His first book, The Time by Dialing (The Swallow Press, 1947), which I received in the mail around that time, impressed me even more. The poem below, which I also shared on Twitter, describes the effect of the wartime blackouts along the Pacific coast—a precaution against bombing raids. It is reminiscent of the work of Yvor Winters (more on him below), but its metaphysics, its diction, its metrics, and its overall tone strike me as stranger, more original than what that austere man would allow.

I have since made it my mission to secure all four of Broomell’s books. The second—a chapbook of poems about Los Angeles, The City Built on Sand—deserves its own post. It is the fourth, which arrived two days ago, that inspired me to write this one. Finely printed by The Prairie Press in Iowa City, In the Iron Temple (1964) presents Broomell at his most mature and emotionally complex. It is very much a final book, one feels—a summing-up. This is not to say that it is somber, much less lachrymose. Though some poems border on the rueful, most are more intricate in their moods: at peace with the world yet wickedly pointed, elegiac yet sardonic, meditative and even whimsical until they turn soberly realistic. The technique, too, has expanded, ranging from traditional meters to accentual patterns and elegant lines of free verse. Most importantly, each page is both stimulating and enjoyable.

That kind of thing is surprising enough in a book of poetry, but In the Iron Temple held a special thrill for me. About halfway through, I stopped short. The title of one of the poems—“Epitaph for a Professor of Sanskrit”—immediately suggested that I was about to meet an old friend. I knew Broomell had done graduate work at Berkeley. This professor, I thought, could only be one man. And I was right.

I am no stranger to the dead Ryder, whose full name is Arthur William Ryder (1877-1938). I first discovered his poems and translations from Sanskrit as an undergraduate at UCLA. In fact, I told the whole story of Ryder and me on my WordPress blog in 2018, and I will reprint that short entry here after sharing another of Broomell’s poems about the man, who was obviously both an intellectual and moral model for him. Pages later in his collection, Broomell writes of Ryder in longer, looser, and more serious form, recalling specifics of his character and his teaching in a manner (and even in phrasing) that brought to mind W. S. Merwin’s wonderful poem about his own departed teacher, “Berryman.” The playful references to Robert Burns (“boozing at the nappy”) and Harold Fredrik Cherniss (1904-1987) give way to memorable—indeed, unforgettable—details. I hope you, dear reader, were lucky enough to have at least one teacher like Ryder; I have had more than my share of luck, and my mind is full of snapshots and quotations similar to the ones Broomell records so movingly here.

And now I will share my old post on Ryder, which is itself a story of meaningful relationships preserved in old books.

“All Progress Is Common to All of Us”: On Arthur W. Ryder, George R. Noyes, and the Art of Translation

(March 30, 2018)

Last month I found myself greatly missing a rare, handsomely printed book I had checked out of the UCLA library many moons ago, when I was still an undergraduate. I ordered a copy online and it arrived last week. I’m not sure how I first learned of the book’s existence. I may have simply run across it in the library stacks, where I spent the better part of my college career. It’s titled, quite unassumingly, Original Poems; Together with Translations from the Sanskrit, and contains many more of the latter than of the former. Its author was the supremely eccentric Arthur William Ryder (1877-1938), instructor in Sanskrit at Berkeley, who died the year before it was published. The volume was compiled by Ryder’s colleague George Rapall Noyes (1873-1952), one of the pioneers of Slavic studies in the United States, who also furnished it with a moving biographical essay.

Both men are heroes of mine—skillful, inspired translators, who recognized that they could make a more significant contribution to the world of letters by rendering the works they loved into English than by explicating them. In fact, Noyes fostered an entire “school” of literary translators from Polish and other Slavic languages at Berkeley. In another volume I treasure, a festschrift for Noyes that bears the equally unassuming title Slavic Studies (1943), his British colleague Sir Bernard Pares (1867-1949) writes: “There is no question in my mind that the Berkeley School of Slavic verse translations is easily the first in the English-speaking world. We on our side of the Atlantic have been as much the practical gainers by its work as you on yours, for in such a domain all progress is common to all of us.”

Noyes was a kindly man, Ryder less so. As Noyes puts it—rather delicately—in his essay, his colleague sometimes “passed the bounds of discretion in expressing his scorn for very worthy men.” Among his indiscretions was a polemic with Harvard University Press, which had raised the price of their publications: “Ryder addressed to the Press violent letters of protest and was not appeased by the explanations offered him. He published and distributed the documents in the case, sending to the Harvard University Press a sarcastic bill for ninety-five dollars for ‘printing and distributing matter designed to raise the moral tone of the Press.’” This curious publication, Noyes concludes, proves Ryder’s “singular wrongheadedness and singular command of vituperative language but also his own honesty of purpose.”

Ryder’s “honesty of purpose” was also evident in his approach to teaching. He “loathed the formal features of academic life; he detested the machinery of courses and grades, examinations and degrees.” What he enjoyed most was “reading Sanskrit privately with his students or ex-students. […] He would listen respectfully to the opinions of the lowliest student, and he never tried to force his way of thinking upon anyone; for, although he might condemn with vehemence the actions or opinions of another, he staunchly upheld the right of every man to make his own mistakes in his own fashion.” In many ways, Noyes’s description of Ryder and his thinking reminds me of the poet Yvor Winters (1900-1968), who taught at Stanford, about an hour’s drive down the coast from Berkeley. I also see shades of Winters’s poetic technique—as well as that of J. V. Cunningham (1911-1985), Winters’s student—in Ryder’s wonderful translations from the Sanskrit.

All three were influential teachers, and all three seemed to regard themselves as men out of step with their era. Compare Cunningham’s witty “For My Contemporaries” with the final epigram in Ryder’s pamphlet of translations titled Women’s Eyes, first published in 1919 and included in Poems:

The critics all were jealous,
The patrons full of pride,
The public had no judgment;
And so my poems died.

And Winters’s “On Teaching the Young” resonates with Ryder’s sense of learning as a long, largely self-guided journey. Another poem from Women’s Eyes reads:

When I knew a little bit,
Then my silly, blinded wit,
Mad as elephants in rut,
Thought it was omniscient; but
When I learned a little more
From the scholar’s hoarded store,
Madness’ fever soon grew cool,
And I knew I was a fool.

Yes, I’m comparing original poems with translations, but like many natural translators Ryder seems to have expressed his own personality most clearly in the poems he rendered. There are even lovelier and wiser poems in this volume than those I’ve already cited, for instance:

“Two Kinds of Friendship”

The friendship of the rogue or saint,
Like shade at dawn or shade at noon,
Starts large and slowly grows more faint,
Or starting faint, grows larger soon.

Ryder certainly had a saint of a friend in Noyes. The copy of Poems that arrived at my home last week is inscribed by Noyes to another Berkeley colleague, Arthur E. Hutson.

Since 2022 or thereabouts, I have found it especially difficult to keep up with the crises breaking out across the world. In part, I imagine, that has to do with the birth of my children, who are remarkably adept at generating small crises themselves. It also has to do, I’m sure, with the means by which information and its ugly opposite reach us these days—with little responsible sorting but with much irresponsible manipulation. And, of course, there is little doubt that the globe is in a particularly bad way at the moment.

Living in Tulsa, I try to attend with special care to news from the cities closest to my heart, Odesa and Los Angeles. Russia’s war on Ukraine, now its fifth year, still occasionally filters up into the headlines. Smaller disasters in Los Angeles do as well. Recently, an industrial fire at a cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights spread toxic fumes through the city’s Eastside. A month later, the terrible consequences are still unfolding.

All very grim, of course. But LA has seen worse. The incident brought to mind an uplifting little poem by a fellow émigré, Viktor Rayzman. Like me, Rayzman was born in Odesa, but decades earlier—in 1934. He spent much of his career in Leningrad, where he became a highly accomplished metallurgical engineer. Bringing his family to the US in 1991, the same year my own family arrived, he eventually settled in LA, where he returned to poetry. This lovely lyric, which I have shortened slightly in my translation, takes place on the Number 4 bus, which I have taken countless times up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. Though we have never met, there’s no doubt in my mind that, at some point, Rayzman and I rode the route together.

A Rainy Day in LA

Riding the Number 4 through heavy rain
down Santa Monica, I craved a sunny break,
my big umbrella dripping at my knee,
the water pooling in a little lake.

At the next stop, a young girl fluttered in,
pulling the wet hood from her radiant hair. 
The driver glumly waited for the green,
shutting the doors against the cold damp air.

She paid the fare, but didn’t move away,
nervously rifling through her little purse.
Her lipstick fell; she caught it on the fly.
The light would turn in seconds, now—but first,

“Open the door!” a woman’s voice rang out.
He did so. With a cellphone in her hand,
a lady stepped aboard and said, “Sweetheart,
I think you dropped this”—then was gone again.

Be it a heat wave or a downpour, come what may
Los Angeles has not yet lost its way.

	March 25, 2012

Дождь в Лос Анджелесе

В автобусе четвёртого маршрута
Катил я в дождь, ловя просвета миг.
Подобьем запасного парашюта
Приткнулся зонтик у колен моих.

На остановке девушка впорхнула,
Стянув с волос намокший капюшон.
Водитель ждал зелёный свет понуро,
Но двери от дождя захлопнул он.

Она монетки затолкала в кассу
И стала чем-то в сумочке шуршать,
Как будто маслом заправляла кашу.
А с неба за ушатом лил ушат.

Порой помада падала из сумки,
Она её ловила в тот же миг.
А красный свет горел, и шли секунды.
—Откройте дверь!—снаружи женский крик.

Вбежала молодая, но не слишком,
С мобильником в протянутой руке.
—Ты обронила телефон, малышка!,
А это на английском языке:

“Ю драпт юр фон”. И, к девушке приблизясь,
Находку отдала. И снова - в дождь...
Лос Анджелес, пусть ливень, пекло, кризис,—
Ты верною дорогою идёшь!

	25 марта 2012

The May issue of Poetry magazine featured my little essay on the poetry of nostalgia, in which I characterized myself as being “[m]ore susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me.” I had in mind both the stream of my own experiences and the larger current of history. One tends to flow into the other, and they did so last week.

On May 20, the day my twins turned four, my friend Oscar Mandel passed away. It was, initially, purely personal memories of our meetings that caught me in their undertow. Yet Oscar, who was just shy of 100, had been a witness to history, and soon I was again drawn into thoughts of what his life had been like long before he and I met in 2009.

Born in Belgium to Polish Jewish parents in 1926, Oscar escaped the Nazis in 1940, mastered half a dozen languages, earned a PhD in English at Ohio State, and taught literature for decades at Caltech. Indeed, he was the backbone of the humanities at that largely left-brained institution, a position he found to be both stimulating and isolating. Towards the end of his time there, at least, he was treated as the treasure that he was. In 1994, he gave an oral history interview to Shirley K. Cohen that is full of valuable details about his childhood, army service, education, teaching, and literary pursuits, but which is most touching for me because it captures his tone of voice, which evokes, in turn, his peculiar angle of vision—a jolly cantankerousness, a cuddly (how he would have hated that word!) misanthropy, an attitude poised beguilingly between cynicism and heartfelt pity.

His second response is exemplary. Humility? Yes. Irritability? That, too.

MANDEL: Let me ask you first: You don’t feel that this material is pretty much covered in this book of mine, The Book of Elaborations, which is in part an autobiography? You feel that in spite of that, you would like to have it on tape?

I’m glad Cohen persisted, but Oscar makes a good point about The Book of Elaborations, the magnificent and uncategorizable collection of essays that first brought him to my attention. Published in 1985 by New Directions, it includes sixteen pieces of various lengths, each “elaborating” in unexpected directions on one of Oscar’s poems. Guy Davenport gave the volume the kind of endorsement it deserves, writing, “in these Montaignesque essays (Voltairesque, Shavian?—the only adjective mist be Mandelian) we have as much of Oscar Mandel as can be packed into one book. Intellect and sensibility dance here as humanly as they ever have. He is—to the critics a bone—a rigorously articulate difficult writer.”

Note Davenport’s caveat: as much as can be packed into one book. Though diminutive, Oscar was a giant of the mind. Luckily, his fleet-footed intellect and refined sensibility were free to waltz their way across the pages of over two dozen volumes of verse, fable, art history, literary criticism, essays, and drama in at least three languages. The most recent of these, his charming Complete Theatre, was published by Insert Press just two years ago.

As I say, it was Elaborations that first drew me to Oscar—the poems as much as the essays to which they gave rise. I reached out to him in late April 2009 with a fan letter. I was a graduate student at UCLA and an aspiring poet and translator. It was on May 17 of that year, almost exactly seventeen years ago, that I first had coffee with him and his equally brilliant wife Adrienne in their lovely back garden. They became a vital cultural lifeline for me in the years to follow. As far as I was concerned, Oscar and Adrienne were culture, the very thing itself. Before I had any sort of standing as a writer, they took me seriously and showed me what it meant to be a person of letters. I cannot wait to share Oscar’s work with my twins, who never had a chance to meet him. They are too young for the essays, but some of the poems will tickle them. The three below, however, I will keep for a later date. You, no doubt, are able to appreciate their wisdom and poignancy now.

Berceuse
 
The prisoner falls down a ditch
and clutching at his pain he sighs
“I’ll stop a bit.” A soldier shoots,
the prisoner tips over, dies.
 
The soldier jumps into a hole,
an airplane sees him where he lies.
The bullets make a dotty line,
the soldier bleeds a pint and dies.
 
Home goes the pilot up the wind,
alas a shell bursts as he flies.
He thinks of mother and himself,
dives into the ground and dies.
 
Beside his head a daisy stands,
the night spreads out the stars;
a blade of weed leaps round her stem,
the daisy chokes, death is no farce.
 
I rise and strut and din at God
“Pity! Comfort! And denounce!”
God says, “I note your claim,” and winks,
and all the stars, applauding, bounce.


Neither Ghibelline nor Guelph

My pen you see roves little in the world,
my syllables are monks. For I perceive
that rhyming warm or cold won’t hang a rascal
by the feet nor at the crisis shackle
any barking general. Mine the grief 
that trails the earthworm to the hungry bird;
mine the minute dominion of the self:
dominion neither Ghibelline nor Guelph.


Triplets

1.

The world decreed me small,
If the world saw me at all.

2.

Much and long I ran,
Ended, though, where I began.

3.

Dwelling low,
Easy into earth I’ll go.

The Ukrainian émigré Alexander Voloshin arrived in Los Angeles a year before Henri Coulette was born in the city on November 17, 1927. For much of the next three decades, until Voloshin’s death in 1960, the two men shared the same terrain, and it’s very likely that the young Coulette saw a good deal of his older neighbor on the silver screen, if only for seconds at a time. He would not have known the name of the extra with the swarthy mustachioed face, and he certainly wouldn’t have known that the extra was a fellow poet—a poet as keenly observant and witty as himself, as bittersweetly in love as he was with the landscape and culture they shared.

What we do know, judging by the manuscript of Coulette’s final collection, And Come to Closure—which was found in his closet after his lonely death in 1988—is that the poet understood the life Voloshin lived. He treated it with utmost sympathy in one of his finest poems, “The Extras”:

Today, they are the subjects of a king,
And they must cheer his passage through the town
This coronation morning, cheer his taking
Purple and ermine, the sceptre and the crown.

They have, they will again, take after take,
But now the star, his agent at his sleeve,
Has disappeared. Their thoughts come back to them,
Like shadows, and they rest from make-believe.

Duchess and chimney sweep are Blossom and Hank.
A light is asked for, and a light is given.
Gossip is music played upon the breath
By wicked tongues, and anecdote is heaven.

Simply human is what their costumes smell of;
Simply human is what their faces say.
They make the lobby and the street look real.
Practicing every day for Judgment Day,

They draw the circle that becomes a crown;
They draw bathwater on a bended knee,
And curtains on the night, and they draw blood.
They are the after that comes After Me.

The very elegance of Coulette’s iambic pentameter lends more dignity to Blossom, Hank, and their confrères than was ever granted to them on Hollywood sets, while dignity is precisely what these people gave to the scenes in which they appeared. Consider how Coulette rings the changes on the word “draw” in the final stanza—how many varied actions these people perform, all reduced to a single monosyllabic verb. They draw a circle that, through the magic of montage, becomes a king’s crown (I imagine a Busby Berkeley sequence); they draw their master’s bathwater; they draw the curtains before a fade-out; and they draw blood in a swashbuckling fracas. Yes, on paper, just one little word—but in effect, the whole picture.

Reading the poem today, I wonder about Blossom. There’s no mystery about Hank. Coulette, whose first name was pronounced “Henry,” went by Hank in his daily life. “Hank, c’est moi,” says Henri. But Blossom—well, she is a tarnished urban flower, like Virginia Cherrill in Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). She may also be a nod to the flower girl in the film at the center of Prater Violet (1945), the first novel Coulette’s colleague Christopher Isherwood finished in his adoptive home, Los Angeles. And I hear her voice as that of Blossom Dearie, child-like yet streetwise.

As Michael Caines and I write in our introduction to the new Carcanet Classics edition of Coulette’s poems—the first collection of his work to appear since 1990—the poet had every reason to identify with extras, those anonymous but essential human beings on the periphery. He himself had been marginalized, partly by choice, partly by chance. You can read our essay in the latest issue of The New Criterion.

He would, I venture, have seen an echo of his own experience with his second book, The Family Goldschmitt (1971)—most copies of which were accidentally pulped at his publisher’s warehouse before they could be distributed—in this passage about an extra’s working day from Voloshin’s mock epic of exile in Hollywood, Sidetracked:

It’s twelve o’clock… And so at last he
decides to dial up Central Casting…
“GA” for “Garfield” (of all things),
Three… seven… one… one… And it rings.
“Hello” — then, with a stifled groan,
“You call back later.” Click. Dial tone.

Evening is here… No calls at all —
now it’s too late for them to call.
“How sad… Maybe tomorrow, then.”
At least he can go out again…

Frustrated, feeling quite defeated,
he dines, drinks wine, heads to the theater…
At the Apollo they’re now screening
the film on which, for four demeaning
days, he worked (at seven fifty
per) — oh, that was heavy lifting…
The set was hot, stuffy, and stale.
Swallowing lukewarm ginger ale,
he sat behind the bar each day,
landed one closeup… flew away.
Others had paychecks for three weeks!
Just think—some folks get all the breaks…

Alas, there is more pain to follow…
Watching the screen at the Apollo,
he finds he’s nowhere to be found!
They’ve cut him out of it, the clowns…
He didn’t count on such a blow—
they didn’t even let him know…
It’s all right there—just not the bar:
the “fist fight” and the “tearful star,”
the “scandal” and the “intrigue” too,
but for a hundred smackeroos
you wouldn’t spot a sign of him! 
Another victim of fate’s whim…
How rude! You suffer for your art
and in the end they scrap your part…

Of course, Coulette could not have read Voloshin’s poem. It appears in my English translation next month, from Paul Dry Books, a few days before Coulette’s poems reemerge in print. This double publication is, to me, of great significance. I have somehow managed to help bring two of my Angeleno heroes out of the background at the same time. The world is a cruel place at the moment, but that supposedly cruelest of months, April, will be kind to two poets long denied kindness. I don’t often plead like this, but I will do so now, on their behalf. Please order their books today—you won’t regret it.

I spoke about Kees, whom I’ve been reading since the age of 17, hurriedly, as is my wont, but still managed, I hope, to make one or two points that are not entirely lacking in merit. One such point—on which Dana and I agree—is this: Although Kees was second to none in his mastery of the American idiom and understanding of the American scene, his sensibility might have had more in common with Eastern and Central European poets who’d witnessed the catastrophes of the 20th century firsthand—who had, as it were, felt them on their skin. What was born of that encounter in the work, for instance, of Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky (who valued Kees highly) was a sense of the human condition as essentially tragic, together with a resolve to face that tragedy honestly, but not morosely or histrionically, not without humor, not without style. Think of Weltschmerz, but with a bit more zest, even a little selzter.

I wouldn’t be much of an Angeleno if I didn’t cite a pop lyric to illustrate what I have in mind. The one that suggests itself immediately was written by my fellow Fairfax High alum Jerry Leiber: “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.” (Take it away, Peggy Lee…) Here’s something you may not know: Those lyrics were inspired by the work of another Angeleno, Thomas Mann, whose early story “Disillusionment” (1896) was a favorite of Gaby Rodgers, Jerry Leiber’s German-born wife. Which brings us back to Central Europe.

As I mention in my chat with Dana, the Polish poet to whom I believe Kees’s vision of the world and tone of voice, if not formal technique, bear a particularly striking resemblance is not Miłosz but Zbigniew Herbert, whose Selected Poems I reviewed for the TLS in April last year. I will reproduce my review below, but not before I share a poem by Kees that concisely expresses the bleak wisdom I find in Herbert’s verse.

The Speakers

“A equals X,” says Mister One.   
“A equals B,” says Mister Two.   
“A equals nothing under the sun   
But A,” says Mister Three. A few   
Applaud; some wipe their eyes;   
Some linger in the shade to see   
One and Two in neat disguise   
Decapitating Mister Three.

“This age is not entirely bad.”
It’s bad enough, God knows, but you   
Should know Elizabethans had   
Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.   
The past goes down and disappears,   
The present stumbles home to bed,   
The future stretches out in years
That no one knows, and you’ll be dead.

Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, edited and introduced by J. M. Coetzee and Alissa Valles (London: Penguin, 2024)

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–98) has the distinction—the irony of which he likely both rued and appreciated—of being the only member of a trinity of internationally influential post-Second World War Polish poets not to have been awarded the Nobel prize. Having lost out on the award, he could at least boast of a bevy of laureates who felt he should have won. Responding to his laconic congratulatory telegram in 1996, Wisława Szymborska wired back: “Zbyszek, Great Poet! If it were up to me, you would be the one struggling to compose a speech right now.” And it was Czesław Miłosz, the recipient in 1980, who had first introduced anglophone readers to Herbert in 1965, through his anthology Post-War Polish Poetry, then more thoroughly in 1968, with a volume of Selected Poems co-translated with Peter Dale Scott. In his anthology, Miłosz accords Herbert the highest praise: “If the key to contemporary Polish poetry is the collective experience of the last decades, Herbert is perhaps the most skillful in expressing it.”

The esteem in which Herbert was held by fellow Poles is impressive, but equally impressive was the degree to which his poems spoke to readers from other parts of the world. Joseph Brodsky, despite his distaste for free verse, argued fervently for Herbert as “a poet for this place; above all, for this time”. Seamus Heaney looked to him as a model, calling his work an “ideal poetry of reality”. Another longtime admirer among the laureates, J. M. Coetzee, is now the co-editor, with Alissa Valles, of a judicious and timely Selected Poems, which he has furnished with an excellent introduction.

This selection is judicious in that it collects Herbert’s best-known and most accomplished poems from every stage of his career. It begins with the opening lyric of his first volume, published in 1956, and ends with one in memory of the essayist Jean Améry, which only appeared in print a decade after the poet’s death. Valles, who previously edited the door-stopping Collected Poems (2007), in which most of the translations were her own, here includes a greater number of renditions by Miłosz and Scott, and by John and Bogdana Carpenter, whose earlier volumes did much to cement Herbert’s reputation in English. This too is judicious, if for no other reason than that it allows readers innocent of Polish to appreciate Herbert’s variety of tones, ranging from the crisply classical, which Miłosz and Scott handle superbly, to the looser, more conversational, which Valles’s approach suits well.

Amazingly, this most subtle of craftsmen was able to wrest those tones from what seem to be the plainest materials: strings of direct statement, mostly in lower case, entirely devoid of punctu­ation. Coetzee described the “vivifying shock” that the “deliberately plain” early translations of Herbert’s poems gave to the “rather torpid and insular British poetry scene” of the 1960s, at the same time signalling that, plain though they were, the poems were in no wise simple: “What impressed readers in the West was the directness with which [postwar Polish poets] dared to address life-and-death issues, a directness achieved more often than not by strategies of ironic indirection”. Irony and indirection are indeed Herbert’s favourite tools, and he uses them not merely to evade the censor, but also to render the human condition as he understood it: complex and unchanging.

In one of his greatest poems, “Elegy of Fortinbras”, here translated by Miłosz and Scott, Herbert gives voice not to Hamlet, the vanquished poet-prince, but to his practical successor:

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison

Does the poet’s sympathy lie with the designer of prisons? Hardly. There is simply no better way to demonstrate his understanding of the makers of systems that break people like himself, and understanding, though it may not save him, is a form of triumph.

Herbert takes the same tack in “Damastes Nicknamed Procrustes Speaks,” here translated by Valles:

I designed a bed to the size of the perfect man
I measured captured travelers against that bed
it was hard to avoid – I admit – stretching limbs
trimming extremities
the patients died but the more of them perished
the surer I became that my research was correct
the end was sublime progress requires sacrifice

When writing this monologue Herbert may, as he admitted to the Carpenters, have been thinking of Lenin, but his Damastes is also the Damastes of myth. By displacing his disgust with Communist rule onto the classical world, he demonstrates, time and again, how little man changes over time. Our capacity for cruelty and self-delusion is as persistent as our capacity for dignity. History may do us in, but, like Mr Cogito, Herbert’s alter ego in two dozen poems in this book, dignity demands that we pursue our “last reward”—“the golden fleece of nothingness”, admission to “the company of [our] fore­fathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland / the defenders of the kingdom without bounds and the city of ashes”.

As war again touches Zbigniew Herbert’s birthplace—Lviv, in present-day Ukraine—and the tide of cruelty rises around the globe, poets who feel compelled to respond directly may learn from his example. The final irony of his indirect approach is that by looking backwards he extended his poems’ reach. Tyrants expire; parables rise from their ruins.

In the sparsely attended centuries-long foot race of fixed poetic forms in English, the sonnet has clearly left its competitors in the dust. Sestinas put on a spurt a few decades ago, and one encounters an occasional villanelle and even a rondeau in the magazines, but it is hard to imagine a cycle of any such thing winning a Pulitzer prize in the 2020s, as Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets did in 2022. Of course, as Matilda Sykes points out in her recent review (TLS, August 15, 2025), Seuss’s aren’t your grandfather’s sonnets. Made up of free-roaming rhymeless lines, each is “a house […] burst open, windows and doors swinging on well-oiled hinges”.

Ramshackle digs, purists would call them – signs of a neighborhood in decline. Yet one can still see the good old bones beneath the peeling plaster. Seuss’s lines may be unmetered, but there are fourteen every time, with at least a hint of a volta midway. Besides, she was far from the first to modify the traditional structure to her specifications. As Paul Muldoon observes in his coolheaded and evenhanded introduction to his excellent new anthology of sonnets, Scanty Plot of Ground, Black American poets in particular have long pushed at the walls of “pretty rooms”, be it thematically, as in the case of Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (“Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”), or structurally, as in the works of Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes, whose freer “American sonnet” form “may indeed be ‘part prison’ but it is a prison with a recreation yard – perhaps even a sequence of interconnected recreation yards”.

That said, it would be inaccurate to claim that Coleman’s extension of the sonnet to sixteen lines, for instance, was unprecedented. George Meredith had beat her to it by a century with his Modern Love (1862). Muldoon doesn’t include any entries from that sequence in his book, nor does he choose any of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s three “curtal sonnets”, instead representing those two masters with, respectively, “Lucifer in Starlight” and “The Windhover”. Yet these two treatments of sudden descent exhibit their own lapses from the Petrarchan ideal. The strong narrative volta in the Miltonic “Lucifer” comes just before the final couplet, when the subject is confronted by the sight of the Almighty’s perfectly arranged stars (that “army of unalterable law”), while the sprung rhythm of “The Windhover” comes as a bracing shock to the reader who sees, on the facing page, the neat iambic pentameter of Surrey’s “I never saw you, madam, lay apart”.

Then again, the sonnet preceding the “The Windhover” is Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder”, which not only employs tetrameter in place of the usual pentameter but also, appropriately enough, throws in a few enlivening substitutions for iambs, so as not to be “too precise in every part”. As the cavalier poet reminds us elsewhere, “Numbers ne’er tickle, or but lightly please, / Unless they have some wanton carriages”.

The pleasures of Muldoon’s superb selection are anything but light. He wisely chose to arrange the 124 works, composed over some four centuries, alphabetically by author surname. This allows us to appreciate how much variation the sonnet has withstood since it was first imported into English, via loose translations from Petrarch, by Thomas Wyatt. Withstood is the wrong word. The sonnet has thrived precisely because it invites variation; its very structure of proposition and resolution demands a turn of mind, and that turn often inspires poets to twist the mold that contains it, so that the form can mirror or reinforce the content. The twists needn’t be seismic. Consider the metrical distress of the second line of the sonnet excerpted from Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent, moving cycle for the stuttering fourteen-year-old victim of a lynching, which derives its effect by departing from a largely regular base: “Emmett Till’s name still catches in my throat / like syllables waylaid in a stutterer’s mouth.”

Such departures – and more radical ones, too – are only meaningful if the reader retains a sense of where the boundaries are, and Scanty Plot of Ground is full of reminders. Not only do most of the poets at least in large part abide by Petrarchan or Elizabethan rules (with the recently departed Tony Harrison sticking close to the Meredithian sixteen-line model in his quietly piercing “Long Distance II”), but we even get a primer, albeit in unruly verse, from Billy Collins’s “Sonnet”: “All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, / and after this one just a dozen …”. Other self-referential sonnets, including Robert Burns’s “A Sonnet upon Sonnets” and Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”, from which the book’s title is taken, pepper the pages. My personal favorite of these is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines”, in which the speaker holds the personified mess of her life “in the strict confines / Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape” he is reduced to “nothing more nor less / Than something simply not yet understood”. It is as if Yeats’s Leda, whose appearance in “Leda and the Swan” closes Muldoon’s selection, had turned the tables on the divine Swan, pinned him down and forcefully “put on his knowledge with his power”.

Surveying the possible reasons for the sonnet’s runaway success in his introduction, Muldoon touches on the form’s mathematical perfection (the octave and the sestet are, as some have claimed, “an embodiment of the Golden Ratio”) and the impression it creates of “observing the thought-process of the speaker […] to such an extent that what we’re engaged with is not a poem at all but a form of drama”. In the end he comes back to the drama of form – to the sonnet’s irresistible tug of war between Chaos and Order, rule and departure, “grave restraint and giddy release”. The sonnet, he writes, “is a room which we may make our own while being simultaneously mindful of, and oblivious to, the other guests who have occupied it over the centuries”.

That, too, is one of the pleasures of his selection and arrangement. Echoes and homages abound. Turning the page on John Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent”, for instance, we find Edwin Muir’s “Milton”, in which the poet restores his predecessor’s sight: “A footstep more, and his unblinded eyes / Saw far and near the fields of Paradise.” While we’re on the M’s, it would not have been excessively self-serving for Muldoon to have snuck in one of his own brilliant sonnets, like “Extraordinary Rendition” or some of “The Old Country”. Instead, he provides us with his own fresh translations of poems by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and César Vallejo. The sestet of the Frenchman’s “Correspondences”, in the editor’s handling, will give readers a fair sense of this anthology’s pungent variety:

    Some of those perfumes are sweet as a baby’s pelt,
    oboe-bright, green to that distant horizon;
    others are quite funky, fly-blown, beating a big drum,

    building as all illimitable things must build –
    the amber, musk, frankincense, and gum resin
    giving voice to the soul’s throb as to the body’s thrum.

Boris Dralyuk is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa and Editor-in-Chief at Nimrod.

The New Year has always been a merry holiday in my family, even in the worst of times. A decade ago, when I was still editing the Los Angeles Review of Books (which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year!), I invited my Belarusian friend Sasha Razor and the brilliant scholar of Soviet media David MacFadyen onto the journal’s Radio Hour to speak about the special significance of the New Year for those who lived under Soviet rule. Do listen to the episode, if the season’s spirit moves you—but to make a long story short, what Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanza, and other religious and cultural days of wintertime revelry are for those who celebrate them around the world, New Year’s was for the denizens of the staunchly secular USSR. All the markers of Christmas especially (from the tree to the jolly bearded bestower of gifts in the night) were displaced onto New Year’s and became a beloved part of the lives even of those who otherwise, sometimes at great risk, retained their Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or other officially repressed faith.

Of course, the significance of New Year for the East Slavic lands predates 1917, as Alexander Voloshin makes clear in a sparkling, bittersweet chapter of Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood. I revisited the chapter this morning, and noted that it was written as 1939 turned into 1940—that is, as the world was rapidly descending into chaos. Today, as 2025 turns into 2026, it is hard for many of us to celebrate without a sense of trepidation, even of dread. Millions of people around the world will spend the evening of December 31 out in the bitter cold, or in bomb shelters. What comfort can we find in Voloshin’s words below? Only the knowledge that we aren’t the first generation to spend what should be a joyous night under dark clouds, and, with that knowledge, the suggestion that the clouds will eventually part.

Among the people to whom I’ll be raising a flute of “foamy Mumm” (or, more likely, Veuve…) tomorrow evening is Voloshin himself, whose poem, so long neglected, will once again appear in print in 2026!

Before we tasted of this woe,
we didn’t greet the New Year so . . .
We weren’t afraid and heavy-hearted . . .
Of course, the life with which we’ve parted
always seems sweet in retrospect.
Be honest, would you not elect
to board the Troika of the Past
and ditch these cars, however fast?

We’ve access now to aeroplanes,
but they are no cure for the pains
of hearts removed from native places . . .
I’d stake my life on this: The case is
that those of us older than forty
are sick at soul. However sturdy
we may appear, it’s just for show—
we’re always worried, always low.
We miss familiar hills and rivers,
and often we are seized with shivers
as we recall those distant bells,
those shepherd’s pipes . . . No, nothing quells
our longing or holds back our tears
when we dredge up those sunken years . . .
Frost-covered spruce and pine trees—all
that we had deemed “worn out,” “banal,”
“provincial” now seems rare and precious,
the only thing that might refresh us . . .

Indeed, it’s painful to admit
that disillusionment has hit
us Russians hard . . . For there were times
when we’d head south, to warmer climes—
Sorrento, Monte Carlo, Nice,
Capri . . . We’d follow our caprice . . .
And there we’d ring in the New Year,
lifting a loud and joyous cheer!
How sweet it was to float at night
in gondolas—a pure delight
to say, “Isn’t it nice and warm?
Back home it’s freezing—a big storm . . .”
While roses bloomed, we thought of snow
and of our luck; how could we know
that we would someday feel so haunted,
that snow would be all that we wanted . . .

We only love, only hold dear
the scenes that vanish, disappear . . .
Now at our temples we may find
frost of a rather different kind . . .

But let’s not dwell on that—instead
we should recall, lest we forget,
a proper Russian New Year’s Eve!
One had to live it to believe . . .

Moscow! Such merry revelries!
The snow is piled up to our knees!
How will we reach the village now?
In our swift troika—speed the plow!
Bring on the friendly toasts and drinks,
the season’s heartwarming high jinks!
Khodynka Field now lies outspread
like an enormous snow-white bed
by which we race along, pell-mell,
to the Kremlin’s chiming bells . . .

Where to now? Off to the Yar,
to hear Sokolov’s guitar,
Shishkin’s famous Roma choir . . .
What a crowd—and all afire!
Ah, no guest will ever want
for vodka at this restaurant . . .
Silver clanging, crystal ringing,
piano playing, people singing . . .
Men in tailcoats . . . Cavaliers,
grenadiers, and cuirassiers . . .
Strapping Cossacks from the Don,
merchants with their caftans on . . .
Rubies, diamonds, emeralds glitter
as the ladies smile and titter . . .
Noise and laughter everywhere—
happiness beyond compare!
Corks are popping! Here they come:
countless flutes of foamy Mumm,
Aÿ-Champagne, Abrau-Durso,
and, bien sûr, la Veuve Clicquot . . .

Twelve has struck! The maestro stands,
as the trumpets in the band
greet the New Year—all is right
with the world! The future’s bright!
So it was throughout the land,
from St. Pete to Samarkand—
but Old Russia is wiped out . . .
There, they live under the knout,
while we roam and curse our fate—
now for twenty-three years straight . . .

1939 is gone—
and good riddance . . . Moving on . . .
Oh, it left a bitter sting.
What will 1940 bring?

War, a raging hurricane . . .
The whole world has gone insane . . .
Yet faith smolders in our souls
like a mound of stubborn coals.
After all, the Russians broke
from the Tatar-Mongol yoke,
made it through the Time of Troubles
with their empire redoubled,
and watched Peter’s city rise
from the swamp before their eyes.
It was there that they first saw
culture, science, and the law—
but then darkness came again . . .
Sacrificing many men,
even Moscow, they still won,
chasing out Napoleon!

My fellow émigrés, today
there’s just one thing I wish to say:
We’re waiting . . . We have waited long . . .
But we will get there—do stay strong!
Don’t give in to your despair.
We’ve suffered much that was unfair,
barely escaped our foe’s Red wrath,
and traveled exile’s flinty path,
but I believe our time will come—
we’ll rest, revive ourselves at home,
with all our children, all our kin,
and then our New Year will begin!

A woman recently reached out to me after finding snippets of my version of Alexander Voloshin’s mock epic Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood on my blog. Attached to her email was the photo above.

Her parents, who had gone through German DP camps and settled in Los Angeles in 1949, befriended Voloshin and his wife, Helen, in the ’50s, frequently hosting the couple at their home. I had, until that day, never encountered anyone who had seen Voloshin in the flesh—not for lack of trying. Voloshin died in 1960, his wife in 1962. I’d asked every Angeleno émigré I could find whether they had known the man, even in passing. None had: it was too long ago.

After years of posting pieces of his poem, I finally drew out a witness, made a living connection—just in time. The photo was taken in the last year of Voloshin’s life. I had found other photos of him—a headshot from the ’30s, a professional portrait from the ’50s—and I include them in the book, together with frames from his films. But I had never seen a photograph so intimate, so poignant.

He’s the dark, diminutive figure on the right. He looks ill, unhappy. I wish I could tell him that, 75 years after his poem appeared in a small émigré edition, Paul Dry Books would bring it back to life in English. Do the old man a solid, pre-order now, and have yourself a ball in April!