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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

Verses on Bird … constantly invites us to reassess our relationship to language and of language's relations to the world. The wonder of this volume is that most of the translations by the four poets who contributed to it [Eleni Sikelianos, Leonard Schwartz, Rachel Levitsky, and Timothy Liu] are nearly as engaging as the poems they represent. This is no small achievement, and it is a credit to the publisher to have gathered so many fine translations under one cover and to have gone to the no-small expense of presenting them in a bilingual format.
—Steve Bradbury, “Tin Fish”

[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 BILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POLISH POETRY

CARNIVOROUS BOY CARNIVOROUS BIRD
Selected by Marcin Baran
Edited by Anna Skucińska
and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-72-0 (paper) $19.95
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6 x 9
336 pages [bilingual Polish/English]

Since the lyric beginnings of Polish poetry, writers have been burdened with duties typically delegated to politicians, soldiers, priests or journalists. The political, social and cultural changes of the last decade have allowed Polish poets to cast off these burdens, and focus instead on individual expression and varied aesthetic movements. Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird focuses on the core group of this movement—poets born between 1958-1969.

…in a constant confusion of mystification and authenticity, distance and directness, representational skepticism and mimetic euphoria, game-playing and honesty, the poets presented here perform their informal, singular duties towards language and the human condition.
—from the introduction by Marcin Baran

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THE DIVING BELL
Elena Ignatova
From the Russian by Sibelan Forrester
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-85-2 (paper) $14.95
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5¼ x 8
144 pages [bilingual Russian/English]

Elena Ignatova was born in Leningrad in 1947. She became an artistic dissident with regard to the hopelessly compromised literary establishment, but never joined the more alienated literary “underground.” She published in samizdat until the appearance of her only officially recognized book, Teplaia zemliia (The Warm Earth) in 1989. In 1990, Ignatova and her family moved to Israel, where she has worked as a screenwriter of cultural documentaries. 

Her poetry exists in a tense balance between her former life in Russia, particularly in the St. Petersburg that was Leningrad, and her subsequent life and its perspectives in Jerusalem. In the last decade it contrasts the new, ancient environs of Jerusalem, described as crystalline and thus distinct from St. Petersburg's characteristic granite, a more chaotically igneous material. 

Ignatova says, “I am convinced that art is active:  it can reflect the destruction of the world, of the historical connections of eras, of the human soul—or, on the contrary, can strengthen those connections. I have always wanted to write about the internal connection, the harmony of the world even in difficult times, about the connection of the past with our own fates, about Russia, about the connections of spaces: of the world of the Russian village, where I passed my childhood, of St. Petersburg and the Holy Land.”

Ignatova's work mobilizes remnants of old poetic solemnity, religious, official or even folk locutions, along with Soviet officialese and conversational vocabulary. Her earlier poetry tends to be formally looser and more experimental, but her mature work is much more classical. Thus, her distinctive voice feels familiar, or better, familial, to a reader who knows her predecessors:  she consciously continues their tradition in this and other ways. Her work draws attention to the tragic disharmony between the way things are and the way they should be. Russian history flashes a dark side from the days of Prince Igor or the Mongol invasions, through the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible, to the Revolution, the Second World War, and beyond. Recent poems reflect current realities from Chernobyl to the current wars in Asia.

Poetry then is the “diving bell” of her title, protecting the poet as well as her readers in a hostile, often toxic environment. It becomes a source of values and ways to approach and understand experience, while still depicting the flaws and compromises of human beings who live in an imperfect world.

Sibelan Forrester translates from Russian, Serbian and Croatian. She is an associate professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College.

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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

Interview with Philip Jenks

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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SALT MONODY
Marzanna Kielar
From the Polish by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-86-0 (paper) $14.95
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5¼ x 8
128 pages [bilingual Polish/English]

Marzanna Kielar's systematic investigations of the North (of Poland) resemble concentrated expansions of homelands into the poetic universes of Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Tranströmer and Eugenio Montale—not surprisingly the authors most important to Kielar. For someone who lists Understanding Glaciers as her favorite non-poetry book, the precise terminology of earth science naturally counterpoints the impressionist re-creation of landscape that occurs time and again in her poems. Stone formations, glacial types, kinds of waves, river shapes—they all have their own, peculiar names: crag, surging glacier, breaker, oxbow. Her recent poems (placed towards the end of this non-chronological selection) frequently take advantage of this peculiarity. The terms testify to the acuteness of Kielar's focus as well as to the persistence of her exploration.

Unlike Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, Kielar does not comment on Poland's past or present. Like so many other young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she no longer needs to: confronting history and the state has finally become an aesthetic choice rather than a poet's moral obligation.

Marzanna Kielar (b.1963, Goldap), a graduate in Philosophy from Warsaw University, works at the College of Special Needs Education in Warsaw and co-operates with the literary magazine Krasnogruda. She has published two collections of poetry and has received the Kazimiera Illakowiczówna Prize for the best debut of the year, and the Kocielski Foundation Prize; she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize.

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese teaches translation and contemporary literature in English at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She co-edits Przekladaniec, a journal of literary translation; her translations of contemporary Polish poets have appeared in numerous journals, and the Zephyr anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird.

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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