Poetry Notes

The Islamic mystical poet Rumi (1207– 1273) improvised the evocative poems which his followers wrote down. Translator Coleman Barks's The Essential Rumi won the Persian writer American fans, some of whom revere the poet as a religious guide. Now Barks is back with The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems. The giant volume includes part of Rumi's 64,000-line Masnavi, as well as many short poems and Barks's copious, informal, personal commentary. (Harper San Francisco, $28 400p ISBN 0-06-060453-0; Oct.)

"There are waters tumbling a thousand feet in flight/ and forests curtained high over countless canyons" in The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yin, newly translated by David Hinton. Exiled from the Chinese court, Hsieh (385–433 C.E.) explored the wilderness and composed verse about it, inaugurating over a thousand years of Chinese nature poetry. Hinton—whose other translations include the classical Chinese poets Li Po and Tu Fu—renders Hsieh in an English both concise and flowing. (New Directions, $14.95 paper 128p ISBN 0-8112-1489-3; Nov.)

While crowds admire South Asian and African novelists like Rushdie or Achebe, American readers—academic and otherwise—don't care enough about verse from developing nations. Jahan Ramazani (Poetry of Mourning) hopes to change all that with The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. In cogent and illuminating chapters, Ramazani (who teaches at the University of Virginia) considers both the cultural work and the aesthetic choices of five key poets, among them Louise Bennett (Jamaica), Okot p'Bitek (Uganda), A.K. Ramanujan (India) and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. (Univ. of Chicago, $17.50 paper 214p ISBN 0-226-70343-6; Oct.)

Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claudia Rankine, Frank Bidart, U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins and 25 others explore verse that takes the poet's own life as its subject in After Confession: Poetry As Autobiography, edited by the Wisconsin-based poets David Graham (Stutter Monk) and Kate Sontag. Poems and (mostly) essays, new and (mostly) reprinted from journals or books, consider such poetry's heritage, and its powers. (Graywolf, $17.95 paper 360p ISBN 1-55597-355-8; Oct.)

A slim volume of lyric pieces, Dawn Michelle Baude's egypt finds its gusto in the poet's ear for musical combinations of language, which piece together an outsider's view of its eponymous land. In "Qurnna," one of three sequences here, the poet admonishes us to "Chase the icon/ through the temple/ you will never win./ The stepped relics rest/ Break, fracture"—as the poet's phrases do. Words appear in visual schema comparable to the step pyramids of Saqqara or the partially destroyed papyri of Sappho. Baude has built a reputation as an international scholar and journalist, her three previous collections of poetry are difficult to find, and at this point in her career a substantial volume would be welcome. egypt is at times a difficult book to navigate, but readers who hold an interest in the modernist epic à la H.D. will find pleasure in its travels. (Post Apollo [SPD, dist.], $12.95 paper 64p ISBN 0-942996-44-5; Sept.)

John Crouse puts language into overdrive in Headlines, a sequence of prose poems which are not so much "headlines" as the graffiti of a semiotic trickster on speed: "History Of The World One Big Sprawling Sentence. Switched Bundles Of Nothing Occur Uttering Words Events, Thats The Secret Blaze Of Glory. Liberty Hence A Doctrine Hence A Thrust. A Most Vital Shitjam Of Thorns Horns A Livingmost. Read My Lips No Flyzone. Blaze Of Glory Elongates Apex Twin Bitches Return As Novel." The misanthrope-meets-sociologist aspect of this work recalls the Bruce Andrews of the Reagan years. Crouse is no tentative theorist, and he uses his basic mode—all capped words, minimal punctuation, disregard for normal sentence structure—to take his readers on thrash-speed thrill-sport travels of microtonal verbal experience, masking behind information overload and synapse-swarming syntax. (O Books [SPD, dist.] $12 paper 96p ISBN 1-882022-40-8; Sept.)