Sandra Simonds Reviews New Poetry Collections of 'Protest or Celebration'

At the New York Times, Sandra Simonds brings to readers' attention a few great, new reads, starting with Major Jackson's The Absurd Man. It's Jackson's "erudite fifth collection," writes Simonds, which "examines the contradictions and possibilities in our search for meaning." From there: 

“What counts is not the best living but the most living,” Camus says in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and Jackson brings us across the world to dive deep into this surplus. With settings from Xichang to Philadelphia to Paris, the writing is sophisticated and far more than mere travelogue. Each place is a way to summon moments of keen observation about art, politics and regret: “In the Yi Slavery Museum, a Bimo’s / screeching dispossession of cries and words / reminds me: we have only each other in the end.” Moments of startling linguistic play disrupt Jackson’s elegant, semiformal style. Driving in Vermont, the poet notices how “the road Vanna-Whites its crops / of corn.” When he leaves his wife, she is “entrenched in her prison / of dreams facing her bedside clock ticking / off the minutes.” Two moving elegies, one for Ntozake Shange and one for Derek Walcott, are the central balancing points of the book. For all of this collection’s sense of displacement, both elegies bring us back to an existential truth that only poetry’s fierce tenderness can offer: “We’re bound to earth / and wear each other’s scars.”

Read on at the New York Times.