Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély, Ottilie Mulzet

VERSE Radu Andriescu, lustin Pan{a, Cristian Popescu. Memory Glyphs: Three Prose Poets from Romania. Adam J. Sorkin et al.f trs. Prague. Twisted Spoon (SBC distr.).2009. 168 pages. $15. isbn 978-80-86264-32-5 In his brief but illuminating transla tor's preface to thework of three Romanian poets born in the 1960s, Adam J. Sorkin describes prose poems as "a formless form, oxymo ronic,with both lightness and heft,a chiseled, lapidary, elliptical poetry" that,according toRadu Andriescu, is "an abnormal mode of writing, marginal, irrelevant, and book ish." But anyone interested in the form or simply in challenging and sometimes brilliantwriting will see through this falsemodesty. Still, Andriescu describes his own work accurately. Some of his prose poems are peppered with allusions to poets and critics.He is least successful where he uses the iron rules of syntax to force together incongruous diction and images of muck, trash,and violence as ifhe is drunk on language, forgettingthat it is almost always more interestingto be drunk than to listen to a drunk. Fortunately, two of the last three poems are more coherent, closer to shareable experience, even medita tive.And in the last, "The Aswan High Dam," he presents fragments of disparate images?but preserved in theirdistinctiveness, allowing the reader to make connections, or not, rather than forcing them together. Iustin Pant a's world is no less seedy than Andriescu's, but he makes more effort to bring coher ence to itby implying a storyor dra matic situation, taking pleasure in "The Familiar," waiting for a lover's phone call and being irritatedby a wrong number before veering into annoyance at hotel phones with out dials because "I detest letting other people make the connection for me." Several of his pieces frame a centralblock of prose with poetry, implying psychological ifnot dra matic conflict. "A Confession," for example, begins with a kind of flirta tion, hesitant, uncertain, expectant, inwhich the speaker is interrupted by a gleam of light reflected from the woman's watchband. Without transition, Panta moves into a prose description of a bureaucratic meet ing, full of faked sentiments and forceddiction,which isdisrupted by awild bird thegroup triesto ignore. Then the poem continues without acknowledging the interruption, recalling the speaker's wordless departure from the woman but end ing "here I am now, beside you / tellingyou this tale." Cristian Popescu is the most original and satisfying of the three writers because he offers the stron gest and most original dramatic and linguistic contrasts. His work may begin in the observable world, but since he sees the poet as a cir- E cus monkey, it leaps into fantasy: E about private rituals afterhis grand- E mother's death; about a family tree E that takes physical form; about a E telephone intowhose slot various E objects are inserted with magical E results. In "The Big Obituary," one E ofmany poems that focus on death, E he envisions his relativeswriting it E with theirarranged bodies as part of E "a whole world of text" addressed E toGod. E Robert Murray Davis E Universityof Oklahoma E Szil?rd Borbely.Berlin-Hamlet Ottilie E Mulzet, tr.Prague.Agite/Fra. 2008. 107 1 pages. 199 Kc. isbn 978-80-86603-77-3| Berlin-Hamlet, originally published E in Hungarian in 2003, is a curious, E often enigmatic cycle of poems by E Szil?rd Borbely (b. 1964). From the E poems it transpires that the author E spent some time inBerlin. The book E consists of forty-nine poems of vari- E ous lengths and mood in freeverse. E The poems can be divided into five E differentsubgenres, though theyare E not grouped as such: allegories, let- E ters,fragments,poems about places E (in Berlin and Vienna), and epi- E logues. The positioning of one of the E "epilogues" is ratherpuzzling. Why E should "Epilogue 1," "the recording E of a drawn-out scream" of some E kind ofmythological creature, come E almost at thebeginning of thebook? E "Epilogue II," on the other hand, at E theend of thebook, contains axiom- E atic statements of gravity: "God's E being is an open box, filled / with E

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