Dorianne LauxOnly as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems

Abstract

Books in Review region, Ukraine. The region was torn, invaded, and occupied by various nations for centuries; hence its rich history. The Bukovyna region is now a part of an independent Ukraine, scattered on the luscious slopes of the eastern Carpathian Mountains—a beautiful country deeply rooted in tradition, religion, and folklore. Matios’s novel Sweet Darusya, initially published in Ukraine in 2003, has been read, studied, researched, and written about worldwide—mostlyinacademiccircles.The questionremains,however,whyittookovera decade for its English translation to appear. In my opinion, not only the complexity of the text made it a daunting task for a skilled translator to undertake but also the challenge of communicating in another language a deeply seeded trauma of Ukraine and its people, masterfully portrayed by Matios. A team of translators, Michael M. Naydan and Olha Tytarenko, undertook this momentous project, as each of them brought their own expertise to the table and turned it into a successful collaboration by blending translation styles and making specific translation choices that work best for the English-speaking reader. I read Sweet Darusya multiple times: when it was first published in Ukraine, then a few years later, and most recently in its English translation. It is a powerful text on many levels: individual, familial, communal, societal, and national. It is a true family saga without a clearly outlined plot, showcasing a few storylines that overlap and tell a story through their own characters and events. At times, it feels that the novel develops on its own without a writer behind it. DORIANNE LAUX Dorianne Laux Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems New York. W. W. Norton. 2019. 128 pages. This newest collection by Dorianne Laux includes selections from her five previous books of poetry and thirty-two pages of new poetry, some of her best to date. As with any collection of selected poems spanning twenty-nine years, we are able to see more clearly (by way of the close juxtaposition of poems separated by decades) constants and metamorphoses in poetic style and content. Laux’s work from the beginning has excelled by way of voice and imagery: a distinct and consistent voice from book to book delights with imagery that is vibrant, original, and vivid. These qualities of imagery shine in every poem, but nowhere more so than in her portraits, especially of celebrities that all of us can picture, such as Mick Jagger and Cher. We have the instant recognition of aptness that we experience, for example, in reading Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer.” Another constant is her recurrent subject matter: we find ourselves mostly preoccupied with sex, loss, death, and love—to wit, mostly universal human concerns considered through the lens of a particular experience related in a confessional style strongly influenced by Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. This influence is most strongly noticed in poems about domestic violence, abuse, and sexual exultation . (As a side note, I might wonder if from some vantage point in the future our own time might seem oddly obsessed with sexual matters when two thousand preceding years of canonical poetry mostly doesn’t include it or does so discreetly.) Laux’s poetry, then, is decidedly written in the grain of her poetic era, not across that grain. As such, we can sometimes feel as if we’ve read these poems before in some way: their strategies often fall within a kind of group free-verse style that almost always feels vaguely familiar by way of strategy and movement, the kind of consensus style we might surmise frequently in the high-profile glossy magazines of our time. There’s also a treatment of the line and rhythm that has too often been the group-style default setting of contemporary free verse for the last few decades—i.e., rhythms that are mostly prose rhythms and lines that are mostly determined by syntactical sense and visual approximation than by time and measured syllabic configurations (or even any other determination, for that matter). In these ways, then, Laux’s poetry does not distinguish itself, except in those poems that rise above everything else she has written and astonish us with their achievement even within...