t live without poetry and easily debates with dead poets about his colonoscopy , or therapy. He jokingly writes, “All roads lead to the toilet. / Rome is now far away.” In a sense, in this poem he sees his youth dying away. He hopes his three-year-old son will have a better future, yet he “cries silently,” knowing the history of violence is bound to recur, as in “Bodrum” and “On Behalf of Life’s Lessons.” He is afraid of death, of occupying armies. Muslims in his community, including himself, had to circumcise their boys secretly during communist times in Eastern Orthodox Serbia. He ends the book with a rather gloomy prediction of how not even reincarnation is news anymore, as it is preempted by news of “war, floods, and sellers of fog.” This moving book of contemporary poetry by Enes Halilović is essential reading. These are poems, in Gibran’s words, of “immeasurable beauty”—making art out of pain. Biljana D. Obradović Xavier University of Louisiana Mary Oliver. A Thousand Mornings. New York. Penguin. 2012. isbn 9781594204777 If all the poems in A Thousand Mornings were as remarkable and well made as “Hum, Hum,” which mines childhood pain in a powerful way, it would be a worthwhile book indeed. “Hum, Hum” succeeds by offering more ambiguity than the typical Oliver poem. Rather than the simple praise of mystery that typifies her work, this poem enacts mystery, from the surprise arrival of bees in the beginning, through a dark past, to a pressing onward at the end. As such, I recommend the 2011 issue of Georgia State University’s literary journal, Five Points, in which “Hum, Hum” first appeared (14:2). The majority of the poems in A Thousand Mornings, though certainly accessible, repeatedly come to rest in self-congratulations. “If I were a Sufi for sure I would be / one of the spinning kind” Oliver proclaims with a pat on her own back at the end of “If I Were.” In “Good-Bye Fox,” she ventriloquizes nature for the purpose of self-affirmation: “you’re okay in my book,” says the fox in response to the poet’s wit. In “The Moth, the Mountains , the Rivers,” Oliver preaches outright: “Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile time with them. And I suggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity , that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is.” A similar poem is “Three Things to Remember,” which begins with “As long as you’re dancing , you can / break the rules” and then immediately concludes with “Sometimes breaking the rules is just / extending the rules. // Sometimes there are no rules.” One fears this may be what Facebook and Twitter can do to contemporary poetry. “You fuss over life with your clever / words, mulling and chewing on its meaning,” that talking fox affectionately chides Oliver, but the charge does not hold up. This metaphor of chewing on meaning is itself among the most worn-out of clichés. In “The First Time Percy Came Back,” we are told that the dead dog is “unreachable. As music / is present yet you can’t touch it.” Such easy sentimentality is a betrayal of the poem’s emotional stakes...