From the Interior

Petr Borkovec FROMTHE INTERIOR Poems 1995 - 2005 Tr.m?>Lued fro;n the ( by Justin Quinn idiom into forms that are power ful and new, has been compellingly captured by the translators in this volume. As she said in a recent interview: "Allmy lifeI've been say ing that I serve poetry. Lately Ihave begun to see thatwhat I am really doing is serving language. Poetry is the instrument, the medium. I have an almost religious attachment to language." (Editorial note: Three of Anghelaki-Rooke's Penelope poems appeared in the January 2009 issue ofWLT.) PeterConstantine New York Petr Borkovec. From the Interior: Poems 1995-2005. Justin Quinn, tr. Bridgend, Wales. Seren (ipg, distr.). 2008. 120 pages. ?9.99/$ 19.95. isbn 978-1-85411-472-3 It's been twentyyears since the fall of the BerlinWall. What has hap pened politically and sociologically in the countries ofCentral and East ern Europe continues to be docu mented with ardor. Surprisingly, however, the new literatures are yet to attract any noticeable attention, particularly in the United States, where, say, Hungarian or Romanian writers cannot rely on the generos ityof the European Union to help distribute their works. Additionally, some believe that thewriting artists who came of age in the 1990s have simply not produced anything of lasting value. In Poland, for exam ple, the criticsargue that thedecade belonged to old masters, mainly Czeslaw Milosz andWislawa Szym borska, rather than the darlings of the media, the so-called "Barbar ians" inspired by the freewheeling poetry of theNew York School (see WLT, May 2004,48-52). What about the formerCzecho slovakia's western half, today's Czech Republic? While theworks of Holub and Seifertare relativelywell known and celebrated, albeit not as much as thoseof the legendaryprose writers Hrabal and Kundera, hardly anything isknown about contempo rary Czech poetry. Naturally, this slim volume of one of the country's rising stars is a welcome trailblazer. Unlike his famous predecessors, Petr Borkovec, who was born in 1970, is neither political nor allegorical. Instead, he is a poet at home with razor-sharp imagery and sensual details: "The eye somehow / (helped by the iceboxbulb, theskylights,and all old ballads of thehills) / divides up time." Befitting a poet whose world continues tobe fragmentedby history, change, and his own being, his use of language ismicroscopic. In fact,many of these poems are snapshots of thepoet's thoughtsand surroundings, carefullydistilled and articulated. For example, one poem opens with "the topmost window open like a lid?" and ends with "Meanwhile the crowds and crowds of eyes, inwaves, / go in the air likehands, repeatedly, / and speech E explodes with colours. Suddenly E eyes / take in theharbour's complex E panoply." Initially, themuted voice = recalls the cadences of a mind hard E at work comprehending the mul- E tiplicity of the outside world, but E the ending is somewhat orgasmic, E acknowledging thatthe insufficiency E of language can be liberating.Con- E sequently, in Borkovec's poems the E ensuing dialogue is always internal E and external. E This is a risky proposition, E mainly because thedredging of per- E ception can be frustratinglyephem- E eral. Additionally, the procession E of observations?the word window E features throughout the collection? E gets tiringafter a while. Still, like a E skilled artisan, Borkovec breathes E life into his lines one syllable at a E time. Interestinglyenough, the col- E lection concludes with a fascinating E memoir, written in prose, recalling E the poet's three granddaughters. It E is the last few sentences that illu- E minate the purpose behind Bor- E kovec's method, particularly when E hewrites, "More oftennow Idescribe E thatwhich I did not see." Indeed, E what keeps his work fromunravel- E ing is the subtletyof thedetails and E theresurrectingnature of theproject E itself, which ismore spiritual than E materialistic, and theway the poet E creates a mosaic of past and present, E the real and the imagined, without E emphasizing one over theother. E Piotr Florczyk E Wilmington,Delaware E Yearn Hong Choi.Moon of New York. E Baltimore, Maryland. PublishAmerica. E 2008. 105 pages. $16.95. isbn 978-1- 1 60610-780-1 I The recurring themes

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