Word: poems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...poet is still experimenting with style in this chapbook. If the poems weren't collected under a certain name, you might not guess that they all come from the same writer because Miriam Sagan hasn't settled into a recognizable tone of voice or mode of diction yet. Her work is compiled largely of images. From the careful control she maintains over each of these, it is evident that she is attuned to the way words balance one another. Sometimes this sense shows through as long as the poem lasts. A structure may emerge that is based on poetic techniques...
...have experienced it absolutely--the dead." Fussell reduces the whole problem to this: it's not that war is indescribable, but that it's "nasty," and this contradicted the sensibilities of the times. The war's nastiness, certainly contradicted the sensibilities of the high culture Fussell embraces. His favorite poem, for instance is, Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches," because of its pastoral resonances. And in his clever pastiche on "The characteristic pastoral homoerotic tenderness of Great War British male love," centering around public school graduates, he ignores the relationship between men in the Other Ranks...
...second poem, "Two Birds: A Dialogue," is a sarcastic, earthy blast against what Chinese editorials have long called the "goulash Communism" of the Soviet Union. It depicts a conversation between two birds, one a giant roc that soars over the earth, with "the blue sky on its back," and the other a timid sparrow "scared stiff" in his bush. The world is in chaos ("Gunfire licks the heavens,/ Shells pit the earth"), and the sparrow wants to escape to "a jeweled palace in Elfland's hills." The roc replies angrily...
Cockroach Milk. When Russia burst triumphantly into literary history in the 19th century, it was hardly surprising that most of her great writers were steeped in folklore. "Each one is a poem!" said Pushkin, who, like Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, used folk tales as vital elements in his work. The selection of folk tales in this English volume was made from Alexander Afanasev's classic mid-19th century collection. First published in the U.S. 30 years ago, the book has now been reprinted under the somewhat misleading rubric Russian Fairy Tales. Actually, the stories include animal fables and laconic...
...occur in the last third of the novel, sim ply because something has to happen. One touch, however, indicates the book's essential virtue. Yuri Maximovich is trying to decide whether to defect. To stall for time, he must sell out and read the KGB's poem. He does so. But first, more artist than survivor, he takes the wretched thing apart and sharpens its images. It is not clear whether he understands that as a secret message it is now worth less. As a poem, he realizes happily...