Unlike nearly every other poet of every era, Geoffrey Hill precedes his poems in death.

I performed a memorial reading of some of Geoffrey Hill’s poems today in the Dialog coffee house in W. Hollywood, California. I was the only one there aware of this ceremony, of course, because I read silently, while having lunch.

At the table next to me, five young women were being lavishly and theatrically chatted up by a waiter old enough to seem harmless but not old enough for them to call the police.

Between Geoffrey Hill stanzas I heard that waiter say in an accent I did not recognize, following a comment that I did not hear, “I would go to Kandahar for you, Honey,” which drew shrieks of laughter. Ah, love and death, those eternal inseparables.

Some day those five young women might be drawn to the dark and erudite poetry of Geoffrey Hill, but there is no need to hurry. Hill is a wonderfully comic poet at times, but his is a dark comedy, and the young women might as well enjoy the light comedy of performance compliments as long as they can.

If you are unfamiliar with Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, may I recommend his long-poem books Speech! Speech! or The Triumph of Love as great beginnings. Neither one is a fast read, but both reward careful rereadings.

And who wants to bother with poetry that you can fully grasp at one reading? Well, yes, you are right, most people. But immediate understanding is not the point of good poetry. Nor are new ideas and new ways of seeing immediately understandable.

I started reading this book of poems six months ago, and have periodically read and reread in it since then. Tremendum, Augustum is a book to have at hand, reading it one poem at a time, and then going back. My copy is next to my books by Geoffrey Hill.

When Tremendum, Augustum arrived in April, 2014, the current New Yorker offered a poem by the estimable Charles Simic. His “The One Who Disappeared” is a slight poem, and I was startled by the realization that many of the poems of Tremendum, Augustum were far more worthy of a readerʼs attention.

I realize that the New Yorker is not the right place for longer poems, or for poems that ask politely for a pause, reflection, and rereading. There are horses for courses, as Francis Urquhart once said.

And so the poems in Tremendum, Augustum are better read in a book than in a magazine. Periodicals announce their expiration date, but books state the year of their birth.

One of the threads or themes here appears to be acceptance and resistance, the complex human reaction to necessity, and to interior and exterior compulsion.

The title suggests the dissonant harmony of the awe and uncertainty that people experience if they are paying attention to the human condition, sensing a presence behind our material and social worlds. Tremendum, Augustum is mostly monotonal — not monotonous! — in that in most of the poems a consistent voice can be overheard meditating about experiences and sights from a consistent stance.

These poems are infused by Catholicism, not by its doctrine or dogma, but by its historic expression in art, its vocabulary, its framing.

The first three words of the eponymous first poem suggest a good part of the book’s collective understanding, even if thoughtful further reading suggests some doubt in those first three words. And what intelligent Catholic’s thinking has never lingered over a slight note of doubt?

The opening three words are “Matter’s power consoles.” These three words imply that the poet, like everyone else who pays attention to the state of our world, needs consolation. The words reveal too that the poet expects consolation, and she expects it from the natural world. The words are uttered bravely, perhaps, not confidently. I can imagine the speaker ending the three-word line with a hesitant, doubtful, needy “Right?”

The quiet tone is abandoned for the penultimate, surprising poem, a shocking elegy of sorts whose grief turns to anger and teeters on despair. Despair is an early stage in the traditional elegy, after which elegiasts reach acceptance and thankfulness. Not here. The poet is angry at the suicide’s betrayal, and about the suicide’s incomprehensibility.

This address to the friend who committed suicide despite his promises is probably the most surprising poem about suicide you will ever read. After so many poems here touching upon real or imagined choices, especially some people’s lack of choices, the last poem is an angry remonstrance against a friend who chose suicide over living in our difficult and wonderful world. Sure, the world is pain, but that’s no excuse.

These poems are rich in matter, in the stuff of this world, like Old Masters’ interiors. The poems are rooted in things, mostly outdoor things not seen directly and simply, but mediated by a larger understanding. Like a good Romantic poet or like a priest, not that the two would ever get along well, Leonore Wilson loves the surface of the world but also imagines how it might be emblematic.

The final poem is an address to a sister in suffering, Marina Tsvetaeva. To paraphrase W. H. Auden, about suffering, citizens of the USSR were never wrong. Soviet era poets are grim tonics when we complain about First World Problems.

Leonore Wilson clearly identifies with Tsvetaeva, and she shows an abiding empathy for others, like Lucifer, who so loved the world that he gave up his sinecure because “to fall from heaven is the beginning of beauty.” She imagines Mary declining the offer from Gabriel, and she marvels that Jesuits can stroll down the street past a lovely young woman without experiencing their own fallen tremendum, augustum, and fascinans.

When she imaginatively explores Tsvetaeva’s losses, she brings her readers with her. I recommend that you be one of those readers.

As a disclaimer, I have met Leonore Wilson. If I had made up any of this praise, she would owe me big time. But it is all true. We live in an era of meretricious Poetry Lite, so Tremendum, Augustum is a welcome reminder of what poetry can do and must do.

Collectively the 71 prose poems (or paragraphs) form a collage of anecdotal memories and asides expressed by a woman, 55 or so years old, whose life in Southern California was touched, quietly and softly, and continually, by America’s wars, by our preparations for wars, and by our anodyne acceptance of wars.

In addition to this war theme, Camouflage for the Neighborhood quietly addresses generational conflict, the often puzzling relationships of men and women, and the grim discovery of our bodies’ built-in obsolescence.

This is not a book about war as suffered by combatants or as fantasized by Hollywood’s audiences. It is a book about the militarization of ordinary individuals, arguably about the militarization of the United States.

This militarization has gone unnoticed by most people, has been camouflaged, I believe, not that Camouflage for the Neighborhood tips into polemic or politics. Lorene Delany-Ullman might not agree with my observation at all.

But showing a playground with a Navy Jet for children to climb on is a clue.

Reading this book, I recalled being in a JC Penney store during the Gulf War, and seeing a tall decorative Santa figure dressed not in red but in camouflage. The store also had toddlers’ pajamas in camouflage patterns, a perfect gift to accidentally predispose your child to feel comfortable with war.

Most of Delany-Ullman’s references to war are reportorial and unemotional, so the reader is not told what to think. Medea Benjamin and Sarah Palin might both enjoy reading most of this this book, neither one offended by the author’s recollections. I trust Medea Benjamin to suss out and agree with more meaning by the final pages.

Sometime towards the last years of the poems’ speaker’s life, perhaps partially in response to the intimations of mortality delivered by heart and cancer physicians, and by the loss of internal organs and teeth, the speaker comes to articulate what was probably a very slowly developing overt rejection of violence and war.

The speaker visits war memorials, Ford Theatre, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. Her visits help the poet’s understanding, and ours.

Were the question to arise now, the speaker says, she would send a son to Canada rather than let him be drafted, but the speaker watched the Viet Nam war go by without apparent objection. Reading this, I was reminded of my own mother’s never forgiving herself for driving me to report to Atlanta’s draft induction center in 1966, rather than spiriting me away.

The speaker does not announce her stance with a screed. It is a grandmother’s quiet response to a two year old pretending to have a gun, a soft push back to the boy’s play. The grandmother knows where all of this play ends up.

Like all good biographies rooted in a place and a time, The life we learn about is at once unique and representative.

Poetry or creative non-fiction?

Camouflage for the Neighborhood is offered as a collection of prose poems, but my sense is that this book might better be called creative non-fiction. There is a lot here to please readers of memoirs and meditative writing, and nothing to frighten off readers who dislike poetry.

The life of the speaker, which presumably is the life of the poet, has been fictionalized by some changes in actual events (e,g, details of the father’s Navy service), and by having the speaker report taking part in at least one event that Lorene Delany-Ullman read about in a newspaper. The welcome notes at the end suggest that Lorene Delany-Ullman is scrupulous about acknowledging her few non-historical additions. This care suggests that the poet and the speaker are one, and supports thinking of this book as a memoir rather than as poetic invention.

While the similes and other poetic devices are few, Lorene Delany-Ullman does rely on imagery (like that Navy jet playground) and on juxtaposition, the fundamental principle of so much poetry, especially Chinese and Japanese. As an example, she shows the abandoned munitions bunkers of the Seal Beach Navy Station — a paradoxical juxtaposition all by itself — next to an estuary that is home to endangered species.

But this quibble about form is unimportant. Camouflage for the Neighborhood rewards not just reading but re-reading. Readers should enjoy and profit from piecing together the fragments of autobiography to better understand the military commonalities of four generations of this family.

Camouflage for the Neighborhood is published by Firewheel Editions (2012)

My review of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry will appear in the Fall/Winter 2012-13 issue of Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com).

Perhaps a few readers today still dismiss the worth of translated poetry because of the long acknowledged inability of a translator to render an exact equivalent of the original. In a literary world with a post-modernist sensibility, this obvious fact is irrelevant.

The inherent imperfections of translation should matter greatly to literary scholars, intent upon understanding the originals, but not as much to poets. Most poets are interested in discovering voices, forms, styles, and techniques, without being overly fussy about what came from the translator and what from the original poet.

Anthologies are still very valuable in this regard, even though anthologies’ influences have been in decline since well before the flood of printed books and then the bigger flood of ebooks. Before book mass marketing, anthologies of English language poetry dominated English language literary culture. Some anthologies, like the Georgian, introduced new literary movements in reaction.

The most impressive anthology of all, China’s Shijing (Book of Songs or Odes), has for centuries served Chinese poets as a pattern book. Poets often composed poems “to the tune of” songs from the Shijing.

The tunes themselves in the Book of Songs have not been preserved, but poets still compose new poems on the structure and syntax of the ancient. Each skilled poet demonstrated that traditional forms can help generate rather than stifle brilliant writing.

I recall once being told a story by a playwright that illustrates the process. Planning to write a musical with a composer on the other coast, Mitch Gianunzio was tasked with writing lyrics for which the composer would write music. When Gianunzio said that he did not know enough about music to do this, he was told to simply write new lyrics for an existing Broadway song or standard, without identifying the source to the composer. If the lyrics fit an original, they would be structurally appropriate for the composer.

One can hardly imagine poets in the next millennium writing poems to the tune of “Autumn in New York” or “A Fine Romance.” That will probably not happen, alas, although worse influences on poets than The American Songbook are at work today.

Despite their diminished influence, anthologies remain formidable primarily as classroom texts, shaping readers’ attitudes and tastes, and as arbiters of worth, shaping poets’ careers. Poetry careers, with the rich bounty of residencies and readings, can be made by anthologies of contemporary poetry.

In their own way, Norton and other anthologies have probably done more to canonize or inter various poets than all of our prize committees, reviewers and literary critics.

This important power of anthologies sparked one of the most acrimonious literary disputes in recent memory when the estimable Helen Vendler attacked Rita Dove’s selections for The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry in The New York Review of Books. Vendler’s attack drew an equally caustic reply from Dove. Their exchange was alarmingly personal, or perhaps refreshingly personal, but the field they fought over involved such vast and serious matters as artistic standards, race, and the grave responsibility of anthologists.

The poet and critic William Logan, whose reviews are not to be missed, wrote insightfully about this dispute in his New Criterion review of Rita Dove’s anthology.

In our own times the idea of proper poetry models seems hopelessly antiquated, despite the alarming sameness of much contemporary poetry. Our times are dominated by a post-Romantic cult of originality and individual authenticity, edging towards a cult of personality, and by a reluctance to acknowledge influences.

Nevertheless every poet who is still developing, and knows it, is excited to find a new poet from the past whose work inspires. These two anthologies of Latin American poetry would not disappoint them.

Still, several poems here invite rereading and meditation. I count among them “personal effects,” “pentagon,” “bagley removes a thought,” “victor,” and “be afraid, brother.” Despite their casual surfaces, these poems seem to me among the best to come out of the war, more worthy of being anthologized than some poems that seem almost canonized.

Michael Casey is a skilled storyteller, writing crisp, brief anecdotes or vignettes free of extraneous lines or phrases. “Imaginative literature is about listening to a voice,” A. Alvarez says, more than about information or even stories. Listening to the voice is probably the chief pleasure in Check Points.

The 52 poems in Check Points involve the same few characters who have appeared in earlier Casey poems, notably an MP named Casey, a friend named John Bagley, and a young Vietnamese woman nicknamed Stanley, hired to help with female prisoners.

Serious and still innocent, Stanley is a foil to the Americans, who have a whiff of detached cynicism about them, in the best tradition of American military humor. Many of the poems are modestly humorous anecdotes in the tradition of military humor, not far from Reader’s Digest “Humor in Uniform” items. As I wrote elsewhere about his Millrat, these poems are free of sentimentality, bombast, and pretension.

Without much of a war going on around them, the young men in this military police unit tease each other, play verbal grab-ass, and sometimes treat regulations and security rather casually. They might all be heroes in a some politician’s speech, but in these poems they are just young guys. Like many who served in Viet Nam, these men seem to be civilians at heart, and kids at heart.

As usual, Casey’s poems have no punctuation, as if they were transcriptions of casual stories told in bars or factory lunch rooms. Words are dropped, syntax is clipped. The poems sound casual, spontaneous, and unedited, but my guess is that Casey rigorously worked these poems to eliminate anything extraneous.

Underneath some of these working class soldiers’ simple accounts of simple events, Casey provides irony and indirection. Soldiers learn to suppress inconvenient emotions, and Casey recreates this survival technique wonderfully.

Some of these poems approach but pull back from directly facing the deeper unpleasantries of war: abuses of the living and dead, the death of fellow Americans, and our abandonment of the Vietnamese people at the end of the war.

“Cenerizio’s service,” for example, ends with a digressive attention to one minor detail, a shift in attention that allows the speaker to ignore the deaths themselves. The poem tells us that two men were

killed in the same bunker
the same night
the same hour same minute
maybe not the same second
but you know it was close very close

Whenever a poem’s speaker edges towards understanding, he stops short, offers a deflating joke, or finds a convenient digression, and the poem ends. But the attentive reader cannot stop as suddenly as the speaker, and slides past the poems’ last lines, moving lightly forward into understanding.

If translators operate in one of three basic modes, Grossman prefers the middle ground of the paraphrasts, translating so the reader “will perceive the text, emotionally and artistically, in a manner that parallels and corresponds to, the aesthetic experience of its first readers.” She has no use for either of the two extremes, literalists or imitators.

Implicitly endorsing this attention to the original is Burton Raffel, who in his notes on translating the prose portions of The Canterbury Tales, writes that “translation is not supposed either to worsen or improve what it tries to recreate. . .  in the case of Chaucer’s prose the difficulty lies in avoiding improvement.”

Literalists include Vladimir Nabokov, whose Eugene Onegin Grossman and I both find unreadable. Another is Ted Hughes, whose Selected Translations includes among the prose pieces several interesting defenses of literal translation.

The most recent advocate of imitation I have encountered is Paul Schmidt, translating the wonderful, tragic early 20th-century Russian poets in Stray Dog Cabaret. “For me,” he writes, “translation is a performance. I mean that almost in the same way you’d say it about an actor’s performance.”

In fact he sounds like Stella Adler counseling actors when he writes that translating is “a matter of trying to think what’s in that person’s head, what was their life like, what elements in their life can you identify with in your own.”

Whichever of the three approaches we might prefer in general, Edith Grossman has done readers a tremendous service with her translations of Don Quixote and several Latin American writers. In an ideal world, foreign language writers would be available to us in more than one translation. Comparing translations of Dante’s Inferno or the Iliad proves that here is no single right way to translate. Variety allows us the richest pleasure and understanding.

I wish that poets would carefully read Edith Grossman’s detailed explanation of how she translates poetry, as she takes far more care in translating than many poets seem to take in composing. I am convinced that far too many contemporary poets are sloppy, self-indulgent (“privileging” the authenticity of the spontaneous first draft), averse to revision, and dismissive of musicality. Edith Grossman can teach all of us who write poetry a thing or two.

This was a fine, engaging production. The simple lighting, bare stage, and street clothing allowed the language and acting to dominate.

Logue’s work retells in free verse the stories from books I and II of the 24-book Iliad by Homer. Logue has offered “an account” or retelling (not a translation) of other books of the Iliad in War Music, Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls, all fine poems that can be profitably read alongside a traditional translation, such as the justly acclaimed version by Robert Fagles and the unjustly neglected translation by Stanley Lombardo. Lombardo’s version in fact was made to be performed.

What has offended some reviewers of Christopher Logue’s retellings, that they are not faithful translations, delights the rest of us. He brings his characters and their situations alive in part with startling anachronisms, unexpected humor, and the fluidity afforded by free verse: sudden short lines, imagistic fragments, and cinematic jumps.

One inherent limitation facing Jim Milton in adapting Logue’s work to become this play is the limited scope of its story. While Achilles’ conflict with Agamemnon is the announced subject of the Iliad, a conflict whose resolution determines the outcome of the war and the fate of Troy, the first two books of the Iliad, Logue’s retelling of them, and therefore Kings: The Siege of Troy present only the initial events. Jim Milton has apparently added a few snippets from other Logue retellings.

The primitive conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, raw male ego rivalry, is not resolved in the play, but is put aside when Zeus sends a dream to trick Agamemnon into a hasty assault on Troy meant to  destroy the Greek effort. The play ends on the eve of that battle, the personal conflict forgotten.

Some audience members might be left puzzled and dissatisfied by Kings: The Siege of Troy. This being America (where pop culture references are inescapable and classical references all but forgotten), some in the audience might not know the Iliad, and thus struggle to understand the play’s storyline and to differentiate among the gods. But they would have neglected to read the notes in the program, hardly the fault of the production company.

Audiences expecting traditional dramatic unity and resolution might be confused by the incompletion of the storyline, and the long digressive account (Homer’s only comic relief) of the insubordination and punishment of Thersites. That comic element is thematically valuable as a foil to Achilles’ own insubordination, although this structural connection might be lost to anyone in the audience encountering the story for the first time.

However formidable these problems might be, the actual production and performances were suasive and pleasing. The pace was brisk, true to Logue’s account, and the stage movement was purposeful and clarifying.

The production employed two fine actors, Dana Watkins and J. Eric Cook. They moved fluidly from character to character, alternating between giving narrative and enacting events, and back again, each playing multiple characters. My intuition before seeing the production was that a stage adaptation would need three actors, but two were adequate. Three still might be better, but Jim Milton knows what he is doing.

Directing his own adaptation, Jim Milton staged a consistent stylized production, the actors now and then pausing convincingly in tableaus familiar to us from urns and friezes, or at least harmonious with our imagined memories of Greek figures in urns and friezes. The lighting designer, Heather Sparling, helped clarify and shape the play’s  rapid changes of place and mood.

An aside: I have come to believe that even very good actors sometimes speak subordinate clauses more rapidly and less expressively than wording in the same sentence that they think more important. Poets as skilled as Logue are not likely to think of any of their words as annoying speedbumps on the road to important language.

But theatre performance and poetry reading are separate experiences, and I defer to theatre professionals on this. The ones who have presented this Kings: The Siege of Troy have done well.

This script is not as far as I know available. Logue’s Kings is available as part of War Music.

The diction is conversational, colorful, profane, and seemingly spontaneous, and the speaker’s stance is skeptical, self-effacing, and alert to absurdity. Here is a former professor of language and literature who can write a profane parodic update of Henry Reed’s “The Naming of Parts,” burlesque classic structure with a brief, hilariously obscene ten-canto expression of GI helplessness, and narrate mythic anecdotes of training and combat that ring all too true. Alan Farrell stands out as one of the few unique voices among Vietnam War veteran poets.

For the price of a restaurant appetizer, we get 13 poems we will come back to now and again with pleasure. Don’t look for this in a bookstore. It’s available at Amazon; given dysphemistic army humor, I imagine that Alan Farrell would be amused to see that when I looked at the Amazon page, two of the ads (presumably triggered by the word “casings”) were for “sausage making supplies” and “butcher supplies.” (a version of this review was posted on Amazon)

Critical reviews often hurt sales and egos, but without them an art atrophies. Some people attribute the lack of critical poetry reviews to pusillanimity, an unwillingness to offend others in the small poetry world, where grants, jobs, and publication opportunities might be at risk. The cause might instead merely be an unwillingness to contribute to a perceived dismissal and marginalization of poetry in our culture today, the sort of uncritical solidarity often seen in police unions and elementary school talent shows.

William Logan is a thoughtful, well read, and perceptive critic known for devastating and acerbic reviews, not unmixed with praise, and this collection shows why. He is not afraid to declare that the emperor has no clothes, even when reviewing demigods like Rita Dove (“…once a poet of modest but real talent . .[now given to] self-serve opportunism”) and John Ashbery (who “has less matter behind his poems than anyone but a devout dadaist”). Logan is also honest and astute on poetry in general, and his long essays are well worth careful reading.

Even when Logan shocks and challenges our own sensibilities (for me, by his mildly deprecatory remarks on the wonderful Richard Wilbur), his criticisms are always rooted in an intelligent reading of the poems. To see if Logan’s reviews are memorable, startling, and true for you, you can sample them at  The New Criterion, but you might as well get this book now and dip into it now and again as a tonic against the hushed reverence that too often greets bland, lazy or meretricious poetry. (adapted from my review at Amazon).