The Tablets [With CD]

A resident of New York City since immigrating to the United States from Belgium in 1935, Schwerner passed away this February at age 71. The two books at hand are his summation. Schwerner's mischievous, fabular epic The Tablets, assembled here in full for the first time, is ostensibly a scholarly translation of twenty-seven clay tablets from the ancient Near East. In fact, it is a postmodern meditation on language, translation, the limits of knowledge and origins of consciousness, and the pathos of intellectual life. Indebted to Olson's ""Song of Ullikummi"" (a poem derived from the Hittite version of a Hurrian myth), Schwerner's fragmented, often humorous reconstruction of an ancient ""original"" is no more real than the Borgesian land of Uqbar--or the Captain's Log on Star Trek. In some instances the muddle of past, present and future achieves an inspired lunacy. (""Tablet VII,"" we're told, survives only in classical Old Icelandic, the work ""of a certain Henrik L., an archaeologically gifted Norwegian divine"" of the 19th century.) ""The conflict between the comedian and the mystic can make poems,"" notes Schwerner, and the ""scholar translator"" who presents the tablets, and whose anxieties and insights continually interrupt--and often overwhelm--the sometimes untranslatable original, exploits both sides. Accepting the authority of physical experience but tempering that authority with book learning and flights of fancy, Schwerner's Shorter Poems make a worthy companion to The Tablets. The best pieces are likewise projections and refractions, most notably the section ""Eskimo and Others,"" retellings of stories found in anthropological texts. Other poems, like ""Sounds of the River Naranjana,"" offer moving testimony to a life devoted to contemplation: ""I'm 53 and the fire/ of the beginner again burns me into waiting. what time is it? the engines/ of pleasure the business of engines, of subconscious gossip/ in the dry white American desert."" These books are an out-of-the-way oasis. (June)