Taurus by Paul Nemser
Review by Alice Weiss
Paul
Nemser’s Taurus is a poetry book with
the scope of a Russian novel and the reach of a modern metal robotic arm able
to withstand radioactivity, able to dispose of
radioactive waste. There are over
100 poems here most of them lyrics, many of them in tercets, recalling Dante’s Inferno, like this one, a vast journey
through a cultural landscape. There are lists and newspaper reports, classified
ads for Russian wives. There are
mythical lovers and robot lovers and mythologizing scientists, bus images Taurus
is immensely ambitious at its core –sad and brave and funny, romantic—the book
undertakes an epic reanimation and a re-evaluation of the Europa myth engaging with an urban underworld of
exploitation, technology, and science.
A myth, after all, is a story of characters whose relationships
reflect, explain, or symbolize both explicit and inchoate issues like origins,
sexuality, love, landscape, culture and the seasons, power, domination, science, and patterns of historical
immigration and cultural exchange. In the original myth, Europa is a pretty
cowherd on the Phoenician coast whom Zeus,
in the form a beautiful white bull, seduces and carries on
his back west across the sea to the island of Crete. Here, Europa is carried east over borders
like a fugitive into Russia, “the snow cracks of a dark imperium.” She “listens
for footsteps/Do they come for me?” “My Fate” she says
steps
forelegs
down out of
the sky. My exile
beckons
with shaken horns.
My husband
bears me on his back
toward
crosshatch birches
where gods
and men
walk in the
same shadows—
But this
lyrical figure, seeming at one with the natural world, is crossing the border
into a different world controlled, as in the original myth, by the bull god,
but different, contemporary. The
god takes the form of a metal gargoyle
perched under the roof of an insignificant palace near the Fontanka, the river
that flows through the middle of St. Petersburg. This is the city that Peter the Great pulled
into Europe, and pulled Europe into. The
Palaces, the wide avenues, the paintings, the sculpture, the architecture, all
Paris. The bull gargoyle himself is a
European figure but here he launches into Russia, makes Russia his bailiwick,
his night club, his love nest.
When the
god animates the bull to climb down from its perch, he becomes a bouncer in a
night club, Europa, a model on a
scrolling placard.
He’s a god
in the costume of a gargoyle
in a speed
shocked age.
antennae in
his horns, mirror glasses.
and she:
How
palpable she is across land and water,
her dusky
electricity
almost in
his metal reach.
We are
taken through the journey by an impersonal guide, our Virgil, in the form of
side bars telling us what is going on and what we are about to see. In the five
page series, for example, “His Age, Any” the sidebar:Personal ads /from the
bull/ gargoyle’s/ website for /Russian brides. Romance vies with devastating
humor, for example, “Anna’s personal info: I am calm and lovely. I have well-sided interests.” and Irina who
wishes for a partner, thus: “I want to meet a man with serious relations to
me. I need a lot of attention, kind and
warm feelings. . .I want to be loved and one woman only for one man (height
5’7”)” Europa, in one of any number of
lyrical prose poems, desires
A man with
a mineral strength. A straight-ahead
approach.
who will breakfast on herbs and new mown grass, his chest bare
as a
boulder. Whose words boom within that
chest and Ohhhh comes out
round as a
sphere.
Nemser’s romantic imagination seems boundless: Europa as a
matryoschka, a nesting doll,
You inside
you
and inside
that
is you,
Child-
sized you fingernail you,
tiniest
speck
without
flaw.
and again, “Her Image-Griboedov Canal”
I envy the
photographers
who saw you
live:
golden airy
thinness,
a direct
unceasing gaze
as if the
lens had a soul.. .
Snapshot.
Snap. No haze, no shade.
Snap. Snap.
Every shot rips a hole.
Is it like
that for you,
My
photogenic bird?
Lightbringer,
when the shutter closes.
In a poem called “Nuclear” Europa speaks
Come we’ll
sleep when all’s exploded
Let’s rise
and split and slice like moons.
Eclipse me.
Reflect me
in a broken
reef, a blackened sea.
I’ll
destroy you if you destroy me.
Another aspect of this work, like going down a creek bumping
into rocks, are the puns. The title
of the personals section, His Age, Any, is actually the
refrain. All the Russian brides will
take a man, any age, but the breadth of cultural consideration and
reconsideration bounces you into the notion of “Age” as era, the Matryoschka
poem is an email “attachment.”
Once
Yevgeny, the robot arm shows up from the secret city of Tomsk where he had been
enriching plutonium, he enters the “Radium Institute founder, VI. Vernadsky. .
.
mapper of
the radioactive flesh of Mother Russia.
Yevgeny
full circle. Once “bomber,” “poisoner,”
sponges up
the Pu, U and all the transuranics.
PU indeed. A poem or so later, there is a list of all things
in Russia and the world named for Vernadsky, as if he were an Athena, or George
Washington.
And love,
love. The air as orgasm. A group of pages from newspapers describing
weird incidents of ball lighening, interspersed by Taurus speaking poems. Here is Taurus listening to drumming
near, Dom knigi,a famous bookstore in
St. Petersburg in the renovated Singer sewing machine building. “Drum. . .”
Like the
god’s voice, but without the god.
Without
even the demigod, the hemidemisemitgod.
The
bull-man, revved up, ready to explode—listens:
that
rhythm? Is it an empire falling?
Is that
glass kniving into Nevsky tar?
. . .The
water settles, then explodes.
A carp
flies on the embankment
bleathing
air. Everything’s
waiting to
be caught.
What
happens when gods copulate? Zeus took
Europa by force: war, violence. and love.
This book is such a layered experience that I cannot hope to cover its
pleasures in a single review. Some parts
of it need to be read with Google close by, but the lyricism, the jokes, the
characterizations, the nightclub, the robots’ love affair. All demand reading and rereading. Taurus is
certainly well worth the The New American Poetry Prize conferred on it last
year. Paul Nemser will be featured at
the Brookline Public Library Poetry Reading February 16, 2014. Next week.
It’s a not miss.
