Down and Outers

Charles Bukowski (1920—1994) remains as prolific and belligerent in death as he did in life. In classic Bukowski fashion, the pieces in The Night Torn with Footsteps: New Poems deploy the line-as-phrase as a primary formal constraint, and a hackneyed, boastful misogyny as a major rhetorical gesture. If continually found "sitting/ in my cheesebox room/ closer to suicide than/ salvation," readers will still be right there with Buk. (Black Sparrow, $30 356p ISBN 1-57423-165-0; $17 paper -166-9; Dec. 11)

Various and sundry works by Richard Hell (Go Now), the leader of the late '70s No Wave band the Voidoids, are assembled in Hot and Cold: Essays Poems Lyrics Notebooks Pictures Fiction. Largely previously unpublished, and typically irreverent, lewd, sublime, non-sequiturous and anti-establishment—these works wrest the strange, funny and disgusting out of most situations. In an early prose poem, Hell describes a bestiality fantasy; in a notebook entry, he describes a meeting with an ailing William Burroughs. Neo-punks and the alternative "whatever" crowd will enjoy this beautifully printed document of overlapping sub-cultures. (PowerHouse, $29.95 264p ISBN 1-57687-082-0; Nov.)

Writing Life

In Rib Cage, Greg Miller (Iron Wheel), chair of the English Department at Millsaps College, paints a tender but incisive social portrait of Southern culture, individuals, relationships, families. "Whenever they lay down, he couldn't sleep/ without his back turned toward her, so she left," he writes, recounting complicated events without judgment or fuss. In the soft cadences and syntactical and adjectival particularities of Southern speech, Miller's stories are quiet, understated and revealing of human complexity. (Univ. of Chicago, $28 76p ISBN 0-226-52799-9; $13 paper -52800-6; Nov.)

Brooklyn's Poet Laureate D. Nurske (Isolation in Action) delivers a book-length family history in verse, The Rules of Paradise. The speaker, whom we follow from childhood to adulthood, moves between his own daily existence and the illusory, unknown world of his father's exile and death in the Catalan village of Prades. The narrator grows, marries, has a child, divorces, all the while haunted by his father's experience. Nurske casts enlarged scenarios from his life onto metaphors for the qualities of existence, love, longing. Of playing on a see-saw with his daughter, he writes: "I sit near the center,/ the fulcrum, at once she has power/ to lift me off the earth…by her tiny weight, she laughing,' I stunned at the power of formula." (Four Way [www.fourwaybooks.com], $13.95 paper 88p ISBN 1-884800-38-6; Dec. 15)

Richard Foerster's Double Going draws consoling connections between experience and the imagination, literature, myth. Contemplating a petit mal seizure, Foerster's speaker says, "This is how, perhaps,/ we first came to know/ the gods: tiny ailment,// a sudden advent of dread." In assessing photographs of the poet's boxer father, cigarette addiction, a waltz and everyday objects like pocket watches and swings, Foerster (Trillium) isolates each worldly thing or phenomenon in a precise, shimmering space unsullied by interference from forces beyond his own focus. (BOA Editions, $12.95 paper 96p ISBN 1-929918-17-8; Jan. 15)

Anna Rabinowitz, editor and publisher of American Letters and Commentary, won the Juniper Prize for her debut, At the Site of Inside Out. She follows up with the book-length poem Darkling, investigating her family's experience in the Holocaust via a fragmentary recollections and textual reclamation, looking for "the way back to raw footage." The book's short, unnumbered sections jump from tercets of long lines, to prose passages, to segments that all but ignore the hegemony of the left margin, to unmaskings of pseudo-scientific theoretical constructions, which cannot compete with the fact that "hundreds of Jews were laid up in a grid-like pattern.... wobbly reliefs of bodies on/ Cobbled stone." This dense, unsettling volume makes a unique contribution to Holocaust literature. Photos. (Tupelo [www.tupelopress.com], $15.95 paper 96p ISBN 0-9710310-4-5; Dec. 1)

Zen student, NEA grant recipient, Fulbright Fellow, trail-blazing genre-bender and accomplished poet and translator John High here reveals his Bloodlines: Selected Writings. Drawing on four books, High includes the critically acclaimed novel-cum-serial prose poem The Desire Notebooks, which resembles Anne Carson's novel in verse Autobiography of Red in its fragmented narrative and compression of mythic allusions and aesthetics with daily contemporary life. High moves from straight, sober syntaxes and slow lyric rhythms for his more narrative work, to a tumbling form that relies less on conventional punctuation to make sense and more on sound, restrained urgency, a sad playfulness and a rush of images and observations: "finney intermittently swept up in this boat. the cargo carries rot oranges, tangerines, gnawed walnuts. cliffs obliterated in a blue heat. black steamers in the northern lights& these naked boys swimming on the shore. absence in the plot causes them to think of themselves." (Talisman [LPC Group/InBook, dist.], $14.95 paper 128p ISBN 1-58498-025-7; Dec. 1)

UP Debuts

Chosen by Robert Pinsky for the National Poetry Series, Rebecca Wolff's Manderley tears mosses off the old manse of Du Maurier's haunted classic Rebecca, tosses them with a heady late 90s bravura ("Not intonation/ but affect"), and ends up, along with metaphorical "Day Laborers" of one poem, "[p]anting like a god/ in the afterglow of the newly minted." In other arch eviscerations, "Mom," or the idea of her, "gets laid/ in all manner of positions," while "The Sun in Winter" bleaches out bad verse, "fixed on ginger-red wood siding/ to reflect into the eye/ a burnished spasm of glad/ tiding: antidote to venom of our imagery's/ declining." Founder and editor of the journal Fence, Wolff here sets the house afire. (Univ. of Illinois, $12.95 paper 72p ISBN 0-252-07005-4; $29.95 cloth 02698-5; Nov. 26)

"A mole in the mulberry,/ and I reckon raccoons/ in the wrinkled leaves/ of night blooming jasmine. Choose, what do you choose?" In Joanie Mackowski's The Zoo, selected by Li-Young Lee for the Associated Writing Programs' Award in Poetry, readers can choose among "Ants," a "Little Song," "The Hat of Miss Magee," "Iceberg Lettuce" and other simply titled, fast-talkingly descriptive poems. The speaker of "Self-Portrait, Double Exposed" tries to discover "who/ crouches here, hiding behind her shadow (turn a-/ round, look,) dead in the path/ of the navel's tornado?" If she fails to find out, she can at least "draw my little sword…kill the stumbling bull," and make "blood, sand, grace, and matadors fall onto my pillow." (Univ. of Pittsburgh, $12.95 paper 80p ISBN 0-8229-5768-X; Jan 20)

A calm didacticism contends with "Social Theory" and "American Reverie," delivers an "Address to Winnie in Paris" and recounts a one-paragraph "Love Story with Bad Moral" in the latest release from The Alice James Poetry Cooperative, affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington. In Sarah Manguso's The Captain Lands in Paradise, "[a] anonymous freezer-box full of violets/ drops down but it's unimportant, love"—and it makes a "Poem of Comfort." While she may be "only trying to find my drink/ and to communicate without lying," Manguso accomplishes a great deal more. (Alice James, $12.95 paper 64p ISBN 1-882295-33-1; Jan.)

Refusing Silence

Vivid, often volatile imagery describes wrenching emotions and events in The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández: A Bilingual Edition, translated and edited by Ted Genoways (ed., Burning the Hymnal). Hernández (1910—1941), a Spanish poet constantly plagued by Franco's dictatorial regime, spent his adult life in and out of prison, worrying about his destitute wife and child and unable to reach the larger literary world thanks to censorship. Though other Spanish-speaking poets, such as Neruda, and the broader Spanish-speaking world, read him passionately, Hernández died in prison at age 31 of tuberculosis. Raw, passionate, despairing and celebratory, these poems are a true discovery. Other contributing translators include James Wright, Robert Bly (who also provides a foreword), Edwin Hoenig and Philip Levine. Photos. (Univ. of Chicago, $25 436p ISBN 0-226-32773-6; Nov.)

Born in Russia in 1935 and subject to years of censorship, Evgeny Rein published his first book at 49. With Evgeny Rein: Selected Poems, a bilingual edition edited by Valentina Polukhina and translated by various writers, American audiences can appreciate this member of Anna Akhmatova's Leningrad circle. In his introduction, Joseph Brodsky, Rein's mentee and intimate, calls the poet an "elegiac urbanist." Indeed, Rein's verse is haunted by the clean, timeless and somber imagery of longing and emotional destitution: "By-ways intersecting, a dilapidated colonnade;/ after the first cigarette there's the final cigarette." By turns impersonal, crystalline, anecdotal, vague, these poems exhibit a metric precision as artful and various as that of James Merrill and a slow, still gaze that misses nothing. (Bloodaxe [Dufour, dist.], $21.95 paper 176p ISBN 1-85224-523-9; Nov. 5)

Another poet who is revered at home (in Norway) but is little known in the U.S. finds expression in The Roads Have Come to an End Now: Selected & Last Poems by Rolf Jacobsen (1907—1994). This bilingual volume was translated by Robert Bly, Robert Hedlin and Roger Greenwald, and covers Jacobsen's 50-year career, showcasing the range of emotions in his poetry, from celebration to grief, and his process of turning to the external world, and nature in particular, again and again, in order to understand his own complicated mind and heart. An inveterate modernist, Jacobsen was also a journalist and newspaper editor. He won numerous honors, including membership in the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature and the Grand Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy, and was among the major figures to introduce modern poetry to Norway. (Copper Canyon, $16 paper 180p ISBN 1-55659-165-9; Nov.)

Although currently his books are required reading in schools in Honduras, Roberto Sosa's career has not always gone so smoothly, on account of his work's defiance of the previous military-based regimes. In the 1960s and '70s, despite receiving international acclaim (including Spain's Adonais Prize), his books were banned, he was fired from his university teaching position and he received death threats. The Return of the River, a bilingual volume translated by Jo Anne Engelbert, shows Sosa masterfully wielding his main tools: mythic images of angels juxtaposed with crumblilng hospitals, dramatically understated jump cuts, piercingly anti-establishment commentary, and restrained emotion: "And in this place/ which is sometimes less than sad,/ under a tree,/ naked if need be, we'll die." (Curbstone, $15.95 paper 288p ISBN 1-880684-80-2; Nov.)