Article
Editorial: 1 July 2010
June 22, 2010
Welcome to the first of PIW’s two July issues, featuring poetry from Colombia and the USA.
An acute awareness of mortality seems to have preoccupied the Colombian poet Eduardo Cote Lamus throughout his brief life (1928-1964). The title of his first publication translates as ‘Preparation for death’, and the theme of death runs through all the poems presented here. Yet, in equal measure, these are poems that celebrate life. ‘You are my war cry/ against death’, the poet asserts in the short love poem, ‘You’. And in the moving ‘Elegy for my father’, the mourners become one with the deceased through the act of remembering the “old peasant” whose “greatest wealth was watching the colts/ galloping freely under the wide sky”.
In Cote’s final volume, Estoraques, the rocky formations shaped by erosion that are found between Cúcuta and Ocaña inspire a long meditation on the rise and fall of civilizations and what the critic Andrés Holguín calls “a cosmic vision of death”.
Colombia also features Margarita Cardona, whose poems are short, spare and wonderfully clear. I particularly enjoyed ‘Troupial’, a miniature that can be quoted in full:
He was such a bad poet
That he did not know
That the troupial bird lifts
Its beak to sing
That the wind is not
Outside only
That words are
Waiting to
Be put before everything.
From the USA are three poets, each with a very distinctive voice. Amy Beeder’s poems have tremendous energy and rhythmic drive, and a capacity to unsettle and challenge. This power often derives from startlingly beautiful images being subverted to describe something shocking, as in ‘Yellow Dress’, where a girl lies dying or dead in a street in Port-au-Prince:
In Tet Bef by the dirty ocean
thousands crush past her without pausing
at the shrine of her spayed limbs; brilliance
like the flesh of lilies sprouting from the pummeled cane.
The Poetry Foundation’s introduction to the work of Kay Ryan refers to her “unique brand of tightly compressed brilliance”, which has won her numerous awards and led to her appointment as US Poet Laureate in 2008. The last line of ‘Cloud’ is a striking example of this quality (as is the whole poem); in just three words she seems to me to say at least two completely different things. Check it out!
Finally, we have extracts from Ron Silliman’s long poem ‘Revelator’, as much a fascinating construction of — or experiment with — language as an exploration of the poet’s inner and outer worlds.
Coming next: the 15 July issue will feature poets from Israel and the UK.
An acute awareness of mortality seems to have preoccupied the Colombian poet Eduardo Cote Lamus throughout his brief life (1928-1964). The title of his first publication translates as ‘Preparation for death’, and the theme of death runs through all the poems presented here. Yet, in equal measure, these are poems that celebrate life. ‘You are my war cry/ against death’, the poet asserts in the short love poem, ‘You’. And in the moving ‘Elegy for my father’, the mourners become one with the deceased through the act of remembering the “old peasant” whose “greatest wealth was watching the colts/ galloping freely under the wide sky”.
In Cote’s final volume, Estoraques, the rocky formations shaped by erosion that are found between Cúcuta and Ocaña inspire a long meditation on the rise and fall of civilizations and what the critic Andrés Holguín calls “a cosmic vision of death”.
Colombia also features Margarita Cardona, whose poems are short, spare and wonderfully clear. I particularly enjoyed ‘Troupial’, a miniature that can be quoted in full:
He was such a bad poet
That he did not know
That the troupial bird lifts
Its beak to sing
That the wind is not
Outside only
That words are
Waiting to
Be put before everything.
From the USA are three poets, each with a very distinctive voice. Amy Beeder’s poems have tremendous energy and rhythmic drive, and a capacity to unsettle and challenge. This power often derives from startlingly beautiful images being subverted to describe something shocking, as in ‘Yellow Dress’, where a girl lies dying or dead in a street in Port-au-Prince:
In Tet Bef by the dirty ocean
thousands crush past her without pausing
at the shrine of her spayed limbs; brilliance
like the flesh of lilies sprouting from the pummeled cane.
The Poetry Foundation’s introduction to the work of Kay Ryan refers to her “unique brand of tightly compressed brilliance”, which has won her numerous awards and led to her appointment as US Poet Laureate in 2008. The last line of ‘Cloud’ is a striking example of this quality (as is the whole poem); in just three words she seems to me to say at least two completely different things. Check it out!
Finally, we have extracts from Ron Silliman’s long poem ‘Revelator’, as much a fascinating construction of — or experiment with — language as an exploration of the poet’s inner and outer worlds.
Coming next: the 15 July issue will feature poets from Israel and the UK.
© Wendy Davies
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