Poetry review – ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL: Thomas Ovans dips into Norbert Hirschhorn’s new selection of prose-poems and finds that come in a wide range of forms and flavours
endless forms most beautiful
Norbert Hirschhorn
La Rive Press
ISBN: 979-8-218-76393-0
70pp $15
Magazine editors have been known to approach a new poetry collection by heading first for the acknowledgements section to see how often their own journal is mentioned. When I agreed to review Norbert Hirschhorn’s latest book, the London Grip editor pointed out that more of the poems had been published in London Grip New Poetry than in any other magazine. This might be interpreted as a hint that a negative review could amount to a slur on a certain person’s editorial judgment; but the reader can rest assured that I will be approaching the text with an independent mind.
I have in fact been aware of Hirschhorn’s work for a long time and reviewed one of his previous collections well over a decade ago …https://londongrip.co.uk/2013/03/poetry-review-spring-2013-hirschhorn/ His new book differs from that previous one by consisting almost entirely of prose poems. It also engages with the contemporary world and all its troubles in a less direct way, choosing to comment in oblique ways that model or draw directly upon Hebrew and Chinese wisdom literature.
Hirschhorn sets out a sample of his varied wares in the first three poems. In “A Wretched Blue Sky” he elegantly and concisely expresses a mildly contrarian view – in this case pointing out that a blue sky is not invariably a welcome sight. “Abu Muhammed – God Preserve”, describing a shoeshine caddy and his method of work, is the first of several gentle and perceptive pen-portraits dotted throughout the book, usually of people observed in the street. “Amok” is a short, one-page narrative about a Junior Minister trying and failing to win an argument in Council but only getting ‘mouse-like titters’ from the other members who understand that the supposedly urgent matter is ‘being considered by not being considered’. Here, as quite often in the collection, Hirschhorn sympathetically records an instance of earnest, well-intentioned effort being thwarted.
Sometimes the poems set us off on a false scent. “Back into the Future” starts by offering a situation for us to identify with
Have you ever been in a supermarket & seen
someone who looked like your dead father?
Spooky.
To follow this we might expect a discussion of the nature of apparitions or a consideration of why images of departed parents may be welcome or unwelcome; but instead the poem meanders into a meditation on time and our relationship with the past and the future. Among other things it offers the pithy maxims ‘If the future is a foreign country it’s up to me to learn the language’ and ‘We don’t go into the future: future comes into us.’ Finally we have the rug sharply pulled out from under us with ‘By the way, close up, he didn’t look like my father at all.’ To be fair, Hirschhorn does address the theme of parental loss more directly in a later poem “My Father No Longer Exists”:
His was the body I saw in coma. His the body I saw
in a mortician’s parlor laid in a pine coffin,
dressed in a white tunic, made up to disguise the
ravages of a life.
Clearly Hirschhorn does not shy away from closely describing life’s mundane and even grim details. He does this at greater length in “Depression” which records the unglamorous steps of cleaning an entire bathroom. There are occasional imaginative breaks to relieve the monotony such as ‘I’m a Yugoslav partisan picking off Nazis: one behind the toilet, four behind the door…’ But such mind games are no help when, at the end of the poem, the reluctant cleaner looks at his situation and cries out ‘who the fuck imagined it would come to this?’ There is, however, an interesting complementary piece a few pages further on, entitled “He Sweeps the Kitchen Floor”, in which a monk (I assume a Buddhist one) takes a much more accepting and meditative view of the domestic task he has been assigned. ‘He strokes the debris into piles, one per quadrant of floor’ and then
… sweeps them
to the dustpan, leaving finer lines to be re-
gathered, re-swept (he thinks if he could shrink
in size along with each thinner line of dust, would
there not always be dust?)
In contrast to such meticulous yet engaging descriptions of familiar actions, Hirschhorn is quite capable of flights of fantasy – although it’s not easy to tell whether the succession of mishaps in “Bad Start to a University Poetry Conference” is a mild or a wild exaggeration of a difficult morning that did really happen. “Chasing After Jesus, AD 5000” is certainly a little piece of science fiction (and somewhat reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story I read a long time ago). “Fairy Tale in Six Voices” clearly declares itself to be a fantasy but is also a parable for our time dealing both with “celebrity culture” and the social chasm between a supposed elite and more ordinary folk. It tells of a young prince who wanders away from the palace, as young princes sometimes do, in search of ‘a bit of mischief’ and who is briefly intrigued by and ‘perhaps a little in love’ with a peasant girl in spite of the fact that she suffers from curvature of the spine. When eventually he takes her home to meet his parents he encourages her with ‘When we enter the Royal Court, try to stand up straight’. Only when he discovers that she can’t does the prince break off the relationship, explaining the misunderstanding to his friends by saying ‘I thought she was just being humble … I had some gold coins sent over.’
I hope I have by now given a flavour of this compendium of adroit observations, narratives with a moral, and perceptive comments on the human condition. Also in the mix are tender love poems and rueful accounts of love-affairs gone wrong. There is wry humour too, as in “The Dough Not Taken” and “Motel from Hell”. And, although I observed earlier that Hirschhorn might be writing less than he once did about distressing aspects of the contemporary world, he has not forsaken political comment entirely. “Edgeland” refers to the murder of publisher and activist Lokman Slim in Lebanon, a nation which is ‘broken as bankers’ and a place where ‘politicians and old warlords steal the people’s money, assassins destroy a mother’s dreams.’ A broader lament for our times appears as “Twenty-Third Psalm for the Twenty-First Century” which, instead of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want’, begins with ‘The carrion bird is my jailer; He leaves me bereft.’
Across this considerable range of topics and themes, Hirschhorn’s writing is always spare and elegant. Sometimes its tone is colloquial and sometimes it is cool and detached. He can convey wisdom and authority but also has a dry sense of humour. He is a very good storyteller – perhaps because of his evident curiosity about the world and what we make of it. Wherever we choose to open this book we will meet a companion who will start a good conversation.
London Grip Poetry Review – Norbert Hirschhorn
Poetry review – ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL: Thomas Ovans dips into Norbert Hirschhorn’s new selection of prose-poems and finds that come in a wide range of forms and flavours
Magazine editors have been known to approach a new poetry collection by heading first for the acknowledgements section to see how often their own journal is mentioned. When I agreed to review Norbert Hirschhorn’s latest book, the London Grip editor pointed out that more of the poems had been published in London Grip New Poetry than in any other magazine. This might be interpreted as a hint that a negative review could amount to a slur on a certain person’s editorial judgment; but the reader can rest assured that I will be approaching the text with an independent mind.
I have in fact been aware of Hirschhorn’s work for a long time and reviewed one of his previous collections well over a decade ago …https://londongrip.co.uk/2013/03/poetry-review-spring-2013-hirschhorn/ His new book differs from that previous one by consisting almost entirely of prose poems. It also engages with the contemporary world and all its troubles in a less direct way, choosing to comment in oblique ways that model or draw directly upon Hebrew and Chinese wisdom literature.
Hirschhorn sets out a sample of his varied wares in the first three poems. In “A Wretched Blue Sky” he elegantly and concisely expresses a mildly contrarian view – in this case pointing out that a blue sky is not invariably a welcome sight. “Abu Muhammed – God Preserve”, describing a shoeshine caddy and his method of work, is the first of several gentle and perceptive pen-portraits dotted throughout the book, usually of people observed in the street. “Amok” is a short, one-page narrative about a Junior Minister trying and failing to win an argument in Council but only getting ‘mouse-like titters’ from the other members who understand that the supposedly urgent matter is ‘being considered by not being considered’. Here, as quite often in the collection, Hirschhorn sympathetically records an instance of earnest, well-intentioned effort being thwarted.
Sometimes the poems set us off on a false scent. “Back into the Future” starts by offering a situation for us to identify with
To follow this we might expect a discussion of the nature of apparitions or a consideration of why images of departed parents may be welcome or unwelcome; but instead the poem meanders into a meditation on time and our relationship with the past and the future. Among other things it offers the pithy maxims ‘If the future is a foreign country it’s up to me to learn the language’ and ‘We don’t go into the future: future comes into us.’ Finally we have the rug sharply pulled out from under us with ‘By the way, close up, he didn’t look like my father at all.’ To be fair, Hirschhorn does address the theme of parental loss more directly in a later poem “My Father No Longer Exists”:
Clearly Hirschhorn does not shy away from closely describing life’s mundane and even grim details. He does this at greater length in “Depression” which records the unglamorous steps of cleaning an entire bathroom. There are occasional imaginative breaks to relieve the monotony such as ‘I’m a Yugoslav partisan picking off Nazis: one behind the toilet, four behind the door…’ But such mind games are no help when, at the end of the poem, the reluctant cleaner looks at his situation and cries out ‘who the fuck imagined it would come to this?’ There is, however, an interesting complementary piece a few pages further on, entitled “He Sweeps the Kitchen Floor”, in which a monk (I assume a Buddhist one) takes a much more accepting and meditative view of the domestic task he has been assigned. ‘He strokes the debris into piles, one per quadrant of floor’ and then
In contrast to such meticulous yet engaging descriptions of familiar actions, Hirschhorn is quite capable of flights of fantasy – although it’s not easy to tell whether the succession of mishaps in “Bad Start to a University Poetry Conference” is a mild or a wild exaggeration of a difficult morning that did really happen. “Chasing After Jesus, AD 5000” is certainly a little piece of science fiction (and somewhat reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story I read a long time ago). “Fairy Tale in Six Voices” clearly declares itself to be a fantasy but is also a parable for our time dealing both with “celebrity culture” and the social chasm between a supposed elite and more ordinary folk. It tells of a young prince who wanders away from the palace, as young princes sometimes do, in search of ‘a bit of mischief’ and who is briefly intrigued by and ‘perhaps a little in love’ with a peasant girl in spite of the fact that she suffers from curvature of the spine. When eventually he takes her home to meet his parents he encourages her with ‘When we enter the Royal Court, try to stand up straight’. Only when he discovers that she can’t does the prince break off the relationship, explaining the misunderstanding to his friends by saying ‘I thought she was just being humble … I had some gold coins sent over.’
I hope I have by now given a flavour of this compendium of adroit observations, narratives with a moral, and perceptive comments on the human condition. Also in the mix are tender love poems and rueful accounts of love-affairs gone wrong. There is wry humour too, as in “The Dough Not Taken” and “Motel from Hell”. And, although I observed earlier that Hirschhorn might be writing less than he once did about distressing aspects of the contemporary world, he has not forsaken political comment entirely. “Edgeland” refers to the murder of publisher and activist Lokman Slim in Lebanon, a nation which is ‘broken as bankers’ and a place where ‘politicians and old warlords steal the people’s money, assassins destroy a mother’s dreams.’ A broader lament for our times appears as “Twenty-Third Psalm for the Twenty-First Century” which, instead of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want’, begins with ‘The carrion bird is my jailer; He leaves me bereft.’
Across this considerable range of topics and themes, Hirschhorn’s writing is always spare and elegant. Sometimes its tone is colloquial and sometimes it is cool and detached. He can convey wisdom and authority but also has a dry sense of humour. He is a very good storyteller – perhaps because of his evident curiosity about the world and what we make of it. Wherever we choose to open this book we will meet a companion who will start a good conversation.