The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Sudeep Sen, ed.

Abstract

Rachida Madani Tales of a Severed Head Marilyn Hacker, tr. Yale University Press Political activist Rachida Madani analyzes the societal roles of women in her modern verse adaptation of the classic tale, The Thousand and One Nights. She examines these contemporary issues as an act of resistance, believing writing has the power to bring understanding and reconciliation. Jeff Lemire The Underwater Welder Top Shelf Productions Jack Joseph seems stuck in a nightmare that keeps re-creating his father’s drowning off the coast of Nova Scotia. When his wife goes into labor, it’s time for Jack to wake up. Known for his award-winning Essex County trilogy, Canadian Jeff Lemire has created another profound combination of art and story in The Underwater Welder. Nota Bene chus, all evoked in modern idiom. Poems from this group, such as “Telemachus’s Kindness,” can bring youth’s brutally explicit assessments of family behavior—“I had no father; my mother / lived at her loom hypothesizing / her husband’s erotic life”—into balance with the more compassionate perceptions of maturity: “as a grown man / I can look at my parents / impartially and pity them both.” Later collections feature some formal innovations, though the tone remains unsentimentally austere. In Vita Nova, Glück introduces the haunting format of the interview; the subject in “The Burning Heart” is Dante’s Francesca, whose responses to the interviewer’s pitilessly direct questions (“Ask her if the fire hurts”) are delicately evasive and oblique: “. . . gradually I understood / that though neither of us ever moved / we were not together but profoundly separate .” In The Seven Ages, Glück gracefully lengthens her line and uncharacteristically unifies poems like “The Sensual World” and “Arboretum” with central metaphors. Her final and most recent collection, A Village Life (see WLT, July 2010, 74), is a cycle of poetic narratives about the communal life of a Mediterranean village that suggests the influence of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca in its simplicity of language and the hypnotic force with which it mythologizes human relationships in poems like “Marriage”: “He never uses words. Words, for him, are for making arrangements, / for doing business. Never for anger, never for tenderness.” Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. Sudeep Sen, ed. New Delhi. HarperCollins India. 2012. isbn 9789350290415 With the exception of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010), which focuses on poets born or residing in the United States, this is the first major anthology of Indian poetry in English since Jeet Thayil’s Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) expanded the canon by presenting over seventy poets spanning three generations. The current selection grew out of two “Indian Poetry” issues Sudeep Sen edited for The Literary Review in 2009 and for The Yellow Nib Modern English Poetry by Indians in 2011. Like these, but in more definite and far-reaching terms, the HarperCollins book departs from previous anthologies in a couple of important ways. One is the decision to omit entirely the older generation (i.e., Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Moraes, Jussawalla , Mehrotra, Patel, et al.) and concentrate instead on poets born between the early 1950s and the late 1980s, the declared start date being 1950, the year in which India became a republic. Such a shift forward in time makes this the first book-length anthology of Indian poetry in which women outnumber men (by fortynine to thirty-six) and poets born or living abroad outnumber those based in India (by forty-six to thirty-nine). Demographics aside, the mere juxtaposition of older and younger poets (with some of the former mentored by foundational figures such as Ezekiel or Moraes, and many of the latter forged in American academia) may– june 2013 • 69 reviews makes it futile to look for common thematic or stylistic patterns. As noted in the foreword, “The range of style, preoccupation, technique is vast, various and impressive.” For most poets, the only common denominator may be traced to their more or less definite Indian roots—a rather tenuous link, considered the subcontinent’s linguistic and cultural diversity, and one which may be mediated or superseded by more recent—and diverse—cultural layers...