people can’t touch me. Words are my Praetorian Guard. At a sign from me they leap into the line of fire. Whoever comes at me will feel their spears.” Peter Constantine University of Connecticut BoSeon Shim. Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye. Trans. YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 94 pages. American readers owe their gratitude to White Pine Press and to translators YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker for making BoSeon Shim’s fascinating Korean poetry available to the anglophone audience. As translated into English, Shim is a master of the contemporary style, writing coyly evasive yet personal poems (see WLT, Jan. 2010, 47–49). Shim’s best poems find their energy in the space between what is hidden and what is revealed. The someone always in the corner of BoSeon Shim’s eye is each person he meets in the world, but it is also his lover. It is also himself. The collection opens with a suggestion of depth when Shim writes, “There is countless evidence that we have souls.” The evidence, of course, is in the poems, in their depth-reflecting surfaces. Shim can be overtly political at times, but he is at his best when he is elusively personal, gesturing toward the evidence of his own hidden soul. Shim’s poetic strategy of indirectness results in startling and resonant imagery. “I enjoy / questions that are heavy and subtle as coffee at a funeral home,” he tells us in “Questions.” In one of the collection’s best poems, “Foreigners,” he informs us that “This road reminds me of my father’s journal.” Shim insists on his privacy—as he says in another poem, “Breaking up with you is none of the world’s business”—yet he is surprisingly vulnerable in his privacy. The best example of this emotive indirectness is the wonderful poem “Spending the John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) is one of Oklahoma’s most revered twentieth century authors. An Osage Indian, he was also one of the first Indigenous authors to gain national renown. Yet fame did not come easily to Mathews, and his personality was full of contradictions. In this captivating biography , Michael Snyder provides the first book-length account of this fascinating figure. Known as “Jo” to all his friends, Mathews had a multifaceted identity. A novelist, naturalist, biographer, historian, and tribal preservationist, he was a true “man of letters.” Snyder draws on a wealth of sources, many of them previously untapped, to narrate Mathews’s story. Much of the writer’s family life—especially his two marriages and his relationships with his two children and two stepchildren—is explored here for the first time. Born in the town of Pawhuska in Indian Territory, Mathews attended the University of Oklahoma before venturing abroad and earning a second degree from Oxford. He served as a flight instructor during World War I, traveled across Europe and northern Africa, and bought and sold land in California. A proud Osage who devoted himself to preserving Osage culture , Mathews also served as tribal councilman and cultural historian for the Osage Nation. By Michael Snyder Foreword by Russ Tall Chief JOHN JOSEPH M AT HE WS LIFE OF AN OSAGE WRITER THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INSTITUTION. WWW.OU.EDU/EOO $34.95 HARDCOVER · 280 PAGES · 12 B&W ILLUS. WORLDLIT.ORG 109 Night Alone in a Motel,” which begins: “I gaze into an evening ocean branded with clouds. / Waves from my unsalvageable wreck swell toward another wreck.” Such imagery reveals more than mere confession ever could. Shim may remind American readers of John Ashbery’s emotive impressionism. Lines like “A flower falls. / Wandering in time, whirling around / the earlobe of a brief moment,” from the poem “A Flower Falls,” could have been written by Ashbery in his more tender mode. It would be easy to mistake Shim, as it is easy to mistake Ashbery, for a purveyor of cheap surrealism, an easy enough poetic trick. A closer look, however, reveals that Shim’s relationship with the irrational is closer to symbolist than surrealist , or it is surrealist only in the purest sense of the original French movement, in...
Read full abstract