\nA review of Pierre Joris\u2019s \u2018Barzakh\u2019<\/h2>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nBarzakh: Poems 2000\u20132012 My father was a healer & a hunter. Is it any surprise I became a poet & translator? (\u201cNimrod,\u201d 121)<\/p>\n \u201cNothing truer than fragment\u201d \u2014 I\u2019m quoting Robert Kelly \u2014 & I love the coupling of \u201ctruth\u201d which in our Western culture is always associated with the simple, the whole, the complete with the notion of the fragment, which can only be incomplete, multiple, partial so that the notion of a \u201ctrue fragment\u201d is de facto oxymoronic\u201d (\u201cMaintenant #94 \u2014 Pierre Joris: An interview with Pierre Joris by S. J. Fowler<\/a>)<\/p>\n In identifying archetypally with healer and hunter, Pierre Joris brings his poems of the twenty-first century into an ever more fervid and restless search mode. Healers and hunters operate under the most severe time constraints, with survival at stake. Which is why Robert Kelly\u2019s sage half-truth \u201cNothing truer than fragment\u201d needs to be fleshed out. What Joris does with fragments, with increasing acuity decade after decade in his poems, is search and sift among fragments with urgent speed and decisiveness \u2014 nomad on the run \u2014 to shape fragments so they coalesce into culturally vibrant patterns of meaning. Think of Pound\u2019s image of iron filings magnetized, constellated into an image of a rose. Like Pound, Joris finds fragments that move through his field of attention at high-velocity. Often from source to target language(s), faithful to his Luxemborgian-cum-American self whose oscillations in youth between German and French gave rise to his unsettling-settling home language of American English. Heard in the play of his ear and intellect, a true world music mix from a hydrogen jukebox in \u201cA Poem in Noon\u201d:<\/p>\n where our r, French, Roaming among romance languages \u2014 hunting in the terra incognita of romance \u2014 Joris finds fragments of extraordinary resonance among the exiled: Dante (\u201cThis afternoon Dante\u201d), Jabes (\u201cReading Edmond Jabes\u201d), and Celan (\u201cShakespeare sonnet #71, re-Englished after Paul Celan\u2019s German version without consulting the original\u201d). Hunting for fragments among them, carrying them with him on his US-Maghreb transits \u2014 he shares with his beloved exiles an acute moral vision, sparks crystallizing fragments into a poem as a patterned integrity, as dynamically whirling as a Calder mobile, intently defining exilic hideaways, latently healing\/reweaving a ripped social fabric. Set to music in this book\u2019s finale working through news fragments of yet another leaking oil tanker catastrophe at sea, \u201cThe Gulf: From Rigwreck to Disaster\u201d:<\/p>\n what we know is oil & water do not mix what we know is you & I have to mix
\n<\/em>Pierre Joris
\nBlack Widow Press<\/span> 2014, <\/span>306 pages, <\/span>$19.95, <\/span>ISBN 996007924<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nrolls & roils
\ninto the dark of a round
\nwonder, a drop in
\na bucket, to re-emerge
\nhissing wet, somewhat
\nsheepish, but not ain
\n<\/em>so difficult to pronounce
\nfor northern claritas<\/em>. (130)<\/p>\n
\nwhat we know is fish & oil do not mix<\/p>\n
\nwhat we know is you & I have to live (175)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n