The Unstill Ones: Poems

True to its title, Oberman’s stirring debut begins in movement: “He was riding in the dark/ down a burned mountain.” That motion defines both an otherwise unnamed rider in an obscured expanse and the sense of an animate past that marks these poems. The roiling of the universe exists in tension with words used to describe it, as when Oberman writes “Horse,/ meaning, to run. From the days/ when a thing was what it did,/ the act of naming itself a desire,/ for stillness, for containment.” For Oberman, a medievalist as well as a poet, language is a shape-shifting historical entity. Throughout, translations from Old English poems, riddles, and charms feature alongside centos drawn from more recent texts. This sense of “times trans-shifting” informs the deep knowledge of the English from which Oberman crafts his poems as well as memory, identity, and embodied experience. Oberman beautifully renders a complex and ever-changing knot of temporalities in which past and present overlap and exert force on each other. The erudition and sophistication of Oberman’s poems does not mean that they are difficult to understand; the poems are not simple, yet they are accessible and emotion-laden. (Nov.)