Tony Hoagland, “Field Guide”

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then it, and rested.
That’s all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty is the fourth collection from Tony Hoagland. Other poems in this book include “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” (since retitled “At the Galleria”) and “Personal” (from Poetry), “Confinement” (from Slate), and “Romantic Moment,” which Hoagland read at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival.

“I think that I got deeper and deeper into the world of poetry simply because it was the only thing that stayed constant in my life continuously, year after year, and then decade after decade,” Hoagland told an interviewer during that same festival. “I couldn’t seem to sustain continuity in any of the other typical realms of life: in relationships, in education, and the idea of a career path was simply laughable to me. But poetry was always there, and I remained engaged in reading it… Poetry—poems themselves—became a culture for me, a culture that I carried with me.”

19 January 2010 | poetry |

Read This: Yotsuba&!

I’ve been meaning to say something about the Yen Press translations of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! since the seventh volume came out last month. My favorite volumes in this series are the ones where the story flows most smoothly from episode to episode, so #7 is high on my list; most of the back half consists of the anticipation and fulfillment of a promised trip to a ranch to see cows (because that’s how milk gets made), with the added bonus that Yotsuba’s arch-enemy, “useless” Yanda, invites himself along for the ride.

I also love Azuma’s range of facial expressions, especially the number of different ways he has of drawing Yotsuba’s eyes depending on the mood of the scene. And I haven’t done a point-by-point comparison, but the new Yen translations seem to catch the impulsive goofiness of the strip a bit better than the previous editions—there’s detailed explanations from a senior editor online, and you can find readers who appreciate the new style (sometimes with reservations), too. Over the weekend, I plunged into the Yen versions of the first five volumes (the ones that had been published before in the US) and I found there were things that I liked better now, things like the little tweaks to the personality of Jumbo, the best friend of Yotsuba’s father, that make him seem a bit more grown up at times but still capture his immature goofiness when he’s interacting with the kids in the series.

I always appreciated the grounded-ness of the series—the idea that this isn’t too far off from how a precocious and energetic child with understanding adults around her really can spend her days—and that seems to come through a bit better now. The stories are clear enough that you could start anywhere, but I do think it’s worth it to start from the beginning and then work your way up to the fireworks show, and the fishing trip, and the day at the zoo… then, too, the little bits of continuity will accumulate from volume to volume and you’ll have even more reason to smile.

18 January 2010 | read this |