Latest Review: "The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry" edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry that was edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris and came out earlier this year. (Most probably around April, seeing that April is National Poetry Month, which leads to a huge number of poetry collections coming out during the one month in which they may be displayed in bookstores . . .)

Anyway, Tim was an intern here in the summer of 2009 (which seems oh so long ago now), and is studying translation at Brown. (And he’s planning on starting some sort of translation magazine, but I’ll let him tell all of you about that once he’s got things set-up and underway), and has reviewed a bunch of books for us. He’s a lively writer, and his pieces are fun to read . . . Here’s the opening of the this review:

The joy of an anthology is similar to the joy of a college course in literature, of listening to the radio, of attending an art exhibition: it is the pleasure of having someone else tell you what is good and important and how it all connects together. You may find the joy of a discovery or an insight that you would probably never have stumbled upon on your own, a joy that puts them in the right. When they are wrong, your ego comes out unscarred, the validity of your own taste has been vindicated; for the reader, it is a riskless situation. Yet with an anthology such as The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, the stakes are higher on both ends. Reading it is the equivalent of attending a class taught by Nabokov or Nicholson Baker. Access is granted to the private preferences of one of our most promising young poets, so the fruits to be gained may be more succulent, but the disappointment more sour should they prove rotten. After all, how many friendships have ended because someone listens to too much Simon and Garfunkel? Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers . . .

To lay any doubts to rest, however, I must say that this anthology brought me joy. All the major and well known poets of the twentieth century are here represented (Rilke, Apollinaire, Akhmatova, Reverdy, Pasternak, Lorca . . . all in the first one hundred pages), but more importantly the selections made by Kaminsky shy away from their most famous and obviously anthologizable work to present us with equally impressive B-sides (just to pick one example, rather than choose Apollinaire’s “Le Pont Mirabeau,” we get “Zone,” the spectacular five page opener of Alcools and “The Little Car” from Calligrammes, the collection of Apollinaire’s more technically experimental concrete poetry). Thus each poet we thought we knew before becomes more multi-faceted with every page of this collection. And this principle extends out to those we don’t usually think of as poets: we find a Kafka parable, poems by Brecht, Raymond Queneau, Günter Grass, and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the latter’s work as a poet often getting overshadowed by the controversy of his films). It as if this anthology singlehandedly seeks to remind us that our greatest novelists and playwrights are, at heart, simply poets.

To read the full piece, just click here.