World Literature Today

Hassan Najmi Gertrude Roger Allen, tr. Interlink Books Committed to write the elderly Mohammed’s life story before he dies, the unnamed narrator struggles with the constant suspicion that Mohammed is spinning lies about being Gertrude Stein’s close friend and guest in her Paris apartment. Yet his growing fascination with the experiences inside Stein’s elite circle makes him hope that at least some of the stories could be true. Orlando Ricardo Menes Fetish University of Nebraska Press The cumuli and bilious forms that skate across the horizon of these poems call up a sense of longing through their invocation of the spirits of past ancestors. Well versed in the uprooted life of an immigrant, Menes’s profound references not only convey local color but also bring the essence of his family history eye level with the reader in these striking verses. Nota Bene reader’s knowledge of the myth. At one point, Ariadne’s perspective is reduced, or refined, to a vision of “these things that one cannot speak,” perhaps drawn from “this sense before knowledge.” Some of these matters lie in depths—labyrinthine, mythic, psychological , physical—that can be plumbed by words, even those “meant to cheat,” which “speak the truth.” The sequence ends with the image of “Swans on the Lake,” a striking, nonsensual , and at the same time erotic evocation of grace and harmony. The book’s second half, “Songs and the Day,” refers sparingly to the myth (though an anthropomorphized laptop with erotic overtones appears in both halves). However, rhythms of all sorts—natural, poetic, physical— reveal glancingly what lies beneath our individuality and even our humanity, “these things / teasingly beyond our reach / though they were ours once upon a time.” At the same time, words are omnipresent, tempting like a gleaming ripe blackberry: “the word I need / in my line,” guarded by “nettles and thorns” but ultimately valuable in visions “not fully communicable / and yet communion.” These lines could be applied to Cristina Ioana Young’s lovely photographs , which for the most part accompany rather than illustrate the poems. But Ieronim’s poems are rightly the center of attention, further establishing her as a significant anglophone presence. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Jacques Jouet. Du jour. Paris. P.O.L. 2013. isbn 9782818019733 Jacques Jouet’s latest book of poetry responds in key ways to a work that appeared fifteen years ago, Navet, linge, œil-de-vieux (1998). The dimensions of that latter collection, 938 pages in three volumes, were imposing ones, just like those of Du jour; and once again the appearance of a book like this underscores the courage of Jouet’s publisher, the Editions P.O.L, coming as it does when poetry is such an embattled cultural commodity . Yet the most striking similarity of these two works is that both of them put on display Jouet’s commitment to the principle of poetry as a daily practice, as a gesture profoundly interwoven in the fabric of ordinary life. Beginning in the early 1990s, Jouet resolved to write a poem a day “until the end of my own days,” as he puts it here, whatever other writing projects might engage him on any given day. The first of those experiments involved poems each addressed to one specific reader and sent to that reader in the mail. Thus, where many poets might dream of being read by millions, Jouet’s wager was more modest: each of his poems would be read by at least one person, but that person would be deeply and immediately engaged in his or her reading. Other kinds of experiments followed: poems inspired by accounts of events in daily newspapers, poems involving portraits of individual people , poems addressed to the subscribers of Navet, linge, œil-de-vieux, and so forth. Chronicling Jouet’s labors from 1994 to 2000, Du jour leaves the impression of an artist exceptionally devoted to his craft, one, moreover, whose attitude with regard to that craft is refreshingly matter-of-fact. Rebutting the notion of inspiration, and refusing the kinds of obscurantism in which poetry is often wrapped, Jouet insists instead that poems need not be produced in absolute agony: “Composing verses...