Work Is Love Made Visible: Poems and Family Photographs by Jeannetta Calhoun Mish

Abstract

, of Roi des cent cavaliers, by Marie 1 Etienne, the author of several col i lections of verse and novels as well 1 as books about the theater.The title i of this recent collection, King of a ' Hundred Horsemen, brings tomind i an Arabian tale as does its cover , illustration, a detail from a Persian rug that dates to the seventeenth i century. Hacker's brilliant transla 1 tion of Etienne's poems can, in fact, i be read as a weave of fourteen-line 1 prose sonnets, numbered in groups i of ten, a tightly framed structure of nine sequences that supports i experimentation, digression, stories , within stories. 1 In the first sequence, "Ocean/ i Emotion," the poet writes of how 1 her childhood memories resurfaced i as images, of how she found her [ voice in the gestures of theater,of i how she invented the real: "I've , traveled my whole life long in 1 countries with splendid names. I've i entered into their legends as if I 1 were a kingmyself." King ofaHun i dred Horsemen is not a memoir; it's a 1 tapestry of memory and expression, i Bits of dialogue, borrowed words from foreignplaces, strange i creatures, and named personae all , appear and disappear in subse 1 quent sequences. What gives Marie i Etienne's collection its poetry are 1 the images that call attention to i the words themselves: "Words are houses." We sense in this bilingual i edition that thepoet and the trans , lator both inhabit language, and 1 carefully attend to thephrasing and i articulation in this collectionwhose 1 architecture, though mathematical i ly predictable, is open to surprise ' and the uncanny, i Maryann De Julio ,Kent StateUniversity ?scar Hahn. Ashes in Love. James Hoggard, tr.Austin, Texas. Host. 2009. 169 pages. $25 ($15 paper), isbn 978-0 924047-72-5 (73-2 paper) ?scar Hahn, a Chilean, is one of the great living poets of our time. Like his compatriot Pablo Neruda, Hahn's poetry has an incredible range. He is equally adept with deeply eroticpoems aswell aswith poems committed to the struggle for freedom from colonial domina tion in Latin America. And there are very humorous poems sprinkled throughout this collection of two books under one cover. Ashes in Love is made up ofApariciones profa nas I ProfaneApparitions and En un abriry cerrarde ojos / In theBlink of an Eye. JamesHoggard, himself a poet, essayist, and novelist, has once again provided the reader with a rare gift,two ofHahn's books of poetry in one bilingual edition. Prior to this collection,Hoggard published translations of Hahn's The Art of Dying (1987),Love Breaks (1991), and Stolen Verses (2000). Hoggard has rendered Hahn's poems into a felici tous English approximation of the original Spanish?"approximation" because translation is like calculus: you "approach," but never quite reach, theabsolute limitof theequa tion. In this sense, I believe Hog gard's translations in Ashes in Love are as good as it gets in terms of approaching the limitsofmeaning, meter, form, and nuance that occur in themovement from one language to another. Hahn has a technical mastery permitting him to use at will the classic traditional forms and meters as well as free verse. His poems counterbalance harsh realities with humor and with wondrous poems about jazz. He excels as a crafts man able to move seamlessly from E closed forms to free verse. In Ashes E in Love, in a manner reminiscent of E W. S. Merwin, Hahn makes gramE mar subordinate to the line and E meaning of the poem. He uses run- E on sentences with powerful effect, E as in the poem "The Elders Coun- E sei": "Watch out Adam when you E go out into theworld / in search of E your lost rib // You might find it E suddenly / it might not fitin your E chest //And it might stab through E your heart / like a bone knife." E This isbut one ofmany electrifying E poems in Ashes in Love. A num- E ber of poems are concerned with E music, such as "Cello," "Fantasia en E bianco y negro / Fantasy in Black E and White...