Editorial: 1 January 2011

20 december 2010 The Israel domain presents Dan Pagis (1930–1986), whose native language was German; he learned Hebrew later in life, and shortly after his arrival in Palestine, began publishing poetry in his new language. ‘Ein Leben’ and ‘Furs’ are autobiographical poems about his childhood, following the death of his mother, and his father’s move to Palestine (leaving the young Dan Pagis in Bukovina with his grandparents.) Sadly, Pagis’s work only became well known and respected with his death in 1985 – his poetry, which grew out of European traditions of the early twentieth century, was lost with the voices of 1960s Hebrew modernism. Pagis’s poetry, critics and readers agree now, was “sharp and penetrating” and in fact paved new ground, engaging in dialogue, through the Hebrew language, with German Romantic and neo-Romantic traditions. Ariel Hirshfeld’s close reading of the marvellous and mysterious poem of internal exploration, ‘The Last Ones’, in the article ‘Listening “with all my ears”’ offers an excellent introduction to characteristics of Pagis’ work.

PIW Israel also presents Anat Zecharya, a young poet whose work forthrightly expresses women’s desires, examining the power dynamics between sex and politics. Perhaps her most striking poem here is ‘A Woman of Valor’, which takes as its subject matter the news story of soldiers at an airbase who had allegedly conducted sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl – a girl who had, significantly, apparently told some of the suspects that “she was of enlistment age”. The poem wryly represents the girl’s experience and point of view (“The fourth moves aside a pile of reports/ on air accidents in the south/ and takes you from behind”) and yet, with its second-person narration, doesn’t give her voice so much as directives: it’s a sophisticated and surprisingly sensitive way to explore the victim status of the girl and the ambiguity of the power relations, both of the incident on the airbase, and of the larger political situation in Israel.

The final poet from Israel is Yair Hurwitz (1944–1988). Despite the personal tragedy and illness in his life, his work is hopeful and energetic, its considerations of death and illness lyrical (and at times even dryly humorous). I found it fascinating to consider the ways in which this selection of Hurwitz’s poetry looks at the interplay of death and language, the way poetry can console, and act as a communicative bridge between the dead and the living: in ‘An Autobiographical Moment’, for instance, his father is not cast into silence with death – rather, he “must come to terms,/ moment by moment, with his other language/ to which time is no barrier”. The end of the poem suggests that the living and the dead can perhaps share a language – of poetry or prayer, while ‘Kingdom and Dream: The Terrible One’, concludes that “Poetry is speech/ in a place/ where there will never be touch.”

The honed bareness and sharp imagery of Hurwitz’s ‘Fluttering Corridors’, a poem about being in hospital, which is split into short sections, chimes with the tone and style of poems by American poet Jane Hirshfield such as ‘Sentencings’ – it too a poem divided into short sections. The influences of Eastern verse on Hirshfield’s writing are evident here in the renga-like progression of one section to the next, and her imagery constantly delights: “As if putting arms into woollen coat sleeves, /we listen to the murmuring dead”. The editors of the PIW USA domain introduce Hirshfield as a poet who offers up acute observations of minutiae and moments, allowing the reader “to look at the world with new eyes”. Her ‘Seawater Stiffens Cloth’ also encourages the reader to look afresh at the process of poetry itself, of the way metaphor works: “Call one thing another’s name long enough, /it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.” Hirshfield is often identified as a Zen poet; ‘To Spareness: An Assay’, one of my favourite poems of this issue, is an ode to and reflection on “the slender depths” of spareness, and its “proposition”: “vast reach of all that is not, and still something is”.

At one end of the stylistic spectrum, Hirshfield’s focus, distillation and spareness; at the other, Dean Young’s extravagant imagery (“Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned / nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle / of mortality”), mix of registers, free-associative tangents and leaps of thought – “I want to put everything in,” says Young of his poetry. The results are unique, collage-like, postmodern poems of great energy and humour that make visible the tussle of internal associative thought and the attempt to express multiple ideas, all the time negotiating intertextual influences and overtly examining the process of writing poetry: “I don’t know what I’m talking about either. / Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself/ I’ve got these words that mean completely/ different things inside myself/ and it’s tearing me apart?” Young asks in ‘Selected Recent and New Errors’. In its self-awareness, Young’s poetry is highly aware of selfhood – “How impossible to have a reasonable relation / with the self no matter what you say, Walt Whitman”, begins ‘Look at Quintillions Ripen’d and Look at Quintillions Green’; in ‘Son of Fog’ he writes “There are sensations that begin in the world,/ my mind responding with ideas but then / those ideas cause other sensations. / What a mess.” It’s precisely this mess that Young’s work emulates, with a wry jouissance that teaches the reader as much about poetry as about the workings of the human mind in the twenty-first century.

The final poet of this issue is Yusef Komunyakaa, who grew up in Louisiana during the Civil Rights Movement, and later worked as a correspondent for the US Army in Vietnam. His poetry is rhythmically and formally taut, packed with imagery both melancholic and beautiful. ‘The Shortest Night’ and ‘Kindness’ are particularly breathtaking, while a series of poems offers imaginative and rich interpretations of the deadly sins – of lust Komunyakaa writes, “He longs to be/ An orange, to feel fingernails/ Run a seam through him”; of avarice: “Locked in the beauty of her bones,/ She counts eight engagement rings/ At least twelve times each day.” ‘Anger’, ‘Avarice’, ‘Envy’, ‘Gluttony’, ‘Lust’ and ‘Sloth’: inspiration perhaps for what to address through this new year’s resolutions? Later this month . . .

In our next issue on 15 January, the Japan domain presents the work of Tian Yuan. We’ll also publish a taster of new work by Dutch poet Remco Campert, which will be published in full in a special Dutch and Flemish National Poetry Day issue on PIW on 27 January.