Equinox by Tsjêbbe Hettinga

Abstract

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^ ^^^ ^^^^H Divided into three sections, there is no real division of subject matter. Heaven and hell, children, and God's inscrutable motives are all questioned throughout the book. In section 1, we hear Dantean rever berations with "all of us will meet in Hell / under extremely gruesome punishments" and echoes of T. S. Eliot with "They're always there, three ladies / saying Yes, yes, / it's really / a very nice house / with a holly bower." It is best to read the verse in The Swing in the Middle of Chaos in small doses to savor the lines and flavor of each poem. The translations are excellent and do not read like trans lations, the highest form of praise one can proffer to the translators. Virginia Parobek Lancaster, Ohio Louise Gl?ck. A Village Life. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2009.72 pages. $23. isbn 978-0-374-28374-2 A Village Life is different from Lou ise Gl?ck's earlier work. We still encounter the vintage lean and mus cular style that is found in the com pressed metaphoricity and startling sudden movement of mind in lines such as these: "The fountain rises at the center of the plaza; / on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub." Yet most of this new work in comparison to her earlier work is dilated, proselike, almost discursive. This is not to say that the new work is filled with the nonessential, the equivalent of poetic flab. On the contrary, given the project of the book, its meditative, unhurried, but careful consideration of experience, of correspondences, of multifaceted circumstance and twilit memory, the modality seems ideal. This layer ing is difficult to represent with a single quotation because it tends to be experienced over the course of multiple poems, yet something of the tenor of the prevalent voice can be heard in these lines from "Sun set": "At the same time as the sun's setting, / a farm worker's burning dead leaves. / . . . Compared to the sun, all fires here / are short-lived, amateurish? / they end when the leaves are gone. / . . . But the death is real. / As though the sun's done what it came to do, / made the field grow, then / inspired the burning of earth. // So it can set now." If Gl?ck's earlier poems some times seem to stride inexorably down a path of emotional or cogni tive determination, these are willing to walk quietly, solemnly, pausing to glimpse down side paths, the eye venturing to the edge of the bend, wondering, discerning, remarking. We still experience the laser-gaze of Gl?ck, of course, but the voice is frequently tinged with knowing disillusionment, a bitten experience, or hard-earned fatigue. In "First Snow," we read: "Like a child, the earth's going to sleep ... / You can see it in her face, everyone can. / So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come. / Because the mother's sick to death of her life / and needs silence." In the title poem, we read: "In the window, the moon is hang ing over the earth, / meaningless but full of messages. / It's dead, it's always been dead, / but it pretends to be something else, / burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes / it could actually make something grow." Not all the poems are darkened in this way, though. In fact, there's an overall balance in the way the poems include villagers of all ages and posi tion: the adolescent, the married, the aged, the lonely, the happy, those "in love," those fallen "out of love." Of course, the village is the micro cosm of the whole human commu nity, and the speaker's psychological insights on the phases of growth and life are as nuanced and original as always in Louise Gl?ck's work. This is a deeply worthy book. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Tsj?bbe Hettinga. Equinox. Ljouwert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2009. 88 pages. 17.50. isbn 978-90-330-0831-3 Tsj?bbe Hettinga's reputation in Friesland and elsewhere has grown steadily in the last two decades. He has been writing poetry since...