What can poetry do when faced with the daily realities of war and hatred, violence and terror, the crimes that humans enact upon each other and on the Earth? A cynic would answer nothing, would condemn the personal lyric as pure solipsism, an indulgence for the privileged few. But many 21st century poets are wrestling with questions of justice, writing at the intersection of history and intimacy, weaving political and social truth-telling into their private experiences.
Robert Pinsky defended his art while serving as poet laureate: “I think poetry is a vital part of our intelligence, our ability to learn, our ability to remember, the relationship between our bodies and minds,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. Bay Area poets Solmaz Sharif and Tess Taylor prove this claim, help us learn and remember with their vital new collections.
Sharif’s astonishing debut Look (Graywolf Press; $16) examines an endless cycle of war and violence, using a myriad of voices and forms. A formidable poetic talent, Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, activists who fled their home country after the Iranian Revolution.
The phrases in all caps are taken from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a sinister document that Sharif has studied in depth. “Look’s” central project is to interrogate the words themselves, to reveal how the terminology of war is entrenched in our language. She cites some of the Dictionary’s nearly 6,000 definitions and then remakes her own, splicing them into longer poems: “PINPOINT TARGET one lit desk lamp/ and a nightgown walking past the window,” “DAMAGE AREA does not include night sweats/ or retching at the smell of barbeque.” For the reader, these capitalized words and their visceral new meanings enact a series of small shocks, felt in the body and the mind.
Far from the sites of violence, Bay Area native Tess Taylor chronicles a farming year in her radiant second collection, Work & Days (Red Hen Press; $11.95). Awarded the prestigious Amy Clampitt Fellowship, Taylor balances solitary poem making in “an old lady’s cottage” with intensive physical work at a local veggie farm. Taylor led youth garden programs in Berkeley and interned in the kitchen at Chez Panisse before digging into poetry, and her keen sense of place and love of food pervade these poems.
Despite global warming, famine and flood, Taylor captures delight and seeks hope, observes “a thumb-sized frog” singing its “short springtime song.” She celebrates the summer solstice, the apex of the year when “light is monument to its own passing” and turns her fine powers of description to mulching garlic, planting leeks, digging potatoes, making apple butter.
May those who are hungry be fed.
May those who have food also hunger for justice.