Tales of Muraski and Other Poems

Rosmarie Waldrop's pick for the 1997 National Poetry Series, Bellen's third major collection employs a textured and hesitant prosody, and an off-kilter epigrammatic style to effectively probe surfaces like, in Bellen's words, ""A manicurist digging for more."" It is the Lady Murasaki of the title--the 11th-century author of the Tales of the Genji--who provides the model for Bellen's method. Murasaki, who wrote Genji in a script learned only by men, is often credited with inventing the novel and took her pseudonym from a character in her own writing. In these serial poems (usually four or five spare sections interspersed with prose), Mayan, Mongolian, and Japanese courtly figures present Poundian personae, but Bellen's poet is as interested in the smell inside the mask as in its public expression. ""Confessions"" flashes between interiority and exteriority with mercurial brilliance: ""without becoming representational, what/ happens after death or inside a running horse// aluminum faucet, the fiction and what surrounds it/ non-radical/ character written in a margin."" Though her writing is rife with historiographic allusions and clues (to the Buddhist ""amidists,"" among others), Bellen is a sensualist with a taste for vernacular as refined as C.D. Wright's; and a historian as steeped in the montage of character and setting as Susan Howe or Guy Davenport. Like those of Lady Murasaki, Bellen's giddy, insouciant renderings of our thickly mythic polis seem fresh, and appear to create their author from the tactile fragments of the text. (Dec.)