Other Flowers

(276)

*Schuyler. Other Flowers: uncollected poems. New York: FSG, 2010.

Wow. I delayed purchasing this book but finally did for half price in New York at the Strand. Who'd have thought the James Schuyler wrote so many great poems not in his Collected Poems. Of course it's uneven, but who cares. Part of the fun is going through and looking for the great poems amid the mess of good poems with great lines and bad poems with good lines.

Echoes

(275) Creeley. Echoes. New York: New Directions, 1993. 113 pp.

I thought that I had already done this book for this project, and it turned out it was the 1982 Creeley chapbook of the same title.

Many think Creeley's later work is mediocre, but this isn't so. When people think of his early work, they are only thinking about a few spectacular anthology pieces. Actually, Creeley's early work also had many unspectacular poems, just like his later books. I don't know if his batting average is any different. Late Creeley stratches the same itch for me as early Creeley, and has the advantage of being less known, less cliché.

Entire memory
hangs tree
in mind to see
a bird be-

but now puts stutter
to work, shutters
the windows, shudders,
sits and mutters-

because can't
go back, still
can't get
out. Still can't.

This poem is called "Echo," one of several with similar titles ("Echoes").

Borges, Sonnets

(274)

*Borges. The Sonnets. New York: Penguin, 2010. 301 pp.

Borges is a great practitioner of the sonnet form. This is a bilingual edition edited by Stephen Kessler. I tried to avoid the translations as much as I could. When I saw Alistair Reid translate "palabras" as "such words as these," or Kessler bury an allusion to Góngora by translating "polvo y nada" as "nothing but dust," I got rather disgusted.

In so many sonnets, you start to notice repeated rhymes. Borges was fond of the "verso" "universo" rhyme, for example.

Juan Bernier

(273)

*Juan Bernier. Antología poética. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 1996. 109 pp.

Bernier is another poet of amazing linguistic talent. He has an amazing description of water mixed with oil in port of Málaga. I've discovered that Bernier and García Baena are a little more interesting that Álvarez Ortega.

Dios de un día

(272)

Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Dios de un día. Madrid: Palabra en el tiempo, 1962. 115 pp.

Here, again the poet creates a single mood by using a consistent rhetoric. The book is made up of two sections, Dios de un día and Tiempo en el sur, both written in the 1950s.

Los campos Elíseos

(271)

*Pablo García Baena. Los campos Elíseos. Madrid / Valence: Pretextos, 2006. 67 pp.

PGB has real poetic chops, with an amazing vocabulary and powers of sensorial evocation.

One poem that stood out in an excellent book begins like this:

He dejado las puertas entornadas
tras el suicidio. Sé que vienes, llegas
por la cal del pasillo con la luna
y es hermoso el verano que escogiste...

The funny thing is that in this poem, where I did not have to look up any words, I feel much more emotion than in all the rest of the book put together.

***

Here begins the fourth percent, or 90 books, of the 9,000 books of poetry project.