Selected and Last Poems

by Paul Zweig

Presents works selected from four previous collections of verse, including "Against Emptiness," "Eternity's Woods," "The Dark Side of the Earth," and "Last Poems"

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published August 1, 1989

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading Zweig, I never noticed that the air after a snow has a "hard rim" from which float particles of love, or that the "silver light flashing from windows" in the slight warmth of April is a reminder of the inevitable limitedness of experience, or that "fields / Roar each night, as if they waited for / An answer" to the questions we hold for the dead buried in them. Never noticed these things, yet I don't struggle to notice them either. The effort was already expended by Zweig. His words don't strain in their reach. When he selects a word and drops it next to another, it is with the grace of a person playing chess in the park: a thought, then a move, a longer thought, another move, only in the compressed space of a poem there is no waiting between moves. Zweig's imagery is dense yet has a clarity that, I think, must be rare. He makes you notice things, as I said, that you always knew but didn't realize it until he lays it down. For example, the resemblance between an empty building and an insect...

The sort of building everyone knows,
A bland skin of squares and angles,
A nest of antennae, empty repeating windows.

...or the musicality of a river's movement...

the river was another world,
Vast, clear and sweet, like a bow
Drawn slowly in one never-wavering note.

Zweig's poetry finds unseen big truths in overlooked little things - mortality from the sun's glint in a window, inevitability from the "patience of gasoline" - and he hands them to us on a platter, modestly, honestly, with no suggestion of the effort it took to shape them into poems. The handholds for our understanding are all there in the right places; you just don't see the path until you're already climbing and then their layout is obvious in its perfectness. One theme of evoking the unseen that is perhaps most striking, and which he uses quite often, is the revelation of other people or beings seemingly living inside of us. Of his baby daughter, he says "She made thin rasping sounds, / As if some creature were trapped behind her gums"; or his father, a "mild, unforgiving man", who "exists in my hands and voice, / And is the nervous laughter I hear / Before my throat expels it"; or of the "dwarf"/"monster" personifying self-doubt that lives inside Zweig and shares all of his experiences, he says "I will give him what I have, / In return he will give me nothing."

This is the first book of Zweig's I have read. Perhaps this being "Selected" poems of Zweig's, it is over-representative of his best work since nearly every one of these poems leaves me with the same feeling of wonder. If so, perhaps that is a good reason for you to start here, too. I plan to read his other books and whether I am disapppointed or not, Selected and Last Poems is going into my "books I would buy" list (I read a library copy) and Zweig is now among my most favorite poets. And finally, there is this line:

...Thirst made me a man,
If a man is someone who drinks pain, and is still thirsty.