Amy De’Ath’s Erec & Enide is a small but impressive first book by a poet
whose work is certain to get more attention as time goes on. While on the
surface, the poems frequently create shimmering, often romantic scenes and interactions,
that surface always comes along with a level of sharp political and social
critique, and is often disrupted by language that is more blunt and ironic than
the poems set up readers to expect. Gender dynamics within individual sexual
relationships are often connected not just to individual human isolation but
also to many larger scale political problems.
The poems that result have a lyrical
sophistication and sometimes even a gauzy sheen, but they also feature sharper, very much
non Art Deco edges that break out in unexpected places:
Said
Erec to Enede, the sun burst
down
on my sails and gallowing tore
my
winnow North.
Said
Enide to Erec, I don’t know how
to
soothe you.
Said
Erec to Enide, the airline strikes pulled
holes
in my interior liver tissue, and
I
daren’t touch a drop.
There’s humor throughout these poems
too, but it’s so sneaky in its bite that it’s easy to trip up and be amused
just at the moment that something dangerous is about to happen.
Ultimately, the range of tones and
surprising shifts of context in Erec
& Enide make for a little book with a much broader variety of concerns than
might at first appear. De’Ath writes poetry capable of lyrical power, ironic rupturing,
and a complex awareness of political and social ideologies, all of which she
handles with an always precisely inflected literary style.
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Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poems in the The Spiritual Life of Replicants take
his thorough understanding of the history of Turkish poetry and modify it in
fascinating ways that respond to the cultural and media conditions of life in
the contemporary United States, where he now lives. Nemet-Nejat is the foremost
contemporary translator of Turkish into English, and the anthology he edited, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish
Poetry, is a must read for anyone interested in the last one hundred years
of Turkish poetry. Replicants
features a number of usually short, often fragmented lyrics that frequently
make use of characteristics of Turkish poetry and the Turkish language more
generally, for instance in the way sentences and phrases slide sideway into
extended sequences rather than being constantly dead-stopped by periods.
Nemet-Nejat’s exploration both of
materiality and the mental procedures whereby people try to grasp phenomena
develops through the poems based on an animist philosophy that doesn’t make
overly simple distinctions between living and non-living matter. The poems also
frequently play with and undermine the relationship between perception and that
which is supposedly perceived: “the yellow of the carpet/ lurks in the yellow
of my eye/ and waits.” Fascinatingly, the book also develops as an extended
critique of U.S. cultural attitudes through a reading of the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner and an interrogation of
what it means to be human or machine in the context of capitalist power. The
boundaries between poetry and prose are also frequently undermined, although
the book moves closer towards prose narrative in many of its later sections. Replicants is therefore an exploration
both of cultural and aesthetic hybridity, although like the best hybrid
approaches, it doesn’t seek to resolve its differences but to exploit and grow
them.
The shape and formatting of the book
become a bit annoying at times, and some of the fragments feel like mere wisps
of language, although ultimately I concluded that even the slightest wisps were
important to the author’s sense of the physical world as incredibly close and
concrete, but never more than partially graspable. His sense that human desire often
tries to control what it cannot hold anchors many of the problems both of
individual people and of the larger cultural dynamics that develop over the course
of the book. The prose sections which conclude the book become more explicitly
an exploration of character, and the way people from differing cultural
contexts struggle and fail to understand each other, while finding themselves
part of the same often mysterious world:
“The damn guy is impossible. Do you know
one day he made me sit in a chair and read a whole damn short story, for one
and a half hours, about this girl in a mental asylum, Karala, Aura, or
something, who had attempted suicide.”
The Spiritual
Life of Replicants
is a unique book of poetry with a well-considered philosophical underpinning,
even and perhaps especially at those moments when it veers close to falling
apart.
