4 hours Ago By The Telegraph
February: frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss Alongside Terrance Hayes, Diane Seuss has a strong case to be considered as the most influential American poet of the last 10 years. A former social worker, over six collections she has become renowned for her fearless excavation of her life in her work. In conversation with poet Hanif Abdurraqib last year, she said of her process: “Being in movement, being in the midst of everyday life, is my main jam.
.. it counters loneliness to be able to hear my thoughts separate from my actions.
” But nor does she want to “interrupt the loneliness. I think for me it’s essential to being able to write.” It’s an approach that has seen Seuss garlanded with awards.
Her last collection, frank: sonnets, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This, and her newest book, Modern Poetry, now arrive in the UK thanks to the independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions , which is making its first forays into poetry publishing. As the title hints, Frank O’Hara is the presiding spirit of frank.
The book is also told with frankness; it’s a vivid account of the past few decades of Seuss’s life, from her upbringing in rural Michigan through to the New York punk scene of the late 1970s, and then back to small-town America, where she witnesses addiction, friends dying of AIDS and the sheer work it takes to stay alive. What her work shares with O’Hara’s, here, is a love of life and living, even in moments of poverty, crisis and pain. That, and an ability to pin down images of astonishing beauty: “How even gravestones buckle and swell / with the tides.
And coffins are little wayward ships making their way towards love’s other shore.” These are also very much sonnets. They might not look like their traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan brethren, but in Seuss’s 14 lines – “one frame in a long strip / of celluloid” – you can see arguments being repeatedly probed, turns being made.
High and low cultural references – one poem references Gaugin ’s Christ and the Velvet Underground within a few clauses – are blended with childhood memories into thrilling, emotional payoffs. It’s an intense, totalising read; unflinching in the difficulty it depicts and still, somehow, uplifting. “I belong nowhere, have / never belonged anywhere, not where I was raised, not where I was not raised / .
.. / poems are someone else’s clothes I slipped / into so I could skip town.
” You can see the book becoming a cult text. Modern Poetry gives readers more space to breathe. Inspired by a poetry textbook of the same name which she read as a child, it’s a condensed history of Seuss’s reading and learning and what this has given her – primarily, the armour to survive and live in a hostile world.
Her reading is smartly selective: as she writes in ‘My Education’, “I read most of Joseph Conrad, having figured out / that I could find some things repulsive and still / require them for my project. My project / was my life.” At times it’s as though you’re eavesdropping on a particularly spiky seminar: it’s invigorating to see her stripping away the pretension often associated with writing poetry.
While the dominant mode in the book is free verse, Seuss is not above deploying her technique in ways that suggest something of an ars poetica. She opens ‘Comma’ with: Part of Seuss’s significance has been because she writes “Of the working class . My class.
It’s itches and psychological riches. / It’s notions and values and humble achievements”; there’s no sugarcoating of the hardships, or simmering violence that she might have seen. Thanks to her insistence that, “objectivity itself – that was beautiful”, we get to see a very particular type of Romantic poetry, battered around the edges but alive to the fact that “Maybe there is such a thing / as the beauty of drawing near.
/ Near, nearer all the way / to the bedside of the dying / world.” With her formidable voice, Seuss is one of the most important poets writing now. But that’s a claim she would, no doubt, puncture and yet also agree with: “I had no God-given authority.
/ I had to self-generate it, like God. / At some point, God had to take the leap / to become God.” RD Rishi Dastidar’s most recent poetry collection is Neptune’s Projects.
Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets are published by Fitzcarraldo at £12.99 each. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books January: There Lives A Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen “There lives a young girl in me who will not die,” writes Tove Ditlevsen in a line that gives its poem, and this collection, their titles.
“She is no longer me and I am no longer her / but she stares back at me when I look in the mirror / searching for something she hopes to recover.” Many of the poems here, newly translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith, seem to circle a young girl who is both her and not-her, who lives on and doesn’t quite. Past and present overlap in unexpected ways.
What is she hoping to recover? Ditlevsen died by suicide at the age of 58 in 1976. She was one of the most famous writers in Denmark, but only became well-known to Anglophone readers when the English translation of her celebrated Copenhagen Trilogy (1967-71) was completed and published in 2021 . Comprising a trio of memoirs, Childhood, Youth and Dependency, it chronicles Ditlevsen’s childhood in a stifling working-class environment; her marriages and love affairs; her intense drive to write; and her eventual descent into harrowing addictions to painkillers and alcohol.
Her prose is plain and unadorned; she doesn’t shy from observations that feel harsh, bordering on cruel. She purports to know the darkest stuff of life, and to share it like a weather report: “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin. You can’t get out of it on your own.
” Ditlevsen, however, once wrote that she did much of her best work in poetry. There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, the first English translation of those poems, starts with selections from A Girl’s Mind, published in 1939 when she was 21, and ends with poems from To a Little Girl, published posthumously in 1978. Throughout, we see the development of a poetic voice, as she moves from traditional rhyme-schemes and forms into a greater level of enjambment and markedly shorter lines.
Her images become more abstract. New motifs emerge. Divorce, for instance, appears late, yet it becomes one of her finest poetic subjects.
Poems about anxiety and depression recur, as do those about wanting to be free of obligations. “Loving badly,” as she calls it, is another great subject: wanting someone close then pushing them away. “I often wish he would leave,” she laments, “and so become / distinctly near.
” This recurrence of theme is no mere repetition: it’s an ethos that defines Ditlevsen’s oeuvre. She’s never done with the complex dance between who she used to be and who she is now. The spectres of her childhood walk through this book: her mother, her father, the streets where they lived, a whole lost world that seems somehow still present.
She’s interested in writing about what is commonly called “trauma” – how childhood wounds shape adulthood, and adults’ struggles are passed down the generations – yet she manages to make this chain of exchange livelier, darker, and stranger than many discussions of trauma do. In one poem, she describes the way she turned away from her mother, disgusted by her smell; her mother “gave up once and for all / on the project of loving me”. Her own children then seem to turn away from her, as though she had taken on her mother’s smell – and her son, now, is fond of his grandmother.
“Love often / skips a generation –” she writes, matter-of-fact; but that dash hangs like an open door, gesturing at the estrangement and heartbreak that might lie beyond. “In childhood’s long darkened night / burn little, flickering lanterns”: so one early poem in this collection begins. That may be what Ditlevsen does best, emerging from childhood’s coffin to and bringing these lanterns up close to the strange moments where past and present collide.
Her poems read, at their best, like illuminations, transfiguring her life again and again. SH There Lives a Young Girl In Me Who Will Not Die is published by Penguin at £9.99.
To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books.
