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But a Passage in Wilderness
"(This first book) is an extraordinary mixture of emotional power and beauty. It's not like anything else I have read lately or in the past. So MUCH verbal beauty, out of the here-and-now, woven with an extraordinary openness to what is precisely NOT beautiful in human life, making that an intrinsic part of the poem's texture"--Marilyn Hacker
- GenresPoetry
109 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 2007
12 people want to read
About the author
Margo Berdeshevsky
13 books15 followersMARGO BERDESHEVSKY, born in New York City, often lives and writes in Paris. Her brand new book is IT IS STILL BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE HEART BEAT from SALMON POETRY in Ireland!! Her recent book was KNEEL SAID THE NIGHT(a hybrid book in half-notes) from Sundress Publications. Her other collections include "Before the Drought," from Glass Lyre Press, a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Berdeshevsky is author as well of "Between Soul & Stone" and "But a Passage in Wilderness" (Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, "Beautiful Soon Enough," received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for FC2 (University of Alabama Press). She is also the recipient of the grand prize for the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, while other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her work appears in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, and Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Bracken, among many others. In Europe and the UK, her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, and Under the Radar. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online, for example: https://poetryinternationalonline.com... She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, at literary festivals, and/or somewhere new in the world. For more information, go to her website http://margoberdeshevsky.com
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 31, 2008
Review for BigCityLit Spring 2008
But a Passage in Wilderness by Margo Berdeshevsky. Introduction by Marie Ponsot. The Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York. Paper, 110 pages.
Several Hearts: Margo Berdeshevshy’s But a Passage in Wilderness
by Larissa Shmailo
Margo Berdeshevsky achieves an unusual trinity in her first book of poems, But a Passage in Wilderness. The collection is experimental, lyrical, and unabashedly passionate. Unlike some modern poets, Berdeshevsky’s inventive language does not shirk the responsibility of addressing love and death and our lives together in society. Exciting poetics abound, but their songs return, like migrating birds, to the flora and fauna of a vivid daily world.
To encompass the range of the subject matter sung by Berdeshevsky requires the several hearts invoked by the poet in “Pele’s Dark Landing.” The poet also needs several hearts since the one, living as it does in the world, is destined for inevitable heartbreak:
…made to be
cracked like the sculpt of a woman’s inner lips
on the floorwall of a cave we visit—inner, silverlong,
more giant than our life and red with tarnish;
cracked again by the night’s quake, feared of the dark
earth, famed,
now veined and a little broken….
But the poet sings loss not in a whimpering whine, but forcefully, as “a sixty-three mile lava tube that skews from the moon.” God himself is called into account for his creations, as when the poet’s Cain (“Cain—After”) tells God from whom, after all, he learned of blood sacrifice. The poem ends in coda:“God damn.”
Throughout the diverse forms of the poems, sometimes referred to as “collages,” there is also not a false note to the ear. Best of all are the idea-laden rhythms of the elegant line breaks and word spacings. A special tension is created by the use of pregnant incomplete clauses brimming with meaning beyond their grammar, a frequent device of the poet, as in the following anaphora in “Born By Knife”:
“When I never knew lava, its pulse, waiting. When I never knew
forsythia. When I never knew any changes as golden, as carriage.”
The poet skillfully uses her punctuation, her white space, and her syntax to modulate and amplify her words. “Whom Beggars Call,” exemplifies how the poet uses a fusion of literary forms in her verse, remaining true to her lyricism in each variant:
The man who cannot love me whom I
chews his say I cannot correct, or love.
Like blue foxes, or birds,
graciously, the holy night
folds.
Or
[…]
Oh obviously I see the concentrated man beside the church wall, so near if he were animal,/ he’d bite. He’s drowning in plastic, and bottles, and bread, and blood. He’s carefully/ daubing at his forearms with white paper, seining scabs in the thin noon, this rain is/ straight pins, he’s a serious kid inspecting his skinned knees in it, his arms bleed so near/ if he was animal—
Berdeshevsky is never neutral, and her figurative language is imbued with color, passion, and life. Sometimes, the lyrical poet adjures her reader, a guide and conscience, as in “Door”:
Before another blatant hour, do not love a country;
it will turn you into a killer, defending your tree, your road,
your stars. Try not to protect the wren, its furred
babies. Say prove to yourself to me again, I of doubt’s
despair born deep in winter. Prove we are not born
in the cauls of killing.
Berdeshevsky’s literate work shines with well-chosen epigrams, quotations, and allusions from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams, from Keats to Cocteau. In “Un-titled”, the language of King Lear is deftly integrated in one of Berdeshevsky’s poems about homelessness:
The bus named want—that Blanche called Desire
now water-ghost tired in wet that keeps on washing up,
how small our hands that never may come clean, (only)
little ghost Cordelia comes: babbling like another lost
chile’ to her homeless Lear:
All blest secrets,
All you unpublished virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate
In the good man’s distress! Seek, seek for him
Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life
That wants the means to lead it.
Berdeshevsky’s dry wit abounds on her inter- and multitextual canvases, as in one of the seminal works in the book, the collage “Best Love and Goodbye”:
Before and After visiting the 400 Doomed Youth
soldier poets of that other century
A man who want our response to the new Holocaust
wing: is it an attraction, he needs to know
Berdeshevsky’s vivid perception, the sine qua non of the poet, and her rich language, equal to expressing the rich contents of a a generous heart, make But a Passage in Wilderness a collection to read carefully and often.
But a Passage in Wilderness by Margo Berdeshevsky. Introduction by Marie Ponsot. The Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York. Paper, 110 pages.
Several Hearts: Margo Berdeshevshy’s But a Passage in Wilderness
by Larissa Shmailo
Margo Berdeshevsky achieves an unusual trinity in her first book of poems, But a Passage in Wilderness. The collection is experimental, lyrical, and unabashedly passionate. Unlike some modern poets, Berdeshevsky’s inventive language does not shirk the responsibility of addressing love and death and our lives together in society. Exciting poetics abound, but their songs return, like migrating birds, to the flora and fauna of a vivid daily world.
To encompass the range of the subject matter sung by Berdeshevsky requires the several hearts invoked by the poet in “Pele’s Dark Landing.” The poet also needs several hearts since the one, living as it does in the world, is destined for inevitable heartbreak:
…made to be
cracked like the sculpt of a woman’s inner lips
on the floorwall of a cave we visit—inner, silverlong,
more giant than our life and red with tarnish;
cracked again by the night’s quake, feared of the dark
earth, famed,
now veined and a little broken….
But the poet sings loss not in a whimpering whine, but forcefully, as “a sixty-three mile lava tube that skews from the moon.” God himself is called into account for his creations, as when the poet’s Cain (“Cain—After”) tells God from whom, after all, he learned of blood sacrifice. The poem ends in coda:“God damn.”
Throughout the diverse forms of the poems, sometimes referred to as “collages,” there is also not a false note to the ear. Best of all are the idea-laden rhythms of the elegant line breaks and word spacings. A special tension is created by the use of pregnant incomplete clauses brimming with meaning beyond their grammar, a frequent device of the poet, as in the following anaphora in “Born By Knife”:
“When I never knew lava, its pulse, waiting. When I never knew
forsythia. When I never knew any changes as golden, as carriage.”
The poet skillfully uses her punctuation, her white space, and her syntax to modulate and amplify her words. “Whom Beggars Call,” exemplifies how the poet uses a fusion of literary forms in her verse, remaining true to her lyricism in each variant:
The man who cannot love me whom I
chews his say I cannot correct, or love.
Like blue foxes, or birds,
graciously, the holy night
folds.
Or
[…]
Oh obviously I see the concentrated man beside the church wall, so near if he were animal,/ he’d bite. He’s drowning in plastic, and bottles, and bread, and blood. He’s carefully/ daubing at his forearms with white paper, seining scabs in the thin noon, this rain is/ straight pins, he’s a serious kid inspecting his skinned knees in it, his arms bleed so near/ if he was animal—
Berdeshevsky is never neutral, and her figurative language is imbued with color, passion, and life. Sometimes, the lyrical poet adjures her reader, a guide and conscience, as in “Door”:
Before another blatant hour, do not love a country;
it will turn you into a killer, defending your tree, your road,
your stars. Try not to protect the wren, its furred
babies. Say prove to yourself to me again, I of doubt’s
despair born deep in winter. Prove we are not born
in the cauls of killing.
Berdeshevsky’s literate work shines with well-chosen epigrams, quotations, and allusions from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams, from Keats to Cocteau. In “Un-titled”, the language of King Lear is deftly integrated in one of Berdeshevsky’s poems about homelessness:
The bus named want—that Blanche called Desire
now water-ghost tired in wet that keeps on washing up,
how small our hands that never may come clean, (only)
little ghost Cordelia comes: babbling like another lost
chile’ to her homeless Lear:
All blest secrets,
All you unpublished virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate
In the good man’s distress! Seek, seek for him
Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life
That wants the means to lead it.
Berdeshevsky’s dry wit abounds on her inter- and multitextual canvases, as in one of the seminal works in the book, the collage “Best Love and Goodbye”:
Before and After visiting the 400 Doomed Youth
soldier poets of that other century
A man who want our response to the new Holocaust
wing: is it an attraction, he needs to know
Berdeshevsky’s vivid perception, the sine qua non of the poet, and her rich language, equal to expressing the rich contents of a a generous heart, make But a Passage in Wilderness a collection to read carefully and often.
September 22, 2009
Praise for "But A Passage In Wilderness" (Sheep Meadow Press, 2007)
"There is in Margo Berdeshevsky’s work a rare persistence of the lyric voice, used with a sense of ecstasy & grief almost religious in its evocations. Absolutely modern & fearlessly romantic by turns, the poems circle the rich & threatened corners of the living planet & travel further into places marked by mythic & oneiric time. With the publication of "But a Passage in Wilderness," Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world “barbaric, vast and wild” that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be."
—JEROME ROTHENBERG
"Margo Berdeshevsky is a mature poet and world citizen whose ever-lively sense of wonder both at the world and at language is a constant in her work. This is writing with emotional power, great beauty and immediacy, found in the here-and-now, woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life, which is an intrinsic part of the poems' texture and reason for being."
MARILYN HACKER
"What makes "But a Passage in Wilderness" a unity, a big book and a small cosmos, is the depth of feeling it conveys, abundant and interactive, embodied and sensual. The poems are unfailingly fluent with emotional understanding, accurately invoked. A faithful dailyness radiates her words, even in her most daring flights. “Mother-ground,” she says, “show me roots in your bare dirty kiss.” She has taken her store of our language to heart."
MARIE PONSOT
"There is in Margo Berdeshevsky’s work a rare persistence of the lyric voice, used with a sense of ecstasy & grief almost religious in its evocations. Absolutely modern & fearlessly romantic by turns, the poems circle the rich & threatened corners of the living planet & travel further into places marked by mythic & oneiric time. With the publication of "But a Passage in Wilderness," Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world “barbaric, vast and wild” that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be."
—JEROME ROTHENBERG
"Margo Berdeshevsky is a mature poet and world citizen whose ever-lively sense of wonder both at the world and at language is a constant in her work. This is writing with emotional power, great beauty and immediacy, found in the here-and-now, woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life, which is an intrinsic part of the poems' texture and reason for being."
MARILYN HACKER
"What makes "But a Passage in Wilderness" a unity, a big book and a small cosmos, is the depth of feeling it conveys, abundant and interactive, embodied and sensual. The poems are unfailingly fluent with emotional understanding, accurately invoked. A faithful dailyness radiates her words, even in her most daring flights. “Mother-ground,” she says, “show me roots in your bare dirty kiss.” She has taken her store of our language to heart."
MARIE PONSOT
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews