David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 145

Neruda’s final collection rewards the reader

The Sea and the Bells by Pablo Neruda


My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Neruda’s last and unfinished collection still contains a number of poems that are as wonderful as any her has written. These poems are both very person, such as the last poem he wrote to his beloved, Matilde (“Finale”), but also touch the universal if not the mythic (“Returning”).

Many of these poems feel unfinished, not just because they have no titles, but they lack that final quality of workmanship Neruda gives to his collections as they are published. Read this collection regardless. Neruda unfinished is superior to so many poets writing today and the collection as a whole rewards us as we experience the haunting sea and silent bell.





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Thank you Sky Island Journal for publishing two of my poems in their Issue 8

Thank you Sky Island Journal for publishing my poems “Smith” and “Dark Sector Lab, South Pole, March 2014” in Issue 8 Spring 2019. This is the first time my work has appeared in this journal. 

Facing Winter

Winter Garden by Pablo Neruda


My rating: 5 of 5 stars



A pensive collection as Neruda faces the Winter Garden of his dying. These elegiac poems sing with the imagery of nature and the lyrical voice of one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets as he faces the termination of his light. He addresses his literal last homecoming from France where he serves his native Chile, and a figurative homecoming as his “single journal” of life returns to the silence from which it came:

I am a man of so many homecomings
that form a cluster of betrayals,
and again, I leave on a frightening voyage
in which I travel and never arrive anywhere:
my single journey is a homecoming.







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Two of the 10-minute plays written by students in my Spring 2019 Creative Writing class at Germanna Community College can be viewed on YouTube

Two of the 10-minute plays written by students in my Spring 2019 Creative Writing class at Germanna Community College were performed by the class. They can be viewed on YouTube:

Miscommunication

It’s Nothing Personal

Celebrate National Poetry Month with a Night of Poetry at Germanna Community College in Fredericksburg April 25 6 to 8 p.m.

Yet one more fine translation by William O’Daly of the late work of Pablo Neruda

The Yellow Heart by Pablo Neruda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yet one more fine translation by William O’Daly of the late work of Pablo Neruda.

This collection of a sort of magical surrealism displays Neruda’s social and political commentary partly hidden by personal mythologies and ironic treatments of the “poet” himself and other actors. Despite the humor, or perhaps because f it, there is a poignancy to the poems and indeed the collection as a whole.

Neruda knew his cancer was going to kill him soon. And he had watched a his hopes for Chile were destroyed by the cancer of CIA-supported Fascism.

His biting satire mocks those middle class suburbanites who buy and buy and still die, and all those who fall again and again for


an endless track of champions
and in a corner we, forgotten
maybe because of everybody else,
since they seemed so much like us
until they were robbed of their laurels,
their medals, their titles, their names.

This passage has echoes of the Martin Niemöller poem:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Nonetheless, there is a forgiveness–for himself and for all the other flawed and fearful antiheroes of his poems. And he himself, at last “turn(s) toward my truth/because I am lacking a life.”

A collection to be read and reread.







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Gravel Magazine’s April 2019 issue includes my poems “Birth Season” and “The Art of Disharmony.”

Gravel Magazine’s April 2019 issue includes my poems “Birth Season” and “The Art of Disharmony.” They have published 6 of my poems and I thank the Editors at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

You can read my poem, “Age of Gold,” published online at Peeking Cat Poetry (Issue 38) and order a print copy.

You can read my poem, “Age of Gold,” published online at Peeking Cat Poetry (Issue 38) and order a print copy.

Thank you Editor Sam Rose.

Looking into the Stone Faces of Oblivion

The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda


My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is the second volume of Neruda’s poetry translated by William O’Daly that I have read, and it is also finely crafted and moving. Neruda takes Easter Island as his subject, the island in half the poems, the humans who live on it, have been part of its history, or visit it as the other half. This interplay of land and time and human experience offers Neruda a chance “to begin the lives of my life again,” an echo of Whitman’s “I contain multitudes.”

The language is simple but eloquent, sometimes blunt. The poet offers criticism with whimsical yet acerbic comparisons:

“we transport ourselves sin enormous aluminum geese,
seated correctly, drinking sour cocktails,
descending rows of friendly stomachs.

But the poet is ultimately forgiving to the humans as they face their individual journeys toward’s time end, as the civilization that made the great stone heads has died away. And those stone heads represent the ineffable that we face, not always with grace:

We all arrive by different streets,
by unequal languages, at Silence.

…we ceaseless talkers of the world
come from all corners and spit in your lava,
we arrive full of conflicts, arguments, blood,
weeping and indigestion, wars and peach trees,
in small rows of soured friendships, of hypocritical
smiles, brought together by the sky’s dice
upon the table of your silence.

Neruda’s conceit of the island of stone heads gives him the opportunity to talk about our experience anywhere on this world, the universality of our facing the unknowable as tourists face these black, unmoving stone visages. It takes a courage most of us lack to stare into them with knowing unknowing:

But let no one reveal the world to us, for we acquire
oblivion, nothing but dreams of air,
and all that’s left is an aftertaste of blood and dust
on the tongue…

Neruda himself faced illness and the overthrow of hopeful democracy in Chile by the military, followed by his own exile. That all certainly colors his mood. Nonetheless, his words and their able translation by O’Daly challenge us wherever we are to look into the else of stone silence, and make meaning from that oblivion.






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Merwin’s sage advice to writers and artists

“I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.” W. S. Merwin