#282:  THREE POETS.   It’s rare for a first collection of poems to show the strength and grace of Danusha Laméris’s book The Moons of August.  Many poets, still singing in the tones of callow youth, rush into print, which can have its merits: the early poems of Yeats, for instance, have a charm and sweetness that belong entirely to the young.  But Lameris’s book, with its voice fully arrived, the perfected sense of when to cut a sentence short, the precisely right divvying of the book into four sections, all so skillfully done, has also something miles past technique: a gravity lightly worn, an obvious dislike of raising her voice, and a life experience that seeps through the pages.  “I’ve lived long enough / to count my dead / on both hands,” and your voice rings differently after you’ve had to say that.  But there’s great fullness here: trees, persimmons, pigeons, cherries, and, in the startling last poem, “Horse.”  She gets poems out of names going out of style, Eve’s relief at escaping from the sameness of Paradise, and pigeons: “None will ever attain greatness. / Though every once in a while / in a tourist’s blurry snapshot / of a grand cathedral // they rise into the pale grey sky / all at once.”  (Take note of how the vowels tumble smoothly along in those lines.)  You have to have known “our banquet of loss” to write this well.  From “Cherries”:  “Doesn’t everything that shines carry its own shadow? / A scar across the surface, a worm buried in the sweet flesh. / Why not reach in, take whatever falls into your hand.”

      The work of Attila József—in a pocket-sized selection called A Transparent Lion—was a bolt out of the blue. He was unknown to me, but is considered one of the great twentieth-century Hungarian poets, born in 1905 and died, a likely suicide, in 1937.  He was deserted by his father at age three, and lived with his mother, who died of cancer when he was fourteen; the loss marked him for life.  From then on, it seems in reading about him online, he wandered from label to label: psychologically, it was decided he was depressive, schizophrenic, or neurasthenic; politically, he was proletarian, socialist, or revolutionary, and after his death got claimed by the Hungarian Communist Party, who had previously expelled him. (Really, if you can ever find a Marxist or Communist government who ever did anything with its artists except piss in their soup, I’ll buy you dinner.)  All this is frustrating in the face of his poems, which, even at the distance of translation, proclaim him a great figure.  There is something Keatsian in him, that vulnerability to the world that gives some poets their music.  He knew the folk poetry of Hungary, as well as the Dadaists and the moderns; you would never take him as being from the nineteenth century.  The proletarian does indeed speak of the poverty he knew and saw around him; but he had an extraordinary sense of the beauty of the world, both social and natural (there’s Keats for you, again).   He had humor, and he had great directness and seriousness; he never blushes at his emotion, his pain, his lostness.  “My homeland, race and humanity / I do know my obligation, // like a mournful stranger at the end of the procession, / when someone gets buried with splendor.”  He wrote, “”Still I’m hopeful.  And tearfully implore you / our beautiful future, don’t be so dreary!...Soon the peace of freedom will arrive.”  But as the datelines of the poems reach into 1937, we hear the end coming—“I cannot find words for myself”—and we turn back to the frighteningly prophetic first poem in the book, which ends, “A drunk man lies on the tracks / and from afar, the earth slowly begins to rumble.”  His fame came afterward, and he is much loved in Hungary today, which is consoling.  “He is fiery like the sun,” his countryman and fellow poet Dezso Tandori wrote.  “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” it says on Keats’s nameless grave in Rome, who was sure he would be forgotten.  He wasn’t.  Sometimes heartbreak and failure aren’t the only truths.

      In my secondhand copy of Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, the translator Andrew Schelling has inscribed it to its earlier owner with “Old poems from the far side of the moon.”  If the far side of the moon is how we measure distance, I think he’s wrong: nothing could be less distant, less lunar, than these spare little verses, translated from Sanskrit verses, some of them two thousand years old.  We always go on about the strangeness of old cultures, how easily they may be misinterpreted, but maybe people don’t get all that different over the centuries, especially not when it comes to the erotic impulse.  “Close your eyes   let / the four remaining months / drift past.  Then / all those desires / ripened by separation / we’ll slake at night / beneath the huge harvest moon.”  “Last year and each / year before, / birdsong and spiced wind / blew down from the / Kerala hills. / But restless, unbridled, / my wits, friend / have never been / so distracted as this year.”  Sanskrit, for anyone who has wandered even a little close to it, is grammatical and syntactic jungle territory, wildly and dauntingly complicated; Schelling, who has picked the language up where and how he could, wields these texts into American poems of grand directness, grand simplicity.  He compares them with the verses of the Greek Anthology, but the sunlight in them is maybe a little moister, a little more shot through with scudding clouds?   A bit less stark, but just as ardent?  This is one of those wonderful books in which all scholarly questions bow to the passion of the poems.  One for the current gender studies class:   “This time let me / be the lady / you play the lover— // to which the girl / protests / shaking her head // but eyes / wide like a / deer’s eyes she threads / a bracelet onto his wrist.”  And one for the times we (always) live in:  “The gold of poetry / gets smelted and refined / from the speech of / unreflective men. / Let us go / cheerfully among them / with poised minds.”  Schelling writes in his preface: “No, not immortality, but a terrible swift impermanence haunts love and chases poetry out of the dark corners of human utterance.  Certain bittersweet delights taken in one another, when in our groping way we manage to touch another person, balance the betrayals and loss.  If these translations convey a hint of it they have more than repaid the labor.”  He caps the book with a little marvel, eight short lines and twenty-seven words, that explains the title and encapsulates the whole.  More than a hint, and richly repaid.

The Moons of August, by Danusha Laméris.  Autumn House Press, 2014.

A Transparent Lion, by Attila József.  Translated by Michael Castro and Gábor G. Gyukics. 

      Green Integer, 2006.

Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, translated by Andrew Schelling.  Broken Moon

       Press, 1991.