NUNCA MAIS: NEVER AGAIN PORTUGESE / ENGLISH POEMS HUGH FOX. (http://www.cornerstonepresstl.com St. Louis, Missouri $15)
The prolific Hugh Fox has released a new collection of poems that he wrote in Portuguese and translated into English. It concerns a recent trip he took with his wife to Brazil. As in many of his recent books it deals with the richness of life and the close proximity of death. Hugh Fox, at 76, knows the fat lady is close to her closing number, and in spite of his gourmet, and gourmand taste for the world, and his still frenzied involvement, that Mermanesque belt of a song still haunts him. Kevin Gallagher, Boston-area poet and founder of COMPOST magazine, writes an email to Fox that Fox incorporates into the poem:
“Enough talking all the time about/death that comes when it comes.”
But the reason Fox riffs so much about death is that he loves life so much. The book is chock full of signature Fox flourishes: the overflow of food, art, sex, people, more food, and much more sex. Fox inhales deeply the beguiling perfume of the world and doesn’t want to exhale. Here he describes a rather pedestrian garden in Brazil:
“ Even the most common places
(Spring—a center for gardens)
always an aura of divinity, a bunch
of super-old women, from an asylum
of the super-old orchid type
of flowers possible, the street outside,
music, what I feel more than anything a
consciousness of the whole world
I have, as frantically as the Buddha
grabbing on to the totality of the present moment.”
As Kevin Gallagher advises Fox:
“Life, think about life,/everyone has to die, it doesn’t make/ any sense to preoccupy yourself with the inevitable”
But knowing Fox, his obsessions will continue, and they will continue to obsess us all.
Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update
