VERSES ON BIRD
Selected poems of Zhang Er
From the Chinese by Rachel Levitsky, Timothy Liu,
Leonard Schwartz, and Eleni Sikelianos.
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-80-1 (paper) $12.95
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5¼ x 7½
104 pages [Bilingual Chinese/English]

Listen to Zhang Er read some of her poems
(Zhang Er reading with Susan Schultz at the University of Hawai’i in 2000; recorded by Juliana Spahr)

…a highly developed range that’s very complex, subtle, very beautiful.
—Leslie Scalapino

Zhang Er’s poems lead us to another world, where we take a bird’s-eye view of our world; dive into the blank of writing and shriek in despair. The eloquence in her poems is a voice debating our time.
—Bei Dao

‘The Bird’ is observed and represented, even as its representation is observed. The bird is material and thought, as well as intention and outcome. The fully imagined bird provides glimpses through history and beyond landscapes, from unusual vantages and perspectives. Thought and experience surround the bird even as they are encompassed by its purview. In Verses on Bird, Zhang Er delivers a vibrant and expansive phenomenology—rich in descriptive and discursive detail, surprising throughout.
—Ed Friedman (Former Director, St. Marks Poetry Project)

Zhang Er grasps for the spiritual through objects of the mundane, quietly detailing the wonder and desperation that courses through human lives. In these poems, the eye watches the eye so that no facet of our existence remains unexplored. “Zhang Er belongs to the generation beyond lament or anger over the hardship endured by Chinese intellectuals, from overthrown rebellion to construction, from confusion to clarity, from darkness to light (ambiguity to clarity). She walks out of suffering and uncertainty, discovers the loveliness, preciousness of life and self-respect...”
—New World Poetry Bimonthly

[from the poem Verses on Bird]

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
From classical fugues to Romanticism, this effort produced
Schubert. When storms attack, the nightjar’s cry
Swells. The noble revolution will require great
Sacrifice, yet do not ask me to capture this process on the black
And white keys, nor to switch to another tone.

I could not find two birds with identical pitch.

With nothing to induce it, innocence makes me walk
Into rushing water as if I were brave. Empty space is great, but nothing
Repeats itself there. Whether I do
Or whether I don’t; from each, the sum of the piano’s voice will rise.
Not to be doubted: bird writes poem, one vowel at a time.

Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1986. Her writings of poetry, non-fiction, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She co-edited First Line and Poetry Current, which are Chinese poetry journals based in New York, and she has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, and Peru, and in the US. She has also participated in projects sponsored by the New York Council for the Arts and by the Minetta Brook Foundation.

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Contemporary Iraqi Poetry

IRAQI POETRY TODAY
Edited by Saadi Simawe
Poetry
ISBN 0-9533824-6-X (paper) $16.95
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6x9
288 pages

For two decades, since the Iraq-Iran war in 1980, Iraq has been the focus of numerous political, economic, sociological, military, and geopolitical studies. However, very little has been published on the Iraqi literary tradition. Modern Iraq has produced a highly complex literature of survival in response to various realities of oppression and to challenges of modernism. This is the first major collection of modern Iraqi poetry available in the West.

Iraqi Poetry Today reanimates the cliché that calls any invaluable work with doubtful prospects ‘a labour of love.’ As Saadi Sadawe writes in his moving preface, ‘Translating Iraqi poetry and publishing it in English had become for me a desperate effort to save what remains of Iraqi humanity and culture in the face of a brutal dictatorship and war.’ His effort succeeds, gloriously. ‘Although I lost faith in politics long ago,’ Simawe concludes, ‘I still believe in the power of the word.’ We should try to share his hope.
—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Fed up with the media’s dragoons of hawks and doves, retired military honchos and journalistic wisenheimers yakking about Iraq? Those craving an alternative to the patronizing blather owe a debt of gratitude to Zephyr Press for giving Iraq’s poets a chance to have their say.
—Bill Marx, WBUR

From “To The Best of Our Knowledge” on Wisconsin Public Radio -
In the segment “Poetry of War”, Saadi Simawe, speaks with Anne Strainchamps and several of the poems in the book are read by Jim Fleming. Listen at: http://www.wpr.org/book/030406a.html

[Read the whole of The Independent article]
[Read an article from The Guardian by Saadi Simawe on Iraqi poetry]

Dr. Simawe guest-edited the pioneering Palestine/Israel issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (No. 14), and three years ago guest-edited a special issue of Arab Studies Quarterly on modern Iraqi literature.

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GOLDSMITH MARKET
Liliana Ursu
From the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-79-8 (paper) $16.95
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5¼ x 8
208 pages [Bilingual Romanian/English]

These poems are luminous, numinous, they have the power to change The Black Sea with a splash of a palm into a spring. Liliana Ursu is a dancer, an archeologist of light. How she makes The Black Sea again, how she expands the places of myth is beyond grasping: your skin, your mind, your heart rejoice. Gracious, hard-edged, generous and moving.
—Tomaž Šalamun

Liliana Ursu’s poems are like flowers at the edge of the abyss. They are beautifully clear and precise, but behind them one glimpses the presence of an ineradicable dark.
—Mark Strand

Romanian Liliana Ursu writes poetry that is wild and unpredictable, on the brink of flying away beyond real and imagined borders. Her short poems are stunning, unforgettable, and expertly translated into exciting English texts by Sean Cotter.... This is one of those books by a European poet that an English reader can pick up and wonder at how the translator did it. We also read in awe as Ursu leads every naïve person by the nose and jumps into the abyss.
—Ray Gonzalez, Bloomsbury Review

Ursu’s book focuses on a place that is at once a literary crossroads and at the same time isolated in the Carpathian mountains. The eighty poems that make up the three sections of Goldsmith Market are all marked with the longing for travel. The first section, unnamed, presents a series of portraits and scenes, from Nobel Prize winners to busboys, all uneasy in their present place. “False Landscapes,” the second section, explores the images of the Mediterranean we receive through writers such as Sappho and Cavafy, and shows us how isolated we are from the actual places by the mythology surrounding Carthage, Lesbos, and Alexandria. In the third section, “Goldsmith Market,” Ursu follows the connections between Sibiu’s history as a meeting place for poets and its contemporary location, with the same attention to distance and longing. The three sections are united by Ursu’s interest in precise, provocative portraiture.

#5 Mint Street

In Alexandria a red cat
in the window of a sick poet
and books sadder than the sea under fog.

Wild dogs bark in his brain
At another window, the bourgeois dine
clinking glasses, white bones on china plates
whiter than the bones of a drowned man...

On a blue chair a flickering candle
All that remains after paying his creditors here
and in Hell.
No one whispers his name.
There is no one.

In Alexandria a red cat
in the window of a sick poet...

 

Song for the Spice Seller

Under the withered cherry tree
the spice seller counts the days
he has remaining.
Dried peppers, clove, cinnamon
amber, myrrh, the untamed musk rose.
Only the barren clink of gold keeps him warm.

“Let’s put cherries, cool cherries over his ears
just for him” whisper virgins of Egina.
He who long ago stopped seeing
he who long ago stopped hearing.
Only the barren clink of gold keeps him warm.

Romanian poet Liliana Ursu was born in 1949. She was a Fulbright fellow at Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and 1997. Goldsmith Market is Liliana Ursu’s third book of poetry in Romanian, and her third book to appear in English (after the two anthologies: The Sky behind the Forest [Bloodaxe] and Angel Riding a Beast [Northwestern UP]). It is also the first translation of an entire book as it appeared in Romanian. Three poems have appeared in Sean Cotter’s translation in the journal Beacons, and two poems from this book were included in The Sky behind the Forest (“Rain in Sibiu” and “In the Town that Was”), both of which appeared, translated by Ursu, Adam Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, in The New Yorker.

Sean Cotter has translated three books of Romanian poetry. He worked in Romania from 1994 to 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer, and from 2001 to 2002 on a Fulbright-Hays research grant.

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A KINDRED ORPHANHOOD
Sergey Gandlevsky
From the Russian by Philip Metres
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-75-5 (paper) $12.95
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5¼ x 8½
120 pages [Bilingual Russian/English]

We can be grateful to Philip Metres for having introduced English-speaking readers to the astringent and unflappable poems of Sergey Gandlevsky. Like Weldon Kees and Alan Dugan, he is a poet of hard-won clarities, of classical formal concision combined with vernacular swagger. Gandlevsky, with his pugilist stance and lyric heart, is a major discovery.
—David Wojahn

Out of the Rubik’s Cube of Russia rise the complex strains of Sergey Gandlevksy ... superb translations that uncannily make the Russian ours.
—Andrei Codrescu

Listen to Gandlevsky read some of his poems.
Also at www.philipmetres.com/
down the page under UPCOMING AND RECENT READINGS

Sergey Markovich Gandlevsky was born in Moscow in 1952, one year before Stalin’s death. An integral member of the Seventies Generation, Gandlevsky was one of the underground Russian poets who wrote only for themselves and their circles of friends during the Brezhnev era. Gandlevsky began writing too late to enjoy the Thaw, that mid-60s moment of cultural freedom, when Yevtushenko, Vosnesensky, and Akhmadulina recited their poems to packed stadiums. Gandlevsky, like many of the underground, chose unprestigious careers, or even odd jobs, both to avoid participating in what he saw as a morally bankrupt society, while freeing up time for writing and travel. For Gandlevsky, to work was to collaborate with the system that was committing autogenocide.

Gandlevsky packs traditional poetic forms with, on the one hand, numerous literary references (Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Nabokov, Goethe), and on the other, with Soviet-era slang, soap brands, and pop bands. The Third Wave poets like Gandlevsky mirror the work of the New York School and of pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein, in their more complex gestures to bracket mass culture in ironic or parodic terms. His poems witness to the twilight period, but also to his own poetic journey as a cultural dissident. Unlike much contemporary verse, Gandlevsky’s poems explore cynicism, sentimentality, self-loathing and disdain. Reminiscent of Robert Lowell’s work, whose confessional poems of mania seethe under the hard artifice of formal constraints, Gandlevsky’s poetry works precisely through yoking oppositions—between form and content, between high concerns and daily indignities. So while traditional themes of poetry emerge from his work—obsession with language, freedom, death, love, the muse—these concerns always emerge against the backdrop of a life full of personal and social vulgarities: militarism, alcoholism, debauchery, ennui.

***

Look, it’s snowing again. There are words in Russian
That make your mouth burn as if from infant formula.
It snows heavily, the head grows heavy,
You almost feel like crying. But these tears
Are from a different time, where a curtain trembles,
A nightingale wails, dawn swims across puddles...
The alarm clock exhausted, you finally rise,
Awakened by a green explosion of poplar.
I once lived in the country. There, where silence
Is equally common in ravine, church, or field,
A truth revealed itself to me:
Pain isn't difficult—it’s the monotony of pain.
I lived in the village a month or so.
Patched holes in the wall with rags of oakum.
Spoke aloud to myself, my speech
Slightly overdone, like from a proper play.

A double-barrel gun of operettic length,
A clock, a bed, a pier glass, one leaf missing,
The other showing a slightly distorted
Four-poster bed, the wall clock, the gun.
The laws of genre—that’s my field.
I was thrown into shivers, fell into fever,
But the ill-starred firearm of the drama
Just hangs there, forgot to fire.
I'm used to waiting. Anyone alive here?
Hang out with me. Come talk to me.
Today’s already lighter than yesterday.
The stubble field is whitest white.
Let’s have a smoke, stranger.
This morning I left the house and
Glimpsing the snow, was stunned and heard
Those good words—look, it’s snowing again.

This book is the first English translation of work from Sergey Gandlevsky’s collected poems, Celebration, originally published in 1995. Winner of both the Little Booker Prize and the Anti-Booker Prize in 1996 for his poetry and prose, Gandlevsky is the author of four books of poems; a memoir, Trepanation of the Skull (1996); a book of essays, Poetic Cuisine (1998); and a novel Unintel. (2001). His books consistently are short-listed for the top Russian literary prizes. He has been included in English translation anthologies 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel (Doubleday Press, 1993), The Third Wave (University of Michigan Press, 1992), and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Zephyr Press, 1999).

Philip Metres is a poet and translator of Russian poetry. His own poetry has appeared in Poetry and Best American Poetry 2002. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

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Letters from Mississippi’s 1964 “FREEDOM SUMMER”

LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI
Edited by Elizabeth Martínez
ISBN 0-939010-71-2 (paper) $13.95
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5 x 8½
286 pages

I am so grateful readers have been given this new opportunity to hear the story of Freedom Summer told directly by some of the young people who helped make that extraordinary moment happen. Letters from Mississippi gives us a deeply personal look at one of the Civil Rights Movement’s key moments—and reminds us that change happens because regular people have decided they were willing to fight for it.
—Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children’s Defense Fund

These letters in perceptiveness, freshness of detail and description, variety of events and situations, and range of experience are unlike anything I've since encountered in civil rights literature. Collectively, they constitute an irreplaceable record of an extraordinary movement in American social and cultural history at midcentury.
—Ekwueme Michael Thelwell

During the summer of 1964, a presidential election year, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) sent volunteers into Mississippi to expand Black voter registration in the state, to organize a legally constituted “Freedom Democratic Party” that would challenge the Whites-only Mississippi Democratic party, to establish “freedom schools” to teach reading and math to Black children, and to open community centers where individuals could obtain legal and medical assistance. 800 students gathered for a week-long orientation session at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, that June. They were mostly White and young, with an average age of 21. Letters from Mississippi is a collection of moving, personal letters written by volunteers of the summer.

Out of print for thirty years, this edition contains new introductory remarks by its editor, Elizabeth Martínez and by Julian Bond, and is augmented with explanatory notes and never before published photographs.

Special feature

Elizabeth Martínez is a Chicana writer, activist and teacher. She speaks on racism, multiculturalism, women’s struggles and today’s new movements. In the 1960s and 70s, she worked in the Black civil rights movement and the Chicano movement. She co-founded and currently chairs the Institute for MultiRacial Justice to help build alliances between communities of color. Martínez is the author of six books and numerous articles.

Also Available: De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century by Elizabeth Martínez (foreword by Angela Y. Davis) [South End Press: ISBN 0-89608-583-X, trade paper; ISBN  0-89608-127-3, trade cloth]

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ONE OF THE MOST PROVOCATIVE AND
COSMOPOLITAN POETS
WRITING IN CHINESE TODAY

FUSION KITSCH
By Hsia Yü
From the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
ISBN 0-939010-64-X (paper), $13.00
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7 x 8½
144 pages

Listen to Hsia Yü read “Bringing Her a Basket of Fruit”.

From the introduction to Fusion Kitsch by Steve Bradbury

Hsia Yü’s frank and innovative treatment of gender and sexuality in a small handful of poems in this collection and in her second collection Ventriloquy (Fuyushu) was seized upon by critics and scholars anxious to find a candidate to fill the long-vacant post of “Chinese feminist poet.” But while Hsia Yü may well have been one of the first woman poets writing in Chinese to have written about love and romance in a manner that broke dramatically from the conventions and constraints of traditional Chinese women’s poetry, if we bother to look beyond labels at the poetry itself, we will find a body of work that is far less interested in providing a critique of gender relations or advancing a sexual/textual agenda than in exploring the sensuous and quirky interface between the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the text. It is this preoccupation with pleasure that sets Hsia Yü apart from other poets writing in Chinese today; that and the fact that her poetry embodies a fusion of styles and influences—both high and kitsch—with the French influence running perhaps stronger than most.

Among her numerous honors, Hsia Yü was most recently awarded the Taipei City Literature Award for her book Salsa.

The Saw

I visualize you walking on the other side from me
In our scanty understanding of the universe
We propose a simple definition
Which we call “the time difference”
Whenever I feel delicious or defeated
In the watery regions of the night
We author our “form and meter”
Like the cardinal principles
Certain schools of painting have long advanced
Pressing myself against the dark
I continue my contemplation of a kind of saw-tooth-shaped truth

I engage in the contemplation
Of serration
An opened can for instance
My contemplation of the can goes thus:
The opening of a can turns
Upon a kind of saw-tooth-shaped truth

I contemplate but then I sleep
Sleep being an ancient practice
Older than civilization
Older yet than poetry
I sit and puzzle over it for hours
Resolved to not resist it

I contemplate sleep
When like a saw
I drag myself awake

I contemplate the saw

CONTRIBUTORS
Born in Taiwan but now dividing her time between Paris and Taipei, Hsia Yü makes a living as a song lyricist and translator. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, of which the most recent is Salsa (1999). She first came to prominence in the mid-1980s with the appearance of Beiwanglu, or Memoranda (1983), a self-published collection of poetry whose brassy and iconoclastic tone struck a deeply sympathetic cord in Taiwan’s younger readers. Besides her popularity in Taiwan, Bei Ling devoted ten pages of an issue of his journal Tendencies to her poems, and Michelle Yeh and Goeran Malmqvist’s anthology of Taiwan poetry, forthcoming from Columbia, will contain translations of 27 of Hsia Yü’s poems.

Steve Bradbury translates Chinese literature and teaches American and Children’s Literature at National Central University in Chung-Li, Taiwan. His translations have appeared in Manoa, boundary 2, Mid-American Review, and numerous other journals.

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Gnosticism and the body

MY FIRST PAINTING WILL BE “THE ACCUSER”
Philip Jenks
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-84-4 (paper) $12.95
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5¼ x 8
60 pages

Inspired speech recording its own fall into dead letter, the poems of Philip Jenks are strange, original, terrifying. A stuttered apocalypse, they affirm our fellowship with all matter while suffering divinity’s perpetual departure from our midst.
—Benjamin Friedlander

The second full-length volume from Jenks expands on the blistering lyrics of On the Cave You Live In (Flood Editions), by moving further into equal mixtures of social critique and sonic pattern. Philip Jenks grew up in West Virginia. He completed a Master’s degree in creative writing at Boston University, and his ongoing engagement with Appalachian culture and politics led him to the University of Kentucky, where he worked at the Appalachian Center. In 2002, Jenks received his doctorate in Political Science. He currently is an assistant professor at Portland State University.

Visual cue in the title notwithstanding, Jenks’s new collection is utterly aural. As he writes in his “poem for U. S. Maple”: “jesus said look no further / it’s all in the hearing.” The rhymes and razor-sharp scaffolding of sound that vertically hold each page together do not, however, make for a page-bound poetry. These poems, baffled by boundaries—sea/land, inside the mind/outside the body—are “voiced” in the Joycean sense, muttered in prayer, proclaimed in anger, recording the experience of “being” at sea: “He falls apart / off his bones in the aisle and is a wander / plus a satyr hs vicious logos . . .” Through ample use of the prefix “hy” Jenks removes both the “his” and “story” from history and leaves us in animal sensation: “hyster,” or womb, the ultimate threshold between land and sea. And thus we have: hydra, hysterated, hysterectomy. This beautiful hermetic work is guided by an exacting craftsman possessed of an ethical mind.
—Jennifer Moxley

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RUSSIAN POETRY IN A NEW ERA

IN THE GRIP OF STRANGE THOUGHTS:
RUSSIAN POETRY IN A NEW ERA
Edited by J. Kates
ISBN 0-939010-56-9 (paper), $19.95
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ISBN 0-939010-57-7 (cloth), $30.00
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6 x 9
444 pages
Cover painting by Eric Bulatov
118 poems by 32 contemporary poets
Bilingual on facing pages
Annotated for the general reader
Introduction and afterword on translation by J. Kates
Biographical notes on poets and translators

In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era is a Russian and English bilingual edition of thirty-two contemporary poets writing amidst the upheaval of the Russian 1990s. The collection conveys a sense of the profound freedom and energy of a unique moment in Russian history, as well as the diversity of experience in the years before and since. Edited by poet and translator J. Kates and with a foreword by poet Mikhail Aizenberg, the collection includes poems written long before 1990 but which could not be published, and those of more recent vintage. These thirty-two poets represent a phenomenal range of styles and perspectives. Beginning with the poet and popular songwriter Bulat Okudzhava, who started accompanying his poems on his guitar in the 1950s, the anthology includes poets whose work is deeply rooted in established conventions, avant gardists experimenting with new forms, and adherents of Russian free verse.

In the Grip of Strange Thoughts is an enjoyable and admirable work. Its thirty-two poets show a tremendous thematic and stylistic range, but are united in their feeling for the vitality of language.
—The Times Literary Supplement

This book is an absolute gift to students and lovers of poetry.
—British East-West Journal, September 1999

Kates’s commentary on various approaches to translating Russian poetry will be especially illuminating to the anglophone readers for whom the volume is intended. With its range of reverberating voices, the present title will be welcomed by Russian- and English-speaking readers of contemporary poetry.
—N. Tittler, Choice, October 1999

It is exceedingly rare to come across a collection of contemporary Russian poetry, and even more so with the original in Cyrillic en face. Taking up In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era is just such an experience, and not less so given the quality of the translations.
—Publishers Weekly, February 1999

The range of subject and of mood is as great as that of style, and printing the Russian originals as well as the translations increases the potential audience for the book and lets English-only readers see when rhymed Russian becomes unrhymed English.
—Ray Olson, Booklist, March 1999