Selected Poems

More than 100 years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote, ``It is the pain of a poem that comes first, and the form that follows.'' Here in Der-Hovanessian's selected work, pain is derived from the cultural dissolution of the war-eroded and occupied country of Armenia; it resonates in concise statements about a people seeking desperately to reestablish a sense of place. The poems address this necessity through the conventions of dreamwork, invocations of the dead, personae poems and through the speaker's firsthand reporting of facts. In those that work best, the poet conquers her tendency to employ repetition as a structural motif and rejects the temptations of regionalism for something more global. The poem ``Translating'' gracefully avoids both of these pitfalls, grappling instead with the real drama of a speaker's internal struggle to transform the unspoken language and images of the dead into an enduring vernacular. And the result, seen as well in the poems ``At Mt. Auburn Cemetery'' and ``Diaspora,'' is an admirable containment. The poems are also energized by the plaintive and mournful tones that course through them, voices bearing the message that something irreplaceable is about to be lost. (Apr.)