From Publishers Weekly
More than 100 years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote, "It is the pain of a poem that comes first, and the form that follows." Here in Der-Hovanessian's selected work, pain is derived from the cultural dissolution of the war-eroded and occupied country of Armenia; it resonates in concise statements about a people seeking desperately to reestablish a sense of place. The poems address this necessity through the conventions of dreamwork, invocations of the dead, personae poems and through the speaker's firsthand reporting of facts. In those that work best, the poet conquers her tendency to employ repetition as a structural motif and rejects the temptations of regionalism for something more global. The poem "Translating" gracefully avoids both of these pitfalls, grappling instead with the real drama of a speaker's internal struggle to transform the unspoken language and images of the dead into an enduring vernacular. And the result, seen as well in the poems "At Mt. Auburn Cemetery" and "Diaspora," is an admirable containment. The poems are also energized by the plaintive and mournful tones that course through them, voices bearing the message that something irreplaceable is about to be lost.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
While many of Der-Hovanessian's poems and award-winning translations have appeared in small-press editions, readers without a special interest in Armenian and Armenian American poetry may have missed her work. But no one should miss this selection of old and new poems, which comprises a personal, political, and cultural history both moving and musical, bluntly stated yet elegant. With beauty and economy, Der-Hovanessian writes: The same salt that flavors/the table sweetens the breath,/causes the blood to rise, spoils/ the pilaf and brightens the smile./Salt that eats the heart/can erode the sun." Raised as a New Englander, the poet can move fluidly from Browning's last duchess, the YMCA, and blueberry pie to the work and family of Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan, who was one of some 200 Armenian literati executed at the start of the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. Newcomers to Der-Hovanessian's poems will be moved to go out and buy her translations and learn more about this world in which poets were so central they had to be murdered first. For all collections.
Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
