Book Review:
A Book of Luminous Things:
An International Anthology of Poetry

First posted in December, 2003

"...as a twelve year old, I drew the map of my kingdom. It had only forests, no fields, and the only means of transportation allowed was canoes. The only inhabitants of my kingdom were lovers of nature with proper diplomas."

- Czeslaw Milosz

I am currently working my way through A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry. As with so many lesser-known publications, I was drawn to pull this book from the shelf by the title. A quick perusal of the contents revealed that this volume was arranged by subject, which is my favorite method for reading poetry, with subject headings such as Epiphany, The Secret of a Thing, The Moment, and Woman's Skin.

I have, as predicted, spent the bulk of my time on the subject heading of Nature, and on individual poems under the other headings which concentrate on natural objects. It is evident in the introductions to many of the poems that the editor, Czeslaw Milosz, shares my appreciation for what remains unspoiled of the world. However, he has intentionally chosen poems "that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible." He further asserts that the poems he has chosen "undermine the widely held opinion that poetry is a misty domain eluding understanding."

In my opinion, the constraints outlined above have resulted to a very large degree in a collection of works that, while meaningful, while *felt*, generally lack fire. They are simple, not in an eloquent manner, but in an unadorned way. Perhaps, for me, it's that he's chosen primarily contemporary poets (I've always felt that most contemporary poets simply haven't the flair of their predecessors for language). Perhaps it's that most of the poems are translations. Perhaps it's that he's angled for short, clear, and concise, and has admitted to purposefully omitting works by the likes of Eliot in order to make the volume more accessible to people (and perhaps my aversion to this last bit merely says unfortunate things about me, however I cannot help but feel the way I do).

I've enjoyed the emotion in many of the works, though most of the poetry is, on the whole, rather unremarkable, and has left me feeling rather cheated for beauty. You can see that the authors recognize the wonder in the world, but most fail to reinstill that passion in the reader.

There are, however, exceptions, and I wanted to note the pieces that spoke to me the most, to chronicle them here for my own memory, and to share them with anyone who also appreciates the natural world.




DAYBREAK
Galway Kinnel

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.


Here, the appreciation I have for this piece is primarily in the feeling, in its ability to share wonder. I can very much connect with the idea of sitting near the shore for an extended period of time observing the slow, nearly imperceptible meanderings of starfish with the backdrop of a sunset. I think, above all else, this is what makes me appreciate art in all its incarnations: in music, sculpture, painting and prose, as well as poetry. I read or observe, and I feel a link with the artist; I realize that this person feels the same passion for form or substance or composition that I admire each day as I move through the world, and in that moment I feel a kinship, a connection. That is what made me take note of the above poem, after encountering so many lackluster works in this volume, but Kinnel's piece still lacks form in my mind; it would be equally powerful as prose, albeit terse.




THE SUN
Judah Al-Harizi

Look: the sun has spread its wings
over the earth to dispel the darkness.

Like a great tree, with its roots in heaven,
and its branches reaching down to the earth.



Still lacking somewhat in form, in style, as with most of the poems in this collection, but not as much and to this one I will give the benefit of the doubt, particularly as it is translated from Hebrew. Being an enthusiast of reading French and, to some extent, Spanish, I realize how very often the ardor is inescapably lost when bringing words to English; this is through no fault of the translator, it is merely that each tongue possesses a simple beauty in words that is unique unto the language, often independent of the meaning.





Perhaps my favorite activity in the world, the one pursuit beyond any other has never failed to give me joy and in memories of which I can remember what happiness feels like, regardless of my current state of mind, is observing nature. The next three authors examine this, but each in a different way.

The first is by contemporary Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. As Milosz points out in his introduction, this poem "opposes the human (i.e. language) to the inanimate world and shows that our understanding of it is illusory." He goes on to say that he personally feels "that she is too scientific and that we are not so separated from things." That may be, though in reading this I thought back to the many times I've rested on a thick bed of moss alongside a clear mountain stream or reclined against a piece of driftwood by the surf of the ocean and pondered how the beauty, the movement, the music of the water continues regardless of my presence. And what's more, she's got some style...

VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND
Wislawa Szymborska

We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it it's no different than falling on anything else
with no assurance that it's finished falling
or that it's falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in the world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
The splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

The next, translated from French, shows that while we are often detached we can also be a part. Though stylistically this didn't do much for me at all (again, a translation), it made me think of all the times I've stood in the forest on a moist autumn afternoon or a temperate summer night, examining the tiny amphibian cradled in my palm, in awe.



THE FROG
Francis Ponge

     When little matchsticks of rain bounce off drenched fields, an amphibian dwarf, a maimed Ophelia, barely the size of a fist, sometimes hops under the poet's feet and flings herself into the next pond.
     Let the nervous little thing run away. She has lovely legs. Her whole body is sheathed in waterproof skin. Hardly meat, her long muscles have an elegance neither fish nor fowl. But to escape one's fingers, the virtue of fluidity joins forces with her struggle for life. Goitrous, she starts panting... And that pounding heart, those wrinkled eyelids, that drooping mouth, move me to let her go.

The final, and also my favorite of the three, concerns the transience of natural events, moments that are inconsequential in the grand scheme of the world, but which hold magic in the heart of the observer. The morning when I saw the cougar leap off the rock wall into the pre-dawn darkness, the night when I watched the meteor ablaze over the forelands, the lynx who did not run but instead stopped to examine me, the first time I witnessed foxfire, all these and more came to mind in reading this.

A LEAF
Bronislaw Maj

A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among other leaves, no one saw
what I did. I am
the only one.




In my life I have seen a great deal of natural beauty. I have embraced it in my occupation, have made it my life, and in doing so have made it possible to see far more than anyone else I know, save for the others in my line of work. I have saturated my existence in the wonder of the earth, and there exists from time to time a guilty complacency in my actions as a result. A clear summer day dawns over the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, full of the promise of sun, and rather than seek out a flat rock beside the iceberg-laden lake, rather than paddle my canoe down the Tawah to the Lost, rather than stroll among the towering spruce, I sit at home with the knowledge that there will always be another sunny day, and there's a sadness in that.

I no longer live in the mountains of my youth. I moved from them quite unexpectedly, having never seen the glory of the flame azaleas in full bloom on Gregory's Bald, a fact I regret still. Will I see that before I die? There is no guarantee. Why I did not learn a lesson from that, I do not know. Though I have a finite amount of time, I have yet to walk to the eastern most edge of Chaix Hills, climb to the top, and peer up the Agassiz Glacier to the base of Mt. St. Elias, despite the fact that I think of it every single time I fly over that area. In the back of my mind, I know that this procrastination will probably result in me never attempting that journey, and there will be no suitable excuse.

WITNESS
Denise Levertov

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.




Until pulling this international anthology from the shelf, I'd generally restricted myself to the poetry of English, French, and Spanish speaking authors. I have denied myself great things. The next five poems, all by Chinese poets who lived over a millennium ago, are included here to remind me that I must seek out more of their work and perhaps the work of their contemporaries.



ANCIENT AIR
Li Po

Climbed high, to gaze upon the sea,
Heaven and Earth, so vast, so vast.
Frost clothes all things in Autumn,
Winds waft, the broad wastes cold.
Glory, splendor; eastward flowing stream,
This world's affairs, just waves.
White sun covered, its dying rays,
The floating clouds, no resting place.
In lofty Wu-t'ung tress nest lowly finches.
Down among the thorny brush the Phoenix perches.
All that's left, to go home again,
Hand on my sword I sing, "The Going's Hard."



MAN IS BORN IN TAO
Chuang Tzu

Fishes are born in water
Man is born in Tao,
If fishes, born in water,
Seek the deep shadow
Of pone and pool,
All their needs
Are satisfied.
If man, born in Tao,
Sinks into the deep shadow
Of non-action
To forget aggression and concern,
He lacks nothing
His life is secure.

Moral: "All the fish needs
Is to get lost in water.
All man needs is to get lost
In Tao."



THE BIRDS HAVE VANISHED
Li Po

The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.



A DREAM OF MOUNTAINEERING
Po Chü-i

At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys--
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days,
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body--both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking--both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts--
Between the two, I get as much as I lose.



DRIFTING ON THE LAKE
Wang Wei

Autumn is crisp and the firmament far,
especially far from where people live.
I look at cranes on the sand
and am immersed in joy when I see mountains beyond
     the clouds.
Dusk inks the crystal ripples.
Leisurely the white moon comes out.
Tonight I am with my oar, alone, and can do
     everything,
yet waver, not willing to return.






On a final note, because the idea of having a dozen poems included here rather than a mere eleven appeals to me, and because this is the first haiku that I've ever really appreciated, and because if I include this haiku I will have documented all the poems of the over two hundred poems in this book that I truly enjoyed and will therefore feel less inclination to purchase this text after returning the book to the library, here is a poem by Issa, who lived from 1763 to 1827:

From the bough
floating down river,
insect song.



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