April Notes

Renowned for decades for her sparely ironic novels, Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; A Far Cry from Kensington) began as a poet, and has lately returned to the writing of verse. All the Poems of Muriel Spark mixes her older rhyming poems (most from the 1950s) with the more informal work of the last 10 years. The Scottish-born Spark covers European cities from Edinburgh to Rome, along with the act of writing and the literary world: "I think that authors' ghosts creep back/ Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves/ And find the books they wrote." (New Directions, $13.95 paper 144p ISBN 0-8112-1576-8)

Poet, mapmaker, film conservator and documentarian, Colin Browne is a co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing. Like Vancouver neighbor Robin Blaser, Browne fosters in Groundwater not only polyvocality but a ranging polyformality of spacious collage, tight lists, knotted rambunctious densities of word and sentence, sonic wordplay, narrative and lyric. There are line drawings throughout that echo map symbols and petroglyphs, heightening the high-stakes erudition and linguistic play: "Petal weapons abandoned. / He ruled in splendor. A Ton Ton Macoute of the heart." The poem-as-film-treatment "Altar" juxtaposes observations of nature, social behavior, historical texts, excerpts from Canadian military law manuals, Native American myth, potent moments of family dynamic and physical peril. (Talonbooks [SPD, dist.], $15.95 paper 208p ISBN 0-88-922465-X)

Drawing on personal anecdote as well as extended quotations from Walter Benjamin, Emanuel Levinas, Mahmoud Darwish and the Marx Brothers (among others), Israeli-American poet Benjamin Hollander assembles two ambitious poem-essays in Rituals of Truth and the Other Israeli. The two pieces reflect, challenge and lament central dilemmas of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian identity, as well as the intractable history between them. Hollander's first title montage is the more satisfying of the two, and the more personal. An Edmond Jabes quote—"I only know that, due to circumstance, solitude has become the profound destiny of the Jew. The State of Israel not only doesn't break that solitude, it often aggravates it"—becomes a repeated touchstone as Hollander offers insights based on his own experience as an Ashkenazi Jew born in Haifa who immigrated to the U.S. at age six, and who thinks critically about his own and others' rhetorical authority. (Parrhesia [SPD, dist.], $12.95 paper 144p ISBN 0-9639321-7-9)