Dedicated to Srebrenica, site of the massacre of over 7,000 people in 1995 during the war in the former Yugoslavia, this fifth collection from poet, translator, and critic Alcalay (After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture) is an assembled epic of polyvocal documentation. Stating a desire to "re-awaken the ancient force of poetry as fact and testimony" in an accompanying interview with poet Benjamin Hollander, Alcalay has produced textual tapestry incorporating a startlingly broad array of materials (from Shelley's "Revolt of Islam" to excerpts from Saddam Hussein's fiction). The poet acts more as narrative guide than self-constructing voice. Much of the text thus appears in quotes, yet the structure, ranging from one-line pages to denser, unpunctuated blocks of text, allows Alcalay to handle difficult material with clarifying distance: "Something like soul, that you are witness to, that / you remember, by experience, by surfaces"/ "some great wound" "in the whole body"/ "so unwieldy, so completely irretrievable"/ "no one dares" "operate." Alcalay's rearrangements of historic documents and contemporary and classical writings are intended, he notes, to raise the political question of "how memory survives" given today's inherently unstable versions of collective consciousness: "we are ready to end this when you start/ to leave you must think back/ with regret you always return/ garment of brightness/ wilderness/ in the midst/ of plenty." As a whole, the book's five sections reflect a measured will to illuminate and testify against political and cultural abuses of power without asserting one's own righteousness. (Nov.)
Forecast:Alcalay, a professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, has written often on the Middle East, and readers will find material here relating to post-1967 Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Reviews within the small press community should induce some national attention, particularly in round-up reviews of responses to war.
