National Heroes
"Indonesia's future is two-hundred million gaping mouths./ Indonesia's future is 15-watt light globes, some white and some black, lighting alternately./ Indonesia's future is a game of Ping Pong, going on all day and all night with a ball shaped like a goose egg…./ Give/ Indonesia/ Back/ to me." From the wonderfully didactic verse of Taufiq Ismail and the rest of "The Generation of 1966" to "The Post Indonesia Generation" that continues to press for renewal, Secrets Need Words: Indonesian Poetry, 1965—1998, a bilingual anthology, introduces readers to the political complexities and samizdat poetic salvos that marked the Suharto era. Edited by Harry Aveling, head of the Indonesian/Malay program at La Trobe University in Australia, the book is divided into theme-based chapters ("Nature and Irony"; "The World Become Absurd," etc.) with short, cogent introductory notes and excellent translations throughout. The energy and inventiveness of this work are not to be missed. (Ohio State Univ., $26 paper (392p) ISBN 0-89680-216-7; June)
With power having devolved to its parliament, Scotland is more a nation now that it has been since its formal union with the English crown in 1707. Taking readers from sixth century bards St. Columba and Aneirin through King James I, Robbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott to Carol Ann Duffy and Meg Bateman, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse covers a 1,500-year, multilingual (Latin, Scots, Gaelic, English) tradition, with poems published in their original languages, along with English verse translations where necessary. St. Andrews University professor of Modern Scottish literature Robert Crawford (Spirit Machines) and Times Literary Supplement poetry editor Mick Imlah (Birthmarks) made the selections. (Penguin U.K. [Trafalgar Square, dist.], $35 584p ISBN 0-71-399238-7; June 1)
Including 25 poets published since 1950, Contemporary Italian Women Poets: A Bilingual Anthology introduces American readers to poetry that, in the words of Luciana Frezza, "won't stop returning." University of Iowa associate professor of Italian Cinzia Sartini Blum and Lara Trubowitz, a lecturer in rhetoric at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, present their own selections and translations of a plethora of poems, with the original a fronte. (Italica [www.ItalicaPress.com], $20 paper 368p ISBN 0-934977-17-8; June)
Sonnets, Name-Calling & Filth
From Chaucer and (100-plus years later) Wyatt and Surrey to John Ashbery, June Jordan and Louise Glück, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English shows just how compelling 14 lines with varying (or no) rhyme scheme have been to poets working in the English language. Phillis Levin (Mercury; Forecasts, Mar. 12) has picked more than 600 poems for the collection, and while many of them are from the 20th century, most of those here don't hold a candle (or a florescent tube) to their forebears. Notes on the poets help further distinguish Dick Allen (b. 1939) from Matthew Arnold. (Penguin, $16 paper 352p ISBN 0-14-058929-5; July) A true Renaissance man, Basque-born Jean de Sponde (1557—1595) was a jurist, alchemist and poet, among other vocations and avocations. Prolific poet, translator and Bennington College faculty member David R. Slavitt has taken Sponde's old French Sonnets of Love & Death and put them in modern English, while attempting to preserve Ssponde's rhyme scheme and immediacy. The results are mixed, but this bilingual edition allows easy comparisons. (Northwestern Univ., $14.95 88p ISBN 0-8101-1840-8; July)
"Longing," "Looking," "Loving," "Ecstasy," "Anxiety," "Aftermath"—Academy of American Poets chancellor and Yale Review editor J.D. McClatchy (Twenty Questions, etc.) has sorted 144 poems by the above suggestive categories in Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems. This pocket "Everyman" edition includes Sappho, Whitman, Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Auden, Muriel Rukeyser, Frank O'Hara and many others. (Knopf, $12.50 256p ISBN 0-375-41170-4; May 24)
"The ass is the metrical equivalent/ Of cash I discovered once by accident," wrote doggerel-master Strato of Sardis almost 2,000 years ago—yet the wry truth of his equation still pertains. This and other such insights are freshly translated by poet and former Poetry editor Daryl Hine (Arondissements) in Purilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology, originally compiled in the court of Hadrian. The 258 pithy and dirty poems of the Anthology's Book XII are presented with Greek en face, and Hine's turns of phrase should turn a few heads: "I give back love for love and hate for hate," wrote one anonymous poet, "completely ignorant of neither state." (Princeton, $29.95 128p ISBN 0-691-08819-5; $9.95 paper -08820-9; June)
