The Work at Hand

Abstract

Donahue continuedfrom previous page ever. Time and the eternal, trauma and memory: one ponders such dichotomies with each new stanza. The poem is both ingenious and moving. As someone who lived in New York for many years. I would argue that "Hum" takes its place among poems like Lorca's "After a Walk" (with its resonant first line, "Cut down by the sky") and O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died." poems that speak on behalf of the city and preserve for the future an aspect of its inner life: Everyone is incidental. Everyone weeps. Detailfrom cover ofThe Night Sky The tears of today will put out tomorrow. The rain is ashes. The days are beautiful. The vocabulary of public events circulates throughout Hum. as if to illustrate a project outlined in The Night Sky: "how to conceive of words not as locked within the self, awaiting liberty, but as freely circulating outside of the self, waiting to be taken in. transformed, and sent back out." Even though we pass through moments of spellbinding clarity and opaque rebuffs to our impertinent demands for picture language, words move through us to reflect our social and political world. Lauterbach cannot, it seems to me, simply celebrate that circulation of words. She cannot sing untroubled the transformation of words that takes place within us. The incomprehensible has happened. It may not be something we care to admit. A bit retro. A symbolist crisis in a postmodern world. A gaudy predicament, she might say, one where the gaudy hides a God, who gives way to a doll, becoming in turn a gull. The flight of the adjective distracts us. The predicament remains, whether at the edge of Ground Zero, or looking at a painting, or talking to a friend, or watching MTV, or just looking out Malarmé's window: Fragment (September) Filtered through the cast of happiness so that evening has the weight of unconditional assent beyond the debris. Joseph Donahue's collection of poems include Incidental Eclipse, from Talisman House, and In This Paradise: Terra Lucinda XXI-XL, from Carolina Wren Press. The Work at Hand Larry Smith Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations Sam Hamill Shambhala http://www.shambhala.com 276 pages: paper. S 1 5.95 This world isfrost on an old man's breath, memory rushing into memory. Sam Hamill is one of the hardest working poets in America, and this includes his 30 years of work as editor-publisher at Copper Canyon Press (he's now retired). Like many poets who also edit and publish the works of others -James Laughlin. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Dennis Maloney, and the countless others of us in the small press publishing world -his own poetry is often given short shrift. It"s ironic since one wonders who. other than a true poet, would do the slave labor of this publishing work? Its chief reward, of course, is allowing us to work with those whose writing we respect, even love. Look at Hamill 's recent defiance of the Bush White House that led to his editing of the important Poets Against the War (2003) anthology. Other major achievements include his books of transía lions from the Latin, Greek. Chinese, and Japanese, selections of which are included here; then there's his monumental The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002). done with fellow Rexroth disciple Bradford Morrow, to keep a tradition of nature and engaged writing alive in American verse. He and others at Copper Canyon repeatedly cross the borders of mainstream and academic poetry. It's a calling, to be sure, but it shouldn't cause neglect. One of the finest statements on the task of a poet in the world is his A Poet's Work: The Other Side of Poetry (Broken Moon. 1990; Carnegie Mellon, 1998). Hamill is. then, a model to many others, but. that said, I want to offer an appreciation of his own poetry assembled so wisely here. More than a third of the collection is selections of Hamill's translations. It begins with Sappho, Anakreon, Asklepiados, and Catullus, and launches into his best work with the Chinese masters, most of them from the golden T'ang...