Sestets by Charles Wright

Abstract

, Treatise on Analogy" describes the 1 speaker findinghimself ina carwith i a trapped bee trying to get out: T 1 picked up the notebook inwhich i Fm /Now recording this incident, ' and with its help / I directed the i insect toward the slightlyopen door, , / Halfway believing that one day i / Someone will treatme the same , way." Full of wisdom, intelligence, 1 beauty, and grace, Janusz Szuber's i poems deepen and strengthen our 1 ties to ourselves and theworld at i large. ' PiotrFlorczyk i Wilmington,Delaware 1 Charles Wright. Sestets. New York. ! Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2009. ix+ 75 1 pages. $23. isbn978-0-374-26115-3 ' A collection of six-line poems, Ses i tetsis something new fromCharles , Wright. Readers will hear the same 1 meditative voice, the same mix of , secular and religious reference, the 1 same rich metaphoricity and imag i ery. Humor, nostalgia, remorse, Lit 1 tieRichard, God, Dante, Italy, Mon i tana, the Blue Ridge, the I Ching, and much more?it's all here, in a i wide range of an expansive spirit i and protean imagination. What's 1 different about trying to fitall this i into a sestet is that it's like a size-ten 1 foot fittinginto a size-six shoe. The i incredible thing is that Wright pulls ' itoff,at leastmost of the time,partly i because his lines are often banners , of print that stretch from the leftto 1 right margins, containing as many i as nine to ten stresses and afford 1 ing more opportunity than more i common line lengths. But, even so, 1 why would thepoet ofZone Journals i choose todo this? , Perhaps theopening lines from i "ThisWorld IsNot My Home, I'm , Only Passing Through" offer a 1 clue: "The more you say, the more mistakes youTl make, / so keep it simple." Well, maybe, but my sense is thatWright speaks from the evening land of a spirit on the edge ofnight and feels thepressure to say less or say itmore succinctly than ever: time is growing short. In the poem "Stiletto," we read: "Why does each evening up here / always, in summer, seem to be / The way?as itdoes, with the light knifing low from right to left? / It will be on the next-to-last one?" Here, the speaker isperched on the edge ofchange, in the evening zone of transition. Ah, maybe that's it: the ses tet, the last six lines of the Italian sonnet form (lines 9-14) after the octave, which begin with a "turn," a change, in their first line. These, then, are poems of "the turn." Con sider, for example, these first few richly allusive lines of "Twilight of theDogs": "Death is themother of nothing. / This is a fact of life, / And exponentially sad. /All these years?a lifetime, really?thinking itmight be otherwise. /What are thecolors ofdespair?" Here, Wright has a little fun alluding to theG?t terd?mmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, spelling "God" backward, and directly challenging Wallace Stevens's famous passage from his poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty." The speaker seems to have turned from hope (though paradoxically in good humor); however, by the last poem in the sequence, "Little Ending," when he is "at thegreat forkon the untouchable road," he says, "Some one will take our hand, / someone will give us refuge, / Circling left or circling right."Here, in the last line of the last sestet, thefull turnis achieved, the eternal turn, the circle. FredDings University ofSouthCarolina MISCELLANEOUS Zs?fia Ban. Esti iskola: Olvas?k?nyv feln?tteknek. Pozsony/Bratislava. Kal ligram. 2007. 232 pages. 2700 Ft. isbn 978-80-7149-921-3 -. Pr?bacsomagol?s. Pozsony/ Bratislava. Kalligram. 2008. 213 pages. 2300 Ft. isbn978-80-8101-056-9 In an intenselypersonal essay about Susan Sontag, included in the volu me Pr?bacsomagol?s (Test packing), Zs?fia Ban comments that real essayists basically write about them selves. By that definition, Ban is an honest-to-goodness essayist. But the personal element is also present in her debut work of fiction,Esti iskola (Evening school), a very loosely con nected stringof stories that run the gamut from somber recitation...