AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

• On Reading a Classic
• Shadi Bartsch (bio)

We were in mid-conversation. "Oh!" said my student, her eyes widening. "Vergil calls him pious all the time, and Aeneas says it of himself, but the rest of the narrative just doesn't back that up. There's the sacrifice of Italians. And he dissimulates to Dido. And he never shook Latinus's right hand for the treaty. That's not pious, not even by Roman standards. But what is Vergil doing then? Aeneas is the hero of the poem!"

"Good question," I said, nodding encouragingly.

"And it's not just the word pious that's applied to him. He's virtuous and manly and in sync with the gods. But then the Italians claim he's a fop who curls his hair and wears a bonnet to war. Another contradiction," she adds. "Which side are we supposed to believe?"

"What if we think about the gap itself, rather than taking sides?" I ask.

She thinks. "Do Aeneas and Augustus share the same kind of gap? They're both described with fine words on the surface, like in the Res Gestae, that list of accomplishments Augustus put out, but in his history he used to be Octavian, who was pretty nasty and did bad things before he became the princeps. It's like the gap where on one side, the Aeneid is like official praise, on the other, we see unpious stuff that Aeneas does."

"But at the same time, Vergil doesn't seem to condemn the praise, does he?" I ask. "Is that a simple political choice, or does it mean something more?"

"I don't know," she says.

"Something to think about!" say I.

Our time was up, and off went my earnest reader of the poem.

I have modeled this conversation because it shows so nicely both how students read and how they don't. My student had just engaged in interpretation level one—reading the text closely, coming up with frameworks for interpretation that were shaped by as much as she knew of the context. And there was another factor here: the sorts of questions I posed were coming from me, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago in the year 2022, the product of Western education abroad and in the US, a woman, of middle-class origin, left of center politically, animal lover and vegetarian, translator [End Page 56] of the Aeneid, who happened to participate in a student's political meaning-making out of the Aeneid, which just happened to go down this path among the many, many possible paths it could take. An awareness of this, of the contingency of one's interpretation, is what I call interpretation level two. Notice the apparent tension between the two levels: I am both aware that the discussion models a particular type of reception, and I believe in it, and my students end up (often) believing what I believ

Reviewed by:

• Finalists by Rae Armantrout
• Thomas C. Marshall (bio)

Finalists is, as we usually like a book of poetry to be, a treasury of small pleasures. The prevailing trends have taught us to expect little insights and clever wording. This book, however, uses those expectations in order to critique them. They are not just met here, but made part of how the book attacks the usual. Rae Armantrout's works have all along been twists on poetry's ways, incorporating the expected while offering new perspectives on expectations themselves.

From "Compound" in Crawl Out Your Window 11 (1983) to "Crescendo," prominently placed in the October 18, 2021, New Yorker, Armantrout's short lyrics have kept up a throbbing basso continuo of tension within perceptions of the world and our ways of putting them into language or finding them there. Those two poems, embracing forty years of an expanding career that has brought her a Pulitzer and other honors, have in them the momentary perceptions we expect as insight from the best poets along with an undertow of penetrating social critique. Armantrout's analyses are subtle, hidden in an approach that looks at things and ways of putting things—and at the world that encompasses both of those—with the same ever-so-slight snarkiness that Dickinson used in "Some Keep the Sabbath." One might call these poems [End Page 125] "ana-lyrical," as they engage both analytical critical thinking and lyrical musicality in their wording. "Crescendo" and "Circles" are two of the many clear examples of this approach in Finalists.

There are many dozens of other fine, enjoyably intelligent poems in the book. They often play one kind of diction against another. "Hang On" opens the volume with an "unlikely eye" and what it notices: like an empty shopping cart / parked on a ledge / above a freeway." The poem moves from this social-symptom image to contemplation of the beauties of a barnacle. "Ceremonial" juxtaposes some chemistry of poisons with a critique of communion. "My Place" examines emotion as if "from a call center perspective." But the one the New Yorker put right in the middle of their article on Paul McCartney's premiere party for Peter Jackson's Let It Be (2021) film presents the complexity of Armantrout's analysis right where it is born—in "languaging." They show how something gets put into words and what the words have to do with how we see that thing. A little close reading can unfold this process in those two two-part poems for us, and show us how to sense it throughout Finalists.

Reviewed by:

• My Body Lives Like a Threat by Megha Sood
• Austin Alexis (bio)

Megha Sood's debut full-length poetry collection, My Body Lives Like a Threat, is a model of contemporary poetry at its most political. Centering around timely issues such as police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration policy, bodily autonomy, and fake news, the book is an example of a poet's passionate engagement with the public turmoil and crises of our time. Even a glance at the table of contents reveals the collection's predilection, since the book is divided into five sections with bluntly political associations: I: Black Truth; II: War and Peace; III: My Body Is Not an Apology; IV: A Just Immigration Policy; V: My Body Lives Like a Threat.

The first section references a number of deaths of people of color, particularly Black men, at the hands of police officers (or biased citizens) in recent years. One poem, "A Nation in a Chokehold," ends with a list of victims of law enforcement: "Here the nation remembers: / Eric Garner, Briyonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd / Here the nation learns again how to breathe / Freely!" (the italics are Sood's). She uses them to emphasize the importance of each individual life and to exclaim over the senseless demise of these individuals. The poem "An Act of Self Defense" is dedicated to Ahmaud Arbery, and alludes to his mother's grief over his death, which ironically occurred while he was peacefully jogging in a neighborhood in Georgia and was not practicing his "right to the Second Amendment" to bear arms. Other poems in this section use the vocabulary associated with police misconduct: chokehold, asphyxiated, "broken prison system," lynched, police gun, "protest-laced streets." The poet stresses the universality to abuse in "Does Hurt Have a Gender?" by ending that poem with these interrogatory lines: [End Page 107]

Do screams have a religion too? Do cries have a race?Does hurt have a gender? Do wounds have a nationality?

Does your tongue curl into sin when you call out my name?Does the triteness of ideologies still mollify your pain?

Some of the poems in this section of the book are prose poems, as if the extremity of the violence that is chronicled is too disturbing to be rendered in verse. Two such poems—"The People We Love, the People We Care" and "A Revolution by Choice"—emphasize the isolation of activism against abuse as well as the continuing struggle t

Reviewed by:

• Bags and Tools: Poems by Michael Fleming
• Laura C. Stevenson (bio)

From the quadrameter title poem with which it begins to the celebrational sonnet with which it concludes, Michael Fleming's Bags and Tools, the winner of the Sundog Poetry Book Award of 2021, is a debut collection in which every poem reveals penetrating vision, crafted with such care that its technique appears effortless.

While the collection is filled with a variety of subjects, moods, and memories that reflect a long and thoughtful poetic history, Fleming has placed his most recent works in his first section, "Just a Word." As suggested by Frances Cannon's haunting sketch of a seventeenth-century plague doctor, most of the section's poems are concerned with the pandemic. Of these, the most impressive—both technically and philosophically—is "Corona," a sequence of seven interlocking sonnets. The sequence opens with an echo of the Book of Genesis but quickly shifts to the perceptions of a TV audience:

In the beginning it was just a word—somekind of bug, a blip in the news,another ambient danger, like murderand bad service and diaper rash—the duesfor being alive, one more thing to thinkabout.

Soon, however, the word becomes a danger that can't be dismissed:

It began to cover the sunand we said this isn't happening, sinkinginto the sea isn't happening, noneof this is real, unpredicted eclipsescannot occur, we will not allow [End Page 120] it. Then all at once night fell—time was strippedof meaning, birds stopped singing in a cloudy,starless sky. No hint of dawn. We musthave failed to see this coming, most of us.

"Most of us" implies that a few people did see coming doom, but while that idea hovers in the air, the second sonnet merely portrays the sorrow of a society that now recognizes its former inattention:

We failed to see it coming, most of us,because we never thought about the plagueor pestilence—antique notions we musthave forgotten.

After describing suddenly newfound fear, the iambics break into a nightmare disorientation that mixes past and present:

Everything we thought we knewwas wrong, delusional, a dream of climbingan endless staircase made

Reviewed by:

• The Wicking of the Broken Heart by Robin Eichele
• Joy Gaines-Friedler (bio)

Robin Eichele's poems ask these heady, existential questions: Who are we? Why are we here? How do we fit? What is real? What is the world trying to teach me? What am I to know beyond the knowing? That is exactly what a lyrical poem is—a moment that reveals a knowing beyond the moment. From, "Feeding the Pigeons":

In the world of small who is the smaller?The chill of the bench seeps the heat from my thighs.The fog of the day usurps the green of leaves.Here is the privacy for askingwhat is the consequence of matter or time or space?Grey heads bob in Washington Squarejust as they bobbed in Leicester—a sea of them–so many years ago—pecking at crumbs withconfident precision—in cracks, on sidewalks, onconcrete and stone—tapping survival signals demanding that I play a role as unwavering demanding that I pose with my random rhetoricals demanding that I scratch for meaning.

This "transcendentalist" seeking of the grandeur that connects us to all things through the intermediary of the self (with the guidance of the poet) permeates the work in this collection. Eichele acts as a spiritual guide. It is clear that he sees this guidance as a calling.

In the mid-1960s a group of students at Monteith College, an experimental liberal arts college within Wayne State University, formed the Detroit Artists' Workshop. The group included Eichele, activist John Sinclair, photographer Leni Sinclair, and others. Theirs was a radical community of students and artists [End Page 129] who not only lived together but hosted concerts, poetry readings, classes and exhibitions. They formed a press. They founded a co-operative record label, they rallied against war, and on behalf of women, they were outspoken activists, humanists, organizers, and early founders of the anti-nuclear movement. They became known as subversive, and police assigned undercover agents to infiltrate the group.

Nearly sixty years later this volume of selected poems embodies those origins, and ideologies. Eichele generously celebrates the poet-artists. All artists. The now "grey heads that bob" are indeed those radical, soul-seeking, cultural icons of that community of artists, poets, professors, and musicians in Detroit and elsewhere, those who have not and will not give up, as Eichele proclaims, "scratching for meaning." His tr

Reviewed by:

• The Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, and: Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk
• Duane Niatum (bio)

It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce to you two of the major contemporary Ukrainian poets. The current situation in Ukraine has brought me out of my book review retirement. Writing this review is the least I can do for fellow poets facing one of the worst crises in modern history, an unprovoked war that is a threat to their individual lives and an attempt to wipe out their culture and history.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of The Many Names for Mother, is a poet of origins, ancestry, memory, and language. These are the central motivators for the poems in her provocative and heart-wrenching lines revealed concisely with concrete detail. I am able to get closer to these poems and their personal [End Page 100] and historical revelations because of watching the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that is now more than a year old.

And like other notable Ukrainian poets and novelists, she honors her family's history that she brings into the present moment. She does this, she says, because she cannot move forward without this important part of her memory, dreams, and potential future. And, of course, her life is brought into focus in the way her words explore the journey her life has taken. But most importantly, this life is anchored to the many names for mother, as the title of her collection points to.

This is a passage from her poem "Inheritance":

And in that distance, who can telligniting times apart? The differencebetween the lived and the passed down:the sundials shadow at noon? I'm wishingagain today still last night—in flux like sand and water and ancestry.

We see how Kolchinsky Dasbach's story flows on like a river of memory and will never be lost or forgotten. She is a poet who leaves no stone unturned to face the reader. T

• We Have Never Been Ancient
• Joseph Farrell (bio)

One of William Faulkner's most famous epigrams tells us that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But those who repeat or paraphrase Faulkner, and even Faulkner himself, are usually concerned with a past that is not very deep. It's really just a matter of a few generations. On the other hand, "that's ancient history," a tediously common phrase that refers to a deeper antiquity, is used to dismiss something as utterly unimportant and irrelevant. This attitude is in no way exclusive to the uneducated or the anti-intellectual. A shallow view of the past is officially embraced by the history department of my own university, which requires undergraduate majors to take as few as one course that includes some material earlier than the nineteenth century. Nor is it unusual in this. The entire structure of all academic institutions, not to mention many other pillars of our society, seems dedicated to the proposition that the deep past is not very important. To those who study a culture that thrived not two hundred but two thousand years ago and more, it isn't obvious that this is a good thing. That's why it might be surprising to realize that our own discipline is part of the problem.

Classics as an academic discipline was shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the same forces that reshaped entire universities, promoted the nation-state as the ideal political structure, and distinguished firmly between the categories of "ancient" and "modern." This distinction is fundamental to the way most people today view human history over the longue durée. So familiar is it that it seems almost natural. That is why it is so shocking to realize that it amounts to little more than a rhetorical gambit.

The most daring use of this gambit was by Friedrich Schiller in an influential essay "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry" (1795–96). Like many contemporaries, Schiller felt vividly aware that he was living in a brave new world, a "modern" one different from any that had existed before. His purpose in this essay was to articulate the aesthetic principles of that world, specifically with reference to its most characteristic form, the novel. But how to accomplish that? Even today the novel continues to resist efforts to define it in terms of [End Page 60] form, essence, or any other quality. Schiller faced the difficulty of defining it as a reflection of the rapidly developing, heterogeneous character of the contemporary world in which the genre was becoming so prominent. But how to define anything that is defined mainly by indeterminacy?

Schiller's great stroke of genius was to define the novel, and modernity itself, not per se but in contrast to some putatively simpler conce

• Death to Classics
• Shane Butler (bio)

As the late August evening gave way to night, I was packing my bags to leave the next day for Rome, where, among other things, I would write the dissertation that I would defend upon my return to New York two and a half years later. The windows of my apartment were open, sending the nocturnal purr of the city in on late-summer breezes that invited sleep. In an effort to resist them, I turned on the television that I otherwise seldom used except for the evening news and planted my suitcase on a table in front of it. I do not remember what was on and doubtless didn't much care then. It was tuned to ABC, where it had been for the news a few hours before—I had a weakness for the bemused gravitas of anchor Peter Jennings—so I left it there. The clothes I packed were rather rudimentary, with the exception of an ill-fitting suit I had bought on what would turn out to be the mistaken report that such was required for dinner at the American Academy in Rome. Books, however, were what mostly went in, including the Latin dictionary that had followed me since my undergraduate days, inscribed with each new phone number, which, back then of course, used to change with every move.

As I folded, shifted, and crammed, whatever was on the television was interrupted by a "special report," the regular term when the reporting of "breaking news" was still an extraordinary event. The face behind the desk was not that of Jennings, who no doubt was home in bed, but that of a reporter I had never seen before and who himself seemed nervously surprised to be there. Princess Diana, he announced, had been in a serious car crash in Paris and had been rushed from the scene to the hospital. ABC News would of course be back as further information became available, but for now we were being returned to our regularly scheduled programming. I remember laughing, not at the news, but at the reporter, whose few words were enough to capture what struck my sympathetic ears as a voice that could only come from another gay man. The network, I said to myself, would never have allowed him in front of a camera in prime time. Indeed, had the news been about anything other than a princess, they surely would have dragged Jennings, or at least one of his regular proxies, back to the studio. [End Page 29]

As for Diana—well, to call me an anti-royalist would be to exaggerate my level of interest in the matter. It is true that, in a curious prefiguration of the story I am recalling, my mother had roused me in the predawn hours sixteen years before in order to watch her wedding to Prince Charles live on television. I must have encouraged this plan, though I cannot remember why. Were we both trying to say something about me that I myself, on the eve of my twelfth birthda

Reviewed by:

• Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents by Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount
• Jan Garden Castro (bio)

Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, the catalog for the exhibition traveling to the National Gallery, London (10 September 2022–8 January 2023), underscores the show's point: Homer applied his powerful painting prowess and narrative talent to capture both ocean and societal crosscurrents. Sylvia Yount terms this his "lifelong concerns with race and the environment." Yount is the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her colleague Stephanie L. Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture in the American Wing, closes the volume by discussing how the artist framed race, class, and gender disparities as he painted nature's magnificence and its destructive force. The Gulf Stream, an 1899 painting reworked by 1906, is the show's centerpiece, displaying a lone Black man adrift at sea in a boat with a broken mast, surrounded by sharks. Homer used the sea literally and metaphorically in an age following the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Jim Crow laws and racist violence marginalized and endangered the Black populace.

Herdrich's essay, "Crosscurrents: Conflict, Nature, and Mortality in Winslow Homer's Art," dives into the vortex of this exhibition and painting as she quotes curator H. Barbara Weinberg's comment that The Gulf Stream and other paintings "seem to ask as many questions as they answer." The same could be said about this exhibition and catalog. Experts mention Homer's one month of classes in the Barbizon style in New York and mostly speculate about the rest of his art education. Even though Homer's father and brother [End Page 149] are mentioned and seem central to his life, readers learn almost nothing about Homer's family or friends. We are sent to footnoted sources if we're curious about whether he had any romantic relationships. Similarly, we are told that the water currents of the Atlantic are central to Homer's body of work but given only general information that Homer's knowledge of this body of water came from oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury and was filtered through a religious source, George Chaplin Child, who believed in divine providence. Ocean patterns are discussed only as they were historically understood in 1857. Herdrich's best discussion of currents is in her consideration of The Herring Net (1885), where she points out "the inherent

• The Poet as Cartographer
• E. Ethelbert Miller (bio)

During a recorded Zoom conversation with Miho Kinnas, a Japanese poet and translator, I found myself thinking about why we had begun collaborating on writing poems together. Was this the result of a pandemic hangover? Had we become addicted to the daily exchanging of emails and the discussion of the work by Chilean novelists? What brings writers together when they step outside workshops and cafés? What is the relationship between collaboration and community organizing? What does it mean to share lines and stanzas of poems when walls are being constructed to keep migrants and refugees out? In our poem "One of Us Is Missing" Miho and I write:

I no longer know where I am going.I should sell my shoes for food.I cannot find a map.

I've always been curious about the cartography of collaboration. How does one follow another without a map? Which tends to bring me back to governmental policies adopted to deal with a crisis. How often does our leadership seem to be clueless or just lost? What is the connection between collaboration and democracy? What is the price of collaboration, and what must one sell to be successful?

Once when I wrote to Miho and told her I missed her, she responded back that she didn't know she was missing. I chuckled after she told me this, but reflecting on her comments much later, her response seemed to summarize the poem "One of Us Is Missing." We began the second stanza of the poem with this intriguing line:

How will I survive without the others?

So much is broken in today's world. War shatters peace. People become scattered pieces. There is a longing to connect, to return home, or to discover new homes. The invention of self is performance art. Every narrative is a [End Page 89] potential passport into newness and a conversation with oneself or another. Miho and I used the term "twoness" to describe what we were doing. We started exchanging lines back and forth by email. Since our work is very different in style and tone, Miho described our collaboration as improvisational while I considered it to be more call-and-response. I found our exchanges spiritual and, at times, having a Zen quality. But how does one construct a poem together? How does one build a shelter or home? What are the politics of collaboration? Is it shaped by form or content? Do we need a map to help us explore? I believe there might be four levels required for collaboration:

Intent

Process

Result

Transformation

Every collaboration has an origin story. Intent begins with desire. The wanting to create something new and different.