Poetry Picks — The Best Books of 2009

(translated by Fady Joudah, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) FSG has brought out a new selection of Darwish poems this year. Translated by Fady Joudah, they seem to hit exactly the right pitch for Darwish, the long lines and the slippery colloquial, the meld of mystic and romantic and political. In this collection of “lyric epics,” the central poem is “Mural,” a 50-line poem that seems like an encyclopedia of Palestinian life. And/or a prayer.

(Fence Books, 2008) Fourteen pieces of poets/poetics theater is what you’ll find in Rodrigo Toscano’s double-daring Collapsible Poetics Theater—to read it is to want to see it or even more To Do them. Life bubbles in these words like the hotpots and geysers of Yellowstone, and they laugh too and cry. This book was selected by Marjorie Welish for Fence as part of the National Poetry Series—hats off whoopee in the air to all involved. Toscano is on to something, ride like a rodeo bull.

(Harbor Mountain Press, 2009) I confess to being a big fan of Elena Georgiou, and her new book Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants just makes me love her more. Rich and dense with real stories ladled, broth over the meat and veggies, her Cypriot roots shine through but also achieve a kind of transcendent universality—“every scream goes both ways.” Poems of the World Trade Tower, poems of the subway, poems of Vermont and Cyprus and Mexico and Bryce Canyon. At home nowhere. At home everywhere.

(Rain Mountain Press, 2009) Gil Fagiani’s latest makes it plain—he’s New York’s Bukowski. Having lived in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) for almost 50 years, he’s got something to say. And reason to shut up about it. That’s the tension. The rest is poetry. “Pat passes me a corner of coke. / I sniff directly out of the glassine bag, / the tourist behind glaring at us / as I wipe my nose with my hand.”

(University of Chicago Press, 2009) Wild intelligence tightened into beauty, that’s how Robert Polito makes the words go down the page. His new book, located at the corner of Hollywood & God, interlaces his love of film and noir lit and pop and philosophe and Jesus, anchored with three poignant prose pieces, memoir. God is a constant in this book, as real as Hollywood, and as phony. And as evanescent. This book adds up, and if your math is right, the poet becomes some kind of saint. If not, a book, as in Spicer’s ideal, that holds together like a globe of black ice.

(Libellum Books, 2009) A stone skipping across lake surface. A knife carefully shaving an orange. Norma Cole’s poems conjure up the tiniest essence and let it breathe down into meaning. Attagirl. It’s some kind of miracle, and in Natural Light she has found a publisher who puts the same kind of total attention into the production that she does in her wrought, gorgeous, inspired and inspiring poetry. “sweet flag: calamus / very cloudy: books flying up to the sun / you, little cloud of more than human form, setting fire in back of the brain.” It’s like Larry Eigner on the Internet!

(Marsh Hawk Press, 2009) Back in the day, 1970 say, Paul Pines, bartender/poet, decided that the thing to do was open a jazz/poetry club, genius, and for the next 18 years or so the Tin Palace was a beacon on the Bowery. If you were there, you knew. And if you weren’t, well, you can feel it in Last Call at the Tin Palace, poems that are stories that are jazz that are memories that are everlasting imprints of music on retinas and the truth from the other side of the bar. Some crazy surrealist collages and all—a gift.

(Coffee House Press, 2009) This is a nice big book from a New York School master but never too far away from Bolinas either, simultaneously evoking Upper East Side childhood and a poetry style inimitable. It has generous, judicious selections from six collections, spanning (OMG) 50 years—yet there is nothing old here! These poems are simply waiting for eternity and they are very, very patient. Berkson was a friend of Frank O’Hara’s and his poems bloom like Frank’s. In “Star Motel,” “Inside I could hear / a party of people, / the aimless cars / and in the middle distance / inexorable murmurs / of the ice machines”—at least two hidden titles here, “In the Middle Distance” and “Inexorable Murmurs.” Hie thee to Portrait, Lo!, and Dream, Reader!

(Counterpoint, 2009) Little Big Book (Go head and Google) sitting here on desk, Ralph Steadman cover all blottoed—why, it’s Capt. Kentucky, dear Ed McClanahan, with a collection of gimcracks and gewgaws fit to choker on! O the Clear Moment is a collection of short stories, a “fictionalized memoir,” about as close as we’re going to get to Ed’s writing poems: one of the pieces, “And Then I Wrote,” has the lyrics of three of his songs. Sobeit! To me all that he writes, like his pals Wendell Berry, Gurney Norman, and the late lamented James Baker Hall, always has that Kentucky talk in it, truth so straight it’s just gotta be poetry. Buy this if you want to have a good time.