Poetry for Students

(Rick Simeone) #1

Volume 24 115


Back,” transcends categories like personal/historical
even as it fuses them:


For the purple fruit
for the carrots like cut fingers
for the riverbed damp with flesh,
you come back.
For the lips of young boys
bitten through,
for the eyes of virgins brown
and bleating on the hill,
for the petticoat of your daughter
shivering by the lake,
for the yarn of her arms
unwinding at her father’s last shout.
For the lamb punctured
from the raw opening
to his red teeth,
for the lamb rotating
like the sun
on its spit...
For a time, Balakian seems to have been over-
taken by such images of offal, which in a peculiar
way allow us to identify with the dead, for exam-
ple in “Mussel Shell” (“I must come when the sky
is burnt / the color of a mussel shell—/ my head
bloated as the stomach of a clam”) and “Fish
Mouth” (“There’s an imprint of scissored / teeth
bound into my head / like fins that turn behind my
eyes”). Sometimes it seems that the poet wants to
get down into the earth with the dead to find out
what our living and dying means, a drive typified
by the title “I Wish Us Back to Mud”.’


I wish us back to mud
for love that asks us
to be free of nothing
and nothing to be free of us.
Undeniably there is something violent in these
lyrical, sometimes nightmarish poems; but un-
doubtedly there is something violent in cell divi-
sion, as there is in genocide, war, and hunger. The
poet is so carried away by his vision that he forgets
to step back, or it is no longer possible. Memory is
not a storehouse of material; it’s a kind of diver’s
belt you could use to sink yourself into the past, his-
tory, the darkness—that is, if you thought there was
something down there that was worth the risk.


In some of the recent poems in this collection,
Balakian seems to have gone too far down. “In Ar-
menia (1987)” contains a deep or Jungian image of
a cave, a “basalt cavern,” in which the self is
sloughed off; “Down there I felt my name / disap-
pear.” In “Yorkshire Dales” Balakian remarks,
“I came to forget the limestone anyway, / and my
name given to me by history.” Still haunted by his-
tory, the poet seems worn down by its horrors, past


and present. The lyricism is still there, but now
ironic and satirical, for example in his labs at Fifties
America and its grotesque refusals and rituals:
“We’re the streaks of the ICBMS / as they tethered
/ over Iowa, // where a box top of Cheerios / gets
you a plastic A-bomb ring.” Although Balakian
may be tired of his imprisonment in history—
everyone is—he still tries to reach across. Balakian
is one of the few who have realized that memory
is useless if none of us remembers the same things.
Alongside Balakian’s visionary history one can
place Derick Burleson’s documentary one. This ex-
travagantly praised volume grows out of Burleson’s
experience in Rwanda teaching English in the two
years prior to the genocide. Unlike ambulance-
chasing “committed” poetry, Burleson’s is a modest
voice and a personal one; having been there,
Burleson knows that history happens to people you
know—suddenly, shockingly, irreversibly: “A year
/ from now they’ll use hoes and machetes / to har-
vest their neighbor’s heads.” Burleson faces squarely
the fact that his friends may have found themselves
on either or both sides of the divide, which he ex-
presses in typically spare rhythms in “Home Again”:
President Habyarimana’s plane
is still in flames on the runway,
and all the next month we watch
as our friends are murdered,
or murder.
There is a deftness to the syncopation, ending
the poem on an upbeat while leaving the reader
hanging on that terrible word.
Burleson has absorbed many African elements
into his poetry, including language, the folktale, hu-
mor, magic, and the fabliau. But he also acknowl-
edges his own position: “Safe at home we eat fast
food / each night and channel-surf / until sleep takes
us on the sofa, // blue tides of TV light lapping /
our knees.” He has an eye for the most brutal ironies
of the West’s self-serving interventions, whether
military or humanitiarian:
Relief planes bomb refugees
with food, and a few more perish
under the crashing crates of manna.
“One Million One”
Sometimes the irony is heavy-handed (“Mag-
gots bloom out of bellies. / Crows whet beaks on
bones, such glee!”) as it is reiterated over and over
in “One Million One.” The poem circles the scene,
looking for a place to land, but there is none.
There’s nowhere to go.
Burleson’s lyric poems are journalistic rather
than mythic; he sticks mostly to the major keys, his

The Litany
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