Post by shayepoet on Jul 15, 2008 21:02:07 GMT 2
Quickly Changing River
Meena Alexander[/b]
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world-- birds, lilies, horses-- up against that from the world of humans-- oppression, slavery, and violence-- ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations. In Alexander's world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a cafe; and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl's sari, the material of a woman's life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present-- sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.
Sample poem:
August 14, 2004
(In Memory of Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004)
I have never been to Krakow,
I imagine it filled with chestnut trees.
It was a green day when you died and hard the telling of it,
Now is the time for patience.
The west is a knot of thundershowers,
The east, a nest of small scale fires.
On terraces covered with roses
Instead of honey bees, bullets swarm.
In alleyways torn silk reveals the bodies of infants
Laid head to toe in caskets of desire.
On a dresser made of mahogany
A woman’s hand arranges a display of attar,
Each vial culled from a separate continent --
Jasmine, lilac, rose -- last of all, attar of earth,
Red earth in pouring rain,
August 14th in the year of the Lord, 2004.
Was it wet in Krakow when you died?
Through airport lounges and shuttered doors,
Through coast lines gashed by mist
Through barricades of blunt words,
Torment of the ant and ox,
In a miserable century with its corrupt couplings
You kept note of it all,
Petticoats trimmed with lace from the black heart of Europe,
Cotton from India, crystal from Lithuania,
A woman’s cheek wet with dew as paradise swims up,
Gold fish, icon of the journeying soul,
In a garden pond struck by muscular roots and fleshly scents
Ferocious toil with pitchfork and spade.
How much time is enough in the life of a poet?
You cannot answer now.
The chestnut trees are thick with rain.
You turn away from the window pane,
The dirt is a honeycomb of consonants.
Hour by hour as you come close to your death
Someone whose face is covered with a veil,
Man or woman I cannot tell,
Reads from the Letter of Paul to the Corinthians.
Reads in a slow, clear but quavering voice,
In speech that erodes the clarity of your own,
Crystalline disturbance of the liquid atmosphere
Where sun and storm collide,
Reads in the tongues of men and of angels,
From the poems you composed and poems to come,
Zone of limestone, chestnut and linden
Zone of sweet water, laced by fever,
Book of the migrant soul,
Now losing, now finding love.
First appeared in Harvard Review #28, Spring 2005
Praise for Quickly Changing River:
"These are poems of rich and satisfying detail-- gingko trees and water taxis, the pearly feathers of pigeons. But the real strength of this book goes far beyond detail, however lyrically rendered. These poems are a sustained elegy for homelessness, for the displacement at the heart of human life. Meena Alexander is an eloquent and ambitious poet."
-- Eavan Boland
"Quickly Changing River is an alluvial force of surprises reaching near and far, always beckoning us closer and closer to its urgent and magical source. From the collection's first poem to its last, 'Cosmopolitan' to 'August 14, 2004,' there's a movement here that challenges and enchants. Meena Alexander is a truth-teller who knows how to make language do anything and everything she desires."
--Yusef Komunyakaa
Interviews with the author:
Kenyon Review:
tinyurl.com/59hamj
Fragile Places: A Poet's Notebook (pdf):
tinyurl.com/5dm36y
The Poet in the Public Sphere A Conversation with Meena Alexander by Lopamudra Basu (pdf):
tinyurl.com/6963yp
In the Mercy of Time -- Flute Music: an interview with Meena Alexander by Daniela Gioseffi (pdf):
tinyurl.com/5jhd8k
About the author:
Meena Alexander was born in India, raised there and in Sudan. At eighteen she went to study in England. Her first poems were published when she was a teenager in Sudan, in Arabic translation.. She has read at Poetry International London, Struga Poetry Evenings, Poetry Africa, Calabash Festival, Harbor Front Festival, Poetry Society, India and other international gatherings. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College and the Ph.D.Program at the Graduate Center.[/b][/blockquote]
Website
Blog
Emery University
CUNY Grad Center
ISBN 0-8101-2451-3, 136 pages, $ 14.95
Triquarterly, January 2008
Paper
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