Afterimages; Zen Poems

This book is Zen, and it is neither mystical nor concrete. It is not here-and-now because there is no here and now in these pages, but it also not surrealist. The author is said to have been a Dadaist, but that is not the coin of the realm either. All I can say is that images come after you, the reader, arising unforgettably out of the quotidian, always particular. A very concrete, here-and-now translator, Lucien Stryk, does an admirable job of keeping up the pace, which moves along much faster than his own very solid, earthbound poetry. A human self emerges from it all, but then quickly submerges. The narrator experiences the range of human emotion. He finds "moonlight between a woman's legs" ("Aching of Life"), then, on the next page, he is looking into the eyes of a potential suicide and asks, "How can I possibly/ Save this woman's life?/ Living as if dead, I shall/ Give up my own..." ("Canna"). Shadows of Hiroshima and worse, ("An atomic submarine nudges past your belly," in "Sparrow in Winter"), mingle with images of great peace ("Time like a lake breeze/Touched his face," from "Time"); Buddhist activism, ("That was the best moment of the monk's life" from "Burning Oneself to Death") coexists with Christian mysticism "The light yellow legs go up the hill of Golgotha," from "Quails.") There are (many) sparrows, cats, rats, quails, pigeons, oxen, roosters and bats. The devil, it turns out, is God. But for this review, the wind has the last word, in "Wind Among the Pines": (entire) The wind blows hard among the pines/ Toward the beginning/ Of an endless past./Listen: you've heard everything.