Jérôme Melançon: Forest of Noise, by Mosab Abu Toha

Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha
Knopf, 2024

 

 

 

Writing about life amid bombs, dismemberments, and deaths; in cities and refugees camps; in the library he created and in the moment of forced flight; and in houses that continue to stand like the families that inhabit them, Mosab Abu Toha commits to life, beauty, relationship to the land, and continuity – all things that Israel seeks to destroy in Gaza through its genocide against Palestine.

Forest of Noise follows Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (2022), a very well-received collection that brought wider attention to the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza (which Israel has since destroyed). By gathering, sharing, and writing books English-language books, Abu Toha participates in maintaining Gazans’ connection to the world, alongside the immense work of Arabic-language poets.

It may be unfair to read and contextualize Forest of Noise so squarely through this anti-imperialist and anti-genocidal approach. Even though Abu Toha does write to resist against these immense systems and their violence, even though he chronicles and widely shares this violence and its meaning for those it targets, a book of poetry can only appear slim and fleeting when compared to the enormity of this destruction.

And yet each of his poems affirms life and shares strength.

The book opens with the lines “Tanks roll through dust, / through eggplant fields.” The symmetry of syllables reinforces the contrast between what crushes and what is crushed, while the rhythm lets us feel the fragility, tenderness, and vitality of the land, especially in view of those parts that have already been reduced to dust. Composed of couplets, this first poem, “Younger than War,” presents a sequence of incisive images that work together to deepen the sense that each event is related and lived through all the others.

Throughout the collection, Abu Toha uses a variety of forms and rhythms to match a shifting tone and to accentuate each of the quickly morphing emotions he presents. Here, in “My Son Throws a Blanket over my Daughter. Gaza, May 2021,” and there, in “On Your Knees,” free verse allows for a slow, careful telling of atrocities and of the resistance to the destruction they are meant to cause. These two poems show the inhumanity of encounters with the military, whether it is at a distance, when a family comes together to wait out the bombings, or directly, when Abu Toha is separated from his family and arbitrarily and brutally abducted, detained, and beaten. Here, line breaks give respite and mimic breath: “Our backs bang on the walls / whenever the house shakes. / We stare at each other’s faces, scared yet happy / that, so far, our lives have been spared.” There, line breaks imitate the breathlessness and indignation of the exhausted prisoner who is repeatedly given the same order: “On your knees! / Yes, I’m a teacher, I say. / On your knees! / But I won’t reach the blackboard / when on my knees. / I’m handcuffed, blindfolded. / I’m shoved from the back of my neck.” The care with which Abu Toha tells these stories meets the contrast of the pain, fear, and shock to bodies that are shaken, banged, restrained, shoved – in no way free to move.

Aside from versified poems, short letters and journals that are just long enough to tell stories open up other possibilities for self-contained explorations of what can be told of the losses and destructions in Gaza along with what is kept and remade. Abu Toha also has recourse to even shorter fragmented poems, so that he may tell what remains possible without exposing the idea to its possible completion… and its likely end. Told in fragments or short forms, the moments and relationships he describes are full of hope and future – and violence and death take on a fleeting character in spite of their repetition.

And at times, Abu Toha refrains from relying even on such poetic effects and literary devices to simply tell, so that we may witness. In this self-restraint, which appears for instance in a short story-like telling of a bilingual letter left in a cemetery for the Angel of death, he indirectly highlights the reach of the poetic aspects of his writing, allows them to shine through more brightly, and lets us become explicitly aware of how he brings Gaza and Gazans to us.

Rhythm, and especially speed, meets the challenges in telling harrowing stories that might otherwise begin to sound repetitive. After all, who would not turn away from images and stories of genocide, after a while? And who would not begin to mix together the succession of persons and acts of violence (and reactions and counter-actions of hope) even as they are told? To Gazans, seeing the death and mutilation of people and the destruction of the places they inhabit as statistics or wholes is impossible: every person, every thing is a world of its own. Abu Toha paces his collection, creates effects of surprise, rest, and work, and brings his readers to participate in the telling by allowing themselves to be taken up by his voice. Aside from the slow pacing described above, there is panic, as in “1948,” where the Nakba is life and death both at a standstill, suspended, through short flurries of words interspersed with breathless silence (“     sparrow on window    shrapnel on door / water leaks     earth soaks blood”) – a panic that is also a refusal to tie organize this catastrophe into an event that bears its own meaning, awaiting instead its telling and its hearing.

And there is also the collapsing of free verse into a single paragraph interspaced with slashes, which brings a hurried, frantic rhythm to the poem “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike.” What might have otherwise looked like a list poem becomes a fevered incantation where simple acts meant to increase the chance of survival morph into the gestures needed for life to continue, so that packing a bag leads to life-giving possibilities: “if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds, / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other[.]”

This reliance of the variation of form takes place against certain constants: oranges, the sea, the presence of the past through pictures, or through stories and dreams about grandparents or a deceased brother. These constants repeat through the collection just as they do in daily life. These poems are full of rooms, full of doors (which, unhinged, become stretchers or hide bodies), full of roads (and streets that are never flat), all spaces that do not truly have an outside or an inside since they are constantly surveilled, constantly about to be annihilated or become deadly rubble. Speaking of, or to, his brother, Abu Toha collapses even the representations of time and space: “I’m looking at the calendar. It’s October 13, You died eight years ago. The square that besieges number 13 reminds me of a grave[.]” That the resting places of the poet’s relatives are razed to the ground and gravestones destroyed only adds to the collapsing of representations and of the anchors that facilitate return to places and people.

In this collection, Abu Toha addresses us – readers of English-language poetry – and shapes us into the public Palestine needs. Though he has this public in mind, this is not a strategic decision, as he explains that “I can express my feelings and my observations better in English than in Arabic.” He shares and relies upon many of the central references of English-language poetry. He takes up poems after Ginsberg and Whitman, but quickly ends them: the great impetus of their long poems, which depends greatly on the others who are able to form a collective, is stopped short by brains “protruding from their slashed heads” and by falling rubble. He gestures toward a poem “After Bob Kaufman” but is interrupted by the pieces of shrapnel that can be found among the objects of everyday life. He prefaces the collection with a quotation from Audre Lorde and a poem with a quotation from Elizabeth Bishop, reminding us that all these poets can also bring our attention to those whose lives and deaths we allow to leave unheard (though regardless of who listens, they do not remain untold). And in every poem, through the collection, his numerous interviews, his social media account, he keeps us engaged, showing us that resistance is not to be romanticized but understood simply as the act of living as oneself, as one’s own people, when others seek to destroy that possibility.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this, notably on settler colonialism in Canada. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Neeli Cherkovski : Broadway for Paul, by Vincent Katz

Broadway for Paul, Vincent Katz
Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

 

 

 

 

Vincent Katz will not leave New York for himself alone. Like so many other poets, most notably Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca, he gives us Manhattan. So much is incorporated here — that is the way he wants it. In Broadway for Paul, the poet shows his hometown from many different vantage points — always with a sense of love and subtle astonishment. He may have been born there, but that doesn’t stop Katz from seeing it anew.  He writes in the opening of the first poem of how “totally enamored” he is of the people who crowd the streets.  We’re told it’s a “warm mid-March evening near 39th and Park,” and then begins a cascade of observations following this information. “The light is such that I can see everyone…” There it is, that habit poets have of seeing so much — of seeing everything and everyone and then making something of it. The poet will dig deep into his city. It is his world and he will share it as such. In the second poem, he’s talking about the subway where you can “look at all the people, and each one is different”.  They are all inside of a bubble, the poet tells us: the City itself is a bubble. We are led into it slowly, the sound of Manhattan enters our pores.  The tempo of this raucous metropolis is caught quite effectively, “They carry their lunches in paper or plastic bags/They are rushing but composed”. Yes, it had to be the same city where Lorca felt overwhelmed by the monolithic architecture.  Katz has the New Yorkers’ vision to see “People in high boardrooms creating situations affecting those with nothing”.

One of the more ambitious poems in this collection is “Autumn Days & Hours.”  This poem is a rich panoply of images.  “A forceful grey covers the sky”.  Not difficult to conjure up such a coloring.  We see “punctuations of light pressing through here and there.”  Because this is a longer poem it is easy for the reader to be comfortably lost within the language. Katz pushes one mood against another and turns abruptly from shadow to light. 

His words are unified and hold onto ordinary facts that help orient his reader, “It was in the high 80s today. The view is endlessly entertaining, like a slow-moving film.”  This conversational tone pervades the collection.  The poet sticks by his reader, putting the city forward matter of factly.  Soliloquizing will not be found here, though there are our elegiac moments that underscore Katz’s relationship to his town. “River” is an artful work of concision:  “This is where I am a poet:/Right here, at the edge of the river, in the cold/Those colors at the end of day…”  And then will write, “I’m able to have my own views out here/And I can hear the water lapping”.

Yes, certainly a sense of romanticism is in this collection, yet that is not the main thing here.  Broadway for Paul is a hybrid.  There is none of the plaintive cry of Lorca or boisterousness of Walt Whitman.  This is a man coming to terms with a cityscape/landscape he has known all his life. He not only digs into the present, but walks the town historically as well. The longer poem “A City Marriage” takes care of all that. Amid the iconic features of modern New York/Manhattan, we are shown The African Burial Ground. Katz tells us how to get there: A short walk here. A short walk there. On the way to that historical place he shows many mysteries and wonders that abide. Reading the poem is like having a carousel spin you around and cast you on a path to the past.

This is a friendly book — not like, I’m an old acquaintance taking you for a trip in an environment with which I am well acquainted. There is nothing in the way of confrontation, it is more like a good conversation, in which you listen with care to the possibilities language affords.  Jump in.  Tackle the avenues.  Make the streets.  Let the poet show you the Way.

 

 

 

 

Neeli Cherkovski’s recent books of poetry include Hang on to the Yangtze River and Elegy for my Beat Generation from Lithic Press. Currently completing new edition of his biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is the recipient of an American book award.

Eileen R. Tabios : BROADWAY FOR PAUL, by Vincent Katz

BROADWAY FOR PAUL, Vincent Katz

Knopf, 2020

I can’t think of a more fitting first poem than “Between the Griffon and Met Life” for Vincent Katz’s new book, BROADWAY FOR PAUL (Knopf, New York, 2020). It is an extremely welcoming poem, not just in its narrative that begins

I am totally enamored of every person passing in this

          unseasonably warm mid-March evening near

          39^th and Park

but in the lightness of its tone. I cite “light” here as a pun as Katz also articulates what will  burnish our view of the persona: “The light is such that I can see everyone and can imagine what they are imagining for the night ahead, what dreams, what fulfilled fantasies of togetherness”. The all of this poem is just a great set-up for what comes next.

What comes next, as noted by the title, is New York’s Broadway—life on its streets, subways, offices and those who populate such scenes. But what the reader ends up seeing is not just New York but City writ large. References may be to Manhattan but the observation and wisdom cuts across geography, e.g. this ending to “7 A.M. Poem”—

The people arriving on trains are not New Yorkers, but

They too are filled with desires, plans, wrapped in winter coats

As the people crashed out on stairs or in abandoned buildings

People in high boardrooms creating situations affecting those with nothing

or, from”Morning, Or Evening?”

“Important to be in one’s own head, not subject to advertising or even others’ art”.

I was heartened to read the poem “Flows” because that’s part of this collection’s achievement: an organic turn from one city scene to another, whether on a concrete sidewalk or in the mind. Such an ease—this flow—widens the persona’s position in New York to include the rest of the world, as in

RIVER

This is where I’m a poet:

Right here, at the edge of the river, in the cold

Those colors at the end of day, in winter

I’m able to have my own views out here

And I can. Hear the water lapping

I love this curved building lit up at night

Like somewhere in Germany

“RIVER” certainly works well as an ars poetica poem, that is, that perhaps the poet needs to be at the “edge” of something that is moving elsewhere—that such a positioning is required for ensuring one’s ability to become exposed, to before taking in, much of what composes the very large universe. Here, the poet doesn’t simply views but takes in—an effect manifested in how Katz’s poems are generously populated with details—from “Café With Bryan Ferry”:

The breeze is causing the canopy edge to flutter,

In turn causing a shadow to enter and retreat

On the edge of the café table

Its pulsing is mesmerizing and also calming

It helps put him in a general trance of midday

In addition, the collection’s flow—tone—is not interrupted but only deepened by the allowance of what can be jarring, e.g. “Ivanka Skirting” that begins

These are poems of mind control I’m going to get inside

          Their minds and change their policies

I am starting with Ivanka before I can move on to Jared

Ivanka is wearing a wrap skirt as she smiles to the children in

          The classroom, Jared smirks walking away

Nothing is easy, no blemishes in this park, green grass

          Beginning to come, March trees in bud, lofty edifices

          Preside

Castle rocks reflect in pond, organic base of massive pain

This city where the rich feast on others’ innards

Expertly-crafted imagery, the specifics of details without getting bogged down in them, the light, the palpable consciousness of a persona which nonetheless does not deter the reader from a personal inhabitation of the poems—Katz’s poetic skills make this collection not only one to read but one that activates the mind’s eyes; I agree with the jacket description of Katz’s poetry as “a way of seeing that can change hearts and minds.” He achieves such with so much grace that to read many of the poems is to feel the world more alit with a ceaseless desire for connections.

Eileen R. Tabios has released over 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in ten countries and cyberspace. Her 2020 books include a short story collection, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora; a poetry collection, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019; and her third bilingual edition (English/Thai), INCULPATORY EVIDENCE: Covid-19 Poems. She invented the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form, and the MDR Poetry Generator, which can create poems totaling theoretical infinity. Translated into 11 languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com