A Daily Glance
Ray Hsu’s Anthropy covers a wide plain--a prairie collection in the wide sense with history, personal story, and contemplative themes all placed before us. Benjamin, Dante, Chet Baker, Kenzaburo, Joyce, Gabo--so many people appear here that I wonder if Hsu's lines about Joyce apply to himself:
But what about an artist looking back on himself, trying to
discover the moment of his creation? He tries to write his
story and discovers that his memory is not one story, but
many: they don’t cohere into a single, continuous narrative.
The wide thrust of the book is part of what makes it so interesting to me. It’s not a single reading experience, but a multiple experience, with about half of the pieces being prose poems and the others just open form.
One of my favorite pieces in the collection is #3 in “Benjamin: Nine Epilogues” which centers on a translation class and an attempt to translate some lines by Fernando Pessoa (as Alberto Caeiro) in which there is the word suadades. So much happens during the piece during the attempt to translate suadades that the poem suggests to me how much words become filled with myriad directions, memories, and feelings.
Ray Hsu’s Anthropy covers a wide plain--a prairie collection in the wide sense with history, personal story, and contemplative themes all placed before us. Benjamin, Dante, Chet Baker, Kenzaburo, Joyce, Gabo--so many people appear here that I wonder if Hsu's lines about Joyce apply to himself:
But what about an artist looking back on himself, trying to
discover the moment of his creation? He tries to write his
story and discovers that his memory is not one story, but
many: they don’t cohere into a single, continuous narrative.
The wide thrust of the book is part of what makes it so interesting to me. It’s not a single reading experience, but a multiple experience, with about half of the pieces being prose poems and the others just open form.
One of my favorite pieces in the collection is #3 in “Benjamin: Nine Epilogues” which centers on a translation class and an attempt to translate some lines by Fernando Pessoa (as Alberto Caeiro) in which there is the word suadades. So much happens during the piece during the attempt to translate suadades that the poem suggests to me how much words become filled with myriad directions, memories, and feelings.
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