Poets’ Corner

TSIGAN

The Gypsy Poem

By Cecilia Woloch

Cahuenga Press: 88 pp., $13 paper

Cecilia Woloch’s new book, “Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem,” is aptly subtitled. The poems have an impassioned, wandering, breathless style, as if the author were relating a harrowing tragedy, a story that has never before been told. And, in a sense, this is the case.

The background of the Roma, the gypsy people, has never been fully documented; the elusiveness of the nomadic tribe (both geographically and historically) is legendary. The poet tracks her paternal grandmother back to the village in the Carpathian mountains where she was born, suspecting a blood connection to the gypsies, but her ancestor’s origins remain obscure. There is only the hint of the half-pejorative, half-awed family reference to gypsy blood that draws Woloch into a kind of romantic espionage from country to country:

Twilight: moving east

en route to Krosno, moving south

toward that corner of the map

where Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia touch

the upper curve of the crescent moon

of the northernmost Carpathians.

The Lemki, Wallachians--nomads--

followed the curve of this crescent, traveled

the peaks from Romania ....

She records in single-sentence descriptions that multiply, page to page, like gravestones, the atrocities committed over the centuries against the Roma. Still, during her travels, she is warned by a scholar of gypsy culture that “it would be nonsense to create personal mythologies.”

This is the question the reader, caught up in the intoxicating swirl of language, may ask: Are we reading this meditation on diaspora as the author’s desire to document a kind of psychological ancestry or as a way back to the sources of literary self-invention?

Perhaps the book’s elusive intentions are less compelling than the poet’s own answer to the cautioning scholar:

I’d like to write

my name in snow;

I’d like to fly ...

into the blank page.

Like Keats’ epitaph--”Here lies one whose name was writ in water”--Woloch seems to be telling us how the essence of poetry is its own disappearance into silence, how improbable this mystery has always been for the bourgeois mind, the government of convention, how removed is the gypsy soul from the armed borders and maps, from the sad republic of clocks.

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AN ANTHOLOGY OF VIETNAMESE POEMS

Edited and translated by

Huynh Sanh Thong

Yale University Press: 444 pp., $20

Ever since the mid-century War of the Anthologies which pitted Donald Allen’s selection of poets (including the newcomer Allen Ginsberg) against Donald Hall’s more formal choices, many anthologies have tried to make “statements,” often haplessly. The worst offenders here, to my mind, are anthology editors who insist on forcing poems into an invented ill-fitting “aesthetic,” hoping to generate more literary groundfire (and a few book sales).

This reductionist mentality is especially ironic given that the term anthology derives from the Greek for “flower-gathering,” implying that the editor’s task is to pick an innately subjective and somewhat random bouquet of blooms. Given this tradition, there is dignity and intensity (not to mention an enormous volume of “gardening”) implicit in the selections in “An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems.” The work does not avoid “politics”--rather demonstrates its transformation into poetry. The selections (and straightforward translations) of Huynh Sanh Thong include poems from the 11th through the 20th centuries, 322 works by about 150 poets, “celebrated, obscure, or anonymous,” as the editor notes. These poems document the many and diverse strains of Vietnamese poetry (building on some aspects of an earlier anthology, “The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry”) and are organized loosely into “themes” that add up to a complex and fascinating view of the expressive tradition in Vietnam--seen through various lenses, including “the role of art in life” and “war and peace.”

Reading this book reminds one that an anthology’s editorial subjectivity can be either eye-opening and informative--or simply limiting. Here the political devastation of war clarifies itself into a lyric reminiscent of “The River Merchant’s Wife”:

You told me once you’d meet me in Lung-hsi--

from dawn I looked for you but saw no trace ...

At noon the village woke to shrill birds’ cries.