[Nature morte à la raie; Chaim Soutine, 1923-24]

Some scholars have written that Soutine is dominated by anthropomorphic gestures, that he is undisciplined, hallucinated, out of control, a necrophile. To spot subliminal forces organizing in his limbo brawn is not to see him as cartoon-complexed; rather, it is to affirm the extent to which he turned the still life into life in the still. Soutine is one of the most porous painters who ever lived. In the bloodmares to be found in the oily, night hair of the Seine are hybrid consequences still-dwelling in our minds-to-be-born

[...

...]

Or another ray, which appears to be disembowling itself of tomatoes, parbroiled and skinned, which Soutine cannot digest, a ray with multiple tomato breasts, O Ray of Ephesus!

--from "Soutine's Lapis"; Clayton Eshleman, 1996

Bolaño started out as a poet and its in poetry one can probably learn the most about the origins for his literary vision. Included with this would have to be the French traditions of symbolism and surrealism. Last weekend I came across an excerpt from a Aimé Césaire work, Notebook of a Return to a Native Land, and it immediately reminded me of Bolaño’s writing in both style and content. Césaire was originally born in Martinique, educated in Paris and then later returned to Martinique. Along with being a poet he was an active member of the French Communist Party.

Notebook of a Return to a Native Land consists of Césaire’s attempt to understand what it meant to be a black African within a country colonized by Europeans and contains themes Bolaño himself could identify with as a Latin American, such as oppressive political forces and the questionable influence of organized religion. Of course, matters such as these cannot be reconciled in the real world, but through the art of poetry they can be properly transformed:

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigi, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtle-doves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, suveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun.*

I find this in Bolaño’s writing as well. He presents dark human truths about the nature of life and history which are incapable of being resolved. But through the creative act, called imagination, a glory can become manifest from this crude material– a world as equally 'part of' as it is 'separate'.

*translation by Clayton Eshleman

One theme in By Night in Chile that can be found in other Bolaño books is boredom, 2666 even prefaced with a quote from Baudelaire, "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom", and this state becomes the onset for more serious matters, such as paralyzing anxiety, existential fear and blind acceptance towards the conditions of life. Below are three examples, the first being Father Urrutia's confrontation with boredom:

"...there came a time of yellow streets and luminous blue skies and deep boredom, during which my poetic activity underwent a dangerous mutation... ...poems whose deep meaning, or at least the meaning I thought I glimpsed in their depths, left me in a state of perplexity and anguish that lasted all day long. And this state of perplexity and anguish was accompanied by a state of boredom and exhaustion. Monumental boredom and exhaustion. The perplexity and the anguish were small by comparison, and lived encrusted in some cranny of the general state of boredom and exhaustion. Like a wound within a wound. (58)"

For the second example, while 'boredom' is not specifically mentioned, it certainly is implied. This is from a scene while Father Urrutia is in Europe to study the decaying cathedrals and meets Fr Antonio and his hunting Falcon:

"By the time I arrived in Burgos, Rodrigo the falcon was eating only mincemeat or sausage meat and the offal that Fr Antonio or his housekeeper bought at the market, liver, heart, scraps, and idleness had reduced him to a sorry state, similar to the state in which Fr Antonio was languishing, his cheeks hollowed by doubt.... (73)"

And later in the book when describing the entire numbed over population of Chile:

"...like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom circumnavigating the Chilean imaginations like an enourmous aircraft carrier. And that's the truth. We're bored. (105)"

Comprised of a sharply focused 130 pages and written without paragraph separations, as a narration from the death bed of a Jesuit Priest named Father Urrutia, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile has a tone of pressured urgency that makes it immediately apparent to the reader that there is something very important being told in his story. At the beginning, it is not clear what though-- you find out that Father Urrutia initially had aspirations towards becoming a poet, but after brushing elbows with some of the upper literary echelon, even meeting Pablo Neruda during a weekend at an estate of a literary mentor, he was instead destined for the established hierarchy of Chile’s intelligentsia. At the same time, he becomes further planted into the conservative powers through his being a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. And after being requested by the Opus Dei to travel to Europe and report upon the physical deterioration of the cathedrals (which turns into a surreal dream tainted with nightmarish implications of impending violence), Father Urruitia returns to Chile to find himself so entrenched within the powers of the time that he is without moral perspective, one which may have allowed him to comprehend and question the involvement he was to have with the horrors that were beginning to take place in Chile.

In 1973, the traditionally socialist government for Chile was taken over by Augusto Pinochet, a coup which was made possible through the assistance of the CIA under the Nixon administration and then upheld through the implied consent of the Catholic church, even though Pinochet was an anti-democratic dictator and ran a regime based upon a guiding policy of “political genocide“. Very quickly, massive human rights violations took place under Pinochet, including the widespread use of torture, imprisonment and the assassination of anyone who may have voiced a dissenting opinion. And because Pinochet’s party was largely Catholic, the church irresponsibly refrained from criticizing what continued to occur until 1990-- the year when democracy returned to Chile.

Because Father Urrutia clouds himself with the established religion and the prestige of being a member of the cultural elite, his actions become increasingly complicit with their actions because of his neglect and self chosen ignorance. And despite his suggestion at the beginning of the book that his story was to be a confession of sorts, a reader can’t help but conclude that this is pretext only and that Father Urrutia’s ‘confession’ is more aligned with justification and an attempt to excuse himself. He says in the first page, “I was at peace. I am no longer at peace.” but this is immediately followed by “There are a couple of points that have to be cleared up.” The boundaries begin to blur, as is the case when examining the psychologies involved with human behavior, and demonstrates another side of Bolaño which I had not realized before. One could almost follow along with Father Urruitia’s justifications, with an ease that is the frightening essence behind Bolaño’s social-political contention.

And of course, and which doesn’t really need to be said, Bolaño’s writing in impeccable, filled with further implications after reading through the book once, incorporating numerous sub-topics that allow a reader to become more personally involved with the story, while at the same time bolstering the central dynamic that was Bolaño’s impetus, or genius I should say (in the traditional sense). This is the third book of his that I’ve read and what I find so encouraging is that while they share similar qualities, which make them identifiably Bolaño, each text is still uniquely it’s own, demonstrating both the astounding depth and breadth of Bolaño’s artistic vision.

[Moonlight Over Arbor; Charles Burchfield, 1916]

[Fragment: 'Along the mazes of this song I go']

--William Wordsworth

Along the mazes of this song I go
As inward motions of the wandering thought
Lead me, or outward circumstance impels.
Thus do I urge a never-ending way
Year after year, with many a sleep between,
Through joy and sorrow; if my lot be joy
More joyful if it be with sorrow soothe.

Makes me feel good,
without forgetting the valuable part about not always feeling good.

Hound Pastoral
--Lisa Jarnot

Of the hay in the barn
and the hound in the field

of the bay in the sound, of the
sound of the hound in the field

of the back of the field of the
bay and the front of the field

of the back of the hound and the
front of the hound and the sound
of the hound when he bays at
the sound in the field

with the baying of hounds in the
baying of arms in the field

of the hound on the page in the
sound of the hound in the field

of the hay that unrests near
the hound in the barn in the field

of the bend in the barn in the
sound of the hound in the bay
by the barn in the field.

Lisa Jarnot is a poet who’s name I’ve seen floating about, with praise, and I finally got around to reading a collection of hers, Black Dog Songs. Jarnot’s style is known for a heavy reliance upon surface repetition, as through repeated phrases and sounds. In this mode, her expression finds a lot of versatility, such as a child-like innocence, sing-song, double sided irony, or simply a sonic presence to hold the reader to the writing, for its own absorbing meditation. But probably the most prevalent tone Jarnot's writing enjenders, and maybe the more subtle, somewhere in the back yard, is that of lamentation. Melancholy, every poet's best friend, behind the scenes yawping through tooth-&-tongue filled sighs, with implications of an "and this too" at every turn.

Black Dog Songs is actually a collection that is made up of four different chap books. The first being 'Early and Uncollected Poems', the second, 'My Terrorst Notebook', written during and for the rise of the Bush administration, the third being 'They', paragraph poems that act as stages for a pair of lovers, or at least where the conception can begin, and ending with 'Black Dog Songs', the most lyrical of the group. While I don't have much to say about the poetry, that is not meant to imply a critique or limitations with her poetry. Instead, the poems stand powerfully on their own for the individual reader, each being wholly enjoyable for repeated readings. If I did have a complaint at all, it would be that the collection is too short. But, good things with time and from efforts to hunt down her other previous publications.

[photo by Tim Flach]

Ovid was Always There

to remind us
that things change
into other
things

I look down
at my hand
turned to
hoof

it seems right
that my ears
lengthen,
grow fur

when a dog
can turn into,
say,
a cow

then March,
with
its good old
lion-and-lamb

act shouldn't surprise
us; we knew,
always,
how things

grow strange, merge,
trade features,
bray, moo,
roar, bleat ...

--David Young

As mentioned previously on this blog, when reading Du Fu: A Life in Poetry I looked into the translator, David Young, and found that he has his own poetic accomplishments and fortunately my local library houses his 2006 publication, Black Lab. Not surprising, there is a strong Asian influence in Young's poetry. A good example being the very first poem in the book, 'Walking Around Retired in Ohio', which uses the Asian approach of stacking imagistic series while occassionally interjecting the poet's thoughts into the scene being depicted. The poem also happens to be dedicated to the Chinese writer and critic Lu Ji. However, one difference from the translations, and which work's to Young's advantage, is that with English being the native tongue for the poetry, a heightened lyricism can be brought to the syntax of the poems, a quality which may be in the original but can be lost when bringing the work into a foreign language:

branches above him, clouds above the branches,
kingfisher green, kingfisher blue,
wind shouldering through honeysuckle
and you lose yourself in fragrance…

the small creek bubbles, slightly pensive,
echoes back from the ridge…

Wonderful use of images and sound. However, Young also incorporates Western traditions as well, such as with some poems referencing Plato and Aristotle (critique being a component, though), another being based upon a Celan work, at one point incorporating a villanelle, also projective verse, lyrical formality, and many with the loose associative techniques found in contemporary poetry. Although, largely these poems, at some level or another, reflect Young’s interest in Asian poetry. If not always through the compositions, still through an aesthetic that is composed from the topics and philosophical perspectives attributable to Asia. The most notable example being Young's intermixing of sorrow and joy, the inevitable depression of winter with the peach‘s “fuzz-bound sweetness” in summer. There are also the poet's efforts to proportion the poet's individualized life experiences and emotions with the transitory nature of totality (one of the main foundations to Eastern thought).

And there are quite a few poems which are very personal, touchingly so, such as when Young writes about the death of his wife-- several decades ago to cancer but with her still remaining a significant component of his emotional landscape. True grief never being something that passes, or is even nameable, "blunder into this emotion/ so large and mute it has no name". The poems which concern Young's subjectivity maintain the brevity notable to Asian poetics, which allows an intimate definitiveness to the emotions but while also placing them within a spatial openness that suggests their momentary nature. From his poem 'Black Labrador':

We've named him Nemo, no one, a black hole
where light is gulped-- invisible by night:
by day, when light licks everything to a shine,
a black silk coat ablaze with inky shade.
He's our black lab, wherein mad scientists
concoct excessive energy. It snows,
and he bounds out, inebriate of cold.
The white flakes settle on his back and neck and nose
and make a little universe.

Form and formlessness, pain and joy, meaning and non-meaning, subjective and objective, emotional and philosophical, self and non-self, presence and absence, life and death, voice and silence, how life encompasses the mutuality of these opposites.

[photo by Tim Flach]

...............The Organ of Thought
.......................--Russell Edson

.....A man thought long of the organ where he thought long of
it. A pupa, he thought, his skull its chrysalis.

.....At death it would find its wings in imago, he thought. Then
he was free and his angel let go.

.....But, oh, he was so tired of thinking.

Much of the human brain might be compared to obesity, a surplus of neuronic tissue, that in the most practical sense has as much use as excessive body heft, save for idly passing the fourth dimension by writing poems, or even trying to find a theory of everything.

The only knowledge that does anything is technology. As for instance, the steps that take us from the rubbing of two sticks together to the flower of the modern cigarette lighter. And though there are those who insist on seeing poetry as a technology, poetry in its long history has never produced a single cigarette lighter no matter how many aesthetic theories were rubbed together.

Poetry is fun. Why burden it with the humdrum of unexplored memory in the illusion of self expression? At best the poem is an impersonal amusement where the writer and the reader laugh together at finding once again that only reality is the reality of the brain thinking about reality....

Poetry is a way of mind; the exploration of a tunnel, where blind albino fish seem to float in nostalgic pools of unremembered memory.

--from a 2004 interview* with Russell Edson at Double Room.

*If you read the interview, you'll see how Edson suggests that poetry is basically a recording of the limitless gestures of our subconscious. I think Edson is full of it, just as the orignal surrealists were full of it. Its a romanticized notion of poetry (and one that I like) but I'm sure Edson puts a lot more thought into his poetry than he lets on, just as the orignal surrealists did. The only poets that came close to this sort of autonomic writing were the Dadaists. However, after a general topic is chosen, there comes a time in the development of a poem to just leave it be, finding it close enough to rational thought but without being placed into a set coherency. Which is a way of mind, a way of life for that matter.

Sometimes Edson can be perfectly clear in his poetry. For example, this little tale, about a mother and father that birth a baby doll with no umbilical cord.


Baby
--Russell Edson

.....After nine months a woman gives birth to a little girl's doll.
.....The doctor's a little disappointed about the baby not
having an umbilical cord, which he takes special delight in
cutting on new borns.
.....The mother and father decide to love it and take it home.
They put a diaper on it and give it an empty baby bottle to
nurse. And life is good.
.....This is what it's all about, says the husband.
.....What what's all about? says the wife.
.....You and I, and the fruit of our loins....

.....But one day the baby begins to make a ticking sound. They
call the bomb squad, and the baby is put in an explosives cage
and taken to a deserted field, and blown up....



Edson has themes in The Roosters Wife other than human reproduction, but I'm sticking with it because its interesting to see how the poems work off one another to create new connections. It's not a puzzle needing to be pieced together, nor a quilt or weave, I'd say more of a tone or atmosphere with qualities that are recoginzable and those that are unique to the world of the poetry. Meaning awaits somewhere in between.

Edson's poetry has an interesting way of being both for and against understanding our lives within the basic processes of nature. First, a poem that sort of could be read either way. But for me, I find that the mild innocence with the woman and the edgier insistence spoken by the husband creates a humorous tone to suggest that an acquiescence to the natural is preferred.

Things

.....A woman said that she had been feeling rather thingy of
late, and had, in fact, just had a thing.
.....Her husband said, What thing?
.....That thing, it came out of my body as suddenly as not, like
some presumptuous stool.
.....That's a baby, you silly thing.
.....Then is it to suckle at my thing?
.....Where else? you silly thing.
.....So the woman held the baby to her chest and said, Now the
thing is attached to my thing. But I don't know if the thing is
suckling my thing, or my thing is suckling the thing.
.....Her husband said, It's the thing suckling your thing, not
your thing suckling the thing, you silly, silly thing....

Masculine and feminine consciousness at play; rational analysis versus inherent entirety that can simply be left alone. But now for a poem that leans more towards raising our understanding of life above nature, to bring something special to the processes of our bodies.

The Fascination

.....A rat was trying to fit its tail into an old woman to keep it
from being stepped on.
.....Don't, said the old woman, Not at my age.
.....The old woman's husband said, The rat's trying to do with
you as I did when I was doing with you. It's fascinating.
.....It is not fascinating, cried the old woman. No more so than
when you were having to do with me.
.....But, as the old husband and wife disputed the fascination
of it, the rat fitted its tail into the old woman.
.....When they discovered the rat doing as the old man had,
the old woman said, See, it is not fascinating.
.....And the old man said, You're right, it is too biological....

Russell Edson (b. 1935) is known for his use of paragraph forms and minimalist sentences, subject matter being an incorporation of everyman domesticity but fashioned with bizarre turns, startling juxtapositions and the placing of the illogical into our presumptions of how or what we think the world 'should be'. Often this creates humor, however, with The Rooster’s Wife, I found the writing equally disturbing, shooting for unease rather than being held only to comedic absurdity. And there is not much in the way of resolution in the book, except for maybe the title poem, which was strategically placed as the final poem, but this is what forces the reader to examine the odd situations and attitudes which inhabit Edson’s poetry, that examination as an important aspect behind the intent of the poetry.

With the domestic settings in The Rooster's Wife, I found two different themes running through the book. One would be biology, in the form of animals (monkeys, dogs, birds, tails) or the basic human life processes (birth, sex, death). These poems, particularly with the animals, tend to be more nonsensical, absurdity as both starting point and end point. Situations are involved, only the expectation for a clear outcome subverted. The other theme I found lies with our social behaviors, marriage/mating and family in particular. With these, through a combination of the various qualities that can be found in morality tales, fables, and drama, resulting from our pratfalls and dumb blinded idiocy, natural ignorance, Edson offers fragments of stories grounded in our social constructions, marriage/family in particular, but with an emphasis upon their (and our) failings in order to insubstantiate both the context and content of the relationships.

Looking at how these poems interact with one another as a whole, a reader can see that Edson nullifies aspects of our lives when placed into a recognition of natural realities-- where there is no line drawn between man and animal, as creatures of the earth we are. Along with this though, he deconstructs the customs we rely upon to attempt to place some form of substance into our lives, to bring some degree of meaningful development to our biological impulses and confinements. What we are left with is only a crude circus. And to explain further, Edson shows the need to see beyond the biological, but then deconstructs the ways in which we attempt to see beyond the biological. A no win situation. Included with this would be how our customs can actually turn against us by aberrantly misdirecting behaviors from which the customs were derived, which is when the poems do actually become funny at times, when not taken to far. The anxiety of male ego possibly being reduced to a cuckold, old men pregnant with rocks........ shrieking...... all of these in deserve of a good laugh.

One could argue that the poetry is nihilistic, and I would nod in partial agreement. But I would also say that Edson’s poetry is capable of jarring our awareness to reveal the natural/social dualism of human life, which then can lead us to closer examinations in order to find the necessary balance between the natural and the social. Maybe not make sense, but at least come to terms with the conflict. Plus, "an unexamined life is not worth living", and all of that. Pretty standard fare for a New England writer (Edson lives with his wife as a sort of recluse in Connecticut), but in a format that is all its own, no author earlier in American literature daring to go forth in a style this demented. I should point out that the cover for the book was from a woodblock made by Edson. Also, a preview of the book is available at Google.

[Water Music; Michael Parkes]

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

--from The Stolen Child; W. B. Yeats

I didn't know Robert Bly had it in him! A full description of the video is below.

From the youtube page: One of 21 video poems in Four Seasons Productions newly released Moving Poetry Series - Three innovative new films - RANT * RAVE * RIFF. Walking Around was written in 1971 by Pablo Neruda and translated from its native Spanish and recited by the great American poet Robert Bly Perhaps one of Neruda's more disturbing poems Walking Around comes to life through a mosaic of classic silent horror films featuring among others the great John Barrymore. Must be experienced on the big screen.

["Rocks"; Roberto Matta, 1940]

Against Blue
--Pablo Neruda

How do we free ourselves of blue,
the blue word, and what will we do
having no more blue?

At times I think it occupied
too much room in my house,
in my sky, in my poetry:
I already have blue pockets
and I have called so many blues
to populate the poor infinite
that little by little and without knowing it
I myself became blue
as if they had painted
my heart and my shirt.

Earlier, blue animals,
beyond me, light blue night,
I want air the color of earth,
beasts of irascible horns
that pierce the sky, so that the blood
of the sky falls in bubbles:
I want a yellow Venus
rising out of the black foam
and the lakes to spill outward
and their sweetness be squandered
until the dry bottom is seen
as a crater of stars.

"...my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny."

From Pablo Neruda's 1971 Nobel Lecture, Towards the Splendid City.

What an idiot I am, I said a thousand times,
while practicing with mastery
descriptions of myself,
as though there had been
nothing better than my own head,
no one better than my mistakes.

I want to know, my brothers,
I said to the Fishermen's Union,
whether you all love yourselves as I do.
The truth is-- they answered me--
we fish for fish
and you fish inside yourself
and later return to fish for yourself
and throw yourself back into the sea.

--from 'I Always'
...Pablo Neruda

[Massacre in Korea; Pablo Picasso, 1951]

Nothing remains, they already scrubbed
the steps of the crime. They left.

The convictions were secret
and the executioners invisible.

It was upon us to see
instead of the moon at night
riding the sky like a star--
the teeth of death.

--from 'The Missing'
..Pablo Neruda

While Pablo Neruda’s poetry is commonly associated with romantic surrealism, he was also decidedly political in his personal life as well as in his writing. This because he believed that poetry was capable of changing the world, a position which I don’t necessarily share. At least not the sort of momentous change that can be seen in a single lifetime (instead, over generations, as with all of the fields of art). However, in his book length poem, World’s End, originally published in 1969 and only a few years away from his death, Neruda took a harsh look at the century in which he lived while confronting the extent to which poetry really could be influential.

It was an idea that Neruda must have felt needed to be refined, likely as a result of his own mistakes and failed judgements on the political movements that he witnessed and originally supported, such as the left wing philosophies of Castro and Stalin's Soviet Union, both of which, of course, harshly fell to corruption. Or another reason possibly in that he had to come to terms with the historical atrocities that occurred during his life, the Spanish Civil War and World War II being two major examples. And with this, if poetry’s influence is seriously limited, then why should one spend his/her life writing? What good can a poet really do for the world? These are the concepts that are placed within World’s End and allow the book to be more than a lament for mankind’s failures during the 20th century but also an examination into the role of the poet and poetry in a world filled with ungraspable complexities.

World’s End is composed of eleven thematically related sections, beginning first with the historical and social hauntings of Neruda’s time, suggesting a general disillusionment with modern progress. However, in the middle sections, Neruda uses the poetry to reflect upon the nature of artistic expression, how it begins with the solitude of the individual and then intimately cultivates into a creative effort-- one which Neruda connects with Earth and creation, the emotional landscape as an aspect of the natural landscape. The poetry within these sections replaces the, at times, heavy handed accounting of the first sections with a broader use of indirect allusion and intuitive relationships, loosening the language to give rise to an immediately passionate, but personal, poetic voice. Then in the later sections, the social is combined with the art of the personal and provides resolution to Neruda’s questions, revealing a poetry which can be valued because of its ability to use the imagination to transform the raw experience of life into an affirmation for life and begin to know its presence within the material world.

This returns Neruda back to the importance of vision to carry mankind through, which ironically is where all political movements begin. As Ernest Hemmingway said, “All things truly wicked start from innocence”. Poetry may not be able to stop the fall of bombs or create social utopias (only dictators make such claims), but it can positively infuse the human spirit by drawing upon the common experience of being human, returning us back to that innocence prior to corruption in order to reevaluate our relation with life. And it was Neruda's hope that the bloodshed of the past would become the unfortunate sacrifice to guide us towards a better future.

Good concepts, but of course Neruda doesn't merely tell the readers his ideas, but, through the magical turning of his lines filled with an ambrosia of images, emotions and ideas, swirled into mind spinning lyrical perfections (in this publication, with the help of translator William O'Daly), he allows the reader to experience the transformation within themselves as well. This is not to say that every poem in the book is dynamo, as some do clunker along, when the ideas outshine the artistry, but there are plenty of standouts and the end effect is powerfully 'there' for the reader.

Below are select frames from Still Life, a stunning 2006 film from Jia Zhangke. The local is the famous Three Gorges region along the Yangtze River, which is a place well referenced in traditional Chinese poetry . Over the past 10 or so years the Chinese government has been raising the waters in the gorge in order to fuel the massive Three Gorges Dam, but in doing so, they’ve had to complete bury neighborhoods and urban areas under water. Before being submerged, the buildings are first demolished in order to extract their metals so that they can be recycled and used elsewhere.

In this estranged setting, Jia tells two stories of a man and woman searching for their former spouses. Infused with the narrations are reoccurring visual motifs that allow the viewer to further reflect upon the influential qualities of time, change and distance. A full analysis is available at Cinema Scope. Jia has proven himself to be one of the top filmmakers in the world these days and I can't recommend enough this moving and captivating work.

M. Ward, 'Chinese Translation'