By B.Z. Niditch
March Street Press
Greensboro NC
Marchstreetpress.com
ISBN: 1-59661-169-3
65 pages
$9.00
Review by Dennis Daly
These poems by B.Z. Niditch roll in at you like ocean waves with the incoming tide, one after the other, inexorably, reinforcing the poet’s internal imagery with an insomniac’s edgy persistence. Even the cover portrait of Frederico Garcia Lorca is repeated as the title page and again appears after the table of contents.
As a matter of fact, one of the poems in this attractive book entitled Memory is printed twice, first on page 16 and then again on page 64. I suspect this is simply a production error. Nevertheless, the logic of printing this particular poem twice does make odd sense, given its title and context.
Many of the poetic images also repeat, but with different twists and varying impacts. In the poem, The Disappearance, an anonymous child vanishes along with all connections to civilization,
the child disappeared
as the lasting echo
trembled in the wind
she or he was
as anonymous
as war itself
a town vanished
along with
an empty room,
an unmade bed,
sunglasses…
Yes, the sunglasses especially; the smallest details of human life have vanished from the landscape. Not surprisingly, the very sex of the child is undetermined in this wartime mystery.
The persona in the poem Missing Person has taken to sleepwalking. Madness has supplanted humanity as he looks forward to deal with the reality of death. Even the sirens of memory are powerless over this morbid meditation,
With sleepwalking
madness,
daily nightmares cut off
infantilized cries
of every motioning memory…
Under the Marquee uses memory as a time machine to deliver the human reality of seemingly past, but still anticipated, moments,
beneath an oversized dark sky
waiting up for you
expecting your flattery
to make us human
if memory holds up.
As in this poem, Dictation, memories dictate the future and sometimes the future is not very pleasant,
…the pitiable
are hungry and cold
among grim neighborhoods
the future is crowded
with written promises
of wretched memory
on stone tablets…
Another disappearance takes place in the poem Absentia,
Fixing his torn scarf,
clothing words
in an open notebook
for a season
of scattered winds,
he forgets the universe,
and disappears.
Sleeplessness, bemoaned throughout this book, finds eloquence in this poem called Sleepless Poet,
you taste
a murdered blood orange
in the cool air
trying to capture
the A.M.
after hours…
In Mondrian Niditch speaks of the insomnia of the painter as part of a way of life, almost necessary to his art,
your painting disguises
then reinvents
an edgy maze
on a blinded surface
with an orange wash
along Dutch parchment
reminding the marred canvas
of dismantled visions
in your sleepless limbs
shaped by solitude
and traces of reveries.
The fears, the secrecy, and again the anonymity are palpable in Niditch’s poem, Budapest. I like this poem a lot. It not only touches on his continuing themes but it seems to add depth to the collection as a whole. Here shadows from before wartime proliferate. The “lumps of sugar” in the last stanza really work for me,
Since I cannot
wake you
our fears
are battlefields
of a distant green
and we like angels
fallen in to lumps of sugar
only speak gravely
when the matre d’ leaves
Off the Cape combines a number of marine images to make the conditional point of nature’s enmity to man. Between the morning’s coldness, the impotence of sails, and the jelly fish I’m convinced. The reddened sun desiring my friendship doesn’t warm me up.
The last poem in the book, Waiting Room, is Niditch’s masterwork. Like a number of his nature poems it is set in winter, only this time inside a hospital perhaps. It is the opposite of claustrophobic. There are empty chairs, that feeling of absence again, corridors that go on and on, and mirrors. There are white walls inside and there is snow outside. A Dali green vase with dried flowers sits strangely there. The poem ends with drama,
wishing to escape
on any trolley,
with an apple croissant
when my initials are called.
There is no unscathed exit this time from that drab institutional universe. Timing is everything. Niditch understands this and writes about it in this book as well as any poet I know.
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