Ziggurat

by Peter Balakian

In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed June-tree, Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as his ongoing concerns with catastrophe and trauma, many of Balakian’s new poems wrestle with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11.

            Whether reliving the building of the World Trade Towers in the inventive forty-three-section poem that anchors the book, walking the ruins of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, meditating on Andy Warhol’s silk screens, or considering the confluence of music, language, and memory, Balakian continues his meditations on history, as well as on the harshness and beauty of contemporary life, that his readers have enjoyed over the years. In sensual, layered, and sometimes elliptical language, Balakian in Ziggurat explores absence, war, love, and art in a new age of American uncertainty.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller (October 2003). Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Stefanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite its modern publication date, this book feels like an inside joke for men living in New York in the seventies. It's emotionless and largely inaccessible. So many of the line breaks feel like attempts at being clever that end up being annoying, requiring a double read to get the full sentence. It lacks flow and anything interesting.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ziggurat was a fascinating and elliptical collection of poems--I finished it a few days ago it was really beautiful in it's attention to detail. Like Ozone Journal, Ziggurat was a collection of poems that dealt with a variety of difficult topics fluidly and all at once. In fact, there was, like in Ozone Journal a sense that a variety of topics--music, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, excavations at Ur, the Armenian genocide--were inextricable from one another. This was especially prominent in "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" which is a spiritual precursor to "Ozone Journal" in a lot of ways, both formal and topical. It too was in a series of disjointed sections that worked to link a broad variety of effects and topics. Having read this days ago and my review being delayed by travel, I'm having trouble re-isolating the individual sections of the poem that were most exciting, but section twenty-five was among them. It begins,

I loved your love of myth and ritual.
I loved reading Eliade with you on the train.

The uroboric windows hugged the car
the spring rain washed away the serpent's tail.

Just as our moment passed like Ash Wednesday

when you returned with the sign on your head

The first section is deeply entrenched in a political and popular culture with poems like "World Trade Center/ Mail Runner/ '73" and "Warhol / Blue Jackie" where the final section is perhaps, a little more personal, but similarly embedded in the world. I especially liked the poems "Sarajevo", "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy", "Self-Portrait with Bird", "Grant's Tomb", and "World Trade Center / Black Holes / '74" but I liked all of the poems and thought that the book did a nice job of creating a new form for tragedy in the American 21st century--a kind of poetic structure being laid out which I saw deployed in Ozone Journal that allows for the experience of momentous things not by breaking them apart but by knitting them together.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I worked backward from news of the Pulitzer to Ozone Journal--which never really engaged me--to this much more solid collection. Balakian is terrific at images & their juxtapositions. Collapsing excavations at Urban, the building of the World Trade Center, & 9/11 did some amazing things to give a long view of fresh injuries. Reflections on Warhol & Kline & Dickinson are as soothing as the bits of anecdotes of a long rich life lived. If I missed anything it was a lot of rythm or turns of phrase to enable some very elliptical derailments of history/memoir.

[NY Sled · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite taking the title from an ancient tower, the central metaphor in this book is about excavation, searching for self and meaning. Many of the poems revolve around the World Trade Center, the mark its construction and destruction left on New York City. The narrator makes deliveries there and uses the building as lens into class and urban landscape. The poems are political, they explore the America of the Vietnam era, the post 9/11 world, Armenian genocide and the crisis in Sarajevo and its place in history. The poems use effectively a lot of metaphors and references built from and on contemporary art to explore the political and social. The centerpiece is a long poem that moves between the aftermath of 9/11 and an early 20th century dig that discovered ancient building and a tower. This is a powerful collection of challenging poems.

[Michael Fuhrman]

“What's loss if not an open grave / where the heart is eaten by worms.”

“O house of heaven rising
O foundation of earth
O elemental zig zag”

[Liam Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was okay meaning I could understand most of the poems. Some hardly at all but it's worth a second reading next year or so.