The Hunt on the Lagoon

by Sheldon Zitner

Sheldon Zitner summed up his career in a seven-word "Here lies, as usual, a Jew d'esprit." The genial wit of "Trial Epithet" informs the whole of this deeply moving collection by a poet and scholar whom A.F. Moritz describes as "a man of the world in the best sense." Whether he is celebrating life's infinite creativity, recognizing the joy imprisoned in a wheelchair-bound man, or affirming art's mission to outlast atrocity, Zitner unswervingly follows Rilke's injunction to join "work of the eyes" with "heart-work." In the collection's title poem, Zitner states that "we invent the world we love, /and like the painter's eyes, our own /persuade the hard discrete details /. . . to surrender to a luminous belonging." Throughout this wonderful collection, many such revelatory moments are caught and many details rendered with equal luminosity. Writing completely without sentimentality, Zitner nonetheless composed his poems with an underlying tenderness and a sadness always held in check by his characteristic urbanity and his epigrammatic wit. The Hunt on the Lagoon is Zitner's final work. These last poems, and all his poems, are things into which he breathed his spirit, and where he can still be met. A poet to the last, The Hunt on the Lagoon is a fitting monument, an inspired book about absence and loss, about the transience of bliss.

102 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2005

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skeletal cabbage, lowly, as grey as green,
with leaves - no, tentacles -

clutching sunlight,
your roots a Medusa tangle

insatiable as mind,
the hunger underground

feeding the hunger above.
Archaic bloom, untamed,

fixed and uncivil as a saint,
I do not know your name

any more than you know mine,
Sun-sharer, your mouth and mine

thirst together, and your breath
restores that mine consumes.

- Weed, pg. 13

* * *

The table talk is lapsing, and we leave
for coffee and a sweet in another room.

Don't switch on the lamps;
the dinner candlelight is light enough.

This is our season of lingering twilights
when trees withhold their darkness

and all things hint as forgotten affinities.
No talk or Coltrane yet;

no odour of tobacco or perfume.
As with a painting everything is in abeyance

save for an intense singularity, a taste
that briefly floods a single sense.

Just for the moment no one is thinking
of something to say next.

- A Little Chocolate, pg. 27

* * *

On three fingers of each hand,
these girlish trinkets - costing,
each, at least the furs she wears -
may squeeze her fingers
always, as I do rarely,
and, worse, may venture
into that curly paradise
I can only cream of.
Her least gesture taunts me
with six links of my chain.
How can I bear this cruelty
that always grants its favours
to half a dozen while I, white
with envy, must look on?

- Her Rings, after Ovid, Amores, 2.15, pg. 32

* * *

Here lies, as usual, a Jew d'espirit.

- Trial Epitaph, pg. 51

* * *

Where women groan in labour He does not go
to uncurl the clubfoot or forestall dimentia,

nor does He rise in parliament or in the street
to strip the rhetoric that flattens cities,

nor does He enter intimate rooms at midnight
to unsay the unforgivable,

yet all His absences cry out,
evoking human charity.

- Deus Absconditus, pg. 64

* * *

Tiniest asset, sleeping now,
no bottom line has creased your brow.

Too soon bad dreams of crunching numbers
will wake you from your unearned slumbers.

May markers rise on your instructions,
no audits challenge your deductions,

and Visa grant your heart's desires
before your Use By date expires.

- Lullaby for the First Child Born with a Bar Code, pg. 76

* * *

I am a high stronghold,
my porticullis is down,
my postern is guarded,
my saint in her niche.
Below me the eagles
watch over my lands.
My page fills my goblet
with wine of my vineyard,
to drink - not to pledge
my lands and myself
to you or your duke,
or the prince of your duke,
or the king of his prince,
and, please God, not to Him.

- Portrait of a Duchess, after Goya, pg. 85