If I Were a Suicide Bomber by Thom Satterlee

focused on the physical universe, reaching out to the stars as well as down to the depths of the sea, which may be why she has been called an ecopoet. The outside world is, indeed, perhaps the most important presence in these poems. Yet they are not moralistic and do not indulge themselves in entranced communion with nature (see WLT, Nov. 2014, 30–32). Fiedorczuk writes a metaphysical verse informed by psychology, astronomy, biology , and literary criticism. Academic language is, for her, a source of metaphorical play: “assimilation and dissimilation” govern the process of converting matter into more or less complex particles, but it is also a rhyming, gently ironic way of summing up the process of seasonal change. She is an explorer, sometimes a celebrant, often one who enjoys complicating the scene she observes. We may feel confused by her intense metaphorical play but never feel that the author holds her knowledge above us or engages in an intellectual game that she will always win. Indeed, one of the mysteries of these poems is the way that they manage to avoid the overwhelming presence of a first-person speaker while also avoiding the coldness of impersonality . Somehow, the poet is there and yet in hiding, acknowledging her own presence yet refusing to occupy much space in the poem. Even in poems that consider the self and her daily life, there is no confessionalism or egotism. In this she resembles Wisława Szymborska, whose first-person speaker is hidden in plain sight, modestly refusing to take center stage. Bill Johnston translates this poetry faithfully and respectfully. He is to be commended for retaining the dominant tones of these poems as well as their literal meanings . Fiedorczuk’s play with tone is, indeed, a delightful feature of her work, and Johnston allows English-language readers to experience her mixture of profundity and levity, contemplative calm and dramatic movement. We can only hope for more in the future. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria Per Aage Brandt. If I Were a Suicide Bomber. Trans. Thom Satterlee. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2017. 260 pages. Thom Satterlee’s translation, with facingpage originals, of the eminent Danish poet Per Aage Brandt is a great opportunity for the anglophone poetry audience to get acquainted with this quirky and engaging contemporary poet. Satterlee has provided a convenient sample from five of Brandt’s volumes, spanning the years between 2007 and 2014. Brandt’s poems are compact— usually ten lines, sometimes less—but rarely do they feel frivolous. The poems are by turns—or sometimes line by line—witty and weighty. They are invariably worthwhile . The compactness of these poems gives them an epigrammatic quality, but reading a number of them in succession puts one more in mind of Montaigne than of Martial . That is, the poems read like very tight verse essays, or assays. They try out and try on various ideas and perspectives. Often they express a strong but frustrated desire for transcendent meaning, as when, early in the volume, Brandt writes, “the morning light seems to want to speak” or, later and a bit more idiosyncratically, “the cat jumps up onto my computer / and vomits, that has to mean something[.]” Toward the end of the volume, he describes rain that sounds “as if the sea-dark truth was music’s / deeper meaning, which we still don’t believe[.]” Elsewhere in the book, Brandt turns this quest for a meaning always denied into a dialogue with the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Brandt has a marvelous habit of treating ideas almost as tangible things. In the title poem, for instance, he fantasizes about finding an isolated spot, concentrating on “the world’s most / insane, stupid, malodorous , and in every / respect repulsive ideas” until they are practically solidified before his eyes, and then detonating a bomb to blast the ideas, along with himself , out of existence. In a later poem he explains that “every time we think about the same thing, / the brain makes a new copy of the idea,” so that we can, without destroying the original, “twist and turn it, tear it into / tiny little bits and put it back together again / in the

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