A harsh review

of the Best American Poetry series, and particularly of its latest (2009) installment. Here.

It looks as if it's going to be nothing but gratuitous invective as one begins reading the review, but as one proceeds, one begins to perceive justice in the reviewer's complaints.

W. S. Merwin

has just been appointed the new US poet laureate. A bio from poets.org.

(I must confess, I always found his work a bit difficult to sink my teeth into, if I may speak thus. I find it a little thin and slippery. I am semi-convinced, though, that the fault is mine as a reader and not Merwin's as a poet. Perhaps I should look at his work with greater patience.)

Here is Merwin's "In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year."

Phrase in my head in the aftermath of a dream when I woke up this morning

"Syntax, my sinful queen!"

Coffee

Among sixteen chilly skyscrapers,
The only thing moving
Was the steam of the coffee.

*

Regard, the coffee-mug
White, with the crimson Harvard seal
And the word VERITAS.

*

The coffee-house guitarist
Had a hit in 1988
With "Fast Car."

*

Countee Cullen
Disdained fair maidens
"With pallid hair, and blood that's thin"
And sang the beauty of those
With skin as dark as coffee undilute.

*

I once met someone
Who sprinkled instant coffee granules
On top of his ice cream.

*

On Christmas morning,
There's nothing like coffee
With a shot of Sambuca.

*

In an old movie, Richard Burton claimed,
"You can't taste cold coffee."
A provable falsehood, this!

*

After eleven in the morning,
I do not drink coffee
Unless it has cream and sugar
To blunt somewhat its potency.

*

At the Café Pamplona,
Sam ordered sopa de ajo
And espresso, not wishing to imbibe
Its watery American counterpart.

*

There was the Catholic priest
Who had a mug emblazoned with the legend,
DECAF SUCKS. We're inclined to agree.
David Letterman says decaf coffee
Is like non-alcoholic Scotch.

*

Why are there not more poems about coffee?
Poets of the third millennium,
Rectify this deficit!

*

Heather told a joke
At the International House of Pancakes
And I laughed and spit an explosion of coffee
At her friend Mike, across the table.

*

I can see throwing tea into Boston Harbor.
But coffee? Saints preserve us!

An Irish nonsense rhyme

(found in Seamus Heaney's prose-book Preoccupations, p. 25 in my copy)

One fine October's morning September last July
The moon lay thick upon the ground, the mud shone in the sky.
I stepped into a tramcar to take me across the sea,
I asked the conductor to punch my ticket and he punched my eye for me.

I fell in love with an Irish girl, she sang me an Irish dance,
She lived in Tipperary, just a few miles out of France.
Her house it was a round one, the front was at the back,
It stood alone between two more and it was whitewashed black.

Hope to be back

soon!