Fred DingsThe Four Rings: New and Selected Poems

Abstract

scholar to add a visit to the suicide forest Aokigahara to the itinerary, and his eagerness to leap from rooftops and under train cars suggests a morbid side to the fascination with impermanence in Japan. Can one still make an inner journey in the age of “turbocapitalism,” Poschmann asks? Perhaps the great adventures of the spirit, the narrow roads to the interior, are no longer possible in this era of smartphones and bullet trains. Her wonderfully ironic novel about a twenty -first-century person seeking an “inner understanding of the phenomena of the Japanese black pine” offers one potential itinerary. Jeff Peer City University of New York Fred Dings The Four Rings: New and Selected Poems Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin University Press. 2020. 112 pages. ENJOYABLE AND INSIGHTFUL, Fred Dings’s The Four Rings consists of striking images that accompany both narrative and lyrical expressions. His narrative poems, beyond their stories, are also refreshingly lyrical. The collection opens with selected poems from two previous works, then presents twenty-nine new poems. The “four rings” introducing the new poems comprise “interdependent rings of relationship : self, family, community, divinity.” Since the poet frequently contemplates Eastern concepts of reality, additionally, the “four rings” suggest the “four immeasurables ” of Tibetan Buddhism. In “Meditation Caves of Tibet,” Dings concludes the book by joining “faint sounds” of “rising” words “opening at last like rings / on a lake to a clarity beyond all matter, / imperceptibly to us, perhaps, / but audible enough for a spirit world to hear.” In “The Bridge”—an image of transition—“arc[s] from here to there, / shaping what I know, to reflect and complete / itself on the flow of what I don’t.” As depicted by Dings, the “rings” seem to involve style and craft as well as subject matter. Images of nature are comfortably situated with a variety of smart but unobtrusive allusions to figures such as James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Aeneas, Lao Tzu, along with references to Buddhism— all this while keeping a contemporary, domestic vison of family members and poet. The poet’s “interdependence” displays comfortable union within individual poems and in the collection as a whole. He links memory with ultimate questions grounded in contemporary experience. In “The Past,” Ding writes: “‘unremembered acts of kindness ’ are never lost. / They whisper to our dreams / like a mother’s hum on the distant edge of sleep / . . . the distant suns of times past / mixing their light with the bright noon of the present.” He suggests “an intimate alienation,” and in “The Last Voyage” the poet affirms “a sudden liberation wanting at the last / what maybe was wanted from the start– / not transport, but immersion.” Like so many of his passages, the poet successfully unites past and present with the abiding question of human destiny. Ken Hada East Central University The Critic as Amateur Ed. Saikat Majumdar & Aarthi Vadde New York. Bloomsbury. 2019. 292 pages. EACH OF THE TEN ESSAYS in this splendid , exhaustively researched, and timely collection—buoyed by the editors’ equally comprehensive introduction and a contrapuntal pedagogical epilogue on “New, Interesting, and Original: The Undergraduate as Amateur”—is substantial in developing its arguments. At a time when many can avow unashamedly that they are critics, in “Beyond Professionalism: The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism,” the essay that closes part 1, Peter D. McDonald asks a question that probes the marrow of the collection and provides its tentacles: “So much for the cunning passages of history. What of the future? Can creative criticism in the Tagore-Blanchot sense even be said to have one, particularly when its fate now seems tied to the embattled, increasingly corporatized, and over-professionalized university of today?” Also in the first part, canonical critic Derek Attridge’s “In Praise of Amateurism ,” aligned with the privileging of Roland Barthes’s views and Joseph North’s recent Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History throughout the book, assesses critical commentary, concluding that “instead of being driven by the need to say something ingenious and unprecedented, [it] would aim at an accurate reflection of the critic’s experience.” That is neither here nor there WORLDLIT.ORG 105 ...