Soundings E-Book

Dora Malech

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 50

Beschreibung

Soundings is Dora Malech's latest anthology of poems written in the last decade and appearing for the first time in a single volume. It includes works from her previously published books, Shore Ordered Ocean, Say So, and Stet. About Shore Ordered Ocean: By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's Shore Ordered Ocean revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliché, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself. About Say So: The poems in Say So are at once rigorously formal and wildly experimental. Human utterance—be it prayer or plea or pun or turn of phrase or epithet—is one of Say So's primary pistons; poetic tradition—rhyme, meter, form, rhetoric—is another; the beauty and betrayals of the body, or bodies—echoed in the beauty and betrayal of language itself—is a third. Together, these forces provide the pressure that makes Say So move and brings these poems to life. About Stet: In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body's bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language. "Inquiring, irreverent, reverent, enraptured, Dora Malech is that rare thing, the magician technician, and she has written a book in which a sudden segue in poetry takes place – from Hopkins to the present." —Mary Ruefle "Malech is ferociously alert to the unconscious absurdity and desire in idiomatic speech, its mortifying blend of self-effacement and self-betrayal. The closer one stares at the dizzying, ultra-fluent surfaces of these poems, the more their grave ambiguities emerge." —Mark Levine "Reader beware: you are handling a book as dangerous as it is delicious. Dora Malech's passionate constraint—her fervor, her discipline, and her devotion—is exemplary and can be contagious. This collection is one of a kind." —Stephen Yenser

Leseprobe

ERIS

An imprint of UrtextUnit 1 53 Beacon RoadLondon SE13 6ED, UK

Copyright © Dora Malech, 2019

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Poems in this edition have appeared previously in otherpublications. Eris would like to thank the followingpresses for their kind permission to reprint:

From Shore Ordered OceanShore Ordered Ocean (ChippingNorton: The Waywiser Press, 2009)

From Say So Say So(Cleveland, OH: Cleveland StateUniversity Poetry Center, 2011)

From Stet: Poems Stet: Poems(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2018)

The right of Dora Malech to be identifiedas the author of this work has been assertedin accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trans­mittedin any form or by any means, electronic, me­chanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without priorpermission in writing from Urtext Ltd.

The author would like to thank Johns HopkinsUniver­sity’s Catalyst Award for making this bookpossible, as well as the editors of Poetry andPoetry Northwest, where some of the artworkin this book first appeared.

ISBN 978-1-912475-49-0

eris.press

Contents

From Shore Ordered Ocean

From Say So

From Stet

About the Author

Aleph, Bet

In my favorite version, the man recites the alphabet over and over, and when asked, he says he is praying. He admits he lacks the words, but says perhaps if he provides enough letters, God can piece his purpose back together.

The word is kavanah, translates to concentration or intent, without which, the words lie inert. And with? Call it all rise. The urge made agent, leavens the lips, tongue, throat, and eyes. In other words, heart’s yes, yeast, or likens to, likewise lives,

needs no light to grow. What say the brewer and baker? What of the grapes in the sun with the yes on their skin, the blush or bloom? And what of this yes’s twin, the, as they say, opportunistic pathogen? I don’t believe I know. I’d like to ask

someone who knows, summon my strongest letters together and say: How long do you think you knew before you knew you knew? Or rather, how long do you think you think you knew before you dressed your I guess in the yes you said I do to, to know you know now?

Let the Record Show

I spent the morning trying to remember the joke about a peanut and assault. People dropped bombs on each other elsewhere. I knew that many of them were at fault

and many blameless. I kept my office locked and the lights off. The phone just kept ringing. I didn’t answer. Nor when someone knocked. I was supposed to be doing something.

Here Name Your

My friend spends all summer mending fence for the elk to blunder

back down and the cows to drag the wires and the snow to sit and sag

on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten and prop amounts at last to naught, knot, tangle.

The next year he picks up his pliers and fixes

the odds all over again. There are no grown ups, and I think that all of us children know

and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join hands so that someone can run them open.

Then whoops, shrieks, and laughter and re-gather together

as if any arms might ever really hold. I’m trying to finger the source – pleasure of or need

for – these enactments of resistance, if Resistance is indeed their name. I’m trying to walk the parallels to terminus –

call them lickety-split over rickety bridge, tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit –

trying to admit to seeing double, innumerable,

to finding myself beset by myself on all sides, my heart forced by itself,

for itself, to learn not only mine but all the lines –

crow’s flight, crow’s-feet, enemy, party, picket, throwaway, high tide, and horizon – to wait

in the shadows of scrim each night and whisper the scene. Always, some part

of the heart must root for the pliers, some part for the snow’s steep slope.

Treasure Hunting

Soon to be a low moon and elsewhere fire. Lucky mountain shone copper but not to pocket. Not that kind of angel

between maybe and the blaze. Asked to hold my baby. Didn’t envy gravity to lug its chubby moon from under.

Dear dire said the radio and oh I was its girl. Called it a silver un-bridge a single listing trestle. Someday sounded

the siren of a false all-clear. May I? My skein all un-spun under fire. The spider alive in a primrose.

The baby bent to an iris and willing her face to unfurl. I wanted to watch the coupling trains. Had never seen

machines in love before. No arrowheads but among ordinary stones red flint from which one had maybe once been broken.

The sky streaks with diurnal war paint. Touches on baby’s pulse where a dream tries to surface. Touches

as the horsemen do (indeed) pass by the monarch in said spider’s web where struggles spin to filigree.

Makeup

My mother does not trust women without it.

What are they not hiding?

Renders the dead living

and the living more alive. Everything I say sets the clouds off blubbering like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence. Blue sky, blank face. Blank face, a faithful liar, false bottom. Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs. At the carnival, each child’s cheek becomes a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself. Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don’t ask me to reconcile one shadow with another. I admit – paint the dead pink, it does not make them sunrise. Paint the living blue,