Ariadne's Veil by Ioana Ieronim

Abstract

reviews The city of Kraków, where Davidson taught for a year as a Fulbright scholar, figures prominently in this collection . Strolling around Jordan Park, surrounded by the busts of esteemed Poles, including poets, the American poet experiences “history’s pulse,” perhaps without realizing that she herself wills that experience into being and is thus part of the commemoration. After all, she is, not unlike her heroine Mrs. Schmetterling, “Any century’s woman,” whose “imagination is / pressed like a tiny chestnut blossom between the pages.” But ironically, and victoriously , Davidson is also mapping out “the enormity of space,” where one’s sense of belonging evaporates as much as it allows one to cling to “a possibility for more // than dissolution.” Indeed, this book is filled with poems that sing and cry, and while doing so they echo with “an ancient call” that keeps us company when we search for God, watch “cumulus clouds rising above a death camp,” or free the “soul’s wilderness” to spread “like milkweed / in the garden plot that no one owns.” Piotr Florczyk Santa Monica, California Ioana Ieronim. Ariadne’s Veil. Bucharest. Contemporary Literature Press. 2013. isbn 9786068366647 The story of Ariadne’s thread leading Theseus out of the labyrinth is a useful metaphor for the strands that bring this book to the reader out of what had been cultural obscurity. First, although Ioana Ieronim established her reputation with poems written in Romanian—some of which, notably The Triumph of the Water Witch, were translated into English—in recent years she has written in English, a decision, or rather a process, she has described in Poetry International. Second, publishers like Contemporary Literature Press (editura. mtt1.ro) are making available to an international audience work that previously would have only been nominally published. While the medium is less important than the message, it represents real progress for all writers and readers. In the first half of Ariadne’s Veil, Ieronim plays variations on the myth. The Minotaur is killed offstage, but Ariadne’s memories of him blend with images of Theseus, whose identity, as well as hers, becomes less certain and more elemental as the sequence progresses —or rather proceeds, since the only real narrative line comes from the 68 worldliteraturetoday.org Hassan Najmi Gertrude Roger Allen, tr. Interlink Books Committed to write the elderly Mohammed’s life story before he dies, the unnamed narrator struggles with the constant suspicion that Mohammed is spinning lies about being Gertrude Stein’s close friend and guest in her Paris apartment. Yet his growing fascination with the experiences inside Stein’s elite circle makes him hope that at least some of the stories could be true. Orlando Ricardo Menes Fetish University of Nebraska Press The cumuli and bilious forms that skate across the horizon of these poems call up a sense of longing through their invocation of the spirits of past ancestors. Well versed in the uprooted life of an immigrant, Menes’s profound references not only convey local color but also bring the essence of his family history eye level with the reader in these striking verses. Nota Bene reader’s knowledge of the myth. At one point, Ariadne’s perspective is reduced, or refined, to a vision of “these things that one cannot speak,” perhaps drawn from “this sense before knowledge.” Some of these matters lie in depths—labyrinthine, mythic, psychological , physical—that can be plumbed by words, even those “meant to cheat,” which “speak the truth.” The sequence ends with the image of “Swans on the Lake,” a striking, nonsensual , and at the same time erotic evocation of grace and harmony. The book’s second half, “Songs and the Day,” refers sparingly to the myth (though an anthropomorphized laptop with erotic overtones appears in both halves). However, rhythms of all sorts—natural, poetic, physical— reveal glancingly what lies beneath our individuality and even our humanity, “these things / teasingly beyond our reach / though they were ours once upon a time.” At the same time, words are omnipresent, tempting like a gleaming ripe blackberry: “the word I need / in my line,” guarded by “nettles and thorns” but ultimately valuable in visions “not fully communicable / and yet communion.” These...