Final Offerings (2007)

Final Offerings Nicky Beer The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman de Coninck Translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown Foreword by Charles Simic Oberlin College Press http://www.oberlin.edu/ocpress 109 pages; paper, $14.95 In their respective introductory essays, both Charles Simic and translators Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown remark upon the notorious obstacles to writing love poetry. Simic remarks that "There's no quicker way ofmaking a complete ass ofoneself —which makes the accomplished work of the late Herman de Coninck all the more extraordinary. But the Flemish language poet's lyrics oftenderness and desire are only one aspect of what makes The Plural ofHappiness such ajoyful discovery. Bosselaar and Brown allude to the "playfulness" of de Coninck's love poetry, and the word is well-chosen; the poetry here is proof that a sense of play is indispensable to the engagement of even the most weighty subject matter. Even when the poems are touched by great sorrow, one always has a sense in de Coninck's work of a buoyant humanity delivering the work from earthbound despair. De Coninck's is a sensual wit, a wit derivedfrom the body. The poems selected are witty, yet compassionate , rather than oppressively clever or cerebral. One might say that de Coninck's is a sensual wit, a wit derived from the body. The connection between eros and language informs the poems from de Coninck's first volume LiYAe Love (1969); the body ofthe lover often fuses with the body of spoken and written language: "we kiss between these parentheses, / so reader won't see us" ("Your Sweaters"); "He walked through her words / as through a soft rain" ("And she hugged him with all her sins"). An increasing undercurrent of absence and loss inflects the middle poems; a sense ofthreat encroaches upon the speaker and the beloved. One cannot help but associate this nuance with the death, in 1971, of de Coninck's first wife in a car accident. De Coninck's elegy sequence to his mother, "Glass Shards in the Sun," is at once moving and unsentimental, its energy derived from the interplay ofdark humor—"Dying is nothing, but all / that paperwork one inherits!"—and palpable grief: "How will your half-open mouth become this poem?" The later work is pervaded by the loss not only of people, but of that sense of loss peculiar to the twentieth-century European poet in particular who writes in the historical wake of annihilation: "I wish I was more of a stranger here than I am. / And this century less mine" ("Paris, May 1st"). The poems from the last posthumously published collection, Fingerprints (1997), feel more subdued and even more reflective, best summarized by the concluding lines ofthe last poem ofthe collection, "Ars Poética": "A poet most work hard learning to be silent: // a gravestone listening to what is etched in it. / Letters that listen until they're filled with rain." That the collection yields a poet of such sensitivity speaks to the strength of the translation itself. The Plural of Happiness capitalizes not only on Bosselaar's and Brown's gifts as translators, but as editors as well in their selection and ordering of the work (both have edited several anthologies ofpoems, separately and together). One looks forward to future publications in which other foreign poets, in similar volume-length selections, are made available to the English-language reader by the admirable attention of Bosselaar and Brown. Nicky Beer 's debut poetry collection was awarded the 2006 "Discovery"/The Nation Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize—a contestforpoets whose work has not been publishedpreviously in bookform. Locating the Voices of Postmillennial Poetics J. D. Smith Darling Vulgarity Michael Waters BOA Editions http://www.boaeditions.org 96 pages; paper, $15.50 Only the Senses Sleep Wayne Miller New Issues http://www.wmich.edu/~newissue 84 pages; paper, $14.00 Apoet's development is in many ways mysterious , not least to the poet himself. Within the larger Horatian prescription of talent and effort—both necessary, neither sufficient—the poet must find his or her emotional and intellectual range and the techniques best suited to its expression, aware of, but...