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The Arrow
I thought of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There’s no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
The Arrow
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All Things can tempt Me
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman’s face, or worse –
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
All Things can tempt Me
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The Realists
Hope that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
The Realists
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The Mask
‘Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.’
‘O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.’
‘I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.’
‘It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.’
‘But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.’
‘O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?’
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
The Mask
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He tells of the Perfect Beauty
O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze
And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:
And therefore my heart will bow, when dew
Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,
Before the unlabouring stars and you.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
He tells of the Perfect Beauty
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A Coat
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
A Coat
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Maid Quiet
Where has Maid Quiet gone to,
Nodding her russet hood?
The winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood.
O how could I be so calm
When she rose up to depart?
Now words that called up the lightning
Are hurtling through my heart.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
Maid Quiet
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The debut collection of poetry from a virtuosic, compassionate new voice.
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist.
Born in India, she grew up across the Middle East, Europe and North America before calling Ireland home.
Founder of the Play It Forward Fellowships, she serves as poetry editor at Skein Press and Fallow Media, contributing editor for The Stinging Fly and an advisory board member of Ledbury Poetry Critics Ireland.
She is the recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award.
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s spellbinding debut poetry collection explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. Each arrow has its own effect on some body – a very real, contemporary body – and its particular journey of love.
The second is a long narrative poem, ‘A is for [Arabs]’, which follows a different kind of journey: a family of refugees who have fled to the West from conflict in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. With an extraordinary structure, yoking abecedarian and Fibonacci sequences, it is a skillful and intimate account of migration and exile, of home and belonging.
Auguries of a Minor God
by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
Publisher: Faber & Faber
September 7, 2021
Language: English
Paperback: 120 pages
ISBN-10 : 0571365566
ISBN-13: 978-0571365562
£10.99
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we will walk back, even with bare feet
if we don’t find our home in the place where we left it
we will build another one in an apricot tree
out of luscious clouds, out of azure ether
Apricots of Donbas—by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk—is the 7th book in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. As are previous volumes in the Series, it has been released in a dual-language edition.
Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine’s industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014, when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants, and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees.
Reflecting the complex emotional experiences of a civilian witnessing a gradual disintegration of her familiar surroundings, Yakimchuk’s poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of child-like babbling about the tools and toys of military combat.
Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk’s voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems’ artfulness goes hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.
(…)
my friends are hostages
and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk
to pull them out of the basements
from under the rubble
yet here you are, writing poems
ideally slick poems
high-minded gilded poems
beautiful as embroidery
there’s no poetry about war
just decomposition
only letters remain
and they all make a single sound — rrr
(…)
Lyuba Yakimchuk from Decomposition,
translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky
Lyuba Yakimchuk
is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter. Her two collections of poetry, Moda (2009) and Abrykosy Donbasu (2015) won prestigious awards, including the International Slavic Poetic Award (Ukraine) and the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (USA). Since 2019, her play The Wall has been running at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, the largest in Ukraine. She also authored the script for the film The Slovo House: An Unfinished Novel, reflecting on the literary life in the 1930’s Kharkiv. Born and raised in a small town near Luhansk, Yakimchuk now lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine’s industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk’s poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk’s voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems’ artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.
# new poetry
APRICOTS OF DONBAS
poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk
Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk,
Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina
Oktober 2021
Paperback
166 pp
ISBN 978-1-7364323-1-0
Lost Horse Press
$30.00
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Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof.
Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival.
Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungry traces the lineage of the speaker’s place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.
Jihyun Yun is a Korean American poet from California who now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A Fulbright research grant recipient, she has received degrees from the University of California–Davis and New York University. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Adroit Journal, and other publications.
Jihyun Yun
Some Are Always Hungry
Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Kwame Dawes, series editor
University of nebraskapress
Poetry
English
September 2020
Paperback
90 pages
ISBN978-1-4962-2218-3
$17.95
# New books
Jihyun Yun
Some Are Always Hungry
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Zwaal is een dichter die met een grandioos taalvermogen de wereld toont in al haar facetten, niet alleen als natuurverschijnsel maar ook als erotische verschijning, als de zee, het water, de vrouw, de kleuren en geuren van alles wat tastbaar is.
Zijn werk, dat hij sinds 1984 in een rustige regelmaat heeft gepubliceerd, is nu verzameld in zeesnede, waarin ook is opgenomen de nog niet eerder gepubliceerde bundel averij grosse. Gedichten van enkele woorden, gedichten van niet meer dan twee regels, gedichten met lange regels die van overvloed van de pagina lijken te vallen. Gedichten waarin de hele wereld als nieuw wordt getoond.
B. Zwaal (Vlaardingen, 1944) was theatermaker en regisseur. In 1984 debuteerde hij met de dichtbundel fiere miniature. Daarna verschenen nog tien bundels, waarvan een drifter werd genomineerd voor de Ida Gerhardt Poëzieprijs en zouttong voor de VSB poëzieprijs.
B. Zwaal:
zeesnede
gedichten 1984 – 2019
paperback met flappen
15×22 cm.
536 pagina’s
ISBN 9789028427655
prijs € 39,99
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Poet and editor Matthew Zapruder was born in Washington, DC. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Zapruder’s poems employ nuanced, conversational syntax to engage themes of grief, perception, and logic. As Dana Jennings noted in the New York Times, Zapruder has a “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture.” Discussing his own development as a writer in the Los Angeles Times, Zapruder addressed the role of rhyme in his work: “[T]he rhyme is what I would call ‘conceptual,’ that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the ‘obscurity of an order, a whole.’”
Zapruder is the author of several collections of poetry, including Sun Bear (2014), Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). He collaborated with painter Chris Uphues on For You in Full Bloom (2009) and cotranslated, with historian Radu Ioanid, Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (2008).
With Brian Henry, Zapruder cofounded Verse Press, which later became Wave Books. As an editor for Wave Books, Zapruder coedited, with Joshua Beckman, the political poetry anthology State of the Union: 50 Political Poems (2008). His own poems have been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2013, 2009), Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll (2007), and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), as well as Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (2010). Why Poetry, a book of prose about reading poetry for a general audience, is forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins in early 2017.
Zapruder’s poetry has been adapted by some of America’s most exciting young composers. In Fall, 2012, his poetry was adapted and performed at Carnegie Hall by Composer Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider. In February, 2014, composer Missy Mazzoli, along with Victoire and Glenn Kotche, performed Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival, and released as a recording on New Amsterdam records in spring, 2015.
Zapruder’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at New York University, the New School, the University of California Riverside – Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and at the University of California at Berkeley as the Holloway Fellow.
He lives in Oakland, where he is an associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing, as well as editor at large for Wave Books. He is also a guitarist in the rock band The Figments.
From Matthew Zapruder’s poem:
American Singer
(. . .)
I notice probably
because you wrote
that strange
word funeral
the constant black
fabric I think
is taffeta
always draped
over the scaffolds
the figures
scraping paint
are wearing dusty
protective suits
and to each other
saying nothing
I move invisibly
like a breeze
around three men
wearing advanced
practically weightless
jackets impervious
to all possible
weather even
a hurricane
(. . .)
Matthew Zapruder
Why Poetry
Hardcover
2017
Pag. 256
Ecco Publisher
ISBN13: 9780062343079
ISBN10: 0062343076
fleursdumal.nl
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