All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, by Charles Bernstein
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) If it’s impossible to get the A of Bernstein, at least All the Whiskey in Heaven is a map to the map. A True American Original, in the lineage of Whitman and Pound and Zukofsky, Bernstein deserves a selected that picks judiciously, lays out concretely, and sums up with big heart open. Then you get Jonathan Galassi to publish it, never happen, and voila, This is That book. “The truth is hidden in a veil of tears / The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear.” Hovering between Essential and Quint.
War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems, by Aharon Shabtai
New Directions (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(translated by Peter Cole, New Directions, 2010) Original in every way and knowing no other way, Shabtai via Cole is an Israeli voice we need, pungent and human. Cole gets the rhyme in. The slender lines of “Begin” get two columns per page, a snake writhing through politics. Then we get some nice long fat lines of love. And notes that we need to get inside the complexities of Israel, where Hebrew itself makes a statement—Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic need not apply. “My heart’s so full of shit, and that’s the quality in me that sings.”
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, edited by Bill Morgan
Counterpoint (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Counterpoint, 2009) How can we thank Bill Morgan enough? Please #billmorgan! Now we get the selected Ginsberg-Snyder correspondence, a new definition of love and friendship. This is the essential history of Beat and Buddhism, how the haiku got here, and Snyder’s patience with Ginsberg in Japan and India. “I went to Yale Panther Rally May Day and saw Genet, he gave a great ‘commencement’ speech which I got a copy of and prefaced for City Lights to publish, tear gassed there chanting om a hum.” “I still think you would find it restful and creative...[to] join us farming and fishing—no newspapermen, no literature... Not a car or a road on the island. No electricity at the ashram.”
The Sleeping With Series, by Christine Timm
Smalls Books (cover image used by permission)
(Smalls Books, 2010) Can you sleep with a series? Christine Timm does and writes about it—reminiscent of Ntozake Shange’s “Serial Monogomy.” So here her wild poet’s heart makes it with everybody from Gertrude Stein to Basil Bunting, Tristan Tzara to Gregory Corso, and (untruth in advertising) Your Fearless Correspondent. Here is the open, playful, human, generous spirit that is both Timm on page and Timm as poet in the world, a renowned teacher and organizer of slams, readings, all things poetry. More! “Let the backs snap like ripe string beans.”
