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January Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri | Washington Independent Review of Books

Familiarity with the hellish subject must be earned, not presupposed. My own feeling is that Sylvia Plath did not earn it, that she did not respect the real incommensurability to her own experience of what took place. Wieseltier is not alone in this criticism. Similarly, Joyce Carol Oates objects to Plath 'snatching [her word] metaphors for her predicament from newspaper headlines'; Seamus Heaney argues that in poems like 'Lady Lazarus', Plath harnesses the wider cultural reference to a 'vehemently self-justifying purpose'; Irving Howe describes the link as 'monstrous, utterly disproportionate'; and Marjorie Perloff describes Plath's references to the Nazis as 'empty' and 'histrionic', 'cheap shots', 'topical trappings', 'devices' which 'camouflage' the true personal meaning of the poems in which they appear.

On a separate occasion, Perloff compares Plath unfavourably to Lowell for the absence of any sense of personal or social history in her work. In aesthetic terms, what Plath is being criticised for is a lack of 'objective correlative' Perloff specifically uses the term. For it can be argued it has recently been argued in relation to the critic Paul de Man that, faced with the reality of the Holocaust, the idea that there is an irreducibly figurative dimension to all language is an evasion, or denial, of the reality of history itself. Criticism of 'Daddy' shows the question of fantasy, which has appeared repeatedly as a difficulty in the responses to Plath's writing, in its fullest historical and political dimension.

The issue then becomes not whether Plath has the right to represent the Holocaust, but what the presence of the Holocaust in her poetry unleashes, or obliges us to focus, about representation as such. It is of course the poem of the murder of the father which at the very least raises the psychic stakes. It is, quite simply, the more aggressive poem. Hence, no doubt, its founding status in the mythology of Sylvia Plath.

Reviewing the American publication of Ariel in , Time magazine wrote:. Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. Do 'Little Fugue' and 'Daddy' take up the two motifs one after the other, or do they present something of their mutual relation, the psychic economy that ties them even as it forces them apart?

In this case it is the form of that sequence which has allowed the poem to be read purely personally as Plath's vindictive assault on Otto Plath and Ted Hughes the transition from the first to the second mirroring the biographical pattern of her life. The first thing to notice is the trouble in the time sequence of this poem in relation to the father, the technically impossible temporality which lies at the centre of the story it tells, which echoes that earlier impossibility of language in 'Little Fugue':.

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe, or Achoo. And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you.

What is the time sequence of these verses? On the one hand, a time of unequivocal resolution, the end of the line, a story that once and for all will be brought to a close: This story is legendary. It is the great emancipatory narrative of liberation which brings, some would argue, all history to an end. The poem thus presents itself as protest and emancipation from a condition which reduces the one oppressed to the barest minimum of human, but inarticulate, life: Blocked, hardly daring to breathe or to sneeze, this body suffers because the father has for too long oppressed.

This at the very least suggests that, if this is the personal father, it is also what psychoanalysis terms the father of individual prehistory, the father who establishes the very possibility or impossibility of history as such. The time of historical emancipation immediately finds itself up against the problem of a no less historical, but less certain, psychic time. Much has been made of Plath as an exile, as she goes back and forth between England and the United States. In particular, my background is, may I say, German and Austrian.

If this poem is in some sense about the death of the father, a death both willed and premature, it is no less about the death of language. Returning to the roots of language, it discovers a personal and political history the one as indistinguishable from the other which once again fails to enter into words:.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. Compare Claude Lanzmann, the film-maker of Shoah, on the Holocaust as 'a crime to forget the name', or Lyotard: Wars wipe out names, the father cannot be spoken to, and the child cannot talk, except to repeat endlessly, in a destroyed obscene language, the most basic or minimal unit of self-identity in speech: In a passage taken out of her journals, Plath comments on this 'I':.

I wouldn't be I. The pen scratches on the paper I. The effect, of course, if you read it aloud, is not one of assertion but, as with 'ich, ich, ich, ich', of the word sticking in the throat. Pass from that trauma of the 'I' back to the father as a 'bag full of God', and 'Daddy' becomes strikingly resonant of the case of a woman patient described at Hamburg, suspended between two utterances: In the poem, the 'I' moves backwards and forwards between German and English, as does the 'you' 'Ach, du'.

The dispersal of identity in language follows the lines of a division or confusion between nations and tongues. In fact language in this part of the poem moves in two directions at once. Note too how the rhyming pattern of the poem sends us back to the fist line. I am not suggesting, however, that we apply to Plath's poem the idea of poetry as ecriture women's writing as essentially multiple, the other side of normal discourse, fragmented by the passage of the unconscious and the body into words.

Instead the poem seems to be outlining the conditions under which that celebrated loss of the symbolic function takes place. Identity and language lose themselves in the place of the father whose absence gives him unlimited powers. Irruption of the semiotic Kristeva's term for that other side of normal language , which immediately transposes itself into an alien, paternal tongue.

Plath's passionate desire to learn German and her constant failure to do so, is one of the refrains of both her journals and her letters home: Painful, as if "part were cut out of my brain"'. Looking for her father, failing to find him anywhere, the speaker finds him everywhere instead. Above all, she finds him everywhere in the language which she can neither address to him nor barely speak. It is this hallucinatory transference which turns every German into the image of the father, makes for the obscenity of the German tongue, and leads directly to the first reference to the Holocaust:.

An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true.

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With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. The metaphor therefore turns on itself, becomes a comment on the obscene language which generates the metaphor as such. More important still, metaphor is by no means the dominant trope when the speaker starts to allude to herself as a Jew:.

Chuffing me off like a Jew. Plath's use of simile and metonymy keeps her at a distance, opening up the space of what is clearly presented as a partial, hesitant, and speculative identification between herself and the Jew. The trope of identification is not substitution but displacement, with all that it implies by way of instability in any identity thereby produced. Only in metaphor proper does the second, substituting term wholly oust the first; in simile, the two terms are co-present, with something more like a slide from one to the next; while metonymy is, in its very definition, only ever partial the part stands in for the whole.

If the speaker claims to be a Jew, then, this is clearly not a simple claim 'claim' is probably wrong here. For this speaker, Jewishness is the position of the one without history or roots: Above all, it is for her a question, each time suspended or tentatively put, of her participation and implication in the event. Given the way Plath stages this as a problem in the poem, presenting it as part of a crisis of language and identity, the argument that she simply uses the Holocaust to aggrandise her personal difficulties seems completely beside the point.

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Who can say that these were not difficulties which she experienced in her very person? If this claim is not metaphorical, then, we should perhaps also add that neither is it literal. The point is surely not to try and establish whether Plath was part Jewish or not.

Once again these forms of identification are not exclusive to Plath. Something of the same structure appears at the heart of Jean Stafford's most famous novel, A Boston Adventure, published in The novel's heroine, Sonie Marburg, is the daughter of immigrants, a Russian mother and a German father who eventually abandons his wife and child. As a young woman, Sonie finds herself adopted by Boston society in the s. Standing in a drawing-room, listening to the expressions of anti-Semitism, she speculates:. I did not share Miss Pride's prejudice and while neither did I feel strongly partisan towards Jews, the subject always embarrassed me because, not being able to detect Hebraic blood at once except in a most obvious face, I was afraid that someone's toes were being trod on.

It is only one step from this uncertainty, this ubiquity and invisibility of the Jew, to the idea that she too might be Jewish: Parenthetically and partially, therefore, Sonie Marburg sees herself as a Jew. Like Plath, the obverse of this is to see the lost father as a Nazi: In this sense, I read 'Daddy' as a poem about its own conditions of linguistic and phantasmic production. Rather than casually produce an identification, it asks a question about identification, laying out one set of intolerable psychic conditions under which such an identification with the Jew might take place.

For there is a trauma or paradox internal to identification in relation to the father, one which is particularly focused by the Holocaust itself. At the Congress, David Rosenfeld described the 'logical-pragmatic paradox' facing the children of survivors: Lyotard puts the dilemma of the witness in very similar terms: Either way it is impossible to prove that death is there' compare Levi on the failure of witness. For Freud, such a paradox is structural, Oedipal, an inseparable part of that identification with the father of individual prehistory which is required of the child: Its cruelty, arid its force, reside in the form of the enunciation itself.

One could then argue that it is this paradox of paternal identification. For doesn't Nazism itself also turn on the image of the father, a father enshrined in the place of the symbolic, all-powerful to the extent that he is so utterly out of reach? By rooting the speaker's identification with the Jew in the issue of paternity, Plath's poem enters into one of the key phantasmic scenarios of Nazism itself.

As the poem progresses, the father becomes more and more of a Nazi not precisely that this identity is not given, but is something which emerges. Instead of being found in every German, what is most frighteningly German is discovered retrospectively in him:. I have always been scared of you With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye bright blue. The image could be compared with Virginia Woolf's account of the trappings of fascism in Three Guineas. Not that this makes him any the less effective, any the less frightening, any the less desired. In its most notorious statement, the poem suggests that victimization by this feared and desired father is one of the fantasies at the heart of fascism, one of the universal attractions for women of fascism itself.

As much as predicament, victimization is also pull:. Every woman adores a fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. Who is putting the boot in the face? The fascist certainly woman as the recipient of a sexual violence she desires. There is no question, therefore, of denying the problem of these lines. Indeed, if you allow that second reading, they pose the question of women's implication in the ideology of Nazism more fundamentally than has normally been supposed. But notice how easy it is to start dividing up and sharing out the psychic space of the text.

Either her total innocence or her total guilt. But if we put these two objections or difficulties together? Then what we can read in the poem is a set of reversals which have meaning only in relation to each other: If the rest of the poem then appears to give a narrative of resolution to this drama, it does so in terms which are no less ambiguous than what has gone before. They thus seem to turn into a final, triumphant sequence the two forms of temporality which were offered at the beginning of the poem.

But for all that triumphalism, the end of the poem is ambiguous. Communication as ending, or dialogue without end? A point about the more personal narrative offered in these last stanzas, for it is the reference to the death of the father, the attempted suicide, and the marriage which calls up the more straightforward biographical reading of this text. It is, again, the relationship of the two levels which is important it is that relationship, part sequence, part overdetermination, which the poem transcribes. But even at the most personal level of this poem, there is something more general at stake.

For the link that 'Daddy' represents between suicide and a paternity, at once personal and symbolic, is again not exclusive to Plath. At the end of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton, with whose suicide the book opened, is allowed to tell her story; the book has work backwards from her death to its repetition through her eyes.

As if the book was suggesting that the only way forward after the death of Peyton was into a grossly inflated symbolic paternity definitively lost to middle America, available only to those whom that same America exploits. Finally, I would suggest that 'Daddy' does allow us to ask whether the woman might not have a special relationship to fantasy--the only generalisation in the poem regarding women is, after all, that most awkward of lines: Nor would such an insight be in any way incompatible with women's legitimate protest against a patriarchal world.

This is for me, finally, the wager of Plath's work. This problem which Plath's treatment of the Holocaust exhibits, of exploring or representing the inconceivable the mythic horror of the Holocaust with the conceivable be it a conceivable subject, such as personal difficulties, or a conceivable form , is also apparent in the Hollywood films produced at the time as well as many similar cinematic treatments from then on, with the notable exception of Shoah []. Annette Insdorf describes the difficulties inherent in cinematic treatments of the Holocaust, citing John J.

O'Connor a New York Times television critic , who writes: These studio productions essentially fit the bristling raw material of the Holocaust into an old narrative form, thus allowing the viewer to leave the theater feeling complacent instead of concerned or disturbed. In Plath's case, the "old narrative form" is that of a lyrical expression through personalized mythmaking, within which the Holocaust fits uncomfortably. In addition to these wider difficulties of using traditional conventions to represent the horrors of the Holocaust, the expressly symbolic approach of poetry appears tainted by the abuse of metaphor in the Nazi regime's employment of the "language rules" cited above, an abuse of language that Plath herself feared in the less extreme cold war "doubletalk" discourse.

It is these problems surrounding the conventionalization and metaphorizing of the Holocaust that not only inform Plath's late poems but are enacted by them. Lawrence Langer's tentative answer to the way out of the impasse between the impact of the Holocaust and the ethical problems associated with its depiction is through a creativity which works to collapse the distinction between history and the present, metaphor and subject.

Plath's late poems try to work in a similar way, "inducing a sense of complicity" by combining the events with an intimate tone and material. Yet instead of trying directly to present the cruelty of the Holocaust itself, the feeling Plath's poems generate is one of complicity in the easy assimilation of such past cruelties. Her poems try to avoid the anonymity and the amnesia contingent on the "them and us" and "then and now" distinctions that characterize the perception of history by highlighting her use of the Holocaust as metaphor.

In such poems, readers are meant to feel uncomfortable with the suprapersonal, mythical depiction of Jewish suffering, feeling somehow implicated because of their traditional identification with the lyric persona in the voyeurism such an assimilation of the Holocaust implies. This feeling of implication that Plath's poems generate may be viewed in broad terms as their success. Such poems are culturally valuable because the appearance of the Holocaust in them is like a "boot in the face"--certainly, few readers leave them feeling "complacent instead of concerned or disturbed.

In other words, readers' reactions of unease, discomfort, and outrage are necessarily a response to the surface, the poem itself, rather than to the events the poem uses as metaphors for its subject be it about individualism, freedom, or memory , because the events themselves are not graspable. The poem is effective because it leaves readers in no clear or easy position in relation to the voyeuristic gazes operating within it of reader at speaker, reader at poet, poet at speaker, and all at the events which are metaphorized and able to take no unproblematic stance regarding the uses of metaphor involved.

Throughout the poem, the speaker and "daddy," masochistic and sadistic figures respectively, appear dependent upon each other, and both figures' connections to Nazism as Jew and Fascist link their dependence on each other lack of individuation. In the speakers consciously disturbing over-statement that "Every woman adores a Fascist," Plath asserts that, while the archetypal male figure appearing in the rest of the poem as father and lover connotes the escape from freedom through sadism, the female figure's adoration of the Fascist is an extreme result of a stereotypically feminine escape from the feelings of aloneness associated with freedom, through masochistic strivings.

Freedom, for the archetypal "feminine" figure in "Daddy," is freedom from the authoritarian father figure. Political realities in the form of Nazism and psychological difficulties in the form of neurosis are inescapably linked. Thus Plath's lines in "Daddy" are both psychological and political. They are psychological not because "Daddy" is about Plath's relationship with her father, but in the sense that Plath uses the situation depicted in the poem to explore the dynamics of her attitude toward individualism.

Rooted in a prehistoric split between subject and object, the dialectic of enlightenment attempts to outlaw primitive modes of perception such as sympathetic magic, and 'makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities'. The very reason which the Enlightenment used as a weapon against myth, religion, and illusion has, in modem society, turned against itself and reverted to irrationalist violence. Its oppressive tendency culminates in the catastrophe of the Holocaust, in whose wake the entire heritage of European high culture appears discredited or exhausted.

For Adorno, as for Plath, this dark vision of Enlightenment rationality is informed by the catastrophic events of recent history. Yet while Plath's writing mourns the victims of what goes by the name of historical 'progress', it also, as we have seen, plays out a deep complicity with the drive towards mastery that Adorno sees as central to Enlightenment.

This paradox manifests itself as a tendency to yoke together historical and subjective crisis in manifestly unstable metaphorical conjunctions. Thus Irving Howe, for example: Eliot was in saying, "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates". This violation of New Critical codes of impersonality is conflated, as Jacqueline Rose has argued, with its violation of the widespread belief that the Holocaust is in some ultimate sense beyond representation.

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What Alicia Ostriker calls 'the earliest and most famous of female vengeance poems' none the less remains a love poem which not only explores the tangled links between femininity, eros, and domination, but mockingly appropriates s myths of female masochism in order to do so.

Through its blatant theatricality and unstable irony, it reflects on its own insertion into literary history and on its own figurative processes. The speaker's comparison of herself to a Jew also happens to thematize the activity of figuration itself:. The infamous metaphor more precisely, simile is an extension of the prior metaphor of the father's language as 'An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew'. It is, as Helen McNeil has-suggested, 'a kind of psychic conceit, as if she is daring her reader to disbelieve what has been so passionately felt and powerfully expressed'.

Once this extravagant 'train of thought' has been put into motion, it becomes a metaphorical machine which conveys the 'I' into a historical and ideological 'other' space not of its own choosing 'I've boarded the train there's no getting off', as Plath puts it in 'Metaphors'. The figurative act therefore not only puts into question the ethical status of the poem's discourse but foregrounds this ethical instability as an aspect of the motivation or intentionality of metaphor itself. The Nazi-Jew metaphor is an extreme manifestation of the trope of subjection to otherness which, I have argued, governs much of Plath's poetry.

It signals a radically simplified and unstable dialectic of self and other at work in the poem's language. This projective dialectic, of which the speaker represents herself as both victim and perpetrator, is acted out through the metrical parallelism of rhyme which becomes an 'engine', a seemingly automatic force with its own momentum.

The entire poem is dominated by the compulsive necessity of the 'you' rhyme, which generates as its corollary the 'Jew'; the 'I' marking the 'not-I' as its other. The father becomes a scapegoat, ritually dismembered into metonymic body parts such as foot, toe, head, mustache, blue eye, cleft chin, bones, heart, and resurrected in a bewildering variety of guises: The original of 'Daddy' is irrevocably lost; it is the symbols of the dead father, his law, which the speaker is addressing: The violent symmetry and parallelism of the victim-oppressor scenario recalls Theodor Adorno's claim, in 'Elements of Anti-Semitism' that the Fascist projects the impulses he cannot accept as his own on to his victim.

It is his similarity to the Jew which arouses the paranoid rage of the anti-Semite and turns the oppressed into an oppressor. In 'Daddy', the oppressive relationship between father and daughter is seen as part of a larger process of scapegoating at work in history and language alike:. Language threatens to break down into nonsense, stuttering, and aphasia 'the brute Brute heart of a brute like you'. The terroristic staccato consonants of the German 'Luftwaffe' are translated into the childish barbarism, 'gobbledygoo'.

January Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri | Washington Independent Review of Books

The 'blue' of the 'Aryan eye', Nazi symbol of racial purity, is rhymed with the blue of the sky which 'squeak[s]' through the death-dealing blackness of the swastika. Victim and oppressor secretly mirror each other; and the victim's response to paranoid oppression is to imitate its features. Plath's overreaching use of the Nazi-Jew metaphor in 'Daddy' cannot be separated from the poem's wider exploration and exploitation, through language, sound, and rhythm, of the violent logic of 'othering'.

It is, perhaps, this linguistic regression which is at the heart of its perceived offence to canonical values. It does not merely refute the self-possession of the poetic subject but also suggests that, as Freud argues in The Ego and the Id, 'what is highest in the human mind' is rooted in 'the lowest part of.

There is no document of culture, Walter Benjamin wrote in the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Although 'Daddy' seems flagrantly to violate the Eliotic doctrine of 'impersonality', therefore, it can equally be seen as pushing it to an unholy extreme: Plath's 'negations' are the effect of a profound ambivalence towards poetic language itself. On the one hand, her work can be seen as a triumphant celebration of the transformative powers of metaphor and of the 'oracular' dimension of poetic language invoked by Seamus Heaney; on the other, it can be seen as activating a darker, daemonic, or nihilistic side of the auditory imagination.

In Plath's poetry, the Romantic identification of the 'symbol' with the sensuous, maternal fecundity of nature, as a means of overcoming the terror of death, or of transcending melancholy, is effectively disabled. Her rhetoric is founded on the recognition of a chronic lack of solace in figurative language. Metaphor appears less as a means of harmonizing an alienated self with the world, as in the Romantic tradition, than as a technology which violently, if exhilaratingly, wrests the body to its own ends.

The noble rider's drive towards mastery tends to undo itself, precipitating a backlash of linguistic regression. Plath thus stages a 'dialectic of enlightenment' in the arena of metaphor, rhythm, and sound, drawing upon the ambiguously incantatory and oral powers of poetic language itself. Plath's interest in Germany and its relationship to exterminating and far-reaching power, particularly its consanguinity with nazism, emanates most forcefully in "Daddy.

Although Plath situates issues of racial dominance and Otherness at the forefront of this poem's literary tropes, scholars to date do not read this poem as evidence of Plath's white authorial position. Annas reads "Daddy" as a poem whose landscape constructs social and political boundaries partially signified by blackness A Disturbance In addition, Annas claims that the purpose of "Daddy" is to exorcise "the various avatars of the other" A Disturbance Broe, however, finds Plath again locating an interchangeability among self and Other especially in the roles of victim and victimizer Nance and Judith P.

Jones argue that the word "black" provides the significant spark in the poem that "ignite[s] powerful associations among culturally significant symbols" Axelrod finds the father-as-black-shoe representative of a force "capable of stamping on his victim" Furthermore, Axelrod suggests that Plath ironically designs her "aboriginal speaker" as only capable of "black-and-white thinking" Clearly, the poem invites racially marked readings concerned with issues of Otherness; however, the scholarship does not effectively address the white authorship and imagination that creates this Otherness in the poem.

Axelrod ventures close to marking the poet's whiteness when he addresses Plath's interest in things German. He describes the emotional year that Plath experienced previous to writing "Daddy," and then he summarizes her psychological state:. She was again contemplating things German: If "German" was Randall Jarrell's "favorite country," it was not hers, yet it returned to her discourse like clock work at times of psychic distress. Clearly Plath was attempting to find and to evoke in her art what she could not find or communicate in her life.

Dyer explains that Germany, along with the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, evokes the "apex of whiteness" to the white imagination What Plath desires at moments of psychic stress is a return to the purity she associates with whiteness as well as a return to her particular ancestral background which she claimed as German and Austrian Rose, The Haunting Yet any such return to or contemplation of things German, especially after World War II, ignited images of nazism for Plath and influenced an imaginative conflation of purity, personal ancestry, and the Holocaust.

The language of "Daddy" reflects this conflation. Jacqueline Rose insinuates that Plath's connection between her own father and nazism in "Daddy" is not the profound and ghastly stretch that other critics have claimed. Rose prompts us to entertain the idea that nazism relied heavily on the dominance of the symbolic father: Clearly, Plath answers "yes" to this question by writing "Daddy. The "black shoe," associated with Daddy, and associated with nazism, has become too constricting. She must become Jew to his Nazi:.

An engine, an engine Chudding me off like a Jew. By taking on the markings of a Jew in the poem, she highlights the heart of whiteness debates: In the context of the poem, Plath attempts to separate from her father, whose power she associates with blackness and nazism. As her father's victim, she takes on the role of persecuted Jew.

Dyer explains that the Jews' relationship to whiteness has not been at all fixed in time. However, like the Irish and the Mexicans, the Jews have been both included and excluded from whiteness throughout time. In particular, their special whiteness has been used as a "'buffer' between the white and the black or indigenous" Dyer That was the book of the decade. The poems are in the voices of women slaves, and the narratives were also set to music and mounted on stage. And it was worthy of the Pulitzer if anything ever was.

She would call friends night or day. Then came her intensity, her genius, her gossip. She helped hundreds of poets toward actualization and confidence in her tenure as laureate. Dolores Kendrick was waiting for her new book of poems, Rainbow on Fire , a few years in the coming. It was issued the day of her funeral, November 29, Feature in Poetry More. Poetry Review in Poetry. A monthly feature that looks at books of and about poetry.

I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones.

I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened? On a cot by an open window I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds. Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps? For myself, I find my wanting life Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance; Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts, Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time. Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can Inherit from disaster before I move. O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor, And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back To sort the weeping ruins of my house: Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact. Great-grandfather Julius Danneels got divorced, changed the name to Daniels, gave away is pet monkey, but nothing erased the boy turning blue.

I inherited the watch Julius won racing pigeons, a fancy piece too complicated to fix, yet I hear it ticking. No one mentions the obvious. I realize my mistake, but keep it to myself. I grip the sides of my chair. Well , I say. What did you kids do today? I was sure my loved ones fit inside my hips like snowy pillows, bolsters, buttress, brace.

I let them go. I let the cookie go. Thread your native streams through the fat and marrowy places of field and wood. Time yourself to their meandering — stopping to gaze upon the spotted lily. Blend with the trees and the shadows. Yield ye to the fascination, penetrate farther towards the center of the mystery. Hunger whetted, bait your hook with the quick and the fresh. Bait it with your heart. Around you air is curvaceous so I orbit.

I cannot keep my body together. Hot sugar spun up in clouds, corn dogs, dusted funnel cakes, pork rinds tossed from the crowd. One Ferris wheel still turns; the last lotus eater — unwary mouth open — swallows the moon. I ask the cashier about size options. Tickets are available here: Vital Possessions is my ninth ninth!! The roots of this book came about through the Gardens by the Bay residency in I had the opportunity to spend hours walking and thinking in the grounds of GBTB. I am more a fan of wide-open moors and natural forests.

But gradually, I came to see the gardens as that perfect synthesis between nature and nurture. It is, in many ways, the epitome of our garden city. The Supertrees are like our skyscrapers, inhabited by a variety of human flora, and the grounds of the garden are much like our planned estates, neatly segmented while still keeping a semblance of nature and enough variety to keep us sane.

The poems in the book began to be shaped by this overarching theme and along the way, they expanded as I explored and visited other green spaces. I also considered the way we interacted with our environment. It became a treatise on what we believe and hold dear to in an age of uncertainty, where our faith is frangible and our knowledge fractured. The book reads like one long narrative and dips in and out of the following themes: Haiku accompanied by photographs intersperse the poems. Ethos Books, my publisher, has been very patient with the manuscript over many moons of editing and piecing together the book.

The cover proved to be especially tricky, because with such a title, it was truly difficult to find an image that would evoke a similar state of feeling. The book launch is at the Esplanade Concourse on 11 August, at 5pm. I will be doing something rather different, and invite all of you to come and join me as Vital Possessions finally emerges into the world.

Time pauses in the gentle estate,. All of which is always a blast, but it does get kinda intense sometimes! Visual artists worked on various stanzas, creating a striking series of tableaus that conjure up visions of modern dystopia. The exhibition opens from 10 am on 9 March, but drop by for the official launch on 10 March at 6. There will also be an interactive workshop on 10 March from 2. Come by to modernise your own bit of Blake and get a piece of artwork custom-made by the artists in the exhibition.

I head off for a writing residency in Paris in late Jan. I step back in a junior college for the first time in six years, this time to be a poet-in-residence at Eunoia Junior College. Looking forward to dreaming up a lot of fascinating workshops and working with bright young minds to spread the seed of poetry. Three books are going to come out in !! The first is Waypoints, published by Math Paper Press. This is a collaborative photo-poetry book between Tay Tsen-Waye and myself. I respond to 36 film images of travel from all around the world with 36 poems of my own.