Path, Crooked Path

by John Balaban

“Balaban’s emotional range is impressively wide and deeply human—by turns compassionate and angry, somber and humorous, earnest and ironic. His voice is strong; his poems are important.”— Harvard Review Guided by an acute moral urgency, Path, Crooked Path opens on Highway 61 and keeps moving across America and throughout the world. Juxtaposing his experiences in eastern Europe and southeast Asia against contemporary life in the United States, Balaban illuminates the humor and hypocrisy that often percolates when individuals are thrust into the mix of cultures. Whether driving past Bush’s Texas ranch, sitting at a café in Vietnam, or trading swigs of vodka with a Bulgarian exile, his poems look beyond the personal to help make sense of an often chaotic world. From “The Great Fugue” ...I am playing The Grosse Fugue, hearing
the faded voices of those good people
who did not want to see me falter, but took me in,
schooling me in an intertwining of spirits
that like music can fill a room, that is a great fugue
weaving through us and joining generations
in charged, exquisite music that we long to hear. John Balaban is the author of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and Vietnamese translations whose accolades include two National Book Award nominations, the Lamont Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His translation Spring The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air . Balaban teaches at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

About the author

John Balaban (b. 1943) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. He has won several awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a National Poetry Series Selection, and, forLocusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems, the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He was named the 2001–2004 National Artist for the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also been nominated twice for the National Book Award. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Balaban translates Vietnamese poetry; he is also a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Balaban is a poet-in-residence and English professor in the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's obvious that this collection marinated for quite some time, as the poems it contains cover a wide range of themes and time periods. Consistent with the other books of his that I have read, Balaban's lines are long and his style narrative. In fact, there is some prose to be found in Path, Crooked Path, but its presence also highlights Balaban's eye for line breaks.

I think the book starts off very strong, with Highway 61 Revisited. The speaker's journey west across the USA mirrors the reader's entry into the collection, "I know I was on the right road, running like a lifeline / across the palm of America. / ... / shining on the bright empty ribbon of Highway 61, / loud with strange cries echoing across America." Travel and decay are probably the two most frequently-seen themes throughout.

It's evident that the poet is considering his own morality, as he considers how others have died while he remains. The state of the world occupies him, and garbage (or other evidence of man's impact on the planet) makes frequent appearances. However, the message often ends on an optimistic note--while the desert he sometimes described echoes TS Eliot's Wasteland, Balaban points out the types of life that manage to hold on and thrive in that apparently inhospitable place.

It's obvious that the poet is well read, and Balaban's frequent invocation of classical or medieval cultures tells us that our apparently-unique problems are far from that, but also that humans have thus far managed to make it through their mistakes. War's terror does not change, even as it is inflicted on various parts of the globe: ""Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and the grass; / Our generals have schemed in vain," Li Po wrote, twelve centuries ago" (Soldier Home).

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up at Second Story in Dupont--after vaguely remembering liking his Vietnam era stuff. Balaban is doing the aging poet thing here--packing in more references to Ovid/Dead Previous Generation Poets/gardenias. Also includes a few translations from Bulgarian poets. Yes, the results are somewhat inevitable. Take this final line of a meditation on Ovid's participation in the defense of a Roman frontier town: "But, now, acacias / fragrance our evening as poplar fluff drifts / through imperial rubble. Only poetry lasts." I guess.

Balaban is better when he's less self consciously BIG. "Ibn Fadhlan, the Arab Emissary, Encounters Vikings on the Volga River, A.D. 922" is a wry look at inscrutable-seeming violence which is found in Western cultures--turning the tables on the whole "othering" deal. "Highway 61" gives us our own littleness in the face of the open, indifferent spaces of America. For every poem that succeeds because of it's understated clarity--and Balaban's language tends to be direct and unornamented--one overstates itself, risks heavy-handedness. Still, the restlessness of the poems--translations, lyrics, elegies, dramatic monologues--kept me engaged, especially when, (from what I remember) Vietnam era poets tend to stick to an eat-shit-and die, chiseled down aesthetic.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 B1711p 2006