When are you done with a book of poetry? When you read every poem in the book? When you tire of the poems or the poet?
I can only say I'm "finished" with this book because I had to give it back to my dear friend who loaned it to me. But I'm not at all finished with this book. Not even close.
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My first encounter with Bachmann was from my former beloved. I can't remember if she read me something or not. I'm sure she did, but it's a blur with manifold other poems and poets she read me—too much to differentiate. I do remember that she liked Bachmann more than Celan, but she also read like a hummingbird, pulling bits of nectar from here, now there, now something new.
After we were kaput, I searched for Bachmann's book, but it was nowhere to be found; unavailable anywhere in NYC, and I couldn't stand to order it online.
Then I was in Berlin and I met this beautiful poet, a calm swirl of stuttering intellect, and she leant me the book. I was elated! I immediately started reading and was immediately in love. I also loved the penciled in notes scribbled in the margins by my new intoxicating friend who was obviously working through translating various poems. (Someone wrote that all real poets try translation—that it's vital to being a poet.) But as I read the book I realized that I was smelling something not evoked from the text, but a sweet flowery smell directly redolent of the book. The Bachmann book smelled of flowers... or something. I couldn't tell, and realized I don't know anything about smells. When I finally asked her what the smell was, she sheepishly laughed and said, It's probably patchouli.
I laughed and said, You damn hippie!
But she added, It might be jasmine or tea tree oil. And then she let me smell her bag, which was full of books, and ¡there it was!— jasmine, tea tree oil, and patchouli. And the smell of her bag was as beautiful as the smell of the book. I knew immediately that from this moment forward that that mix of smells would forever remind me of Bachmann and my willowy friend. She laughed and said, But the smell fits Bachmann.
What? I exclaimed, Bachmann was no hippie!
No, she said, But Bachmann smells of rotting autumn. And Bachmann does. Does smell of rotting autumn. And that combo of tea tree oil, pachouli, and jasmine is the smell of rotting autumn.
Last, another friend; a friend I met in NYC; a Berliner friend; a clad-in-black whirlwind bounding through life with penetrating clear eyes that also remind of Bachmann; Bachmann, who constantly refers to clear dead eyes, or even a dead eye, cold; but my friend's eyes are far from cold, and at my anarco-whirlwind friend's place she read me Bachmann in Deutsch and I read it back to her in English. And the musicality! Wow, the language sang. Sang of sadness and depression and despondency, sure, but sang anyway. (The only happy Bachmann poem I've read is about getting drunk.)
Ok... the book. Wow. Decaying autumn and the only happiness the happiness of drunkenness.
I've only finished Borrowed Time, which is one of the two books Bachmann published in her lifetime. Darkness Spoken includes all of her poems. The other book published in her lifetime is Invocation of the Great Bear. The rest of the book is divided in five large sections of poems, broken up into various periods of her life.
Here, listen (and I mean listen: that is, read it out loud):
from Fall Down Heart
Fall down, heart, from the tree of of time,
fall, you leaves, from icy branches
that once the sun embraced,
fall, as tears fall from longing eyes.
or...
from Darkness Spoken
The string of silence
taut on the pulse of blood,
I grasped your beating heart.
Your curls were transformed
into the shadow hair of night,
black flakes of darkness
buried your face.
or...
from Borrowed Time
Harder days are coming.
The loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon.
Soon you must lace up your boots
and chase the hounds back to the marsh farms.
For the entrails of fish
have grown cold in the wind.
Dimly burns the light of lupines.
Your gaze makes out in fog:
the loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon.
or...
from Theme and Variation
All summer long the hives produced no honey.
Queen bees gave up and led their swarms away,
the strawberry patch dried up in a day,
and without work, the gatherers went home early.
All sweetness was carried away on a beam of light
in a single night's sleep. Who slept while this happened?
Honey and berries? He knows no misfortune,
he who lacks for nothing. For him, it all comes right.
What she does beautifully (like Celan) is use repetition for dramatic effect.