Eternity & Oranges

by Christopher Bakken

“We’d not slept in days, or else we were/ still sleeping—who could tell?” someone asks in the opening poem of Eternity & Oranges. The voices we encounter in this book speak on the verge of disappearance, from places marked by disintegration and terror. Christopher Bakken's poems are acts of conjuring. They move from the real political landscapes of Greece, Italy, and Romania, into more surreal spaces where history comes alive and the summoned dead speak. In the formally diverse long poem, “Kouros/Kore,” but also in this book’s terse and harrowing dream songs, Bakken writes with devastating force, at every turn “Guilty of the crime of praise” while “begging for an antidote to beauty.”

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 18, 2016

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book. Much of its power is hinted in that title -- the poems go after eternity but are connected to the lived life by those oranges, a spectacular fruit that we take too much for granted. And the fruit also connects us to Greece, and Greece is essential to these poems, as it is in much of Bakken's work.

I had forgotten that he uses a translation I did with William Reader of Karyotakis as his epigraph, and that one of the essential poems in the book, "Impressions of a Drowning Man," is dependent on those translations. So, of course, I am predisposed to enjoy this book. But Bakken knows Greece so intimately, food and weather and dance and language, he is so willing to use it as a touchstone, that everything, contemporary and historical, informs the poem.

Contemporary and modern Greek writing is a part of it all, but he is able to move far back in history. A long central poem, "Kouros/Kore," uses the archaic sculptures of male and female figures to establish a dialogue between the two perspectives that seem to become two parts of the poet's vision. That is an indication of the bigger ambitions of this book, part that reaches toward Eternity.

But I'll admit my joy in the Oranges, the connections to those moments on the Greek islands. "Squid Fishing" begins:

When we wake the rowboat from the beach sleep
it agrees to float, even surrenders
that fifth of island moonshine from the hull
which we use to wash down our oranges.

[Eric Mueller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review forthcoming

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

These beautiful poems are haunted and surreal. Like being trapped in a dream that cycles between nightmare and ecstacy. Equal parts longing and suffering.

Though Greece informs these poems they are not set there specifically, and yet they are. These poems are all places and all times and collapse the ordinary distinctions of there, here, then, and now.

Read them. Love them. These are Bakken's best poems.

[Kelly Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading these poems, I mixed up an ouzo and water with cucumber and questioned why I ever left life on Paros. A nice collection that combines place, time, experience without being hung up on specifics of time, place, and experience. A bit dreamlike. A bit dull at times. Some beautiful lines that kept me reading the collection in one sitting.

[Kass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doesn't have much to do with oranges