Night Begins with a Question: XXV Austrian Poems Book

Why do we read poetry? If we were to simplistically answer that we want something sweet and pleasant at the end of the day then this small dual-language anthology may not be the thing for someone seeking a balm, an anodyne confection to salve today's wounds of living in a world once again aiming to destroy itself, but this time determined to-at last-succeed in the endeavor. When we put down the book, put out the light and again fall unconscious with some vague hope for yet another day despite our own small ambit of work, obligations, and banalities this compact collection should instead leave us lying awake wrestling with questions. Questions of where am I, how did I get here, where and with whom do I belong, in what place and how can I hope to live less wrongly in an ever-more wrong world? More than a question of Heimat (home) or Heimatlos (homeless), these poems are, it seems to me, about finding a humanizing relation to time, space and meaning in other lands, the arc of love and death, generations of peace and war, and the diasporic (from Greek diaspeirein, "to scatter, spread about") sense of drowning silently in a language not our own. Unable to answer or call out because we have lost our tongue through the simple surgery of geographic relocation, we have not yet grown another.

As I struggle, late in life, to learn to read the German language, and of necessity read and re-read each of these 25 poems, first in German and then English, over and over, a sense of vertiginous weightlessness takes hold. It is the sense of having irremediably left one's own too comfortable world to travel other worlds in other times, and then the whole world with its vast history of everlasting traumas, oppressive fears and desperate hopes. In this anthology there is one poem for each of 25 years (1978-2002) reflecting personal experience and recollection, collective memory and regressive atomization of the uprooted and displaced. I don't know enough German yet to pronounce on the translations, but the more I read the better they seem - imagination and wit are abundant. I can't say I enjoyed these difficult poems in the ordinary sense of the term, but I would not have missed the collection.

Finally, a quibble, but one that seriously matters to experienced eyes. Publishers, listen up! The paper on which this is printed is wrong. Partially calendered, the paper is just that bit too reflective, making the reading more difficult than it ought to be.

Effigies collects the work of four Indigenous poets, selected and introduced by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. dg nanouk okpik is an Inupiat-Inuit from Anchorage Alaska, Cathy Tagnak Rexford is Inupiaq, French/German and English from Anchorage too, Brandy Nalani McDougall, from Upcountry Maui, is of Kanaka Maoli, Chinese and Scottish ancestry, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt, from Hawaii, is of Spanish, Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry. The danger in such a book is exoticization, and it is a danger that poets and editor do not successfully overcome, in my opinion. The problem is knotty: how does one who live among "baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume ... white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu" (from Editor's Note) write about these things without sounding exotic to readers from the American mainland? The best poems in the book treat these wonderful images as background to an unfolding human drama that readers can understand from their own lives. So in "Oblong Moon," Perez-Wendt writes,

The night Harry Pahukoa died
He was driving up from Honomanu
After laying net
He had to lay the net
Before the full moon.

The poem also succeeds in reaching out to the reader because it does not assume that its reader will understand the timing of laying a net. It explains without condescension or servility. The opening is also a skilful exercise of suspense.