Interrupted Praise: New and Selected Poems

by Edwin Honig

Edwin Honig is noted for his comprehensive analysis and translations of literary works, primarily plays and poetry, from Spanish and Portuguese into English. A poet himself, his earliest translations were of the poems of Federico García Lorca and of plays by the Spanish writers Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Miguel de Cervantes. Honig's poetry is respected for the same attention to detail and style evident in his criticism and translation work. Honig's use of humor is another aspect of his writings that has attracted much attention and analysis.

174 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1983

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I read this collection in preparation for watching First Cousin Once Removed (2012), a documentary by Alan Berliner (first cousin once removed from Honig) documenting the poet’s final years and decline due to Alzheimer’s. Although I hadn’t yet seen the film, it was impossible to read the book without constantly having Honig’s fate in the back of my mind. The poems, arranged in opposite chronological order from 1983 to 1955, are focused mainly on home, nature, love, death, and memory. The latter two strike a chord, as this collection was published 28 years before Honig’s death to Alzheimer's. There are certain lines that are a somber foreshadowing of his fate:

How shall I know who he is,
now so clearly beside me,
I who am living
knowing I’m dying.
**********
The world is changing as we think it. Thinking
is a flame burning.
Thinking is in the head where nothing happens.
Thinking happens
inside the flame. The flame will go on burning,
The flame is nothing.
***********
We give birth to ourselves on the brink of dying.

My favorite poem, “The House,” describes a couple’s home that slowly decays and is abandoned, like their relationship, until it is sold after their break-up. The new owner arrives, blissfully unaware of the memories (good and bad) attached to the home, which necessarily excludes the outside world while setting the scene for the lives of any who take up residence inside. It’s not too much of a stretch to compare this to human consciousness, which inhabits a body and knows nothing of the world that came before us, slowly decaying along with our bodies, necessarily excluding all others, except for the few who take up residence in our lives, minds, and memories. Maybe the mental deterioration of old age (dementia, in particular) is like a new consciousness (owner) taking up residence within the same body, blissfully unaware of the memories -- good or bad -- that existed previously. And here I am partially borrowing an idea from Philip Larkin’s “The Old Fools”:

“Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored
[…]
That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here.”

Honig’s poem seems to parallel Larkin’s in the sense that our memories are like the lighted rooms of a house where we take up residence. But sometimes a new “owner” arrives, even as we happen to inhabit the same old body. Maybe this is what Honig means when he writes, “We give birth to ourselves on the brink of dying,” giving birth to a new consciousness on the brink of death. What must that feel like, losing one’s grasp on the old life, thoughts, memories, and, ultimately in death, the old consciousness? As Larkin concludes in his own poem:
“Well, / We shall find out.”