Word: poems
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...Kyrgyz themselves are of Turkic stock, one of the many confederations of Central Asian nomadic tribes that coalesced into an ethnic group over generations of war and migration. Their founding national myth is the Epic of Manas, a 500,000-line poem that is 12 times the size of The Odyssey and claimed by some to be one of the few examples of oral literature preserved in its original form for nearly a thousand years. It tells of a heroic warrior, Manas, as he united the Kyrgyz and smote enemy invaders upon the steppe. It's a tale that...
When he details the mechanisms of the natural world, Hass attempts to draw connections between nature and the world of human emotion. In the poem “Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey” Hass opens by precisely describing the formation of a dune: “twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. On the leeward side / the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees...
...poem continues, Hass widens the scope of his lens. The dune moves, he writes, in a “grand slow march / across the earth’s surface,” which “has an external counterpart in the scouring / movement of glaciers.” As he explores the layers of fractals in nature, the poet sees similar shapes and motion in the patterns of human feelings. He notices “The movement of grief / which has something in it of the desert’s bareness / and of its distances...
Although most of the new poems in “The Apple Trees at Olema,” are more or less narratives, Hass’s eye for detail in his portrayals of human relationships is just as keen as in his more scientifically based descriptions of nature. “Some of David’s Story” tells the account of a man named David as he falls in and out of love with his former lover. By specifying the name of this character and by including details throughout the poem, such as the specific kind...
Even when Walcott is not explicitly contemplating the process of aging, whiteness saturates his vision; he notices the white shore, white ferries, white wine, the “white scream” of birds, and even the whiteness of the page as his poem comes to a close. In his constant encounters with objects washed in white, Walcott is trying to create a kind of visual rhyme. In his poem “In Italy,” in which he speaks of his experience in Italy as an elderly man, he writes, “my hair rhymes with...