Charges by Gitta Honegger

Abstract

collect the fragments of the past, re-created through forceful and poignant imagery. Dawes succeeds in exploring the present condition of the African experience of the diaspora through the lenses of the past and the examination of the self with a great deal of lyricism and creativity. The continuous juggling between the past and the present as well as the use of multifarious voices—of people, spirits, and souls—that speak to the resonances of the past and to complexities of the present, while pointing to future paths, is one of the major poetic achievements of this collection. The need to reconcile with one’s past is what the journey into the “gleaming city of celestial beauty,” around which the last part of this collection is centered, is all about. It is, Dawesseemstohint,aprerequisiteto“retrieve those healing songs,” in view of reconstructing one’s identity and finding one’s voice in the contemporary present situation. Lamia Zaibi University of Manouba Don Paterson. 40 Sonnets. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 64 pages. The sonnet carries more freight than any other form in the English tradition, which it entered early in the sixteenth century through Thomas Wyatt’s loose translations of Petrarch. With the form came a host of conventions: unrequited love, cruel beauty, the lovers’ paradox. The greatest sonneteers, however, have shown as much ingenuity in subverting the form as in meeting its formal and thematic demands. Early on, the Earl of Surrey altered the Italianate rhyme scheme to be suitable for English, creating what is, unfairly, known as the “Shakespearean sonnet.” After half a century of lovers’ eyes shining like the sun, Shakespeare frankly declared that his mistress’s “eyes are nothing like the sun.” Early in the seventeenth century, John Donne turned the sonnet’s erotic energies into devotional verse, and, at century’s end, Milton made the sonnet political. In the twentieth century, Robert Lowell jettisoned the form’s ornate rhyme for his confessional sonnets, while Ted Berrigan turned sonnets into an avant-garde game of cut and paste. Even with this history weighing on the project, Scottish poet Don Paterson makes the form fresh and interesting in 40 Sonnets. Paterson writes some formally strict sonnets, but he also isn’t afraid to jazz around. “Séance,” for instance, is fourteen lines of Ouija board gibberish: “Speke. – see sskseek[.]” “Shutter” reduces the standard sonnet’s iambic pentameter to a few syllables per line—“As she slept / late / below”—but brings to the surface the sonnet’s barely submerged eroticism: “the naked / skylight / he lapped / her breast[.]” Paterson uses blank verse in “The Foot” to tell a heartbreaking story of violence in Gaza. Some of the sonnets seem intensely personal, like “The Roundabout,” in which, addressing two children, he describes a day that was “our first out / after me and your mother.” It is hard to tell if the “after” demarcates a marriage or a divorce, and this reticence makes the gesture seem all the more intimate, a technique used throughout. Yet another poem imagines what it feels like to be a wave, and yet another attempts to poetically embody the curmudgeonly TV doctor “House.” Out of a single form, Paterson makes a great variety of poetic experiences. Much of the fun in 40 Sonnets is in watching how the form shifts from poem to poem and in watching how Paterson’s various approaches interact with the sonnet’s illustrious history. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Miscellaneous Elfriede Jelinek. Charges. Trans. Gitta Honegger. London. Seagull Books. 2017. 200 pages. Elfriede Jelinek adopts the narrative structure,setting,andthemesofAeschylus’s Suppliant Women for Charges, a drama that delivers a powerful, raw, emotional depiction of the refugee crisis that is currently playing out on a global scale. The Nobel Prize–winning author witnesses via television and other media—she is an agoraphobe —the plight of a group of refugees from Central Asia and the Middle East, who arrive in Vienna in November 2012 and set up camp in front of a church near her home. Jelinek uses these events as the backdrop for writing her own tragedy. The local populace engages in an intense debate about what to do with...