POETS’ CORNER

AT THE SKY’S EDGE

Poems 1991-1996

By Bei Dao

Translated from the Chinese

by David Hinton

New Directions: 224 pp., $15.95

I reviewed Bei Dao’s collection of poems “Old Snow” upon its publication in 1991--when the shock waves of Tiananmen Square still reverberated in the West, accompanied by unforgettable images of the young student protestors. Bei Dao, who’d been a leader of the underground protest movement, a radical journalist and poet in his native country, happened to have been outside of China when government tanks crushed the rebellion.

In exile, he was made an instant international martyr, and his poetry was translated into 25 languages. I remember trying to read the poems in “Old Snow” dispassionately and succeeding, at least to this degree: I recognized a genius “beyond” the topical. A powerful sense of his Whitman-like rhetorical immensity coupled with a passionately eccentric sensibility won out: I felt certain that his poems would last as poems, as distinguished by their literary substance and style rather than their historical relevance.

After reading “At the Sky’s Edge,” his second retrospective volume (with a superb, thought-provoking foreword by Michael Palmer), I feel happily reconfirmed in my earlier judgment. These poems of the early ‘90s rely on a hyperactive surrealism uniquely his (“huge breasts on a waitress/strawberry ice cream”), growing wiser in “Advertising”:

A dictator freshly-elected by the newspapers

waves warm greetings ...

... now’s the time a flower shop opens

or in a more reflective vein in “The Next Tree”:

where is it wind comes from

we count days and nights passing

inside poppy seeds....

come, you barbarians

please join this legend ...

becoming a tiger in a foreign land.

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TWICE REMOVED

Poems

By Ralph Angel

Sarabande Books: 74 pp., $20.95

Ralph Angel’s poems are deceptively quiet, deceptively calm. Beneath their carefully constructed surfaces, they are wild, even intimidating. The power of restraint in poetry cannot be overestimated. The cliche of Emily Dickinson’s little white dress (on display at her house in Amherst) beneath which beat the heart of an anarchist-visionary (“My life had stood, a loaded gun”) should stand as provocative reminder of both the hidden and overt volatilities of language. Angel usually relies on the force of the implicative, but when he lets loose, as in “Half Circle,” the reader knows it:

A rock’s thrown

through the window.

A man’s beaten in the hall.

The same young woman, night to night,

sleeps against your door.

These poems burn from within. Listen to the lyrical authority of the following lines: “To give birth to ourselves each day makes this death/an act of will, and stopping here to say goodbye is all too sadly/telling.”

The word “telling” on a line by itself is pure Angel: It sends up the idea of “telling,” isolating the narrative impulse, orphaning it, while still allowing it to chime in off-rhyme with “will.” This is a brilliant sight gag about poetry. Knowledgeable, musical, parodic, cockily singing to the all-powerful Invisible. If this is an Angel, it’s Lucifer, the one who got away.

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THE LOVE-TALKERS

An Erotic Fable

By Gail Wronsky

Hollyridge Press: 140 pp., $23.95

One has to have stockpiled a freezerful of sang-froid to title a book “The Love-Talkers”--chilling out evocations both of soft-core porn and sex therapy guides. These dream pieces are so naively and quixotically amorous that they operate like little peep-shows of the author’s imagination (both fleshly and spiritual)--in prose so unabashedly “purple” that the reader risks contracting violet fingertips from turning pages.

Gail Wronsky, an acclaimed poet, has somehow given birth to a completely new form here: half prose, half poetry, a drifting hybrid of myth and priapic fantasy, it could be called a roman de lala.

“In Mexico City, it rained. It rained on the cobblestone pavement of Coyacan. It rained on the Churrabusco. It rained on Frida Kahlo’s houses--the blue one in Coyoacan and the strange studio Rivera had built for her ... in San Angel.”

“Around a corner, they entered a corridor of serpents’ heads, just eye-level. ‘Quetzalcoatl,’ said Felix, ‘the wind.’”

“‘Let’s have a baby,’ said Lara, suddenly.... They were deep in the tunnels under the covered Olmec pyramid in Cholula--the one Cortes had thought ... was a hill.”

Wronsky climbs every mountain--and every pyramid, hill and fleshy bump. The girl can’t help it.