Today's poem Chimeras by Brian Sneeden (Issue July/August 2024, Poetry Magazine) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/162831/chimeras?query=M Charming. So charming. So I can’t help saying my impressions. This unrhymed tercet poem is meticulously crafted: metaphor and pronoun. Full of paternal love to poet's daughter. While reading the poem, these spooky pictures come up to my mind: a video clip of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Edgar Allan Poe’s works. The poem is well-structured by enchasing his daughter’s free imaginations. Love and wit with gothic elements (“Chimeras”, “the moon”, “the Wolf Singer”). In the beginning stanza, a reader can be confused with the line “She plants the vertebrae of her enemies”, however, the third line allows the reader to figure out she is a small kid. The phrase “her enemies” might seem the poor common sense of adults that kills gorgeous imagination of children. The mysterious “the Wolf Singer” might be a coined one made by hi
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Review of Unexpected Vanilla by Lee Hyemi (trans. by So J. Lee) Three or four years ago, I wrote a review of Unexpected Vanilla by Korean poet Lee Hyemi (trans. by So J. Lee) published by TILTED AXIS PRESS. ISBN-13: 978-1911284505 https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/store/unexpectedvanilla While exploring translated poems, soon I want to touch the original: Korean, a sister language of Japanese. This experience is as if seeing Japanese through silk cloth. It creates a sense of wonder. And the impressions I get are quite different from poems written by British and American poets. My boat quietly drifts in ripple waves; on the contrary, it crosses high waves upon reading British and American poems. Might that be due to the similarity between Korean and Japanese languages? However, the work doesn’t make the processes of translation explicit to readers. Could the book be read without knowledge of the translation? – such a question was born in me, for I can go ahead fluently. And except for
Today's poem FACE THE STRAIN by Joolz Sparkes published by AGAINST THE GRAIN POETRY PRESS (ISBN: 978-1-73-916840-7) £6.00 This pamphlet FACE THE STRAIN is written by the Londoner poet Joolz Sparkes, born and raised in the UK. As in the poetry book London Undercurrents (written with Hilaire), the verse stage in the pamphlet is set in London with love and hate. The title serves as a metaphor for Sparkes’s daily life there as a working woman. I, as a freelance translator, can strongly sympathize with her works and feel keenly what she is fighting in society. The collection covers various forms, i.e., formal poem (‘We’re trying to stop, honest’ with rich cacophony) to concrete poem (‘No title’ with irony). Through it, the current social issues such as diversity and gender are expressed with her own lyricism. From that perspective, it includes works that could be described as political, reiterated as in the previous book. What is most impressive for me is ‘O World, who shall we be
Today's poem THE WORK OF A WINTER by Maureen Boyle This collection is different from most of what I have recently read so far. Different from works by immigrants. In this sense, the book is dissimilar to those for me. The main stage is Belfast, broadly, Northern Ireland. Garden and winter are keywords throughout the collection. From poem to poem, her religious feelings and sensitivity are embedded in various forms. Further, in gardens, winter means a kind of death, waiting for seasonal change, i.e., spring as rebirth. The opening verse is a sequence of poems in memoriam of her father. The first poem in the sequence Latin-entitled ‘INCUNABULA’ implies the beginning and end of his life. The poems are portrayals of Northern Ireland’s history and her daily life, nature, and religion. From ‘INCUNABULA’, one of poems that stood out for me was ‘VII’ showing summer pleasure in her childhood where Enid Blyton was picked up. Enid's works have been popular in Japan, therefore it’s famili
Today's poem I didn’t know such a history in Great Britain - the history of the Romani people. I knew and met only the Romani people who lived in Spain, Portugal, and Hungary. Some of them were great musicians, e.g., Django Reinhardt. And although completely forgot it, there is a book The Traveller-Gypsies by Judith Okely on my family’s bookshelf and I recall I read it a long time ago when I met them in Europe. After that, a poetry collection FURY by David Morley was presented to me two years ago. His collection contains poems on the Romani people. https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784109905 Now Sanka (サンカ) people as wanderers in Japan come up in my mind. Unfortunately, they could be no longer living. Even now it is shadow of Japan's history. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AB Here, I would like to introduce the poet Raine Geoghegan’s poem 'Under a Gooseberry Bush'. When I joined a poetry workshop in the UK, a British poet
Today's poem Second encounter with poems by Layli Long Soldier. First, in Nina Mingya Powles’ online workshop. This time, Carrie Etter’s session in the early morning today. After finishing her session, I promptly purchased Layli Long Soldier’s collection Whereas via Kindle. Such a book title Whereas I have never met, only seen in agreements, i.e., legal documents. I first thought that the title was non-poetic, but I agreed with it when I read the Part II in the collection. Soldier’s poem Edge stroke me so much. I could see passing sceneries during the drives. Mother called Mommy might be Soldier herself in the poem and her small kid might be in her car. They saw scenes flowing from her car and chatted to each other. Mommy could not accurately hear the kid’s chit-chat. In the poem, unique effects of punctuation are exhibited, e.g., enumeration of words. That is transition of scenes and sound frame by frame; sometimes not to catch words or sometimes to catch words like hallucinatio