Cvetka LipušWhat We Are When We Are / Kaj Smo, Ko Smo by Tom Priestly

Abstract

In the last and longest story, “The Opiate Eyes of the Buddha,” Katherine, vacationing in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, joins a hotel celebration that ends in horrific murder. Having risked death to escape, she asks: “Where is the dialogue between us and space, us and God? The bridge? The cosmic cable? . . . I’ve learnt something . . . to be less spoilt, to be more grateful. To try to be alive, not to take it for granted. Maybe to be alive . . . is to be happy.” Raising existential questions, these generically diverse and often deceptively lyrical tales suggest that protagonists who accept life as empty succumb to artifice, playing their own games or asking to be played, while those who dare to search for “real life” find connection to others and the cosmos, “touched by beauty, and finally , by grace.” As Katherine understands at last, “I am just able to see . . . I am the blueprint, my atoms came from the stars, I am connected.” Michele Levy North Carolina A&T State University Cvetka Lipuš What We Are When We Are / Kaj Smo, Ko Smo Trans. Tom Priestly. Edmonton. Athabasca University Press. 2018. 108 pages. THIS BOOK OFtranslatedpoetrydeserves strong reactions, and it both evokes and earns them. It is a complex if short work, and one’s responses might not be immediate , but they will come. As each of the thirty-two poems here adds its insights to the ones before, and as the sureness of Cvetka Lipuš’s poetic vision becomes more apparent, we cannot help but be grateful that the author has let us inside these deeply humane thoughts of hers. We are also likely to be more than a little bit in awe of the consistency and calm insistence of her language ; this is high artistry. We might also be grateful for the aptness of the title, which, reinforced by thoughts from the brief foreword , impresses on us the unity and mission of this project, a testing, a plumbing, of our nature (I won’t say identity) in the long game that is cached or aggregated experience (I won’t say life). Aleš Šteger Above the Sky Beneath the Earth Trans. Brian Henry. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 75 pages. WHAT IS IT about Slovenian poets that continues to tickle American readers? The most famous of them, the late Tomaž Šalamun, was simply fun to read. What’s more, beneath their surreal façades, his poems hid a voice wrestling with fundamental questions about the human condition . Is that it, then? Fun and games coupled with irony, that most famous eastern European poetic ingredient? To be able to combine humor and absurdist turns of phrase with serious meditations on ethics and history is hard to pull off, yet in the hands of the Slovenians it never feels contrived. Aleš Šteger (b. 1973) continues in this vein, though this latest volume to be translated by the inimitable Brian Henry, himself a fine poet who’s learned a great deal from the poets he’s translated, is a bit different. First of all, it’s much quieter in tone than we’d expect. Gone are the histrionics and the pyrotechnics. Divided into three sections , “Beneath the Earth,” “Field of Audibility ,” and “Above the Sky,” the untitled poems consist of mostly declarative sentences , many of which are end-stopped with a period. The effect is both jarring and engrossing, for while the rapid succession of precise lines can dull our senses, their wisdom , if you will, hinges on the poet’s ability to communicate his thoughts and feelings in a way that is greater than the sum of their individual parts. In his blurb, Ilya Kaminsky singles out the volume’s third poem—my favorite lines in what is certainly a fine poem: “The day arrives like a poem / In a lost language”—but there are plenty of gems throughout. “Between truth and man / I choose waiting,” declares the speaker of another poem in the book’s first section, and I’m immediately hooked. Recording his peregrinations around the world in the second section—from Japan through Argentina and on to Germany, especially Berlin, which has become an important focal point for Šteger—the poet...