Lorna Goodison, Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, Carcanet, £9.95,

ISBN 1 85754 848 5

Philip Levine, Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, £9.95,

ISBN 1 85224 737 1

Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard, Carcanet, £9.95, ISBN 1 85754 869 8

 
Here are three poets who differ greatly in their backgrounds, resources and priorities; but are united in having had to create or re-imagine their literary traditions. Lorna Goodison, for example, was born and grew up in Jamaica, but now teaches at the Michigan University. She wonders about the effect of Western culture on her work: “Perhaps if you remain you will become civilized,/ detached, refined, your words pruned of lush.” I don’t think there’s any danger of this happening: Goodison’s language draws much of its strength from the divisions and oppositions of Jamaica’s history. To take just one example, when she refers to the emancipation of chattel slavery as “1838 the year of general full free”, we sense the tension between the European imposition of the date and the Anglo-Caribbean term for the event.
 
Perhaps contraries are necessary to a poet’s development: certainly, Goodison’s twin virtues are her restraint and her ear for incantatory rolling rhythm. Take these lines from ‘Where the Flora of Our Village Came From:’

            Coffee, kola, ackee, yams, okra, plantain, guinea grass,

            tamarind seeds and herbs of language to flavor English;

            those germinated under our tongues and were cultured

            within our intestines during the time of forced crossings.

 
Here, Goodison characteristically matches delight in her language’s overflowing exuberance with exactitude and precision: consider the amount of work being done by that deferred verb ‘cultured.’

In ‘So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art,’ Goodison describes a “nameless woman” whose children have been sold into slavery. The woman makes dolls as substitute children:

            She suspended those wood babies from a rope

            round her neck, before she ate she fed them,

            touched bits of pounded yam and plantains

            to sealed lips; always urged them to sip water.

 
The poem ends by telling us “She did not sign her work.” The refusal to expand on the event that triggered this compulsive behaviour – or to spell out the links the title makes between such anonymous acts of reparation and Jamaican culture – acts as a demand that the reader consider such issues. But I am in danger of making Goodison’s work sound worthy or dry or dull. In fact, the fluency of the rhythms, the dazzling imagery and the celebratory impulse make Goldengrove a pleasure.

Since On the Edge in 1963, Philip Levine has produced a new book of poems every two or three years. His work ethic is unsurprising: a chronicler of industrial life in Detroit, Levine writes poetry “for people for whom there is no poetry.” This might make Levine sound like a counterpart for Fred Voss, but the differences are significant: Levine has greater emotional range and has stayed more open, more vulnerable and more melancholy than his compatriot (though there is humour: see ‘Gin’ or ‘A Theory of Prosody’). In Levine’s world, the threat of premature death by industrial accident, violence, alcohol or the army is never far away. Even more prevalent is an insidious death-in-life; a mostly-unspoken sense of defeat that haunts poems like ‘Starlight,’ in which the poet remembers, aged four, being asked by his father if he is happy. His father’s voice is “somehow thick and choked,/ a voice I have not heard before, but/ heard often since.”

Knowing he is one of the lucky ones, Levine has all the knotty feelings of a survivor. In ‘The Escape’ he writes: “O Lord of Life,/ how much you made them pay so I could love.” For this reason, there is a distinct sense of the transcendent moments in his poetry having been earned and paid for: they are never easily escapist. ‘The Simple Truth’ begins:

            I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,

            took them home, boiled them in their jackets

            and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.

The poem ends:

            Can you taste

            what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch

            of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,

            it stays in the back of your throat like a truth

            you never uttered because the time was always wrong,

            it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,

            made of the dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,

            in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

 
I strongly recommend this outstanding book.

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi poet currently living in the United States. Her most recent poems are found in the first and longest section of The War Works Hard. Although Saadi Simawe’s introduction repeatedly describes these poems as child-like (albeit the wise, subversive child in the Emperor’s New Clothes), these are songs of experience rather than innocence. When the truth is as bitter and bleak as this, it requires irony if it is to be expressed at all. This is from ‘Bag of Bones’:

What good luck!

She has found his bones.

The skull is also in the bag

the bag in her hand

like all other bags

in all other trembling hands.

His bones, like thousands of bones

in the mass graveyard…

 
In the brilliant title poem, Mikhail displays a Brechtian knack for finding the unexpected angle that can illuminate a situation afresh. The poem begins “How magnificent the war is!” and goes on to form an ironic hymn of praise to war:

            It inspires tyrants

            to deliver long speeches,

            awards medals to generals

            and themes to poets.

            It contributes to the industry

            of artificial limbs,

            provides food for flies,

            adds pages to the history books…

 
The War Works Hard closes with poems that were written in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war. These pieces are more demanding, with the irony working as a necessary encrypting device for the author’s sympathies (see the gnomic ‘Nun’). The bulk of the book is taken up with the later, more public poetry in which Mikhail finds ways of writing about Iraq without indulging in sloganeering, glibness, cynicism or any of the other prefabrications commentators use to avoid the truth. In Elizabeth Winslow’s clear, unfussy translation, an important new voice in world poetry can be heard in English.

This review first appeared in Poetry Review 96:4 (Winter 2006/7)