My German Dictionary

by Katherine Hollander
(The Waywiser Press, 2019) 

Reviewed by Star Coulbrooke 

     

It takes skilled wordcrafting, an ear for clarity, and a penchant for multiple levels of meaning to hone syntax into diction as rich as one’s country of origin. Katherine Hollander applies those traits to rouse language from an uncomfortable heritage, fashioning stanzas that expand into layers of national and ancestral history defined with elegant simplicity, intricate imagery, and complex metaphor. 

The introductory poem in My German Dictionary first presents a simple fact of the speaker’s personality:

I couldn’t be a good Jew, so I tried

to be a good historian. I couldn’t be

a good historian, so I wrote poems.

Then the poem complicates its assertion by insisting on what the speaker can and cannot write about, not the “Shoah” but the “Somme,” not the “heart” as “pocket watch,” but “swans / snails, stars, and mud.” Images arrive and gather intricacy with each stanza’s plea, asking “oak-owls” and “grandfather clocks” to help find her country, and handing readers a “good traveling coat” adorned with “fox fur collar / and a fat gold tassel,” along with the enticement of an irresistible metaphor:

Pull it on, and from the wide sleeve a little

cedar ladder nudges out, ready to take you away.

The first few rungs of that aromatic ladder are taken up by the seminal poem in Section I, “Answers to the Question Europe,” a series of sonnet-like scenes in a life with the last line of each section set apart in denial or affirmation, as in “dumplings” that “floated like little boats // not making a path I could follow home,” or a “half-dead” black cat that “showed me / its beautiful paws, which it held out // pink as soap, like little cameos.”  

Four connected poems comprise the middle of Section I, layering on scenes that pull readers further up the ladder: two German Jewish sisters who look alike and live together amiably except when fighting over “one another’s political affiliations” (“Sophie and Escha, 1929”); a young girl and her parents who live through the Berlin blackouts “at the stove, one burner on / a blue water lily of light” (“General Strike, Berlin 1920”); “dead youths” who “come in, / dragging their next war behind them” (“Great War”);  and a wounded soldier taken in by a family of bears in his delirium, bears who took off their skins “and hung them up in the hallway, and without them / they looked just like men” (“The Wounded Soldier”). 

To complete this suite of stories on the first few rungs of the ladder, the speaker asserts “Why I Don’t Do Genealogical Research”—assertion in the title, but not in the poem. Here we are treated to a lovely and fragile image, “the soul / like a translucent little figurine,” sustained through multiple other images as refracted and gradual as daylight glinting and graying with sunset, the beams and then the colors and then the soft, dark, descending souls of children whose lives were “very brief” and whose souls, the speaker wishes, 

    might have been lifted, 

and tucked, and zipped inside the thick  

impossibly soft fur buntings 

that are the striped trousers

and silken hoods of my two

cats, Henry and Christopher,

housecats whose lives are “gentle,” who are beloved, whose eyes reflect the souls of those children who began transitioning so beautifully in the poem, into the speaker’s “own murdered kinspeople,” and therefore her attitude against genealogical research.

Section II demands a strong and steady hand to hold the ladder, first for “War Suite,” a short poem series of excruciating contrasts, as in “The Family of Skeletons,” all those innocents killed in every war, who “wore our hearts in our breasts like red purses” and “used to eat blackberries / and bouillabaisse, falafel and cherries,” but who now “wear nothing, drink bowlfuls / of air.” Or “The Recruiter” whose heart “cramps like a fist,” who “lures the beautiful boys.” Or “The Parents” who “let the devil in the front door,” whose regret cannot be restrained:

Our son’s face looked into his face

like a bird charmed by a serpent,

a flower mesmerized by sun.

I know now I should have

let loose the unfriendly dogs.

I should have barred the door

with my own body.

“War Suite” then gives way to the “Book of Icons,” addresses to particular characters from the annals of European history, rendered with intricate description and infinite care. “Rosa Luxemburg,” for instance, who “crossed the border from Germany,” to make “an uneasy home, a mouse / in a knife drawer,” who was killed for her “murderous red language,” but “hush now—here you are”:

    in the meadow you loved so much,

up to your waist in the deep grass

and wild flowers, your eyes covered

with a bright visor of light.   

“Book of Ikons” melds with “Exile Diptych,” a poet-historian’s fancy for imagining Bertolt Brecht “abstracted” in Svenborg and searching for “something true” in Hollywood. The final poem of Section II, “Dear Union,” is in protest of Marine Le Pen and is written as an apology to the European Union, which the speaker describes as a lush, benevolent beast with “raisin-scented paws,” a spine “made of bridges,” and “solar panels” for a hat. 

Hollander’s skill in storytelling is enhanced by the creative accuracy of a poet/scholar, so that the first two sections of the book have already prepared readers for the third, in which the titles are in German, but there is no translation of the titles inside the poems. Instead, we get definitions in story-like images that impart knowledge of a time and a people we need to recognize if we are to live in a world that goes beyond the trauma of a dark and needlessly oblivious past. 

Here are just two poem excerpts, for example. “Die Courage” defines a concept, endowing it with human traits:

Everything soft or tender,

be banished. Anything that asks 

mercy, be exiled. A hard

cheese, that’s what you are,

sinewy, and with a voice

like smoke or a spice grater.

The speaker follows Courage “through the woods,” through poverty and illness, until the concept transforms into human action: “Foolish woman. / Go find your son.”

In “Verliebt,” young lovers begin as innocent creatures destined for a tragic fate:

Oracular valentine, with the drunk

little black milk snakes curled up

on your forehead. Their tongues

lapped the saucer and they fell

fast asleep. Your heart a black

heart, buttoned on with a mitten.

These 25 poems of definition tempt and thrill with adept imagery. Hollander is one of those rare wordsmiths who can place three or four adjectives in a row and make them work like magic. (See “drunk / little black milk snakes” in “Verliebt,” above, and check out the three-adjective detail in “Ohne,” where “seals sleep on the slick / black living lace that coats the rocks.”) 

Hollander’s techniques extend beyond the elements of language, syntax, and imagery. She has organized a manuscript that moves with meaningful intention from the moment that little cedar ladder extends from the sleeve of the traveling coat, “ready to take you away,” to the final moment of the final poem, “Zusammen,” imploring, “Call everyone. Call everything loved. / Take my hand. Let’s go.”

What a privilege to be led by this writer of inspiring intellect into a collection that reveals ever-intensifying histories of people and events, each unfolding in poem after poem, section after section, to culminate in a memorable volume that begs rereading, time after time, like all good tales of seemingly impossible human nature.

 

Louder Birds

by Angela Voras-Hills
(LSU Press, 2020)

Reviewed by Katherine Hollander

In Angela Voras-Hills’s exciting first book, Louder Birds, we encounter a world of wonder and unease, an acutely yet fantastically midwestern landscape teeming with life and seething with quiet danger. The poems that construct this world are sharp and exact, tart and rigorous. Admirably strict and spare formally, they are also self-critical, featuring an innocent and sometimes bewildered “I” who is never overindulged by the speaker. In this humorous and sometimes brutal book, there is ice fishing, there is Jell-O, there is a pair of wild foxes charmingly named Conclusion and Prudence. There are cornfields and barns, an “I” and a “you,” a grandmother and a baby (sometimes yet unborn), a cat that stalks from poem to poem. There is the threat and actuality of bodily harm, and what feels like an entire Peterson Field Guide’s worth of animals, the majority of them dead. Most importantly, there is a very sure hand, a very confident voice directing the flight and shape of these excellent poems.

The best in the collection—wonders that include “Never Eat a Polar Bear’s Liver,” “Krakow,” “Chateaubriand,” “When We Were Prey to Nothing,” and “In the Beginning”—posit a strange and tender relationship between a sometimes-befuddled subject and her sometimes-broken environment. The speaker is affectionate towards, and alienated from, both the natural and the human (although these poems rightly look askance at that artificial divide). They both confess and celebrate: “we brought guns to the firehouse bake sale,” the speaker in “Bake Sales” tells us, “we caught the carpet-mouse, left him / asleep in a box with crayoned windows.” In this poem, as in a number of others, childhood is charged with relish and menace. In winter, “We raced to the front porch to lick / the icicle hanging from gutter to ground,” and in summer, children are given “five dollars for a Dixie cup full” of lemonade by men who, perhaps friendly, perhaps sinister, then “[drive] away waving, their lips wet.”

In “On Earth as It Is in Heaven,” a jubilant mother rides her motorcycle to Las Vegas and drinks “cocktails in the sun” just days after cancer treatment, but this triumph is placed next to a childhood memory of a grandfather whose “friend learned he had brain cancer and shot himself.” His widow is unconsoled by floral arrangements, prayer, or “ham and potato casserole” in a church basement, but still, and in the face of all this, the family stocks its freezer with abundant fish from the same lake “my grandpa landed his plane on.” In the wonderful “Maps of Places Drawn to Scale,” “a van flips on an exit ramp” and provides the occasion for a meditation on how birth, death, and community are different in small towns and large cities:  

                                                     [ … ] At a Chinese buffet,
                                 Death is stuffing her cheeks
                    with crab rangoons, while a family
      stands behind her with empty plates. Nobody stuck
                    to the vinyl booth finds ‘You will suffer’
                                inside their cookie, but it’s implied

These poems—funny, sad, unflinching—are typical of the collection in the way they productively commingle ordinary but authentic pleasure, flawed human connection, and the threats of death and harm.

This threat of harm runs through the collection like barbed wire through a field. When it works, it is part of the rigor that infuses the book, giving it a powerful shrewdness and frugality—though the images of violence, particularly that visited upon animals, can sometimes feel grotesque. We encounter a drain full of dead eels fed upon by flies, a dying worm consumed by millipedes, a field of crow parts crunching underfoot, two separate bleeding rabbits, and a doe that “flipped / over our hood and dragged her back legs / across the highway into the woods.” This violence is often effective. For example, the car-struck doe appears in the beautiful “Controlled Burn,” along with a dead but still-speaking vole and a “chorus” of living frogs, who advocate on opposite sides of a debate about heaven. In this poem, the question of violence and death is a real question, complex and nuanced, and the contradictory answers are inflected with humility and forbearance.

Similarly, “Preserving” (one of my favorite poems in the book) moves from luscious plenty and human care to bleak humor or worry and back again several times, tracing the preservation of a summer’s worth of lemons to a tumble on winter ice:

              [ … ] When I fall,
            I catch myself with my face.
                        When I fall, I go

                        to the hospital, to make sure
                        the baby is still alive.
            There are so many small things
         
            to worry about in a large way.

Here, injury and the very real threat of personal loss are tempered by an understanding of the haplessness of human destruction—of the environment and climate, of animals, and of other humans, including a botched death row execution. Toads thrown into a pond by children in the mistaken belief that they are frogs will still drown, regardless of the children’s good intentions, but nevertheless “we can’t blame them for not knowing / what swims, what sinks, what floats.”

At other times the proliferation of physical harm approaches gratuitousness, what it represents or portends unclear. Instances of mundane or believable injury (the pregnant woman’s fall or the doe struck by the car) are joined by more fantastical ones (a speaker who paints the mouths of strangers shut with glue, or one who spontaneously “slit[s] the skin” of ermines “to warm my neck”). These two sorts of violence—fantastical and mundane—are both adroitly conjured, but they sometimes seem to undermine one another, making it harder to take either variety with the seriousness it demands. Instructions toward an ethics of violence—how should we understand this? Should we stop it? Can we, and how?—are not forthcoming. This perhaps weakens the collection, but it is also part of its spell. It feels of a piece with the half-imaginary midwestern world Voras-Hills conjures so well; like the real Midwest, it feels plain, clear, and very, very confusing, intolerant of obfuscation and mysticism but also profoundly obscure, profoundly mysterious in its total refusal to offer explanations—if you belonged, the poems both demonstrate and lament, fondly concede and stubbornly protest, you’d already know. This is itself an incantation (assisted by the poems’ consistently oracular titles, like “Wait in the Bathtub and It Will Carry You”), and the spell works. But there are moments, too, when we might wish for a little more mercy, a little more clarity.

Yet it is clear that Voras-Hills is a poet of seriousness and talent, one whose vision is attentive, unsparing, and, in the end, compassionate. In the very first poem in the book, she presents us with a girl “holding a plywood sign that reads: / zucchini / and God / in red paint,” tells us that “her hair snarls in the wind / and rain, but she doesn’t notice. Like any sign,” Voras-Hills reminds us, “it’s difficult to know how seriously to take it.” This difficulty, this question of seriousness, these signs—these are the worthy subjects of her poetic scrutiny. And there are no easy answers. But the poet’s precision, the beauty of her language, and her comfort with the obscure and the unknowable offer, if not a rescue, a reprieve. “For now, the puddle remains / unnamed,” she tells us, “so it is not yet a disaster.”